Here's some reading to get your teeth into!

[Music] hello it is lovely to see you again thanks for tuning in we are on holidays and the only sad thing about that is that we are without murphy our beloved dog um but i have a lot of good companions in terms of books to keep me distracted from what my puppy might be getting up to in kennels but today i'm just going to talk about two of them i'm going to review the candy house by jennifer egan and the book by sequoyah namagasu nagamatsu called how high we go in the dark now the reason for putting these two books together is in fact twofold a they're structured very similarly and i think they make a nice little pair and b well they're quite meaty the books that make you that give you a lot to kind of chew on starting with the candy house and now this one comes to us from corsair um jennifer egan won the pulitzer with a visit from the goon squad now some of you may or already have read that one and this does take characters from the golden squad so if you've read it you have kind of an added um element and a kind of that sort of you can be smug about knowing already who some of these characters are um and it was a book that stood out i think for its kind of experimental um play with form um the candy house is very similar in in terms of this form that even uses and it is something that um nagamatsu is using as well which is using interlinking stories um which are very closely connected very tightly woven um but kind of give a looseness to the the frame of of narrative arc in um the candy house we have several characters and i think what i liked most about this book was the fact that um were invited at the in the early stages into a little group of of people um one of whom is desperate frank bix is desperate for an idea for his next big project and he's an innovative creative um man in his forties and he um in conversation with a couple of academic sort of research-minded people comes up with a new idea about uploading your consciousness so we're in a world which is a little bit removed but not really that far away from the world we live in which has an experimentation with artificial intelligence and in egan's book we are looking at a world where everybody gets really excited about this world that this um entrepreneurial sort of um you know um well genius really in in a lot of ways has come up with but you can upload consciousness you can review your memories you can decide to review other people's memories with sort of provisos attached and it i suppose what i uh that was a long and convoluted sentence but what i like is that we get into this circle and eventually we're allowed eagan let's situate ourselves with other members of this group and it seems random but in the long run it's not really because we will get stories from different people in that group or from members of their family family or um it sort of crisscrosses time relationships and it's all about connection um it's not quite sci-fi um and it's definitely not dystopian but it's it's one of those reads where i was spent my time saying oh my god how did she do that this is so clever because as you go through the book you're backward and forwarding saying oh i know who that character is because it was mentioned in the first one and then there were three sons and now here's the last one and oh golly how did she do that so i spent a lot of time saying how did she do that i was gobsmacked by it and it's incredibly sophisticated writing and i suppose i really had to get my reading teeth in you know i don't like to be spoon-fed i don't like i don't like sometimes i do when i'm very tired but um i felt this was a book that oh and she was pointing all the time to other people other narratives um and really um asks you in a way to plunge back in again and have some fun so i would say have some fun it is it is uh this is not actually its final cover but it's something very close and it is a lot of fun but also there's a she's dealing with a lot of um what if all of this internet social media artificial intelligence it all looks glamorous and wonderful but there's going to be a price very deep sequoia nagamatsu this comes to us from bloomsbury so it's similar in its structure it's an absolutely fabulous read again it is actually a debut novel he's written short stories and again this started as sort of um well he's formatted as in interlinking stories and it is a little perhaps a little bit harder to um but there's more confronting material in this one and it's probably harder for some people to say oh gosh i'm really dying to pick this one up because it is dealing with things that are very close to our reality now and these are book books are both very clever from that point of view as we're looking at now and we're looking at some of the things which are not great about us as humans and about what can happen so he where she's looking at ai and the the lack of human connectivity is um nagamatsu is probably looking more at well plague now most people will say oh god i don't want to read about the plague in the middle of a pandemic but he it's not just that it's about um the i suppose the circle the the the cycle of life it is about the about being connected to other people but it's also about death and mourning and grief and how we enter into a conversation with ourselves so we become very aware of ourselves as we watch um a certain sort of devastation wreak itself upon humanity and if we're confronted with um that great finality and lose some and how do we um what conversation do we have with ourselves what conversations do we have with the people who have died or with the people the kind of the randomness of the people that were left um whether we choose to or not connect to who are left and who we might connect with and it might be seemingly random and there's a lot of this randomness going on because i reading this i felt like golly this is like one of those search and find um activity books i i got really pleased with myself when i saw in each section of it oh my god there's a character oh that's the one from and and again like eagan i was backwarding and forwarding through um you know from one section to another um and and wondering how on earth he was going to to to loop some of them seem to be quite truncated quite separate from each other and then as you you need to get to the end you may have to work a bit for it but you really need to get to the end to see what all these connections are it is much more speculative it's very um sci-fi it's a it's quite dark um there's everything from you know robo dogs um to um death hotel elegy hotels and to sort of fairground rides of i suppose there's a there's a ride called osiris where dying children are um you know helped ushered through into the next world in in the kindest possible way it's about kindness it's about being hopeless but finding that you're really not that hopeless it's about research it's about the importance of of science and it's an enthralling read another one that you needed to get your reading teeth sort of firmly in place so that you can chomp your way through it um and it felt quite sort of very much like the author was riding the horses the apocalypse and they were giving him a bit of a hard time because wow he races through through issues both of these are astonishing um not easy and they're definitely not like reads but um your world will be richer for them that's it there'll be more soon see [Music]

Channel: The Leaf Bookshop

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Id: ZGKRVYh7JVM

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022