August 2020 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2020 in books: a literary calendar

Guardian, January 4, 2020

The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel (to be published August 4th) set in Nigeria, written by Akwaeke Emezi.

via Penguin Random House

Because there is no extract on Ama**n yet, I don't yet know if I want to read it. Plot and setting are one thing, writing style another, so first chapters are important to me. But at any rate, according to Emezi's publisher, this is the plot:

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious.

But because an excerpt of Emezi's earlier work Pet looks interesting too, I might read that already. It's a young adult novel that, within the fantasy genre, appears to be a (not overly subtle) pastiche of American social politics.

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Recently the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica took place. As a child of the 80s, I dimly remember the Balkan Wars, with the snipers who made cities uninhabitable to civilians, the soldiers who fought against each other from the Croatian and Serbian sides, the Bosnians and others who were massacred, the streams of refugees, and then a few years later the Kosovo War.

via Amazon.com

In To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, by Kapka Kassabova, summarized in the words of her publisher Granta Books:

Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy of the Lakes, Kassabova’s journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

I feel bad for mentioning a small literary quibble. But I will say that in the first chapter, her good intentions appear to outdo her writing style. For example, there are mixed metaphors:

Some places are inscribed in our DNA yet take a long time to reveal their contours, just as some journeys are etched into the landscape of our lives yet take a lifetime to complete.

It sounds mysterious and vague and deep, but does it make sense? wouldn't other metaphors work better?

Anyway, she has a prime quotation from Henry David Thoreau at the beginning: "A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Fantastic.

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In the meantime, I am also reading other books:

First Nations/Indigenous literature (Canada):

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

Him Standing by Richard Wagamese

African-American history:

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Around the World in 32 Countries:

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays by Jorge Luis Borges [Argentina]

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes [Spain]

Gute Nachrichten auf Papierfliegern by Juan Marsé [Spain]

Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez [Spain]

Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit by Gabriel García Marquez [Colombia]

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans, Alex La Guma ed. [South Africa]

To-Be-Read: 'Book Haul' from a Berlin bookstore a few weeks ago:

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Humankind by Rutger Bergman

Extra:

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories by Doris Lessing

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“New Releases for August 2020” [Goodreads]

The Death of Vivek Oji [Penguin Random House]

"Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2020 Book Preview" [The Millions] (July 15, 2020)

To the Lake [Granta]