Summer Reading Goals ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR GOOD BOOKS | BY JENNIE LAY
A LITERARY SOJOURN READING LIST
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ead to prepare yourself for the return of Literary Sojourn this fall. Or just stockpile this list for the year’s best books to pile by your bedside. Steamboat’s beloved literary festival is going live again, and it’s a lineup of heavy-hitting authors whose collective works create a diverse and delicious summer reading list. Here’s a look at five of the featured writers.
“Hell of a Book” | By Jason Mott This is the tale of an unnamed Black author on a cross-country book tour. It is concurrently the story of Soot, a young Black boy in a rural town, and The Kid, the author’s imaginary friend. Designed to be disorienting, it is a story about identity, love, loss, the Black experience, and so much more. Jason Mott won the National Book Award for “Hell of a Book” this year … and well, it’s a hell of a must-read novel. It is not insignificant to the narrative that Mott dedicated the award in his acceptance speech “to all the other mad kids, to all the outsiders, the weirdos, the bullied. The ones so strange they had no choice but to be misunderstood by the world and by those around them. The ones who, in spite of this, refuse to outgrow their imagination, refuse to abandon their dreams and refuse to deny, diminish their identity, or their truth, or their loves, unlike so many others.” Want more Mott? Follow up “Hell of a Book” with “The Returned,” his bestseller that morphed into a television series called “Resurrection,” about a town where dead people come back to life.
“What Strange Paradise” | By Omar El Akkad In the wake of his award-winning geopolitical bestseller that reflected many of his witnessed experiences as a journalist covering Afghanistan, Guantánamo and the Arab Spring, Omar El Akkad returns with a more intimate vantage on a global predicament: the migrant crisis. The wreck, both literal and societal, is relayed in the voices of two small children at sea. It is a gripping dystopia locked in our global reality. The novel turns “otherness” on its head, and makes clear that hope lies in finding a deep resurgence of humanity. Want more Akkad? After “What Strange Paradise” read “American War,” a brilliant, devastating and nuanced imagining of a post-apocalyptic future America mired in a long-running civil war.
“Our Country Friends” | By Gary Shteyngart This is Gary Shteyngart’s pandemic novel, and it’s exactly what we need right now. Brimming with elegant prose and insightful bite, it’s the story of eight individuals hunkered at a Hudson Valley estate for what was supposed to be a quick inconvenience. We all know better. The absurd human experience unfolds as urban people reside uncomfortably in the rural. In Steamboat, it’s a phenomenon we’ve witnessed IRL. Shteyngart’s pandemic web flexes with love and sex and narcissism and privilege. There STEAMBOAT MAGAZINE | OUTDOORS 2022 | 69
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