Best Books I've Read in the Last Month or Two

Look! I've been reading books!

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
A deeply strange book about speech turning poisonous—literally, words (then communication) make people sick and die in this story—it makes its oddness (the speech sickness is just the beginning of the strange) with such normalcy the reader has to wonder "Maybe I'm the weird one?" Very Cronenberg, although that's a name-as-adjective I only know by reference. But I think I'm right.

Death of Cool by Gavin McInnes
I've liked Gavin McInnes since before it was cool to not like Gavin McInnes.

The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov
The final novel Nabokov wrote in Russian, it is the mostly not-fascinating story of a young Russian writer living in Berlin, but he says something brilliant every two or three pages, so you can't give up.

The Selection by Kiera Cass
I am hiding this in the middle hoping you don't notice it. It's a dystopian YA adventure that I heard about, the premise: "Hunger Games meets the Bachelor." I chuckled and poked fun as it was described to me enthusiastically. And then I found the full audiobook recording on YouTube (wish I could say that discovery was accidental.) And so. Well. Listen. It's as good as a book where 36 girls are selected in a lottery to date the prince of a post-WWIV United States can be. I think.

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
I think I should read more Evelyn Waugh. This was his first published novel, it starts the story of a young English man hired to teach at a boarding school where all the teachers are odd and only dryly absurd British things happen and goes from there. Fun. Silly. Tricky to reconcile with Brideshead Revisited.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Thought I should read something good and American. Really liked it. It's the ultimate family road trip gone bad story as a family wagons their mom's dead body to the town where she requested to be buried. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different member of a shifting cast of narrators, in 2014 this sounds like a gimic, but it's an effective way for details to come into focus from multiple perspectives. I was very into it. Best read on this list! I should be reading more Faulkner. I should have been reading more Faulkner for a long time.