There is a bit of a theme I’m experiencing in my reading as of late. Seems that England has come to the fore with Shakespeare in the mix at times. (It kind of began this summer with Alexander Kleeman’s new novel Something New Under The Sun—which doesn’t have anything to do with England, a very US book, but has a kernel of Shakespeare in the mix.)
Anyway, that was in the limbo time. (I moved mid August, and spent most of July and August packing, cleaning, etc.) My last “posting” was the Spring Book Club:
Sync Book Radio presents a 42 Minutes/Always Record crossover for the 42 Minutes Spring Book Club. Always Record is the second portion of the conversation, continuing from 42 Minutes episode 367.
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Listen: The Sheltering Sky (42 Minutes 367) at 42minutes.com
—I suppose that I should also note that during the painting of the old house, I was also listening to the audio version of Sandman which is also pretty English, and also references Shakespeare.
Anyway, after I landed and settled into the new place, immediately it was Treefort & the summer installment of the 42 Minutes Seasonal Book Club:
FREE 10.12.21 Episode 370: Summer Book Club
Naked Lunch
For the summer book club, we continue on with our Beat theme, this time sharing 42 minutes on William S. Burroughs's 1959 classic, Naked Lunch, one of the most important novels of the 20th century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. This is an unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and, ultimately, a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone.Topics: Junky, Queer, 90s, Cut Ups, Synchromysticism, Sex, Drugs, Tangier, Interzone, Paul & Jane Bowles, Ethics, Cancel, Transgression, Orgasm, Cronenberg, Divination, Dr Benway, Schizo, Cocaine, Yage Letters, Ayahuasca, Technology, Mayan Codexes, Control System, Word Virus, Junk Economy, Matrix.
Purchase: Naked Lunch from Bookshop.org
Watch: Naked Lunch at Archive.org
Listen: 42 Minutes Seasonal Book Club shows from 42minutes.com
Explore: Book Club at Bookshop.org
Listen: more Naked Lunch on Always Record at thesyncbook.com
(In many ways, it was with Burroughs that I spent my summer.)
The book club talk itself, still verged toward the pandemic. With that in mind, directly after the chat, as I still was settling in the the new place and routines, I started into “plague” fiction:
Station Eleven is a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, her fourth.[1][2][3] It takes place in the Great Lakes region before and after a fictional swine flu pandemic, known as the "Georgia Flu", has devastated the world, killing most of the population. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015.[4]
The novel was well received by critics, with praise emphasizing the understated nature of Mandel's writing. It appeared on several end-of-year best novel lists.[5][6] By 2020 it had sold 1.5 million copies.[7]
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?
Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
A Tale of Two Cities is an 1859 historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. In the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, critic Don D'Ammassa argues that it is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed.[2]
As Dickens' best-known work of historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities is claimed to be one of the best-selling novels of all time.[3][4][5] In 2003, the novel was ranked 63rd on the BBC's The Big Read poll.[6] The novel has been adapted for film, television, radio, and the stage, and has continued to influence popular culture.
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by a mysterious pandemic illness that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. It also includes discussion of the British state as a republic, for which Shelley sat in meetings of the House of Commons to gain insight to the governmental system of the Romantic era. The novel includes many fictive allusions to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication, as well as their close friend Lord Byron, who had died two years previously.
The Last Man was critically savaged and remained largely obscure at the time of its publication. It was not until the 1960s that the novel resurfaced for the public as a work of fiction, not prophecy. The Last Man is one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published.
Marie de France (fl. 1160 to 1215)
William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)
Hamnet Shakespeare (baptised 2 February 1585 – buried 11 August 1596)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ( née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)
Charles John Huffam Dickens ( 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870)
For years, this has been on my list. Haven’t made it through. If I’m doing dystopian this Fall, I’m happy it’s Mary Shelly (42 Minutes Fall Book). Station Eleven was an interesting dystopian too. I can see why it became so popular. I know that I definitely revisited Contagion & Outbreak last year.
The Stand is a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy novel written by American author Stephen King and first published in 1978 by Doubleday. The plot centers on a deadly pandemic of weaponized influenza and its aftermath, in which the few surviving humans gather into factions that are each led by a personification of either good or evil and seem fated to clash with each other. King started writing the story in February 1975,[1] seeking to create an epic in the spirit of The Lord of the Rings that was set in contemporary America. The book was difficult for him to write because of the large number of characters and storylines.
In 1990, The Stand was reprinted as a Complete and Uncut Edition. King restored over 400 pages from texts that were initially reduced from his original manuscript, revised the order of the chapters, shifted the novel's setting from 1980 to 10 years forward, and accordingly corrected a number of cultural references. The Complete and Uncut Edition of The Stand is Stephen King's longest stand-alone work at 1,152 pages, surpassing his 1,138-page novel It. The book has sold 4.5 million copies.
The Stand was highly appreciated by reviewers and is considered one of King's best novels. It has been included in lists of the best books of all time by Rolling Stone, Time, the Modern Library, Amazon and the BBC. Reviewers praised the believability of the story, the relevance of the issues raised and the liveliness of the characters, but criticized the protractedness of individual episodes, the plot dualism, and the deliberate denouement. An eponymous miniseries based on the novel was broadcast on ABC in 1994. From 2008 to 2012, Marvel Comicspublished a series of comics written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrated by Mike Perkins. Another miniseries debuted on CBS All Access in December 2020, and finished airing in February 2021.[2]
‘Station Eleven’: The HBO Max Show Made a Fictional Pandemic Before and During a Real One
Directed by Jeremy Podeswa and Hiro Murai, the adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel finished filming two episodes before the show's premise became eerily prescient.
Michael Buckner/Variety
Emily St. John Mandel’s acclaimed 2014 novel “Station Eleven” tells the story of a society ravaged by a mysterious avian flu. Spread out over multiple generations, the book picks up just after the disease spread and follows various characters’ stories for decades after.
Production on the series had already begun and was roughly one-fifth of the way through before the events of last spring reconfigured everything. Speaking on a panel as part of the Television Critics Association’s virtual Summer Press Tour, producers and members of the cast shared their experiences from various stages of lockdown and how those, in turn, informed the show they were all working to create.
“The themes of the show were becoming so resonant as we’re going forward, it really made us think so much about what’s important in life, which is really what the show’s about,” said Jeremy Podeswa, an executive producer and director on the series. “Really what matters is other people, the people in your life you care about, your health, and also making art, which is what we’re all doing with this show. That really gave us a great sense of purpose in a really difficult time.”
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/09/station-eleven-hbo-max-tv-show-pandemic-1234666720/
In 1992 (2021 in later editions)[1] following a devastating global war called World War Terminus, the Earth's radioactively polluted atmosphere leads the United Nations to encourage mass emigrations to off-world colonies to preserve humanity's genetic integrity. Moving away from Earth comes with the incentive of free personal androids: robot servants identical to humans. The Rosen Association manufactures the androids on a colony on Mars, but some androids violently rebel and escape to Earth, where they hope to remain undetected. As a result, American and Soviet police departments remain vigilant and keep android bounty-hunting officers on duty.
On Earth, owning real live animals has become a fashionable status symbol, both because mass extinctions have made authentic animals rare and because of the accompanying cultural push for greater empathy. However, poor people can only afford realistic-looking robot imitations of live animals. Rick Deckard, the novel's protagonist, for example, owns an electric black-faced sheep. The trend of increased empathy has coincidentally motivated a new technology-based religion called Mercerism, which uses "empathy boxes" to link users simultaneously to a virtual reality of collective suffering, centered on a martyr-like character, Wilbur Mercer, who eternally climbs up a hill while being hit with crashing stones. Acquiring high-status animal pets and linking in to empathy boxes appear to be the only two ways characters in the story strive for existential fulfillment.