October Preview

Well we got dumped on with snow — about 10 inches — last weekend.  I knew the beginning of fall was too good to last, but the good news is: the skies look clear now for the foreseeable future and the warmer temps should melt the early snow away. October looks to be a busy month — I’m having minor eye surgery on Monday, which should slow me up for about a week, and then mid-month our city’s annual book festival starts here and I have tickets to many author events. 

Already, I’ve seen Margaret Atwood speak about life in general and read from her new sequel novel “The Testaments,” which I have a copy of but haven’t started yet. In public, Atwood was impressive and sharp as ever. She might be turning 80 next month but still doesn’t miss a beat talking about politics, public policy, and totalitarian regimes. She said she started writing “The Handmaid’s Tale” when she was in West Berlin in the 1980s and that she was influenced by what was going on in the world, particularly in the States, toward women and reproductive rights. She had read and liked such dystopian fiction as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” … and basically the rest is history. So I plan to get to “The Testaments,” but I’m saving it for just the right time. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been looking through what’s coming out this month and I’m still a bit all over the place on what to pick up. There’s new fiction by such well-known authors as: Zadie Smith, Jojo Moyes, Rene Denfeld, Jami Attenberg and Jeanette Winterson among others … and for nonfiction there’s books by: Bill Bryson, former national security advisor Susan Rice, Elton John, and even Carly Simon, who’s written a book about her friendship with Jackie O called “Touched by the Sun.” Hmm who would have guessed it. I’m looking at these and a few others that I’ve picked out below. 

First off, I hope to get to Elizabeth Strout’s new novel “Olive, Again,” which is a sequel to her 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Olive Kitteridge,” which was everywhere on the planet for many years. Who can forget the blunt and grouchy Olive, a retired math teacher, whose everyday life in the small, (fictional) coastal town of Crosby, Maine filled the pages of 13 interrelated stories? Not me, I read it and got into Olive’s world … though I didn’t follow it up by seeing the four-part TV miniseries starring Frances McDormand as Olive. Did you? The novel was a pre-blog read for me, and now the new book, like the first one, unfolds through 13 new linked stories with Olive, which focus on ordinary moments in ordinary lives. The stories form a cohesive novel — as Publishers Weekly says — “that captures, with humor, compassion, and embarrassing detail, aging, loss, loneliness, and love.” So yep, count me in. 

Next up, I’ve been waffling between Deborah Levy’s new novel “The Man Who Saw Everything” and Ben Lerner’s new one called “The Topeka School.” Both look a bit out there. The first half of Levy’s novel takes place in 1988 about a young male historian who gets hit by a car and recovers in East Berlin, where he falls in love, and the second half jumps to 2016, where the same protagonist has some of the same events happen to him again, upending everything expected up to that point. Hmm.

Whereas Lerner’s autobiographical novel follows the story of Adam, a teenage debate champion, as well as his parents, who are psychologists grappling with the best way to raise their son while struggling with their own issues. It sounds conventional, but it isn’t. After all it’s by author Ben Lerner whose novels often read like scattered episodes (more than tight plots) that go off on an array of tangents, which was similar to his last novel “10:04” that I listened to on audio. Still he is clever and humorous at times,  and is often considered “one of the best writers of his generation.” But is he? I will try out his new one to see. 

Next up is Irish author Edna O’Brien’s latest novel “Girl” about the harrowing story of one girl’s torment as she is abducted along with other Nigerian schoolgirls by the jihadist group Boko Haram. Yikes, I wonder if I can stomach this story about one’s victim’s brutal survival and her faith in redemption.

If so, it’ll be my first by O’Brien who many say is “one of the greatest Irish writers of the 20th century.” She’s written many books over her lifetime, some of which were banned in her native Ireland when they appeared in the early 1960s. She’s now 88 years old — so I think starting somewhere with her literary canon is better than none at all. So perhaps I will begin here with this book and move backwards in time. I’m curious too about her 2012 memoir “Country Girl,” which tells of her beginnings and life as a writer.

Last up in books is either Steph Cha’s crime novel “Your House Will Pay” about two Los Angeles families that are forced to face down their history of loss and rage while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence. The author says it’s a contemporary story with deep roots in the black/Korean tensions of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. It’s gotten some high marks from various reviews and on Goodreads so I’m looking at that — as well as H.W. Brands’s history of the American West called “Dreams of El Dorado.” This is a nonfiction book and I’m starting to get into the genre as we get closer to “nonfiction November” and the end of the year. This book seems to be a sweeping history of the settling of the American West by a highly esteemed historian … which captures “from Texas to California, from beaver pelts to buffalo robes, from the hoofbeats of horses to the steam blasts of the first transcontinental trains,” according to Hampton Sides. So if you like the West, “Dreams of El Dorado” might be just the right read to refresh yourself with its history. 

As for movies in October,  I don’t see much that I want to see.  My husband might want to see “Joker” but it doesn’t look that appealing to me. Is it just another look at a deranged Joker character that Heath Ledger played in “The Dark Knight” — this time with Joaquin Phoenix?  Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday says it’s “more than just another comic book origin story, becoming a gritty urban allegory about the pent-up rage of aggrieved young men that can easily ignite into a destructive, nihilistic movement.” Hmm. Whatever it is, I’m in no real rush to see it. The movie looks quite freaky. What do you think?

Other than that comedian Eddie Murphy is back to play the real-life comedian Rudy Ray Moore in “Dolemite Is My Name,” which might have some laughs in it. I don’t recall the comic Moore but apparently in the 1970s, he had an alter ego he played named Dolemite that was quite a phenomenon.

But perhaps the most divisive movie out this month is “Jojo Rabbit,” a comic spoof about a Hitler youth who finds out his mother (played by Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a Jewish girl in their home. It’s a bit rare for World War II satires about Hitler and the Nazis to come out so this made quite a commotion when it premiered last month at the Toronto Film Festival. Many loved it for making Nazis look like goofballs, but other critics, said Ann Hornaday, thought it crossed a line in its “sendup of anti-Semitic tropes at their most ludicrously deranged.”

So see it at your own risk depending on your sensibilities. 

As for album releases in October, there’s new ones by Wilco, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Grace Potter, Michael Kiwanuka, Trigger Hippy, and Allison Moorer that all seem worth checking out. It was hard to pick a winner but I’ll choose a new album called “Carrying On” by the Canadian folk/roots duo Kacy & Clayton. I hadn’t known about them before, but it’s their fifth album, and so far, I’m liking their song “The Forty-Ninth Parallel,” which you can check out here.  

That’s all for now. What about you — which new releases are you looking forward to this month?