What to Read Next: Finding Life at the Edge
Volume 9, Issue #4
Hi there, readers!
This week we experienced a totally new-to-us weather phenomenon: freezing fog. Chilly, moist air blew off of Lake Superior, coating the town in a thin, clear layer of ice. ‘Twas a bit of an ice rink around here while the rest of the state was basking in sunny 50s. We’ve heard spring is the worst time to be a Duluthian and it seems we’re getting an early taste of that. Thank goodness for the sauna in our basement!
Anyways, I’ve read some great stuff lately. Here’s just a small taste.
Crux by Gabriel Tallent
“Will we make it? . . . There was no answer to that question, except in the terrifying, day-in, day-out work of the attempt. The doubt and suffering and pain—all that was the point. Without the doubt and suffering and pain, the tops were nothing.”
Dan and Tamma are two high school rock climbers of the dirtbag variety — they don’t have gear and they’re not on a team. They’re just poor kids going out in the wilds to see what they can “send.”
As real life quickly approaches, they have to decide between college, family obligations, or that dirtbag dream of living the van life in Utah’s canyon lands. It’s a coming-of-age story about making big choices while being too young to do so.
The style is unique and, I imagine, even off-putting to some readers. There’s a lot of technical climbing language — which I certainly didn’t understand but found myself immersed in anyways. There’s also just a lot of teenage dialogue, including sarcasm, raunchy jokes, and “like” galore. I’d normally be bothered by it, but since the characters are teenagers, it perfectly fit the narrative, and the rest of the prose was not in that same vein.
Overall, I loved the unique writing and the memorable, easy-to-root-for characters, who were earnest in their dreams (despite all the sarcasm). I finished Crux a few weeks ago and can’t stop thinking about it. Passages like this are going to stick with me for a long time:
“I’m going to go out into the dangerous, beautiful, empty places of the world and make of that wasteland a church and a home. And maybe, possibly, have a shot at being that hard-sending chick on the poster in the bedroom of every little girl in the world. But only that: a shot. I will consider it my very great privilege to make the attempt.”
It’s certainly not always a happy book, but I enjoyed it from start to finish.
Comics Corner: Rough Riders by Adam Glass
We all know that Theodore Roosevelt was our most badass president. He rode a moose; he got shot in the chest during a speech and finished the speech; he swam in the Potomac in the buff. The guy was a certified legend.
In Rough Riders, Adam Glass (writer) and Patrick Olliffe (artist) imagine what would happen if a steampunk version of TR teamed up with other badasses of his era — Thomas Edison, Annie Oakley, Houdini, and boxer Jack Johnson — to fight aliens. The premise is just so frickin fun.
In this first volume, Glass rewrites our textbooks so that the Spanish-American War was actually started by non-humans and the famed Rough Riders actually had a rather different and top secret mission than what you’ve read about in history books.
Rough Riders is basically the comic version of Aliens vs. Cowboys (the 2011 movie). If that’s not an endorsement, nothing is. There are three paperback volumes of this comic run; I’ve only read the first but enjoyed it enough to definitely read the others.
Be good to each other,
-Jeremy