September Reads in Review
Happy October! As I type up notes on my favorite recent reads to share with you all, I’m noticing an entirely unplanned theme involving crime and violence. Here are three books worth reading, ranging from most clinical to most cinematically gory:
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Fans of Capote’s In Cold Blood will enjoy this engrossing, rigorously researched true crime memoir, which recounts Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s experience working on a death penalty case as a summer intern in New Orleans after graduating from Harvard Law School. Like Capote, Marzano-Lesnevich becomes consumed with one case in particular, that of Ricky Langley, who molests and kills a young boy. Unlike In Cold Blood, however, in which Capote avoids reflecting on the reasons for his obsession with the case, Marzano-Lesnevich probes how the nuances and complexities of Langley’s case intersect with their own childhood trauma and family secrets.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
This well-written, offbeat literary murder mystery is narrated by an eccentric, animal-loving, middle-aged Polish woman living near the Czech border during a winter when several of her neighbors turn up dead. You’ll want to refrain from reading reviews and jacket copy to avoid spoilers, though I can say from my own experience that the book is still pleasurable in a different way if you know its biggest reveal in advance. I read Tokarczuk’s much more experimental and unrelentingly peripatetic novel Flights this fall as well but had a harder time sustaining investment in its numerous threads, which are thematically connected but never converge into a more traditional plot structure. Drive Your Plow is a far more accessible entree into this Nobel laureate’s body of work.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
In his first novel after acclaimed story collection Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah plays out a near-future reimagining of the American prison system as a Hunger Games-esque, fight-to-the-death reality TV show. While I sometimes found the inconsistent tenor of the book’s frequent footnotes distracting, and as other reviewers have noted, it inadvertently perpetuates the graphic violence-as-entertainment it seeks to critique in American mass media, I admired the passion in the writing and the boldness of Adjei-Brenyah’s varied, interwoven narrative voices. Just this week, the book was also announced as a 2023 National Book Award finalist. If you are a writer, I highly recommend Adjei-Brenyah’s craft talk on surrealism on the Tin House Between the Covers podcast, posted August 4, 2023.
As always, feel free to post in the comments if you have questions or thoughts about the above titles or others to recommend! Thanks for reading!