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Carissa Green Reads

I read widely from many genres. Perhaps this blog will feature fewer ratings and reviews, but I certainly intend to write about my reading life - it's the subject I most find myself wanting to talk about.

Currently reading

D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of WWII
Stephen E. Ambrose
Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
M.T. Anderson
The Path Between the Seas
David McCullough
Chekhov Four Plays
Anton Chekhov, David Magarshack
The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Walter Kaufmann, Friedrich Nietzsche
A Kierkegaard Anthology
Robert W. Bretall

The Novelist as Soothsayer

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart is getting plenty of good attention this spring for his new novel, "Lake Success." But remember this one, from 2010, "Super Sad True Love Story?" 

 

This novel was a comedic take on an alternate near-future world, in which people eschew face-to-face interaction in favor of communicating on personal electronic devices (apparats, with umlauts over all three as, if you please). People become "media" stars, making their living by broadcasting themselves doing pretty much anything online. The United States' economy is collapsing, and society is at the mercy of money or resource-holding countries such as Norway and China. 

 

Here's one detail that didn't strike me as so prescient when I first read the novel but now is screaming out at me: The U.S., in this novel, has a broken government and is losing an ill-advised, unpopular war in -- wait for it -- Venezuela. 

 

Let's not go there.

 

-cg