Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Okay, this is basically Brave New World, modernized.

Told through the medium of diary entries, emails (“globalteens”, a future FaceBook/MySpace), and IMs, a 39 year old book reader (an offensively smelly hobby in this dystopia) weathers the end of America and the wooing of a 20-something woman.

Some of his future-projections are a little hokey. He merges 7 or 8 current corporations into unwieldily named conglomerates, like ChaseBPMcDonalds or some such thing, which I get, but I think is weak world-building.

“Apparats” (copious umlauts excluded) are omnipresent iPhones; No one talks (or “verbals”) much, mostly they sit together and text. This seems right on.

All in all, this is a fine summer read, alternating between whimsical and believable futurism.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon

This is a fine novel to read on the heels of Making Comics, a little further back the book The Ten-Cent Plague and, even further back, Weird Comic Book Fantasy at Dad’s Garage.

I will admit, I missed the “A Novel” bit when I picked it up, I didn’t remember how it came to be on my wish list, or what it was about. When I started reading and realized it was about the Golden Age of comics, I thought maybe I had added it as another Ten Cent Plague history-of-comics sort of book. I thought “EC” publishing as a real place, but this turns out to be a novel, and the E.C. (Empire Comics) of the novel is different than the EC (Educational Comics) of the real world, though the latter was also in the end part of the novel.

At any rate, it is a terribly good novel, sporting don’t-want-to-put-it-down writing and stories. You get a lot of good flavor of the pre and post war eras, intriguing characters, amusing and believable situations and dialog. It’s written as a historical account, complete with footnotes about things that never happened¹.

Highly recommended, whether or not you’re into the comics scene.

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¹ In 2013, Michael Chabon came across this entry and wrote me a personal note thanking me for the kind words. Also, there was cake.