Chapter Six: Have We Got Books For You

Hello!

Holidays of all kinds are coming up! No matter how you’ll be celebrating them, we’d like to suggest that a prime book-reading time of year is right on the horizon. And we’d like to make sure that you’re prepared. See below.

For some of us it’s summer; for some of us it’s winter. Some of us sneak away with a book for a moment of solitude; some of us read in the company of others, enjoying a companionable silence. We’ve done our best to anticipate a few likely circumstances and a few appropriate books below.

Also, our crab started an advice column.

With esteem,

Rebekah, Huw, Rachel, and Lara

Choose your own book adventure

You are on your way to the airport at the busiest time of year. Obstacles in your path: bad weather, security staff, Boeing bullshittery, the ordeal of renting a car. The book for you: Changing Planes by Ursula Le Guin, in which the discomfort of airports gives people the power to travel to other dimensions. “Basically, it’s Le Guin giving herself an excuse to describe different imaginary societies,” says Rachel.

You are very cold. It is very dark. The world is a mess of upsetting contradictions. You put a tiny umbrella in your beverage of choice and pretend you are on a tropical island. You pick up Alaya Dawn Johnson’s multi-award-winning novellette, A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i. It won’t make you feel better about the upsetting contradictions, but it does take place in the tropics.

You woke up at 3am and realized you forgot to defrost the turkey. You are now standing by the sink running cold water over an enormous shrink-wrapped fowl. You should definitely download an audiobook of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and listen to it while you cook. No dinner party you give will be as bad as that one. We hope.

You live in the Southern Hemisphere. Congratulations, you’re off to the beach for your summer holiday. (You are Rebekah.) She re-reads Earthsea every year, but Huw told her to branch out into The Sympathizer, a literary historical novel which he says is “high-energy, voice-driven, heart-breaking, hilarious, and edge-of-seat exciting.” Woah.

You just got home from a holiday party you never wanted to attend. You want to immediately enter a different reality where none of those people exist. The book: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Rebekah says: “Almost nobody exists in this book.” And: “Don’t read anything about it in advance. No reviews. Nothing. You have to go into it blind.”

You wake luxuriously late with an empty schedule, but you’re plagued by a dream in which you never adequately mourned the death of your first childhood crush. Someone who never even existed—and yet, your sense of loss is crushing. The book is Connie Willis’s Passage: a novel about life, death, consciousness and memory. Trust Huw on this one. We always do.

Send your circumstances to [email protected]. We’re here to help.

Madame Bernarde would like to say a few things

Welcome, dear readers, to the most superior and utile advice column.

My name is Bernarde l’Ermite, but you may call me Madame Bernarde. I am a hermit crab; I prefer feminine pronouns when communicating in gendered languages; and I am a reliable narrator. I also employ semicolons (correctly).

I am uniquely qualified to advise you on all matters: I am possessed of perfect taste and perfect knowledge.*

You may ask me anything. Consider the following examples:

No. Read a book. I’ll recommend one.

Be sure the egg whites have achieved room temperature before beating; use caster sugar rather than granulated; incorporate sugar with extreme tenderness. If this doesn’t work, read a book. 

Beam me the device specifications, and stand by for further instructions. First, though, have you tried powering it off and restarting? While it’s booting up, read a book.

Yes. It is definitely too late; and if my telling you so is sufficient discouragement to quash your dream, then your dream was never dear enough to be worth pursuing. Pursue dreams regardless of what anyone tells you. And read a book.

*

Although the constraints placed upon me by the editors of this publication preclude my answering all questions posed, rest assured that your question, whoever you are, is legitimate; that I have the answer; and that my answer is correct.

You may write to me via [email protected].

Until my next communication, I remain humbly** yours,

Bernarde l’Ermite

 * An advantage to being a whole-cloth fabricated personage—human or otherwise—is that my assertion of omniscience and infallibility is accurate; a so-called “real” (i.e., non-fictional) person making similar claims would necessarily be lying.

** A graceful but inaccurate figure of speech; I am never humble.

What we’ve been reading online instead of being useful

This story on how the publishing industry has a gambling problem reminded us all why we’re doing this.

Avoid difficult family conversations. Make them all play Catfishing instead. (It’s not connected to either fishing or dating, but rather Wikipedia.)

If you’re in Seattle, our distributor Asterism Books is holding a holiday sale this Saturday, November 29 (which also happens to be Small Business Saturday).