While March might have come in like a lion, the weather in the next little while is promising to be a lot more lamb-like. If your spring reading list isn’t quite where you’d like it to be, our friends at McNally Robinson Booksellers have you covered with the latest edition of 'What to Read'!
The Antidote by Karen Russell
Hall’s first book comes from McNally Robinson’s Author of the Month for March who’s known for dystopian characterizations and outlandish explorations through previous books like Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove.
The Antidote takes place in Uz, Nebraska during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Hall notes that the fictional community’s history of violence ravages it as much as the depression.
“So there’s a figure in the novel, she refers to herself as the Prairie Witch, but she is the antidote,” Hall elaborates. “Her body serves as the bank vault for people’s memories and secrets, so, literally, if something’s bothering you in your memory, you can take it to her.”
“It’s a bit of a crazy novel, but there’s something in this trope of being able to forget the things that you don’t want to remember that, you know may not surprise anyone that it comes back to bite them a little bit.”
Twist by Colum McCann
Hall first became acquainted with McCann’s writing almost a decade ago with a book called Let the Great World Spin. “When I read it, I was just blown away by it,” he shares about that experience, which centres on the lives of everyday New Yorkers as highwire artist Phillipe Petit walks the tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.
Twist tells the story of Anthony Fennell, a journalist assigned to cover the story of broken fiber optic cables sunk miles beneath the ocean. Fennell journeys to west Africa to discover the human labour that services the information needs of the world, and meets a fellow Irishman John Conway, a ship captain that handles the cable repairs.
“The life of the story in the characters and their thoughts and how it resonates with the reader,” says Hall.
Theft by Abdulrazak Grunah
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, Grunah returns with an exploration of colonialism and the fate of a refugee in a new place. “They always find themselves caught between cultures, caught between places,” Hall observes, noting that those struggles are also present in Theft’s central characters.
In the novel, Karim returns to his sleepy hometown in Tanzania from university and interacts with Fauzia, who’s had far less opportunities in her life. Together, the two of them offer friendship to a fellow named Badar, who’s unsure what the next part of his life will be.
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” says Hall of the novel. “That story just sounds kind of meh, but we are in the hands of a world class storyteller here. I’ve talked about this before on this show, where you’re just enthralled in a very simple story sometimes.”
The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
“Emma Donoghue is no stranger to us,” smiles Hall, noting that the author has visited McNally Robinson several times over the years. “She’s really at her best, in my opinion, in her historical novels, and this is another historical setting as she takes as a starting place the real 1895 French railway disaster.”
The disaster, which saw a train jump the tracks and out of the wall of the Paris train station, is the setting for Donoghue to explore the lives and stories of various passengers from different life circumstances and socio-economic backgrounds.
“Even though we know how the journey ends, there’s still a suspense about it because the characters don’t know, and so it’s a kind of an inverse of what you would normally consider suspenseful.”
Carbon by Paul Hawken
A well-known climate writer and thinker, Hawken explores the most essential element for life and the most central element of the climate crisis. “He charts the course over the planet’s history, he takes us through the worlds of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food and farms, and he points out all of the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience,” Hall says.
“One of the questions we always get about environmental books is, ‘Is it preachy?’,” explains Hall, who answers with a thoughtful ‘no’. “This is more of it as a science,” he explains. “It’s about how the world works and yes, it becomes fairly obvious that we need to pay attention to this in the course of his explanations.”
McNally Robinson Booksellers stops by the Classic 107 studios for What to Read on Morning Light every first Friday of the month just after 8:30 a.m.