3 book recommendations for September, 2020
Twenty-twenty has made me so grateful for novels, music, movies, and other vehicles of psychological and emotional transport. Escapism is underrated: freeing your mind offers not just an avenue for temporary relief, but also a new vantage from which to find perspective.
So follow your curiosity, read to your heart's content, and return to your life renewed and ready for action.
And now, books I love that you might too:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is a novel as exquisitely balanced as the temperament of the Russian aristocrat it follows through his decades of house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and humane, this story is a prism through which profound truths shine with uncommon clarity.
Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk is a captivating, pragmatic guide to writing fiction illuminated via gut-wrenching real-life stories that simultaneously communicate and exemplify the lessons Palahniuk learned writing Fight Club, Choke, Invisible Monsters, etc. A toolkit and a treasure chest. I found this book so useful that I'm including it as a resource in my advice for authors.
Little, Big by John Crowley is a kaleidoscopic epic that redefines what imaginative literature can do. My aunt gave me this tattered paperback last year and I had no idea what to expect and you shouldn’t either before you read it—just know that it’s weird, wonderful, so very worth your time, and boggles the mind and heart simultaneously.
Bonus recommendation: In this thought-provoking audio-adaptation of the original six-part PBS series, Bill Moyers interviews Joseph Campbell about the power of myth and how humanity forges meaning from life.
In other news:
Rick Liebling interviewed me for The Adjacent Possible: "If writing fiction were a thing I could well and truly figure out, I probably wouldn’t keep doing it."
Line from my work-in-progress: "If you thought too hard about anything, it became impossible. The only way to make progress was edgewise, never looking at the task directly, sneaking through the alleys of your subconscious to arrive at a decision you knew full well you’d already made."
From my conversation with Alix E. Harrow: "Doors are the ultimate promise, aren’t they? Every closed door in a story is a perfect little Chekov’s gun, begging to be opened."
If reading Veil's prologue sparked your curiosity about the Don DeLillo quote Miranda uses for her book's epigraph, you can read it here.
David Mitchell on weaving six novellas into Cloud Atlas: “It was just the insouciance of youth. Sometimes your lack of experience can save you. Sometimes an underinformed decision is retrospectively the right decision, and had you had more wisdom, you wouldn’t have done it.”
Erik Mitisek interviewed me for Denver Startup Week about the art of writing and publishing, building a career as an author, and the creative process behind Veil.
From Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey: "Finally I saw myself, how my wit exceeded that of other men but gave me no leverage against fate, and how in the time to come it would avail me nothing but possibly an understanding of the full scope of my helplessness."
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, tell your friends. Every month, I recommend books, both fiction and nonfiction, that crackle and fizz with big ideas, keep us turning pages deep into the night, challenge our assumptions, help us find meaning in a changing world, and make us think, feel, and grow. In an age of digital abundance, quality is the new scarcity. The right book at the right time can change your life.
When I'm not reading books, I'm writing them. If you savor the promise and peril of new worlds opening up, if you prefer hard questions to easy answers, if you seek adventures that will transport you and leave you changed, then you're the kind of person I write for. You can find my novels right here. Bon voyage, fellow traveler.
Cheers, Eliot
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Eliot Peper is the author of Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. Subscribe to his blog here.
"This is the best kind of science fiction, in which the overriding issue of our time, climate change, is addressed with vivid characters serving as exemplars of the roles we need to take on in the coming decades, all gnarled into a breath-taking plot. I hope it's the first of many such novels creating climate fiction for our time."
-Kim Stanley Robinson on Veil
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