PECKERWOOD BOOK CLUB: Genre-Hopping, Robot Poetry, Plus What'cha Reading These Days?

Welcome back, Manor Hors, to The Peckerwood Book Club, a periodic dispatch where we joyfully recommend the books we love, new or old, favorite authors we can't get enough of, dead or alive, and other urgent book-minded minutia!

Meanwhile, do you have a favorite book genre? And do you sometimes hop to other kinds of books on occasion just to mix things up? For my part, I love literary fiction, but sometimes after half a year of them, for example. I need to take a break. One time I hopped to trashy murder-mystery novels - or "airport novels" as they're sometimes called, since you can read them on a long flight - and explored the works of Lee Child, Elin Hilderbrand and James Patterson. That lasted maybe three months, and it was definitely funzi (I mean that in a good way), but I can't take a diet of cotton candy for long. Another time, I explored memoirs, including books by Christopher Hitchens, Mariah Carey and George M. Johnson. That lasted a bit longer than trashy murder-mysteries. But with a few obvious exceptions, TV and movies do this sort of thing so much better. No, really. I'm really looking forward to watching the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix, for instance, but no way in hell would I waste my time reading her memoir.

Ultimately, what I crave from books is what I seldom get from TV and movies, like rich, complex themes and characters, and things I can't get from them, like stylish prose. It's why I keep going back to authors like Muriel Spark, Toni Morrison and Ian McEwan, re-reading my favorites. Of course, literary novels is a broad category, and some of them criss-cross with other book genres, like thrillers, or historical fiction. Just recently, I read "A Psalm For The Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers, a wholly immersive literary sci-fi novel - a lyric tale about the search for inner peace - which I wholeheartedly recommend. 

The set-up is deceptively simple. In the future, Sibling Dex, an anxious sex-neutral monk, decides to leave their monastery to become a traveling tea server in the outlying suburbs, but soon travels alone, searching for peace of mind in a long-abandoned forest. There, they meet Mosscap, a sex-neutral robot made up of spare parts from long-ago freed and abandoned sentient robots, who helps Sibling Dex relieve their anxiety, and vice-versa. 

The economy of the writing is stunning. The futuristic landscape feels real and long-inhabited - world building is seldom this sparse and effective - while the dimensional characters never fail to ring true.

Sibling Dex is a likably contemplative outcast whose ongoing search for inner peace, and his work as a tea server, takes him on a journey which unfolds like an ancient troubadour’s tale. The novel’s paradox is that the wisdom Sibling Dex seeks ultimately comes from an amusingly chatty, sometimes profoundly inquisitive, robot. At times, they read like parent and child, or older and younger sibling, then switch roles back and forth several times. It's well worth seeking out.

In the meantime, your Bibliophile Bendy Boy™ is looking for his next delicious read - and, yes, he's interested in more than just picture books, thankyouverymuch. So let 'er rip, won't you? What's your favorite type of book to read? And what do you recommend?

Photo Credit: Macmillan Publishers