Others: Mixed An unemployed advertising executive investigates why the deranged man who shot his father in a shopping mall was released without being charged.
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Kate Black
2024 · 1 review
Others: NegativeA phenomenology of the If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living? In less than a century, the shopping mall has morphed from a blueprint for a socialist utopia to something else a home to disaffected mallrats and depressed zoo animals, a sensory overload and consumerist trap. Kate Black grew up in North America's largest West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids. It’s the site of a notoriously lethal rave for teenagers, a fatal rollercoaster accident, and more than one gun-range suicide; it’s where oil field workers reap the social mobility of a boom-and-bust economy, the impossibly large structure where teens attempt to invent themselves in dark Hollister sales racks and weird horny escapades in the indoor waterpark. It’s a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend. Can malls tell us something important about who we are? Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming-of-age in North America’s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. Ultimately, a close look at the mall reveals clues to how a good life in these times is possible.
Thomas Pynchon
1963 · 492 pages · 2 reviews
Others: MixedHaving just been released from the Navy, Benny Profane is content to lead a slothful existence with his friends, where the only real ambition is to perfect the art of "schlemihlhood," or being a dupe, and where "responsibility" is a dirty word. Among his pals--called the Whole Sick Crew--is Slab, an artist who can't seem to paint anything other than cheese danishes. But Profane's life changes dramatically when he befriends Stencil, an active ambitious young man with an intriguing mission--to find out the identity of a woman named V [Victoria Wren], who knew Stencil's father during the war, but who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.
What made the match, strongest first
Nalo Hopkinson
2015 · 222 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive"In this long-awaited collection, Hopkinson continues to expand the boundaries of culture and imagination. Whether she is retelling The Tempest as a new Caribbean myth, filling a shopping mall with unfulfilled ghosts, or herding chickens that occasionally breathe fire, Hopkinson continues to create bold fiction that transcends boundaries and borders."--Back cover.
Susanna Clarke
2001 · 1006 pages · 14 reviews
Others: Mostly positivePublished in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North-South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete.
What made the match, strongest first
David Mitchell
2020 · 584 pages · 1 review
Others: NegativeThe long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief, blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968. David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?
What made the match, strongest first
Robert McCammon
2002 · 792 pages · 4 reviews
Others: MixedIn 1699, a traveling magistrate and his clerk, Matthew, come to Fount Royal to try a woman charged with witchcraft.
Mixedto me it feels much less like a novel of ideas in kingdom come sometimes characters really feel kind of weird because they don't act or talk like normal people at all they talk more like megaphones for the offer to pass is like philosophical or political views on a certain topic that said they are both great books really
