Finished my Zooms for today, now what? (II)

April 2, 2020
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As part of her research for future literary endeavors, Emma Pérez is reading these days three novels written from a first-person point of view. There There is the creation of Tommy Orange, a young, award-winning creative writer--enrolled member of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. The novel mostly takes place in Oakland, CA, while some of the characters travel through Emma´s beloved Southwest, especially New Mexico.  Her second in the list is a classic, Faulkner´s As I Lay Dying.  It also takes place in the South, which always triggers Dr. Pérez Texan upbringing.  She is a big fan of Faulkner at all literary levels, but she likes to highlight his influence on other giants like Gabriel García Márquez, Cormac McCarthy or Toni Morrison. Which leads us to her third pick, Morrison´s God Help the Child. Again, the South and again Morrison's genius, which Emma revisits as often as she can.

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As for audiovisual fiction, Dr. Pérez is consuming the third season of Ozark, the addictive family-crime series endowed with very strong female characters.  Not so meridional, but enough to feel the presence of Mexican drug cartels. Then, she is catching up with the obsessive Killing Eve, in anticipation of its upcoming season three. Beyond place-related or literary merits, this is just about Emma´s passion for spies and murders, combined with the show´s whimsical feminist perspective.

 

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David Yetman just finished Paul Theroux's On the Plain of Snakes: a Mexican Journey (not to be confused with Snakes on a Plane, please). He enjoyed the reading, especially in the excellent parts devoted to Oaxaca and Chiapas. Dr. Yetman can read Spanish so he is giving a shot at Sidi, by Spanish best-seller author Arturo Pérez Reverte. The hyper-thoroughly documented story deals with the legendary figure of El Cid and the fights between Moors and Christians in the Spanish borderlands of the XI century. David is also revisiting 1491, the book Charles C. Mann wrote after his much-debated article in The Atlantic. Dr. Yetman finds interesting how much of his material now seems mainstream.

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Next in his list is Barry Lopez´s Horizon. The author travels to several sites in the world to see what people are up to, how they and others are manipulating their environment and what this all means. "He is an excellent writer rather obsessed with unloading his environmental and historical analysis (usually accurate) onto the reader", says Yetman., who also took the overlooked Countdown, by Alan Weisman, a friend of his, professor at Prescott College: "It is a superb bit of research and writing into the realities of what our civilization (?) is doing to the planet.", Dr. Yetman tells us.

And, last but not at all least, David emphatically recommends Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, from our very own Emma Pérez. This profoundly Southwestern, queer, award-winning historical novel "stays with you", says Yetman.