Issue 108—Reading Underground
Welcome to 500 Words.
TOP OF MIND
Summer reads are specific reads. The book that is your beach read, with a steamy plot you can interrupt with another iced tea or piña colada, isn't the same as your airplane read, a book that is fine on the way out, but on the way back starts to feel too heavy to fit in your suitcase. Your cabin-in-the-woods vacation read has a story that you can read in a week, accompanied with whatever animals are howling out there.
These books, according to novelist Adam Sternbergh, are short-term pleasures by design. There's another kind of reading, though, the book that you can read in a hot, fluorescently lit subway car during rush hour. That's subway read. As he writes, in that situation "I want to be anywhere else, and fast." The subway read has to capture your attention and hold it through your stops. Sternbergh continues,
While I envy the razor-focused commuters who crouch over a dog-eared Dostoyevsky, I’ve learned that my subway-brain, addled by constant announcements and the overheard conversations of my neighbors, can’t give a dense classic the close attention it requires.
So I want thrilling plots, yes — but also thrilling language. I want sentences I’ll stop to read twice. This is why standard throwaway airport thrillers don’t migrate well beneath ground.
His top recommendations are Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, which he calls a "shiv of a book about a blocked writer watching her marriage unravel," and James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential.
I'd add to that Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, a short novel about a tech culture trying to take over an indigenous culture and failing. It's forceful, filled with sentences you'll want to read twice, and fits in a bag.
COPING STRATEGIES
Gardening isn't easy. You'd think all you have to do is go to the garden nursery, pick out the nice plants, and plunk them in the ground. But certain plants like certain locations in the garden, then it gets really hot, you forget they're out there, and they all die. Back to the store you go to try again, reminding yourself that it's not the destination, it's the process. You keep trying, and learn that tomatoes like heat, so they thrive in August, and squirrels like strawberries, so we're feeding them. We don't get many strawberries for ourselves, but at least the squirrels are happy.
PROJECTS
It's quiet in August, but the wheels continue to turn. The third book in the Utopia Engine trilogy, Liberation, is with the proofreader, and the re-issue of the first book in the trilogy, Surrender, is with another proofreader. The marketing plan is spinning up to release Liberation on October 7 and the re-issue of the trilogy in a special bundled edition two weeks later. I've been speaking with publicists and will go to contract with one soon. I have some interesting (maybe weird) ideas for social media. And I've started writing the next trilogy of books, this one for younger readers.
But I have taken some time to do nothing, watch Severance, play tennis with my wife and youngest son, make too many matcha lattes, and work through the pile of books-to-read.
I hope you find time this week ahead to take a break and do something you didn't expect to do.
Thanks for reading,
Lee
SOURCES
Transportive Reading for Underground Transportation
Books recommended in this newsletter
Subway photo by Lee Schneider
This is a weekly letter about indie publishing from Lee Schneider. Author of the novels SURRENDER, RESIST and the forthcoming LIBERATION. Creator of the audio dramas MISSION OF THE LUNAR SPARROW, YOUR PERFORMANCE REVIEW, and PRIVACY POD. Working on many things. Nice to see you here. 500 Words is a publication of FutureX Studio.