The next summer read: ‘Station Eleven’

I've commented here and there — mostly on Facebook, I guess — that two of the books I read this summer that impressed me the most were "Stoner," a 1965 novel by U.S. writer John Williams, and "The Narrow Road to the Deep North," a 2013 novel (and 2014 Man-Booker Prize winner) by Australian writer Richard Flanagan.

"Stoner," which was reissued in 2003 by New York Review Book Classics, was featured in a New Yorker magazine story under the headline "The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard Of." It tells the story of a man whose seemingly ordinary life gives meaning to the lone struggle of the individual. 

Flanagan's novel, which is a harrowing tale of Australian soldiers struggling to survive in a Japanese forced-labor camp during World War II, was described in the Washington Post as a book that "will cast a shadow over your summer and draw you away from friends and family into dark contemplation the way only the most extraordinary books can."

So what's next? Well, I think I'm going to try "Station Eleven," the featured book of the annual Spokane Is Reading event. Author Emily St. John Mandel describes her book as "about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. It’s also about friendship, memory, love, celebrity, our obsession with objects, oppressive dinner parties, comic books, and knife-throwing.”

What could be better than that?