1.
Last weekend, I flew to Chicago for my father’s 60th birthday. I wanted to spy on my fellow Southwest travelers’ books, but everyone had a Kindle or an iPad so I can’t tell you what people flying from LA to Chicago were reading. On my flight home, a male teenager was reading The Hunger Games. I almost dropped my carry-on on his head, so it was too awkward to ask him what he thought of it, so far, and why he chose to pick it up.
2.
In the summer of 2006, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince came out on Harry’s birthday and I worked for my father’s investment consulting firm as a receptionist/clerk. I took a train from my parents’ house into the city, then rode the L to the office – a two hour commute. For a month, every second book on every train was a Harry Potter book.
3.
On my flights to and from Chicago, I read China Miéville’s new novel Embassytown which is the perfect novel to read when you’re flying to your ancestral home because it’s about a woman flying (through space) to her ancestral home. It’s also about language, religion, and the disintegration of a marriage.
Miéville references Earth several times near the beginning of Embassytown, so we understand this space epic is meant to take place in our distant future. While it’s easy to develop a deep connection to Miéville’s characters, the emotional resonance of the idea “these people could be our descendants” doesn’t hit me until I’m somewhere above the Grand Canyon: in the characters’ darkest, least hopeful moment, a digital archeologist discovers some degraded copies of something the reader understands are zombie movies, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Our protagonist, Avice Benner Cho, watches the movies; she and her compatriots read our stories as their own.
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