What We've Been Reading

Brad:
I'm currently reading Popular Music from Vittulaby Mikael Niemi. Niemi is a Swedish novelist who grew up within the Arctic Circle, in northern Sweden near the Finnish border. The novel takes place in the small town of Pajala (where Niemi himself grew up), with Matthias (as a grown-up) writing in his journal about his youth. It's a strange, eloquent book, with splashes of magical realism as Matthias and his friends slowly encounter Elvis, girls, and lots and lots of snow. I'm not very far along in it yet, but it's proving to be difficult to put down, and once I've done that, difficult to shake its warm hold.

Dustin:
I just foraged through Paul Harding's Tinkers.(Full Disclosure: I read this a couple weeks ago and I'm writing about it now because, not coincidentally, Paul Harding is reading at InDigest 1207 on Wednesday Oct. 7.) Tinkers concerns is two occasionally converging stories: An old man on his death bed looking back at his childhood, and the story of his epileptic tinker father and the battles that each encountered as their life paths ran in parallel and forked. The language flowers into beautiful labyrinths of digressions and descriptions. It reads almost like a work of modernist existentialism but is ultimately more pointed than that. It's complex and beautiful, one of the more demanding and satisfying works I've read in a while.