Lisa L. ’16 | Harker US Book Blog

The First Bad Man by Miranda July
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Imagine aliens. Imagine supernatural creatures. Now, imagine that those things are your neighbors, behind the placid faces of housewives and the lady who works behind the desk at the local dentist’s office, and you have a basic idea of Miranda July’s eccentric novel. Like she does in her other works, July plays with interpersonal relationships in an extreme way; sex is like vanilla yogurt and violence is like a commercial break. Everything plays out in an almost hyperrealist way, with everything totally ludicrous but also plausible at the same time. The main character accidentally buys a hundred snails and they end up all over her apartment. And that’s a tame plot point. Miranda July has managed to infuse the banality of suburbia with madness, the kind of madness that lies quietly in all of us, the kind that only shows if we’re only brave enough to admit that it’s there. The First Bad Man is a contemporary novel that’s definitely worth the read.

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On the Road by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book made me want to throw on a denim jacket, steal a packet of cigarettes and hitchhike across America to wind up in a damp basement in New York City to crank out pages of leaky ink poetry on a typewriter. On the Road invokes a sense of nostalgia for the way America used to be, when the roads were full of strangers promising money at their brother’s house in California, and the good life was hauling groceries up a hill outside San Francisco, and everyone was mad, mad about their loneliness or their art or the American Dream or their girl or their drugs. Or all of it at once. Kerouac takes the hitchhiking words of the English language and throws all the vagabonds, the orphaned teenagers, the Midwestern farm boys together to make lines of beautiful metaphors and descriptions. This book is the essence of spontaneity and trying to create the purest form of art out of the whimsy of the human mind. It’s gritty, dark, and hopeful all at once, and definitely one of my favorite books.

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