Posted on October 7, 2022
When I committed to attending UNCG for graduate school, I suddenly realized the amount of changes I had just agreed to. Like most of my colleagues, I was packing up and leaving the life I had made—my friends, my routines, my job—behind me in order to have two years where I could fully immerse myself in the craft of writing. Granted, it was a comparatively short move: relocating from Raleigh was one of the smaller distances in my cohort. But looking at my house where I had lived in with my closest friends for the past three years from the rearview mirror of my U-Haul made me realize what a giant life change I was enacting. I had barely any belongings—just a few pieces of furniture, my clothes, and my books—rattling around in the truck, my cats sitting in the front with me. Over the summer I felt the incentive to read through my books as much as possible, gradually checking off the ever-expanding to-read list, knowing that I would have much more limited time once the semester started. Some of the most stunning novels and collections of poetry I discovered during this time period, where I was cramming in reading for pleasure before I faced the seemingly unending stack of required books for school.
Even though I am receiving my masters degree in poetry, I have a not-so-secret proclivity towards reading genre fiction. I love science fiction and the emerging genre of speculative fiction—the world building it requires, how it experiments with form, its ability to be overtly political. It’s no wonder, then, that I gravitated towards The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, a science fiction novel that has created a lot of buzz recently for the depth and ambition of it. It feels impossible to say anything about this novel without first acknowledging the beautiful translation work done by Ken Liu, author of “The Paper Menagerie”. The writing at a sentence level is incredibly intriguing and graceful, somehow managing to translate ideas about culture, revolution, and theoretical physics across entirely different languages. To place this novel purely in the definition of science fiction does it a disservice. It is also a historical fiction piece based on the era of the Chinese Revolution, and the way it meshes place and ideas of technology, science, and extraterrestrial life is truly extraordinary. Without a hint of dramatism or irony, this novel was a once-in-a-lifetime read for me. Its ability to avoid any cliches or triteness and provide an actually unique, incredibly thoughtful narrative about aliens in of itself is an impressive feat.
Through my love of speculative fiction I discovered one of my favorite contemporary authors, Charles Yu. I read his work chronologically, beginning with his short story collection Standard Loneliness Package, which was released in 2010 and was his first novel after working as a lawyer. Yu has this incredible and recognizable balance of humor and poignancy—it feels like the depiction most reminiscent of actual human experience in writing that I have ever encountered. Naturally, I had to read his newest novel, Interior Chinatown, when it came out. With each of his collections and novels Yu finds a new way to challenge conventional functions of form in a way that elevates his storytelling (not a radically new type of writing for him, as he famously was a writer for the first season of Westworld). In Interior Chinatown, the entire novel is told through entirely a screenplay for a television show. Naturally, the novel expands beyond the show itself and blurs the line between reality and creation. The novel provides a reflection and meditation on race portrayed in media, family, capitalism, and how these forces interact with each other. Yu’s particular sense of wittiness and reflection is so distinct: fans of his work will recognize his voice anywhere. I believe Yu to be one of the most exciting contemporary writers in the world of speculative fiction—I find his work electrifying.
One of the most evergreen things about being a writer, perhaps one of the only guaranteed parts, is that when people in your life don’t know what to gift you, they will always give you books. And I love to receive these literary gifts! They reveal a piece of a loved one’s personality and oftentimes are books I wouldn’t have otherwise grabbed for myself. For my birthday my good friend and roommate gifted me The Latinist by Mark Prins, a novel detailing a doctoral student’s studies and relationship with her advisor after she discovers he is monitoring and stalking her. I found it a fascinating look into academia and a didactic dive into the world of the Classics. The author has a mesmerizing understanding of the complicated process that is translating Latin and making sense of ancient texts. I always love the sensation of learning alongside enjoying a novel—when it has the ability to gently teach and bring out the interesting parts of a discipline. A friend also recently gifted me the poetry collection (finally, my mention of poetry!), The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang. At its core the collection is a psychoanalysis of the self: it collects and recounts the absurdities of dreams in order to tell the story of a life. The poems make a grand gesture towards how inescapable are the institutions that control our lives. The structures remain intact, hauntingly so, in the dreams, and the trauma is ever-present. Despite these heavy themes, the poems avoid being weighed down. Wang embraces humor in her poetry—acknowledging the absurd and laughing about it. I always appreciate some lightheartedness in poetry, breaking the echoes of the canon that it has to be a strictly serious form of expression.
I had the luck (is that the word for it?) of one of the books on my to-read list coincidentally also appearing on the syllabus of my Structure of Fiction class. Thus, I started Infinite Country during one of my last days living in Raleigh and had the opportunity to finish it here at UNCG. It served as a bridge of sorts in my transition. The novel follows a girl in her escape from Colombia and addresses themes of violence, immigration, womanhood, and language. The structure of how author Patricia Engel tells the narrative beautifully interweaves the histories of a family and how they interact with the larger cultural context. The character building in this novel is unparalleled: they have so much depth and complexity as truly complicated and compelling figures.
In the world of so much overwhelming newness, I appreciate the familiarity of getting lost in a book and meeting others who share that love. As my reading list grows and I discover new authors, I am so excited to be in a community of writers who reflect my own enthusiasm and ensure that my list may always be unending.
CAROLINE WHITE is a first-year poetry student from Laurel, Maryland. She currently works as a Consultant at the University Writing Center, an educator, and literacy volunteer in the surrounding Greensboro area. Her poem “peaches” won the 2019 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry.
