The Satanic Verses

Ayatollah Khomeini went through the trouble of issuing a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses. The UK broke diplomatic ties with Iran over it, Rushdie himself had to spend the better part of a decade in hiding under police protection, people have died...friends, this is an intense book. 

It is quite difficult to summarize The Satanic Verses with both brevity and clarity. The main hinge of the plot is that two actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, survive a plane crash over the English Channel and begin two startling transformations: Gibreel into the Archangel Gabriel and Saladin into the Devil. For serious.

Why this is a Good Book:
- Rushdie is fabulous writer who surprises at every turn. He can write something profound on one page: “The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it” and goofy on another: “She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!” His dialogue is not exactly realistic, but there's something so genuinely human about it that it just feels natural.

- The novel isn't afraid to be literal about outrageous or bizarre things. Gibreel and Saladin literally turn into Gabriel and the Devil. There is a village literally encased in butterflies. The whole novel is a tour de force of magical realism and now I can cross "tour de force" off my vocabulary bucket list.

- I won't lie to you. Many times while I was reading it and even after I had finished I felt like there was some deep undercurrent that I wasn't getting and/or that I was just not intelligent enough to read it. But this is a Good Thing! The Satanic Verses is absolutely a hard book to read, but so compelling that you know you will want to reread it and that you will get something totally new out of it every single time. You also get the immense satisfaction comes along with finishing a Hard Book that was one hundred percent Worth the Effort.

Why it's a Book that will make you Look Good:
- The controversy is quite famous, so reading this excellent novel not only tells the people sitting near you on the train that you have sophisticated literary tastes, but that you are also concerned with global issues, are well-informed on the day's news, and probably speak several languages with a bon accent.

- The cover is mad funky in a cool, I'm-probably-into-non-Western-art kind of way.

- Having the word "verses" in the title informs everyone who has never heard of this book that this is no Nora Roberts lightweight but a work that has philosophical insight and three-syllable words. Btdubs: this is true.

Wear it with:
A really great orange/gold scarf. Brings out the title beeyoutifully.

Got a Book That Makes You Look Good? Leave it in the comments!

Angle of Repose

 

As any person with more than an ounce of style and fashion sense can tell you, accessories matter. It's not just about the clothes, it's also about what you wear with the clothes. Yes yes, this means purses and jewelry and scarves and shoes, etc etc etc. But it also means the magazine you read on the subway (no Star or People or Celebrities R Gr8, puh-leez), the color of your laptop case, and the book you read on the plane-train-automobile. Is this horribly snobbish? Definitely. Should you care if someone is judging you for your splashy tabloid rag? Definitely not. Will you care? Maybe. So if you're anxious to be judged as a stylish and smart person with the sort of gravitas and opinions one would want to invite to dinner parties AND/OR (this is very emphatically an and/or situation) you just want to read a good book, read on.

Angle of Repose is blooming brilliant. It's about a historian by the name of Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair in his retirement, who is chronicling his grandmother's life in the West. As Lyman digs through all the hardship, triumph, grief, and wind that one expects from a pioneer story, he reflects on his own life during the tumultuous 1970s.

Why it's a Good Book:
-Stegner's writing is simply great. It's beautiful while still being conversational, it's perfectly descriptive without being overwhelming, and he creates a page-turner without letting his readers skip over anything.
-The characters are 100% believable and all of them are sympathetic. You just want the best for everyone and suffer the pain of knowing that it just can't possibly work out that way. It's a Pulitzer Prize-winner. I'm fairly certain there's a requirement for it to be somewhat depressing.
-Even when it's depressing, Stegner manages to make it uplifting and hopeful.
-Even if you've never been there, it wonderfully captures the feeling of the Midwest.

Why it's a Book that will make you look Good:
-It's a Pulitzer Prize-winner.
-The title is sort of ambiguous and implies that you're smart enough to know what it means. It uses the word "repose."
-Wallace Stegner is well-known enough to make people furrow their brows and say, "Hey, he sounds familiar..." but not so famous that people think you're reading him to look good.
-It uses a nice font. And the colors are eye-catching without being garish. Same goes for the cover photo.
-It's respectably thick.

Friends, put down Fifty Shades. Everybody is on to you and, like P.J. O'Rourke has warned, you will be embarrassed if you die in the middle of it. Pick up Angle of Repose. Your eulogies will be better.

Got a Book That Makes You Look Good? Leave it in the comments!

(This post was originally published, with minor differences, on VintagePixieBoots, where I was formerly a contributor and where I got the idea for this blog.)