It turns out architecture folk don’t really go for junk fiction when it comes to summer reading. Karl Ove Knausgaard makes another appearance, alongside classics by Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon, as well as some more architecture-specific reads. Here’s what Amale Andraos, Dora Epstein Jones, Jenna Didier, and Mimi Zeiger are reading (and listening to) this summer—and why.
Innocents and Others
by Dana Spiotta
“Spiotta is often compared to authors like Don DeLillo for her use of pop-vocabulary and slippery contemporary narratives. Set in the semi-present, the eighties, and the seventies, the past in Innocent and Others is a recent past, with recent past technology and politics folded in on each other. Props include anarchist bookstores, film, and telephones that can be “phreaked” with the perfect whistle. Amongst this temporal flotsam is a story of friendship and rivalry between two female filmmakers—avatars of high and low art and other recent past distinctions.”
My Struggle
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Back in December a conversation with Aaron Betsky and Tim Durfee about the everyday (some of which is in our Post-Geographic podcast) changed my mind about Knausgaard. I had been put off by what seemed like a heroic guy novel. I mean, c’mon, it’s six volumes about smoking cigarettes and pushing baby carriages through Stockholm. But the slowness of the unfolding memoir and the unrelenting need to describe everything, no matter how boring, ends up being strangely exhilarating. But much of the now and the now and the now of every page has seeped into my own writing, reminding me to be more reflexive in my critique.”
Skyscraper
by Faith Baldwin
“Total summer indulgence: I’ve been picking my way through The Feminist Press’ Femmes Fatales. The series reissues pulp and noir novels from the early 20th century written by women. I tore through Laura and Now, Voyager, and am ready to start Skyscraper. The blurb on the cover reminds us that it was first published in 1931, the same year as the opening of the Empire State Building and more than four decades before J.G. Ballard’s High Rise.”
Full list here.