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Bookninja's First Annual Top Ten Holiday List™: Apocalypse and Destruction
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We at Bookninja are proud to bring you our first annual Top Ten Holiday list. In the spirit of the season of renewal, rebirth, and enforced glee, our theme this year is Apocalypse and Destruction. The following is a list of works we think best sum up this theme. Note: While there are already many holiday classics that fit this theme - "The Waste Land," "A Canticle for Leibowitz," Moby Dick, "The Nine Billion Names of God," "The Battle of Maldon," etc. - we at Bookninja are dedicated to bringing you the new and revolutionary, so we've compiled a list of recent classics (and by that we mean works we read voluntarily, not works we were forced to read in school by doddering old men who had visions of Pound in the middle of class or who lectured in Old English just because they could). No need to thank us. Just enjoy.
Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in
the West The tale of a scalping raid into Mexico that goes wrong (and that's just for starters), Blood Meridian is quite possibly the most apocalyptic book ever written, in every sense of the word. McCarthy savages the romantic Old West myths of outlaw heroes and the last frontier, replacing them with grotesque accounts of horrible, almost unbearable violence and pure, cold hatred. Everything is dirty, everyone is evil, and there is no redemption to be found anywhere, no matter how hard you search for it, and you will. Yes, you will. Enola Gay The "Waste Land" of the 21st century, Enola Gay is a poet's dream, or nightmare, depending on whether you like your poems straight up or on the rocks. Levine tackles it all here: the rupturing and fragmentation of poetic tradition, the techopalypse of the late 20th century, the failure of society, the failure of history, the failure of belief systems of all sort, the failure of language itself (but not in that self-indulgent language poetry way). Enola Gay is a meditation on the end of the world, not through sudden cataclysmic destruction, but through slow decay. (You can read the Bookninja discussion here.) "A Dry Quiet War" A science-fiction masterpiece, "A Dry Quiet War" tells the story of a soldier who returns to his farming planet after fighting in the future, at the end of time. All he wants is to be left alone, and maybe rekindle a relationship with a past love, but it's never that easy, is it? His town is harassed by glims - other soldiers from a parallel universe that was destroyed in the war - and if the narrator interferes with them at all, he runs the risk of upsetting the balance of the war that he's just returned from, the war that has yet to be fought. Confused? You won't be. Daniel is a master at imaginative, visionary sci-fi ideas, all based in real concepts circulating now, but he's also a skilled writer who cares about story and voice. He knows his literary tradition, too - the story is positively Faulknerian and features the twin suns of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Does he get the girl, you ask? Well, this is a list about apocalypses and the end of things.. The Dead Father A forgotten American
classic, The
Dead Father tells the tale of a group of people hauling the
"dead father" - a giant, godlike figure who is "dead
only in a sense" - across the countryside in search of an object
that will restore him to health and power. Along the way the dead
father reminisces on the past and frequently breaks loose of his
bonds to slay everything around him, although some of his foes are
alive only in a sense. Meaning is always unstable and contingent in
the book, and readers will never quite be sure what's going on. But
that's all right - neither are the characters. Button, "The Gernsback Continuum" This story's not so much about the end of the world as it is about the end of a particular dream of a world. It tells the story of a photographer hired to shoot some art deco photos who starts to lose his grip on reality and see the world that could have been, a world of flying cars and utopian cities free of crime. It's an homage to the classics of sci-fi, an elegy for what could have been, and a premonition of Pattern Recognition. One of Gibson's best pieces. "Bloodfall" The end of the world as seen from the perspective of a hippie commune (or something like that), who welcome it with one long party. It's Boyle at his manic and absurd best. Where does the title come from? Well, the world ends in a bloodfall, a rain of blood of biblical proportions. Only it doesn't really end. And the bloodfall is replaced with something else.. "City of My Dreams" A love/hate song for Vancouver, "City of My Dreams" nicely sums up everything about the postmodern city: its emptily hip culture, deluded artists, nature fascists, and all the dreams of a better life that have gotten lost in the condo canyons and float aimlessly around the streets. Not just about Vancouver, but about the places inside ourselves that we retreat to but can't live in. Gartner's vision of Vancouver's destruction is one of the most beautiful moments of CanLit. Grendel The Beowulf myth told from Grendel's point of view. The accident-prone monster just wants to hang out with the humans to ease his loneliness, but they don't really like the looks of him and proceed to abuse him. Grendel gets ticked and much carnage ensues. Things definitely get apocalyptic for the poor monster when Beowulf shows up on the scene as a crazed, almost abstract force of nature and renewal, as if he were the embodiment of a Dylan Thomas poem. Poor Grendel has had an accident. Indeed. "Sea Oak" Another brilliant Saunders piece, and maybe his weirdest yet. "Sea Oak" is the story of a man who supports his family by working as a waiter/stripper at an aeronautical-themed strip club (that's right, aeronautical). His life is slowly falling apart when his aunt dies and then comes back to life with a plan to fix all the problems of his family. Does it work? Read it here and find out. This one has it all, folks - death, rebirth, more death, and the slow collapse of civilization into nothing but desolate commercial spaces and empty simulations of its own meaningless symbolism. Oh, wait.. Invisible Cities If you don't see how this book fits the theme, you have no business reading it anyway. But just in case you haven't used it to woo someone yet (try it, it's a great wooing book!), here are the details: Marco Polo describes the cities he has seen in his adventures to Kublai Khan in the dying days of Khan's empire, but they are all impossible cities, built out of dreams and destined for destruction. There are dead cities and cities for the dead, cities built of spiderwebs and invisible cities. But these cities may not be real, they may all be imaginary. They may all be Venice, or they may be nowhere at all. Beautiful and haunting at the same time. See also Borges.
Yes, we know there's only one woman on the list, but we couldn't really think of other good apocalypse-type tales authored by women (besides Oryx and Crake, which is really good, but mostly for the chase scene at the end - how come people 100 years from now are using CDROMs and DVDs?) We're open to suggestions.
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