One of the neat things about surgery is that I do a lot of reading, and right now, I am jumping back and forth between three books I am enjoying very much, I wanted to share them with the many book readers who follow the blog as I often do.

I haven’t finished any of the three (one will take a few months), but I’m deep enough to know when I’ve struck some gold.

R.F. Kuang’s, Yellowface is a terrific read; I’ll be up late reading it.

It’s a bitting, razor-sharp, and all too revealing novel about how American book publishing works. The book is long overdue; every publishing horse in America has been taken over by giant, mostly foreign billionaires and corporations eager to control American publishing and erode almost all its values.

Kuang knows their soft spots and goes right after them.

The book is a rough but funny expose of how publishers deal with privilege, appropriation, and honesty.

The days of publishing books just because they are well written are over; publishing is ruthless, cruel to its people and writers, corrupt in the way stars are made,  and rarely authentic. Authors are marketed like cereal, and the young and gifted are often sacrificed for big profits.

Kuang, a best-selling author in her own right, is studying Contemporary Chinese Culture at Oxford College in England. She has all of the publishing in a buzz.

(Confession: I couldn’t stand being in book publishing after 26  books; I fled to the blog where I can write what I wish and have never regretted it. It is just as false nasty as suggested.)

Kuang, who is Asian, writes a devastatingly funny and cutting satire..

It isn’t a pretty world.

The novel is centered on fictional bestselling author Juniper Bong, who is not named Bong and is not Asian and isn’t a bestselling author either.

Her real name is Julia Hayward, and she is – was – the best friend of Athena Lie, who is Asian and a best-selling author whose books have won every major literary award and who is wildly rich and famous at the age of 27. Hayward is an abject failure. Her friend’s success is eating her up.

The two have been best friends since Yale but have never managed to be close.

Juniper’s one book was trashed by the critics and sold very few copies. She is not able to sell another.

When Athena suddenly dies, Julia and Athena are together in Athena’s apartment, getting drunk and making pancakes.

Hayward steals an unknown copy of Athena’s next novel, sneaks it into her bag, pretends she wrote it, and sends it to her agent, thus becoming a fake bestseller. She claims only to have been curious about the manuscript when she stole it but then realizes no one in the world has seen it or knows what’s in it. She gets right on it.

It’s a dazzling and perfect plot and setup. There’s no question Bong won’t get away with it; the suspense comes from how.

Twitter and social media have significant roles in this book, but Haung’s real target is the greedy, hypocritical, condescending, and inherently racist publishing companies in New York. I’m hooked.

Hayward posing as Bong is immediately praised and assaulted on social media. I’m already gripped by wondering long she can get away with it.

Kuang’s understanding of social media is timely and biting. The book is an all-too-true expose of an insane and corrupted world and how it promotes or ruins authors, underpays and overworks its editors,  and stumbles when bringing new and diverse voices to publishing.

I can’t wait to get back to it.

I’ll finish this one by Sunday. The book is getting raved everywhere. Seems well deserved to me. Her publisher is happy to make a fortune at its own expense.

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Also:

I’m 100 pages into King, A Life, a biography of Martin Luther King by Jonathan Eig.

The book is intensely readable and fascinating and captures the whole truth and struggle of the life of one of the most influential voices in American History.

King is out of fashion these days; he was too good to his enemies for our time.

. The book is intensely readable, full of new details and surprises, and fills in many blanks about King’s life, including the FBI’s many tape recordings of King flirting with his girlfriends. They were compelling reading.

So was King’s genuine faith, which infused the Civil Rights movement and helped white Americans to understand it.

I had no idea how complicated his early life was in brutally racist Alabama; his father was an alcoholic, and his mother risked her life to beat up anyone who mistreated her son.

Eig recognizes King’s greatness but also reminds us he was very human. The book is almost 600 pages long; I’ll read it chapter by chapter.

 

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The third book I’m reading is a mystery by Danish mystery writer Katrine Engberg, now a European bestseller. She’s a rising star in the mystery world.

It’s called The Sanctuary.

I’m only 40 pages into it, so far, so good. This is an intelligent mystery; her characters are likable and get down to business. I love reading about Denmark, a country I know nothing about.

I’ve always jumped back and forth between books; I get impatient and curious about whatever I’m not reading. I have no trouble keeping up with all of them at once. Once I get rolling, I read one book at a time.

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I’m really into all three of these. Tomorrow, we’re going to see the new movie, Little Richard. I Am Everything.

As a kid, I was mad about Little Richard; we both looked forward to seeing it. He helped shape rock and roll and had a painful life offstage.

Some sadder news.

This afternoon, I listened to what is almost certainly Paul Simon’s last album, Seven Psalms.

It just came out and sounds and feels like a farewell; Simon is 81, and the album, one song that is 33 minutes long, is about death in his lively, touching, and creative in the Simon way. It’s a beautiful album but a sad one. He experiments with music to the end, but there’s no doubt about the actual subject matter here – he faces the reality of his death.

I’m going to listen to it again later tonight. I miss Simon, he was one of my favorite songwriters. Godspeed, Paul.