Books Seattle Reads a Book With an Ugly Cover
posted by on March 4 at 16:30 PM
Seattle Public Library has announced that this years’ Seattle Reads choice (the program formerly known as “If All Seattle Read the Same Book…”) is The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu, who is originally from Ethiopia.
It’s got one damn ugly cover:
I haven’t read it yet. The novel is about a Washington DC neighborhood in the 1970s. There’s also quite a bit about Alexis de Tocqueville, which is promising, and lots of talk about class issues, which could be interesting in a discussion at the library, since the library tends to draw upper-middle-class bookclub ladies and also lots of lower-middle-class-and-lower people to their readings. Maybe a class war will break out. There will be five author appearances at branches of the SPL and Seattle Central Community College, spread over May 7th through the 10th. SPL probably has a ton of copies of the book at their various branches, if you’re interested.
Woooooooo! De Toqueville!
Also, class wars.
Though it's buying into the hippy utopian social engineering project, I'm kinda excited to read this.
Though I haven't read the book I saw Mengestu speak last year at Elliott Bay and was impressed. The passage he read was great and he gracefully fielded a number of ill-informed audience questions (why would one ask an Ethiopian writer living in the US about the Congo?!?!). Class and race will certainly come up since gentrification is a central theme in the book. That's a good pick by SPL.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).