Hello, dear readers. It’s lovely to say hello to you again! Letting you know upfront, this is not a Bad Books Good Times revival, just a new project, but it’s one I think might be up your alley.
Today I’m launching a new newsletter (just what we call blogs in the 2020s I guess). It’s got a bit of the old BBGT DNA in here, but the silly fun won’t be the old “haha, this book is bad”. This book might be really good! The catch is… I don’t know. Even though I’ve read it once. It is so confusing. So this time around, the silly fun is “haha… am I an idiot?“
I’m reading Pedro Páramo.
Pedro Páramo is a 1955 novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, which has gotten new buzz with a brand new 2023 translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. The type of buzz where my Brooklyn book club is reading it, I have seen strangers reading it on the subway, and apparently it’s getting a Netflix adaptation, which will be very interesting because this book is inscrutable. Nonlinear, surreal, and possibly magical realist, Pedro Páramo is a real Dark Souls of books–ass book ostensibly about a man who travels to his estranged father’s hometown after his mother’s death, but maybe everyone there is a ghost, and someone is (someones are?) telling him about his shitty dad’s life but it’s not clear who and maybe they’re a ghost, maybe everyone is a ghost, aren’t we all ghosts if you think about it?? It’s difficult in a way where the difficulty is the point, and god willing you might get what else is the point if you get really, really into it.
wtf is pedro páramo will definitely feel similar to you, the old readers of Bad Books Good Times. This is a new newsletter/blog by Matthew, reading not a bad book, but a wildly inscrutable one. This is a section-by-section guide to reading and understanding (maybe) Pedro Páramo. We’re going to approach this thing painfully slowly, sometimes a page at a time, and create some awful nightmare digital index cards and red string board to try to crack what actually happens in this book. It might not ultimately “explain” Pedro Páramo (there’s a pretty long summary on the book’s Wikipedia page, that, honestly, had I thought to look up could’ve saved me this whole project, I guess), but it will answer a greater question: is everyone reading this right now just kinda all posers?
Give it a shot! Hope to see your lovely minds over there. Help me understand this book so I don’t look like an idiot at book club.