Back To School Reading List For Grown-Ups
NONFICTION
W
e will admit it. No one at SFR is ready for summer to be over. Not at all. While some of us detest the heat and some of us love to be steamy, our staff agrees on one salient point: This season seems to have flown by at an incomprehensible speed. The Back to School Reading List for Grownups is a regular annual feature intended to counter those summer reading lists you clip out of magazines and noodle into your bullet journal. It’s meant to signal that reading to learn things and escape shouldn’t be relegated to sunshine and lounge chairs. But, if you’ve read this far, we’re pretty sure you already know that. Even if you’re not a 10-books-in-one-season kind of reader, there’s something here for you, too. Choose a few titles from this compilation of new and newish books. Maybe try a graphic novel that grapples with the theme of loneliness? Some of the writers have long local and regional connections to Santa Fe and the Southwest (such as Gregg Turner’s memoir and Jamie Figueroa’s new novel), others take on topics that are deeply concerning for the nation and the world (think opioid epidemic, climate change, immigration.) Take them all at your own speed.
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AUGUST 111-17, 2021 •• SFREPORTER.COM SFREPORTER.COM AUGUST 1-17, 2021
Hallucinations From Hell: Confessions of an Angry Samoan By Gregg Turner August 2021, Rare Bird Lit For those rare few Santa Feans who don’t know bonafide punk rock royalty resides in Santa Fe, let it be known that Angry Samoans cofounder Gregg Turner has called our hamlet home since 1993—but before that, he was a driving force in the very
California band that waxed poetic about Hitler’s cock (among various other eyebrow-raising lyrical feats). These days, Turner’s more of a retired math professor following a tenured stint at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, but just as he had a way with words in the 1980s, so, too, does Turner now in his debut book, Hallucinations From Hell: Confessions of an Angry Samoan. Fair warning: It’s gonna get weird, but then, Turner’s editor Dave DiMartino tells us as such straight away in the editor’s foreward, simultaneously warning that Turner will indeed later present a story about (and titled) “A Cup of Pus.” Even this call to steel yourself won’t properly prepare you for Turner’s twisted words, but the surprising reality of his compendium of short tales—some of which may be true, some of which may have been embellished over time, some of which might actually belong to other people—is that they’ve got a lot of heart and a lot of humanity. Think Vonnegut meets John Waters here, or at least a well-wrought take on gross-out, bad taste nonsense. Just know you’re also in for strangely human insights. In particular, stories that present sleeping math geniuses, clumsy exterminators who formerly impersonated Elvis and skeptical teenaged punk purists shine in the earlier half of Turner’s opus, though don’t forget his abbreviated time as a public radio host enamored by S&M (he was fired) or tall tales from New Mexico’s underbelly. Later in the tome, find reminiscent pieces on Roky Erickson and Dogh Sahm (obviously musical titans themselves), the sad tale of an invalid diploma and, yes, that forewarned cup of pus. Surely you won’t know exactly what to think, but then, the punk set never did much care about your comfort so long as they got their stories across. (Alex De Vore)
