You will like these books, I promise

So last week I finally gave up on trying to find IMAX tickets for The Odyssey, and my wife and I went to the poor man’s showing instead. Just a normal big screen, not the super-really-really-big screen. Bummer! We put the kids down, our sweet neighbor came over and watched the monitor, and off we went. The movie started at 8:20 and we got home at MIDNIGHT.

Was so so so worth it. I’m a 30-year-old white guy, so obviously I love Chris Nolan. But the movie got me thinking about something bigger than the movie.

The book-to-movie pipeline gets a bad rap. “The book was better” is basically a reflex at this point. I mean you can say it before you’ve seen the movie and be right *most* of the time. But I think we undersell what’s happening when a book becomes a film. `Every reader has this sacred, private space in their head. When you read, you’re the one deciding what the world looks like, what the characters sound like, and what the color palette is. You get to cast it and light it. You get to choose what song to listen to while you read, essentially scoring it for yourself. Nobody else has ever seen your version of a book, and nobody ever will. It’s the most private screening room on earth.

What I love about movies is that it takes the picture someone else had in their head and publishes it. For two hours (or, in Nolan’s case, three-plus), you get to sit inside another person’s imagination. And what’s crazy is that Homer’s been running this experiment for about 2,500 years. Every bard, every translator, and every director who touches that story is showing you their private version. Just think of the English translations, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is not Robert Fagles’s Odyssey is not Nolan’s Odyssey is not the one in your head.

Anyways. Here are six books I picked for you this week. It’s one for every color. I really think you’re one step short of guaranteed to love the one that matches yours.

Everything that has a battery in your life comes from a few select metals, and those metals are getting increasingly hard to find and becoming more and more unethically sourced. This is Green reading at its best, because it’s a complicated global system made completely understandable, one mine at a time! Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction, btw.

When it comes to WWII, one of the lasting questions is: what did we miss out on because of all of the people who died so young? Tens of millions were taken before their time, and the scientific discoveries, art, poems, etc. that we were deprived of is maddening when you think about it. This novel take 5 children who died in a bombing and imagines where their lives would have gone had they not been taken so unjustly. It’s a novel about time and chance — and the value of a single persons life.

Gass spent nearly thirty years writing this thing. THIRTY YEARS. It’s about a historian who sits down to write the introduction to his big scholarly book and instead starts digging. Literally digging. He digs a tunnel out of his basement, and figuratively, into the ugliest rooms of his own mind. This is a VERY strange book. Not a comfortable read.

This is a story about marriage under pressure that is so emotionally honest it almost hurts to read. The reason I'm pushing it to yellow readers is because the relationally honesty in this book is profound. You get real life, real problems, and real consequences. These characters have so much flesh on them that you can practically give them a hug in between the lines on the pages.

A Belfast hotel manager wakes up to masked men in his house. If he doesn’t drive a car, and the package that’s in it, to his own hotel, his wife dies. I mean come on, Red readers — that is what we live for! (yes, we I’m a red reader). Moore never lets the pressure off from there. Booker-shortlisted, and lean as a wire. Read it.

Im a huge Dan Simmons stan. Hyperion and The Terror are all time reads for me. Since we’re doing Homer this month: this book is the Trojan War, replayed in real time on a terraformed Mars, presided over by beings who claim to be the Greek gods. It sounds impossible. It is impossible. Simmons pulls it off anyway, and the scale of the thing will give you the exact goose-bumps-and-vertigo feeling Orange readers are always chasing.

P.S. — Don’t know your color yet? That’s what ReadYourColor.com is for. Two minutes, and you’ll know which of these six was written for you.