Remap Recommends, Volume XXII

Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month? 

Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends. 

It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.

Patrick Recommends: Reading a Bad Book

There is something poetic about the last recommendation I made for this feature coming right as I was doing my best “I’m a good reader” imitation, cranking through a new book every few weeks.

And then I ran into a road block: a book that didn’t grab me.

I picked up Angel Down by Daniel Kraus after watching the (excellent and weird) trailer for Whalefall, the last book by Kraus. (He also wrote The Shape of Water!) I have a weird thing where if I’m exposed to the trailer for an upcoming movie and I’m interested in seeing it, I’ll wait to see the movie (my preferred medium) and check out the book down the line. In the meantime, if I thought Whalefall was interesting, why not check out Angel Down, a book that won a dang Pulitzer?

Well, here’s the thing.

Angel Down has a fun premise: a soldier encounters an angel during World War I. It also has, in theory, a surprising literary hook: the whole thing is written as one unending sentence. The problem: said unending sentence proved utterly distracting to me, and I was unable to progress enough to even reach that angel. But because I’m also someone who is stubborn and wants to finish things they start, I kept grinding pages of Angel Down, despite my huge issues with the prose. Then, I started avoiding the book because I felt like my inability to appreciate it was a personal failure. Which meant I stopped reading.

A few weeks back, I’d had enough. The lack of reading was more of a failure than discovering a book that won a Pulitzer wasn't for me. I wanted back on the horse. I admitted defeat on Angel Down (though I’m going to give it another shot on an upcoming flight where it can garner more attention than my nightly 15 minutes), and instead went straight for potential garbage: a book called Haunting Skies.

There was an article about how Haunting Skies had been optioned for a movie, and while I’m not convinced there’s much chance this book is any good, get a load of this premise:

Earth has fallen to alien invaders, who abduct the last survivors for grotesque experiments. Their fatal mistake will be taking Elisa—a young girl possessed by Satan. Father Kang, the last surviving exorcist, has one insane plan: get Elisa aboard the mothership, strike a deal with the Devil, and turn Hell against the aliens.

This is low brow stuff—but it's also delightfully breezy.

But importantly, I’m back to reading every night, and in a week or two, this easy book will be behind me. I’ve already got my next book lined up, too: Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, a story set during the Black Death that, by sheer coincidence, also involves angels and demons. As far as I know, there’s no UFOs.

Rob Recommends: The Womack Sisters

I don’t usually listen to albums on repeat a ton but when I spent an afternoon letting The Womack Sisters’ self-titled album run through to the end and restarting it, I reckoned it was time to go and buy the vinyl (along with a set of excellent 45s for Overmono’s Pure Devotion).

There’s no bad version of it, but owning the vinyl feels appropriate because the album has a vintage sound that I absolutely adore. It’s a pointed approach: sisters BG, Kucha, and Zeimani are the daughters of Cecil and Linda Womack and the grand-daughters of Sam Cooke and as a production the The Womack Sisters evokes 60s and 70s soul records without feeling like imitation. I’ve seen some reviewers evoke Stax records, the Memphis soul label that made albums with a consistent, iconic sound that I absolutely adore (most people are at least familiar with Isaac Hayes’ Shaft soundtrack from Stax).