Ep. 12: The Darkest Book I Have Read to Date
What is the darkest book you have ever read? What actually makes a book dark in the first place? Up until this book, I am not certain what my answer would have been.
Is a book “dark” solely due to graphic content, meaning, or extreme violence? Or is it just heavy subject matter, such as suicide, depression, or abuse?
When people ask me what type of books I enjoy reading most, I believe my most common answer is "I love reading dark books" yet I am not even certain how to best explain that. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is dark. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is dark but in an entirely different and unique way compared to The Road. Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage is dark as is The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang, and those two books are worlds apart in content.
Dark is difficult to define in exact terms and this is something specific to each reader.
Enter My Dark Vanessa.
The story is powerful, difficult to read, and important to experience. I most certainly would classify this as a “dark read”. A 15-year-old girl away at a boarding school who falls in love with a 42-year-old teacher might not sound extremely dark, but the perspective from which this is told (that of Vanessa) is what adds power to the story. It is a tale of love, confusion, abuse, grooming, destruction, hope, and hopelessness. It is devastating.
Listen to Episode 12
Mentioned in the Episode
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Adventures in Publishing Outside the Gates: On the industry’s gatekeeping by Wendy Ortiz