Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Seven literary jobs from hell

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Allegra Frazier tagged seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, including:
Carer on the donor track (Kathy in Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro)

Anyone who says better jobs await us in the future isn’t thinking of this book. As clones produced and raised for organ harvest, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy submit their whole life cycles to their unenviable job. As children, they simultaneously take care of their bodies to preserve them for donation and create art projects in order to help activists prove they have souls. As adults they become carers, assisting other donors through the ultimately deadly harvesting process, until the time comes when they must donate themselves. Kathy, a carer so skilled she’s been allowed to work seven years beyond the normal timeframe, sees in her work nothing but a gloomy image of her own future.
Read about another horrible literary job on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue