What is Joseph G. Peterson reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Joseph G. Peterson, author of The Perturbation of O.

The entry begins:

I read fiction, poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. The following are my most recent obsessions.

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is the book that I'm recommending that everyone read. It tells the story of his father's imprisonment in a Japanese labor camp where his father was subjected to slave labor. It was a notorious labor camp where prisoners were expected to die. Flanagan's father didn't have long to live when a fellow prisoner of Flanagan's father noticed a white flash of light on the horizon at mid-morning. That flash of light would lead to the release of Flanagan's father from the slave camp, and his survival which led ultimately to the birth of Richard Flanagan. The flash of light on the horizon was the bomb going off over Hiroshima. Question 7 is structured in some ways like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 as the parallelism of the titles suggests, and it grapples with several important moral questions...[read on]

About The Perturbation of O, from the publisher:

The Perturbation of O tells the comic story of how a loser became a winner with the publication of his memoir, Gideon’s Confession, and the chaotic aftermath that the book and an encounter with Oprah Winfrey have had on two people: Gideon Anderson and Regina Blast, a woman about whom Gideon wrote intimately in his memoir.

Told mostly in a single conversation between Gideon and Regina as they sit on a spring morning drinking coffee and eating pastries, The Perturbation of O deals with concepts of fame and intimacy, and who has the right to speak about whom.

Visit Joseph G. Peterson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Piece.

Writers Read: Joseph G. Peterson.

--Marshal Zeringue