Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader. Our guest today is Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman author of Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir, published in February by Norton.

Jessica has “performed” on PBS, QVC and at concert halls worldwide. Her writing has appeared in the NYTM, McSweeney’s, Brevity and Hippocampus. She teaches creative writing at Northern Kentucky University.

Sounds Like Titanic is a book that at first seems as if it is born of the imagination of the author, because so much of it seems unreal, impossible and unbelievable. Once we dive in though, the reader rapidly gains an understanding, albeit with a remaining bit of doubt, that we are dealing with true facts. Not alternative ones.

The book is published at an opportune time. It discusses reality, “reality” with quotes and it begins to discuss, maybe because it was published a little early, written a little early, it begins to discuss whatever the hell reality we are living in now.
As a backdrop to our present day situation, when Donald Trumps says that his father grew up in a very nice town in Germany, although it’s a fact that his father was born in NYC. And Kim Kardashian is studying to be an attorney, or an unreasonable facsimile of one.

So here, not to wander off, as I am wont to do, we have the composer, a charlatan, a naif, a likable man with the smile of a velociraptor.

And we have Jessica, young, eager to make her way as a kinda good violinist, in the world, given an extraordinary opportunity and the meshing of her talents and the Composer’s overarching plan together is what gives the excitement and to be precise, the meaning of this book.

And even more, because of the time it takes place in, gives us a viewpoint from then and then from now back again. And for good or for worse, the book is a gnomon pointing to our times and, in my opinion, the doom that awaits us.

And with that peculiar fatalism that I oft times introduce to this, welcome Jessica and thanks for joining us today.