The Need, by Helen Phillips: This book is fucking amazing. It’s my last read of the ten books long-listed for the National Book Award in fiction, and I definitely would have made it a finalist…it’s so amazingly odd in its beats. It’s also hard to discuss without giving too much away. I think I’ve heard people describe it as being “a trick,” “about a child,” and “the story of a paleobotanist,” and when someone asked me about it I wavered for a while before saying it was about motherhood and dualities, some more literal than others. The structure is perfect, the language is fresh, and the ending – which was going to have a hard time living up to the rest of the book/tying things up without being pat – was executed expertly. It will likely be one of my favorite books of 2020.
In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz: This book has lived on the floor next to my bed for six months, as I renewed and renewed it from the library since it wasn’t on hold. It should be on hold. Everyone should read it. I don’t remember where I saw it recommended, but once I’d received it I read the description again and thought it might be a miss for me…historical fiction and set in the west (granted, Blood Meridian is one of my favorites, so maybe I should have been more immediately excited about this one). It’s beautiful and uncanny, completely mesmerizing. Without giving too much away, the main character’s journey and the endless open plains on which he makes it felt tonally perfect for the early days of voluntary quarantine.
The Human Stain, by Philip Roth: Reading this in quarantine was slightly jarring somehow. The writing is excellent and the story is totally compelling (this was actually my first Roth novel – I’d only read Goodbye Columbus) but there was something…cunning about it? As if he had carefully selected which characters would say which things in order to very neatly sidestep potential criticism for those sentiments.
10:04, by Ben Lerner: I wanted to say “I don’t think I like meta-fiction” but that revealed my shallow understanding of the meta-fiction canon – I do, in fact, like Slaughterhouse 5, Pale Fire, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Cloud Atlas…so I guess what I disliked here was either the execution or the more specific self-referentiality of the narrator, rather than that of the text. There were many things I did like – the return to various types of imagery, the ideas, the connective tissue among those ideas and motifs – but the meta elements didn’t do anything for me except frustrate me. An odd quibble: though I always appreciate a return to/new layering upon images that have already appeared, I was distracted by the repetition of several words throughout – namely craquelure, dissection, proprioception.
The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian: I went to college with the author, and I remember him posting about the book (and the contest that’s central to it, the Loebner prize) at the time, but somehow never read it until now. Because it’s from 2011 (and focuses on 2008-9), I wondered if it would be outdated, but although AI and technology are central to the premise, the specifics of current AI aren’t so important. Most fun for me are the inquiries into communication structure and linguistics. The situation is AI and the Turing test, but the story is “what are humans trying to create when we try to create AI that behaves in a human-like way?”
