Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson: I knew there was an environmental contamination element to the plot – unexplained incidences of cancer, possible toxicity – before I started reading it, but that had grown hazy by the time I started, so my point of entry was “man wants to buy and cut down the world’s biggest tree” and the unease crept up on me as the references to “the spray,” miscarriages, mysterious cancers, etc slowly piled up. These are the things in the background as the narrative focuses on survival in a waning industry and the immediate threat of death by enormous log or piece of machinery. Overall – the setup and some of the buildup was very compelling, but there were so many minor characters that it was hard to keep track of them all, and I had a torturous time attempting to picture the logging tools. The pacing felt uneven in that there was so much buildup and setting of the stage and then everything happened at once. I was not a great fan of the ending, which felt too convenient in numerous ways, but the writing throughout was strong (with the quibble that the phrase “so and so sucked snot” was used more than felt necessary!)
The Sea of Lost Girls, by Carol Goodman: I remember exactly where I was standing in one of Cincinnati’s Barnes and Nobles the summer after I graduated high school when my AP English teacher emerged from behind a bookshelf. She was a beloved teacher and I was happy to see her – even happier when she pointed at the book I was browsing, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and said, “You’ll love that. It’s trash, but it’s delicious trash” (apologies if I am misquoting – that’s what I took from the conversation, and I think it’s interesting now because I agree with the summary but it feels like The Secret History has been recast as serious literary fiction in the wake of The Goldfinch, which strikes me as much more literary). I did indeed love The Secret History and immediately after reading it I looked for something that would scratch precisely the same itch. I found something quickly that was truly a perfect match even though it had very little plot overlap – Carol Goodman’s The Lake of Dead Languages, which, like the Tartt, was a debut novel. Both books would do well with the current hunger for “dark academia,” but while I almost always see The Secret History on lists of “10 Dark Academia books for fall” etc, I rarely see Goodman…which seems strange because if my sample size of two proves correct, the majority of her books are dark academia. This one wasn’t quite as exactly tuned to my interests as The Lake of Dead Languages *also I read that SO long ago and have no idea how I would interpret it now* but definitely met my expectations for it – a little overwrought, somewhat predictable, but pretty page-turning.
Noise, by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein: I have not read Thinking, Fast and Slow and feel that I should, but I did read The Undoing Project (Michael Lewis’s book about Kahneman’s friendship and collaboration with fellow economist Amos Tversky) and there’s a fair amount of summary of Kahneman/Tversky’s work there…and ultimately I might prefer to read Lewis’s distillations of Kahneman’s work and life. Noise focuses on sources of error (in court sentences, insurance evaluations, etc) that are not caused by human bias but by other forces. This was a bit dry, probably suffered from multiple-author syndrome, and was formatted in a slightly cloying way with quotes at the end of each chapter that were supposed to summarize the topic but instead sounded like a wacky statistical Greek chorus. I started to wish it were shorter about a third of the way through. And then I had to bring my Kindle back online to download loans that were about to expire and…just let the library take Noise back. I do plan to finish it, but I need a break for fiction.
Behind Closed Doors, by B.A. Moore: Well this…was just cartoonish. Overwritten everywhere, generally predictable, highly unbelievable. It did help me pass the hours of an afternoon spent on the couch, I suppose. And if I were marooned somewhere with nothing else to read I would be glad to have it. But…really. Come on. It wrapped up well, at least, but the treatment of one of the major characters throughout was…problematic. I’m realizing that the proportion of my review paragraph composed of ellipses is probably a good predictor of
The Hunger, by Alma Katsu: So curious, always, what’s categorized as genre (horror in this case, though it’s not especially explicit) and what’s considered literary. The writing of this retelling of the Donner party crossing is beautiful (and literary…), and it’s very subtle horror (the focus is far less on the potentially paranormal and instead directed on the mundane horrors of other human beings).The reason I’m thinking about genre/literature (I know it’s a tired conversation for the most part) is that this was published by a horror imprint and I don’t think I heard much – or at all – about it when it came out in 2018 (and I’m generally always scouring “coming soon” and “books to anticipate” and “best of _____” lists), but if I didn’t know that I would have thought, based on the characterization, atmosphere, and narrative threads, that it was a highbrow title. The ending wasn’t a disappointing fade-out nor a too-neat climax.
