Never Saw Me Coming, by Vera Kurian: It’s very possible that I saw this advertised on my Kindle’s homes screen and the title was already in my brain before I saw it recommended again (on Reddit, I think). And…it was an entertaining read but I’m not sure those are great sources for recommendations for me. The premise is that a college (cleverly named after a US president – the author is Canadian, or at least this was published in Canada – who does not have an actual university named after him…so not George Washington, James Madison…Franklin Pierce? This was a strangely enlightening Wikipedia article I just consulted) – John Adams College – has a combined scholarship/research study program for/on psychopaths (the author’s/characters’ term), and the main character matriculates in order to murder someone for revenge, but then the psychopaths start getting murdered…the thing is, there are fast-paced, page-turning romps that are well-written and incisive (Gone Girl, eg, though maybe referring to Gone Girl as a “romp” makes *me* sound like a sociopath), and this wasn’t one of them. I even predicted the ending (and another key plot point!), which I always claim to be bad at but have now done so successfully enough times that maybe I’ve developed the skill. Not when the novels are surprising, though.
Kim Jiyoung, born 1982, by Cho Nam-joo: It’s a season of short novels and mountainous nonfiction, which is not a bad balance. In this case, though, I wish it had been a longer novel. Kim Jiyoung is, essentially, the story of one average Korean woman’s life told through every minor, major, mundane and unusual instance of misogyny she experiences during her first 33 years of life. It’s incandescently infuriating and effective, but the ending felt abrupt (though the actual final sentence was an incredibly successful gut punch). There’s a precipitating incident, though (not a spoiler since it happens in the first few pages), in which Jiyoung starts to speak as other women from her past, that is almost entirely dropped instead of being explored. I don’t know if it was necessary at all – or it could have been returned to in much more depth at the end of the book. Overall, though – oof. Quietly searing.
The Hail Mary Project, by Andy Weir: I have to confess I had a weird crossed-wires issue with the name “Andy Weir” and for some reason I confused him, half consciously, with Andy Slavitt, of Obama administration and COVID Twitter fame. It was the sort of loosely formed, not explicitly acknowledged association that I didn’t realize I had until I realized it was wrong, like in college when I assumed one of my classmates was the son of Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon because…um…his last name was Sedgwick. So…this book was not written by Biden’s temporary COVID response advisor (though Slavitt did write a (nonfiction) book recently…in my defense?) but by an Andy who seems to have always been a science fiction writer. The most politically involved he’s been, per a casual perusal of his Wikipedia, is to state that he’s “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” which, ugh, I guess at least he said it in 2015 and not after Trump’s election. Cough. I digress. This book is tonally very weird. The main character, a man in his 30s or 40s, reads like an excitable ten-year-old. There are many exclamation points. It struck me as verbally slapstick at times. As a story, though, I have to admit I ultimately found it pretty endearing.
Selection Day, by Aravind Adiga: I had a couple of false starts with this one, because you’re immediately immersed in one character’s internal monologue and it’s followed quickly by a conversation between two characters (I was reading it on Kindle, and I don’t think I would have had any issue following the story if I had access to the back cover copy – after I looked up the equivalent online, I was sufficiently oriented). Once immersed and untangled, I was fully invested. I knew nothing about cricket (the primary driver of the story) going in, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had stayed completely in the dark (I did look up the basics). I wished, a bit, for a longer and more conclusive ending – there were hopes I had for the two main characters that didn’t pan out, and other narrative threads about which I was left wondering – but overall I highly recommend. I see that there’s been an adaptation for TV that’s now on Netflix, so I wonder how many of the plot points were left fully intact.
Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker: I meant to read this last year because one of my seventh-grade students had tagged it as the most recent book he had read that he’d enjoyed. After repeatedly shuffling it to the back of the list, I started it over the Christmas holiday. The first few chapters are a fairly basic summary, but I did learn that the “people throughout history have slept into two long-ish chunks (four hours each) separated by a few hours awake” is likely a myth, and that was only the fad in the late 17th/early 18th centuries – the reality, per the author, is that most people throughout history did sleep in a long stretch overnight, but added a 30-60 minute nap in the afternoon (which persists in the form of siestas in some places). Also, because humans are easily flattered creatures and like to read about ourselves, I was curious to learn if greater amounts of REM sleep were at all connected with memory (I get more than the average amount of REM, according to the blunt instrument that is my fitbit, and have a memory that has been described as “frightening”). It seems all stages of sleep are responsible for memory formation and preservation, just in different ways. Of course, about a quarter of the way through the book I learned that the author is apparently “very controversial” in his beliefs about sleep (these must be yet to come, because nothing has been especially out of the ordinary yet) and has been routed on Twitter for truncating graphs, using statistics in a cagey way that supports his theories but doesn’t give a full picture, etc. So I suppose I have a number of rebuttals to read once I finish the book.
