Radiation Nation, by Natasha Zaretsky: I read books about radiation at the same rate I read books about diseases and epidemics, which is to say as much as availability will allow me. I read about this one in my college alumni magazine. It’s very smart but unnecessarily jargon-y; it reads like a dissertation rather than narrative nonfiction (I suspect it was, in fact, a dissertation). In short, it was a relief when I realized that “52%” on my Kindle actually marked the end of the book and beginning of the notes and bibliography section.
Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young: I took the jacket off of this book almost immediately so that I could put it in my purse and take it on the subway with me (only naked books are allowed in my purse–it’s like a sauna in that way). As such, I didn’t read the back of the book or the inside cover description more deeply than when I first bought it. This is notable because, as a collection of essays, much of the framework of the book relies on context. I don’t think it speaks well of a collection if it doesn’t hang together without the help of material outside the diagesis, and I’m happy to say that ultimately, Can You Tolerate This? didn’t actually need the supplementary material to cohere, at least after the first few essays (also, maybe contradictingly, I don’t think a book should rely on blurbs/about the book, but I do think a great title that ties things together is a strength, and this is a great title). Ultimately I really loved it–there were a few shorter essays that felt like filler and could have been left out–and I’m happy essays like this are being published. By “like this” I mean deeply important but not ostentatiously about “important” topics, and extremely well written in addition to being important.
I’ll be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara: I read this just prior to visiting Sacramento! (Fortunately, they caught the likely Golden State Killer, who in the book is known as the EAR-ONS (a name that looks pretty odd out of context), earlier this year)) Is it a tautology to say that if you like this kind of book (I do) you’ll like this book? That’s not a dismissal–the writing is good and it’s horrifying and interesting–though I wish McNamara had had the chance to finish it before her death (and, of course, to see the likely killer arrested).
Fever Dream, by Samantha Schweblin: I admired this more than I enjoyed it, and I’m inclined to go down a wormhole of trying to define “enjoy” and also attempting to clarify that I don’t mean “admired more than I enjoyed” as damning with faint praise…but I think it’s an accurate summary of how I felt and so I’ll leave it at that. For some reason, perhaps because I was already thinking about titles/framing devices/front matter, I kept thinking that if this had been a short story (ie even if it had been the same length), I would have enjoyed it more. I don’t know if that makes sense. There’s a terrific uncanny feeling throughout, but the elliptical nature/the ambiguity of what was actually going on left me a little empty. I saw this book compared to the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer and that seemed apt because I loved the idea of Annihilation but found it a slog in practice (and then tried to read the second book, Authority, and couldn’t). Going back to the idea of framing, the original title for Fever Dream when it was published in Spanish was “The Rescue Distance” which is a VASTLY better title and focus. I don’t know–I craved more explicitness.
Cowboys are My Weakness, by Pam Houston: I read almost all of this on an airplane, which is mildly ironic because I had started her book Contents May Have Shifted (which is essentially set on a series of flights) before traveling, but I had that one in hardcover and Cowboys are My Weakness on my Kindle, so…that’s how decisions are being made these days, in addition to “what’s due back at the library first?” (though that doesn’t apply to ebooks, because you just have to put your Kindle in airplane mode so your books don’t get yanked back when they’re overdue…).
Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks: Because I write about music and the brain, I’d been meaning to read this since it first came out…Sacks is always enjoyable reading, but I had forgotten how anecdotal most of his work is (A Leg to Stand On being the exception among what I’ve read–and I would assume Awakenings is, too, though I haven’t read that one; I do remember the film adaptation as one of the first things I watch with great interest from my parents’ bed). I wished he spent more time on fewer cases and did more explaining of the neuroscience, even if speculative (and written for the lay audience).
The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis: I haven’t read The Big Short or Moneyball or anything Lewis has written, but I’m sure I will after reading this one. I had been meaning to read Danny Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” for a while, and am even more interested after this brief introduction to his work with Amos Tversky on decision-making, heuristics, and mental biases. I was really sad, though, when halfway through the book I Googled both Kahneman and Tversky and went through a sequence of thinking “Tversky looks so much younger than Kahneman! Wait…IS he younger? That can’t be…they were young men in Israel at the same time…ohhhh.” If I had finished the book before looking for their faces, I would have learned that Tversky died in 1996. I do sort of wonder, re: Lewis, about the volume and popularity of his work and whether it will be consigned, like Malcolm Gladwell’s is (at least in what I’ve heard and read), to the realm of lightweight pseudo-science. But then Lewis isn’t writing science; he’s writing about scientists and their work, which is fundamentally different (though apparently people took him to task after Moneyball for having described a well-known phenomenon as if it were his discovery, but…clearly his editors hadn’t heard of it, if they didn’t point that out to him?) In any case, I do want to give him props for his subtitle, “A Friendship that Changed Our Minds,” because it sounds like it means one thing before you read the book and can be read in a few different ways after you finish.
Transcription, by Kate Atkinson: I like the loose connections among Atkinson’s recent books. (Okay, I said that before I actually got more than 20 pages into Transcription, which isn’t actually connected to Life After Life or A God in Ruins, though it does have a similar feel–beyond being written by the same person–in that it takes place during war, in London.) I will say…that I was disappointed when I finished. I enjoyed the book 95% of the way through, but the ending was lacking. The structure–flashbacks throughout–works perfectly well, but I didn’t actually understand the resolution, nor did I have a sense of completion, and the bookending device didn’t work at all for me. Still, I don’t wish I hadn’t read it, and I mean that as more of a compliment than it sounds.
The Witch Elm, by Tana French: I was extremely vigilant about determining 1) when Tana French was likely to complete a new book, 2) when Tana French’s latest book was set for publication, 3) when the library had the book on order. Hence I ended up only, I don’t know, 76th on the waiting list for this. I’ve read each of her other novels–my favorite remains The Likeness–and though I was initially disappointed that this one is a standalone (not narrated by a member of the Dublin detective squad) and didn’t feel that the voice rung true enough…I ended up somewhere between liking and loving it anyway. I can rarely predict the endings to mysteries, and while I pretty much figured this one out, French always writes her endings with so much nuance that beyond the basics (whodunit) I didn’t see it coming.
Your Duck is My Duck, by Deborah Eisenberg: I keep calling this My Duck is Your Duck accidentally, and then This Land is Your Land gets stuck in my head…I haven’t actually read beyond page 2 yet, but I already have library fines. Worth it! She is one of the greats.
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