We Are Okay, by Nina LaCour: I could tell that this novel was going to break my heart from the first chapter, but I kept reading it anyway because of how atmospheric and cozy it is. Reading We Are Okay is like being in a snow globe full of glittering flakes but wrapped up in your warmest, softest blankets. Even the cover art, which when I look at it again is a girl standing on a bed in front of the ocean and moon, but which I initially thought was a young woman walking on the face of the moon through outer space with an enormous gentle giant of a planet in the foreground, contributes to the mood. This was just a lovely, lovely book.

The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton: I had never read a Michael Crichton book! I’m not sure why, given my proclivity for disease narratives that are halfway between science and science fiction. It’s tricky to read a book from 1969 that’s heavily reliant on technology and innovation without applying modern standards…but I think my quibbles were valid regardless, eg “we missed an important memo because the machine didn’t ding!” seems like the 1969 equivalent of “I knew that a highly important text might come through, but I didn’t once check my phone because it didn’t make any noise! Whoops, turns out I had the ringer off.” I enjoyed this as it was, but it felt like two-thirds setup and then very minimal crisis and resolution. I had a persistent feeling I was skimming without meaning to, and no matter how much I tried to force myself to slow down I didn’t ever really feel like I had the five main characters straight in my mind. Each needed an epithet, like in Greek myth or epic, to remind me who was in focus. The ending came and went so quickly – it felt like a movie that had been planned as the first of a trilogy (and maybe it is that in book form; I know there’s at least a sequel).

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut: I love the conceit behind this – I guess I would call it a collection of stories?: imagining the thoughts and emotions of the mathematicians and scientists behind a handful of world-changing discoveries and inventions. But it was a little unmooring not knowing which elements were fictionalized. I think I would have preferred if everything outside of the minds of the characters was factual and the liberties taken were interior (and maybe that’s how it actually was – in which case I would have liked clearer indications). Although the chapters are self-contained, they not only clearly belong together and resonate off of one another but also could hardly have a fraction of the impact when taken alone. I…enjoyed this, but felt like part of it was missing, and that it could have been so much more.

Death With Interruptions, by José Saramago: I read Blindness years and years ago so I don’t fully remember if it had the same feel as this – the story felt very non-visual to me (which, of course, would be somewhat appropriate for Blindness). That is, I couldn’t picture the setting, what anyone looked like, and so on, because there was so little description. The dialogue was often hard to attribute because there were no quotation marks and on every page there was a veritable thicket of commas. At the same time, the examination of bureaucracy and the dialogue are so witty and sharp that it was often delightful reading anyway. When I was about two thirds of the way through this, I left my Kindle in Philadelphia and my loan expired, so that was tragic (Reading With Interruptions).

The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook: I loved Diane’s collection Man v. Nature, and I’m glad my temporary separation from my Kindle drew me to pull this from my shelf (I love analog books…but I love reading in the dark more). I was expecting an apocalyptic/dystopian setting, and that’s somewhat accurate, but more nuanced (don’t get me wrong – I also love straight up dystopia, but it was a different and fresher experience to have a world in which everyone is suffering through climate change but only a small group are living truly different lives than we are). The writing is stunning – and would be stunning no matter the subject or setting – but I have a weakness in particular for stunning writing about southwestern landscapes (or maybe just western journeys in general – thinking of books as different as In the Distance, How Much of These Hills is Gold, The Hunger, American Elsewhere, The Indifferent Stars Above, Blood Meridian…) and their flora and fauna. The characterization and nuances of the plot match up in strength to the writing.

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The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold: The “five” are the five known victims of Jack the Ripper, with virtually no attention to their deaths themselves and a pure focus on their lives, which were bleak. I appreciate the author’s intentions to focus on the women as people rather than victims, but have to admit that I wouldn’t have minded a bit more information about the aftermath and investigations. There are other books for that, though.

The Book of M, by Peng Shepherd: Everyone loses their shadows and, subsequently, their memories. A premise not unlike that of Saramago’s Blindness, but even more speculative. It took me some time – maybe the first fifty pages – to be drawn in, but then the braided narratives (three, or four, depending on your definition) grew more compelling. It felt very cinematic – the thing it reminded me most of is The Walking Dead, with “shadowless” instead of “walkers” and without the element of contagion, but similar in the small bands of survivors coalescing into different sects with widely varying strategies for living in a dystopia. Ultimately, it was too far into the fantasy realm for me – I’m very into speculative and dystopian fiction but prefer that the unrealistic conceit, if there is one, is a starting point or backdrop rather than an integral and developing part of the plot. The fantastical elements did yield some captivating images, but they (the fantasy plot parts) were much more at the forefront than I would have preferred.

Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier: Whew this was a ride. Extremely readable and well-plotted, though the character motivations weren’t always fully realized. Even though it required a little more suspension of disbelief than some thrillers, I finished it in two days and didn’t figure out the specifics of the plot even when I thought I was onto them.

The Ballerinas, by Rachel Kapelke-Dale: I am ever hopeful for a quality ballet thriller, or even non-thriller, especially after being disappointed by The Turnout. Sometimes I think I’ll just reread all of my middle grade and YA performing arts novels instead of facing disappointment. And…though categorization isn’t always useful and genre lines are often blurry, it may be that this book could have been marketed as a YA novel – and that’s why it worked for me. Or, rather, it was its hybrid quality that landed so well – dual timelines, one following adolescent ballerinas and the other their adult counterparts. That said, there were revelations (in internal monologue) toward the end of the book that felt overwritten, didactic – the themes and conclusions that a reader should have been able to draw from the events were made too explicit. It may be that I’m turning a harsher eye to that element because it reminds me of flaws in my own writing, but there were too many sweeping statements, too many ideas tied up neatly and presented to the reader.

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, by Ashley Winstead: It seems that either something about the pandemic made everyone want to write about murderous college students or I started sourcing book recommendations from a different sphere. I can confirm that I broadened my search for new reading material, but I don’t think that fully accounts for just how many murderous college students populate current literature (nor do I think the dark academia/resurgence of The Secret History adequately account for it). This was a slightly strange blend of nuance and camp, trope and surprise.

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The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore: Something I think about quite a bit is whether we have – as a world, as a society, as scientists – gotten better at determining when materials/elements/products are going to be toxic too us than we used to be, or if we just believe we are because we’ve discovered and ceased using lead, asbestos, radium, etc. It’s possible that we are actually better – that we aren’t simply relying on having ruled out some of the most poisonous things and that instead we have better testing methods and more foreknowledge of how substances react with our bodies…but I’m skeptical. I don’t have a substantially better way to navigate the world, though – I avoid microwaving plastic even when it says it’s microwave safe, because why are plastics suddenly okay to microwave when previous iterations weren’t, I don’t use real silver flatware (much to my mom’s annoyance when she wanted everyone’s silverware to match at Christmas…), and I have generally avoided going through the scattershot radiation x-ray machines at airports. And all of those precautions may be unnecessary or even misguided (I’m imagining that glass and ceramic are more time-tested in microwaves, but is that really true? Did all three materials exist when microwaves were invented?), but they aren’t time-consuming nor do they come with any ill effects (I suppose what I’m saying here is that I not only got the COVID vaccine as soon as I was eligible but also had my immunity titers for things like MMR and DTAP tested years ago and got boosted for those, too).

The book, though, is less about a lack of understanding of the substances we interact with – it starts off that way, but it’s quickly apparent to numerous scientists that radium is dangerous – and more about lack of workplace safety and the ways in which young women were sacrificed and ignored in favor of production and profit. The “body horror” as I’ve heard it called is gripping and terrifying, and it starts not even fifty pages into the book. I wished I had a better way to keep track of the characters; I understand the author’s desire and commitment to naming as many of the radium girls as possible, but it was difficult to recall their individual characteristics when they reappeared. This became easier eventually, as five of them become the focus when they bring a lawsuit against their employers, who by that point are completely mercenary, misogynist, and immoral in their response. It’s an infuriating but captivating read.

Admissions, by Kendra James: I love the double-play of the title – admissions to boarding school and colleges, yes, but also confessions about boarding school and examinations of what it’s like to be one of a few Black students there. It’s not as if non-boarding private schools and public schools are devoid of the same issues, but they’re amplified by the closed-in environment and the ways in which the students (at this school at this time, in particular) were left to fend for themselves against casual racism and isolation.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay: I think there’s a derided American tendency to romanticize the UK (attended by a significant amount of baggage about which parts of UK – or primarily British – society and history Americans tend to romanticize, eg wealthy and white), but I’m much more susceptible to mooning over Australia. The descriptions of flowers and trees and nature alone make this novel worth reading, and the contrast of an all-girls boarding school in a rambling (it’s not just me) Victorian mansion set in the Australian bush is tantalizing. But…the setup and atmosphere and building action did more for me than the conclusion.

The Impossible Climb, by Mark Synnott: More mountains more problems. Uh…the way the author describes women (one passage in particular) is incredibly off-putting, as is the weird voyeurism about Alex Honnold’s personal life and bodily habits (Honnold does not come off well and it’s hard to tell how much of that is a product of the way the author writes him). I didn’t mind the way various threads (the author’s own climbing experiences, the history of climbing, and Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan) were woven together (if I hadn’t seen Free Solo and read enough about Honnold already I might have minded more) but…yeah, bad taste.

Fiona and Jane, by Jean Chen Ho: This was…good. There’s not really a diplomatic way of saying that without it sounding like “what I actually mean is it was not amazing” but I don’t really mean it that way – just that it was sort of quiet and pleasant. I think it being linked stories rather than a novel contributed, but ultimately it was more that no singular event was given huge weight, even though both title characters there were numerous significant events. I don’t automatically respond to books that feature significant events, anyway – some of my favorite books are those in which nothing really happens – but this felt like a drawing in which everything was the same shade of pale. I would definitely read something else by this author, but the book was nice but unmemorable for me.

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The Kissing Bug, by Daisy Hernández: Apologies while I (perhaps undeservedly) go a bit hipster-epidemiologist and state that I’ve been afraid of Chagas disease as far back as at least 2011, when I added it to a saved email draft containing – among other detritus – a list of diseases to check if I ever have an unexplained illness. It hits the scare triggers for me – potentially deadly and largely undetectable until it’s too late (unless you proactively test for it, which no one who had spent her entire life in the midwest/northeast/Bangkok would have done). I’m glad it’s getting more attention in the United States now, though unfortunately much of that is probably due to its creep northward into Texas and California. Hernández is a writer with personal familial experience of Chagas disease, so as far as epidemiology books go this reads more as a personal narrative rather than lay science, but also has the research element – something of a cross, tone-wise, between Porochista Khakpour’s Sick (a writer writing about personal experience with illness) and Pamela Weintrub’s Cure Unknown (a science writer balancing science writing with personal narrative). Before hearing about this book, I heard Hernandez on the Chagas episode of This Podcast Will Kill You. I’m glad that Chagas is coming more to the fore of US consciousness, and after reading The Kissing Bug I am less fearful of what once seemed to me a completely silent assassin of a disease.

Last Resort, by Andrew Lipstein: This book is the pinnacle of inside baseball if the baseball player is ME (is that how the expression works? Or does inside baseball mean it’s interesting primarily to baseball fans, not necessarily players?). Fort Greene setting? Publishing world? Questions of plagiarism/ownership/death of the author? (Okay, those are universal – and to say that the book is inside baseball is not a knock, it’s just that the larger themes are probably more interesting to most readers than the narrator’s opinion of Walter’s restaurant or the descriptions of memorial obelisk in Fort Greene Park). Oh BOY was this published at the perfect time on the heels of “Kidney person” discourse on Twitter (it just occurred to me to wonder if the narrator doesn’t own a smartphone purely so the author didn’t have to deal with the narrator reading a Twitter stream). The bullet points of the plot – none of which are spoilers – is that a writer visits a friend and hears an unbelievable story about the friend’s vacation, AND reads the story the friend has written about the events…and then the writer writes a novel based on his friend’s experience. The author (of the actual book) managed to make me feel horrified for both parties, both of whom are wronged (say what you will about transformation; if I as a writer told a writer-friend the story of something outrageous and unusual that had happened to me and they took the outlines for their own work, I’d be furious – but at the same time, the possibly-plagiarizing-narrator seems ultimately MORE wronged (for reasons that may constitute spoilers, so I will avoid being explicit)). As a teenager and young adult I was petrified of being on either side of plagiarism – equally scared of inadvertently stealing as I was of having my thoughts purloined.

The protagonist is kind of a tool, but a fairly inoffensive one (and of course he’s a bit of a dick by design) (why are so many names of literal tools insults in their own right – hoe, rake, etc?), and though there’s one (seemingly uncharacteristic) clumsy use of symbolism, there are some truly hilarious moments and lines. For some reason – newness? – when I checked the ebook out from the library, it was only available to read online and not on Kindle. So I read it at my computer in a combination of glee and terror that made my face look like the grimacing, teeth-grinding emoji brought to life. And then, nearly 2/3 in, there’s a plot development that made my jaw drop in the way that every event and decision in Raven Leilani’s Luster did – an utter “They did WHAT?” moment.

How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu: I hear people complain about plague novels (in general) but…any tragedy that affects multiple parts of the world, let alone the entire world, is going to give rise to an entire canon of media about it (though that likely doesn’t apply to this particular novel, which must have been written before the pandemic to be published in January 2022 – and the pandemic of this novel is completely unlike anything the world has experienced in 2020 or in history). But in re plague novels in general – think about how many World War II movies and novels there are! I would call this a novel in stories – some characters are consistent from one to the next, but only briefly – as every chapter (the book identifies itself, in subtitle, as a novel) is set in the same universe on a forwardly progressing timeline of a world stricken by “the Arctic virus.” It reminded me of Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation in mood and of Tommy Orange’s There There in how it builds to its conclusion, which quite frankly was absolutely exultant. I had literal chills as I read the last few pages and absorbed the connections they illuminated among characters. So, so phenomenally good.

The Third Pole, by Mark Synnott: I often wish I could read Into Thin Air again for the first time, and with that hope I started this recounting of a more recent set of travails on Mount Everest. And, actually, a much older one – the book narrates an attempt (by the author and others) to utilize both drones and mountaineering to determine whether George Mallory and Sandy Irvine actually summited Everest before their deaths, which would have meant that they were the first known to do so, rather than Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay. I may need to reread Into Thin Air again or find a closer analogue, but I enjoyed this for its own attributes, though there may have been too much time spent detailing just how handsome every single person in London found George Mallory and on the clothing and grumpiness level of each archivist Synnott encountered during his research. And while I admired the author’s ability to recognize and call out his own hypocrisy (particularly in regards to climbing with vs. without oxygen and in striking off on his own and putting his guides’ lives/livelihood in jeopardy), it was still pretty glaring hypocrisy. In some ways it’s more difficult to condemn because some of these decisions are being made while hypoxic and in an altered state of mind…but that’s a known phenomenon. I’ll conclude that in order to avoid having to make those decisions in the first place there are a number of things the author could have done before he was in an oxygen-starved, addled state, but it’s also easy for me to say from a place of never having experienced oxygen deprivation and having no desire to ever set foot on Mount Everest. (As for the oxygen – I’m no purist and have no moral issue with incredible feats being accomplished with the use of tools; that’s evolution of extreme sports, though there are secondary concerns about safety (eg people who aren’t in strong enough condition to summit Everest and for whom oxygen may mask deficiencies only enough to get them into real danger and/or crowd the mountain to a dangerous level; guides assuming more risk by carrying oxygen for customers; waste from discarded oxygen containers).

Reprieve, by James Han Mattson: This is, for sure, both very clever and very smart. It was highly effective in keeping me tense and unsure of what was real and what wasn’t until its final chapters, but the allegorical elements felt extremely heavy handed. The author’s commentary on fear, race, and power would have been more potent if it wasn’t spelled out so explicitly – if it instead gave the reader more space to contemplate. Conversely, I wanted more insight into the motivations of the antagonist.

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Why We Can’t Sleep, by Ada Calhoun: Ada is a friend of a friend and my primary memory of her is from that friend’s wedding, where Ada had the best shoes and her husband’s karaoke of “The Thong Song” was so good that his preteen son was impressed and not at all embarrassed. I knew of and about this book already but, possibly, had avoided it because I was afraid it would give me ideas for a future mid-life crisis, or confirm that said crisis was quickly approaching and nearly nigh! The book focuses on Gen X women specifically, so some of the elements of childhood and adolescence (the Challenger Eruption, the pre-HIV era, trying to find a job amid the dot-com bubble bursting) weren’t as resonant for me as an elderly millennial (though I probably have more in common with Gen X in growing up primarily without a computer, since my family got one late compared to the rest of my cohort), but I found myself gritting my teeth in recognition over the omnipresent anxiety, fears about money, worries about when and if you’ll be able to have kids and your parents’ health…and then feeling guilty over stressing about your very lucky and privileged life. (Also, in some mild irony that I suspect was widespread because the book is hard to let go of even when you’re tired, I read it until 3:30 am one night, so it sort of answered its own implicit question). “Please let there be an uplifting ending,” I thought as I read, and as I tried to remind myself that typically my fear of what might happen is worse than the actual happening (sometimes, at least?). It does! Phew.

Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters: I think this was the most-recommended book of the year – so much so that two of my colleagues chose it for our office holiday party book exchange, and I was able to snag a copy there. A few recent novels this reminded me of: Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead and Fleishman is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner – but also wholly original. And hilarious. At first I read the title as “Detransition, Baby!” like “Achtung Baby” or as an imperative; then I realized that it could quite literally refer to the sequence of events Ames experiences: detransitioning, then having a baby. This was so good, so smart, so sad and so hopeful. (Also: so funny). On a craft level, in addition to the amazing sentences, I was impressed by the deftness of execution in her choice to write two (the two? Two of? The two, I think) main characters in close third narration and a third narrated from an outside perspective.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro: Although the obvious comparison for this novel about a robotic “artificial friend” is Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (clones instead of AI, but tonally and thematically similar), this most reminded me of Samantha Schweblin’s Little Eyes, which I loved. Structurally they’re very different – Little Eyes is a series of vignettes, some containing characters we meet only once and others that reappear and build throughout the book, and this is a linear narrative following one “AF,” Klara – but they’re exploring the same ideas of surveillance, suspicion, and humanity. The last Ishiguro I read (maybe I’ve read all of them? I just checked and the only one I haven’t read is The Unconsoled) was The Buried Giant, which I found incredibly bland, so I personally consider this a return to form. There were a few choices that felt off – the housekeeper’s dialogue – but the intertwining of the two major pursuits, one (literally) natural and the other technological, wove together well. And it was the idea of the Sun that shifted this beyond feeling like an iteration of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” among other near-future dystopian media. Elements of the world are revealed slowly – one major piece of information comes near page 250 of 300 – and there are subtle, sinister details throughout. The ending was a bit of a slow fade, but that was thematically appropriate.

The Indifferent Stars Above, by Daniel James Brown: What a genius title for an examination of what one woman’s trip along the Oregon trail with the Donner party would have been like – in parts details are necessarily imagined, but events are not. Somehow this read almost as a thriller, with no disrespect toward the characters and what they endured (and in some cases inflicted), even though we all know the stories of the Oregon trail and the Donner party and there was always a fixed endpoint (well – only kind of – after all, many did survive the journey to the west). The scope of the danger, the harshness of the landscape, the unbelievable hunger and cold – all of it would be almost unfathomable but is described with such care it becomes horrifically imaginable.

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen: This has been on my to-read list (and many others’ lists, I’m sure, given the Pulitzer prize and the forthcoming TV series…) for what feels like years – possibly since the beginning of the pandemic. I had no idea that it was Nguyen’s first novel! It’s both incredibly smart and mordantly funny, but its most outstanding feature (in my biased opinion) is Nguyen’s use of metaphor. Genius, of an echelon that – in my consumption of books, which is obviously not exhaustive – may contain only Nguyen and Karen Russell. (From what I’ve seen, it sounds like it was a little too dense with metaphors for some readers – but not for me!) I did anticipate some of the plot points, but not all of them, and it’s not a heavily plot-driven book at heart so that didn’t bother me much. I have intentionally read very little about the sequel, The Committed, so I have no idea if it features any of the same characters (though I assume it does).

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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.

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Once There Were Wolves, by Charlotte McConaghy: Immensely well done. I have not read Migrations (yet) and didn’t know anything, really, about either the author or the novel before beginning it. The past and present are woven together expertly and everywhere you look there’s something else that the story is about – wolves, conservation, twins, mirror-touch synesthesia, place, domestic violence. I was impressed by the author’s writing and storytelling both, and the novel never stopped surprising me.

Lost in Summerland, by Barrett Swanson: Someone is writing personal narrative about experiencing existential depression in South Florida? I feel threatened! Okay, that was primarily the first essay. I wasn’t totally sold on the premise of this collection – “looking for the real America” – seemed like a pretty thin rod on which to hang a bunch of stories that happened to, in some cases, take place in different parts of the country – but I may just have been extremely grumpy while reading this. Things kept needling at me – the way the author is so consciously self-effacing, the overdone flourishes in the prose (in particular when they were reused – how did an editor let two instances of “pumicing away” and two instances of “a whole nomenclature of ______” and three instances of “the vade mecum of _____” make it into the same book?). I might have appreciated them more one at a time, over years, rather than over a week during which I wasn’t having the best of times and may not have been as receptive as I otherwise might be. But these are many conditionals. I will say that as I read on, I did really admire the title essay and another late essay, “Disaster City,” although when Swanson began to recount his experiences with OCD I again started to feel like, hey, this guy is taking my beat here…so perhaps I should consider that the things nettling me in the collection are those that reflect my self.

Home, Land, Security, by Carla Power: The title, albeit clever and ultimately fitting, doesn’t completely capture the focus of Power’s book, which centers on deradicalization and the different methods countries around the world (in particular the UK, Indonesia, Belgium, Pakistan, and the US) have enacted (or failed to enact) in reintegrating former terrorists (neo-Nazis, members of ISIS) into society. There are a wide range of approaches and an equally wide range of participants being deradicalized – from those who have committed atrocities to those who have only planned on traveling to Syria to join the Islamic state or whose “participation” in terrorism was strictly providing support (eg food, lodging) to terrorists. Powers does a great job of questioning herself at every turn – how her allegiances and motives may cloud her judgment, how she can better examine her own prejudices and beliefs, how even the act of doing so may still leave her with lacunae in her understanding. The experience of reading her well-reasoned, empathetic, and compelling narratives, then reading on as she deftly questions herself, made me edgy (in a necessary way) in trying to interrogate my own biases and even my response to the book itself. Incredibly compelling and crucial.

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner: The first thing I did after someone recommended this memoir was go to my Spotify “liked songs” (all of which come from my Discover Weekly playlists – ie all of the songs are recent discoveries and representative of only a tiny part of my actual “liked” music) to see if I had liked any by Japanese Breakfast, Zauner’s band. Yes! “Diving Woman” from their 2017 album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. (This was just to satisfy my curiosity – I realize that could sound as if I might decide whether to read the book based on whether I liked the music). Initially, it pained me to imagine that Zauner probably had an easier time publishing this due to relative fame – because it’s SO good that the idea of it not existing (if Zauner were unknown to the world) was painful. But then I discovered that actually, Zauner’s writing success and her musical success happened almost simultaneously, and she likely sold Crying in H Mart on the strength of the excerpts she had already published as essays (including one that won Glamour Magazine’s writing contest). I loved this book – but it’s also, for anyone with a mother, or anyone close to their mother – extremely sad and difficult to read.

Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner: Okay, as much as “spy stuff” is one of my top two most problematic favorite things (the other is the summer olympics), I didn’t harbor any illusions that the CIA has been a force of good in the world (or even a force of neutrality…or mild evil…) – but good lord was I not expecting just how incompetent it’s been! Sure, I knew about some of the missteps and the more recent flat-out failures, but at some level I went into this history of the CIA expecting underhanded, unethical intelligence…and found sheer bumbling destructive incapability. The book, though, is fascinating. It can be tricky to keep track of all of the players in the CIA’s history, but the 1000-page tome is structured around the tenure of each president, which helps. Unfortunately, because this is a 2007 book, there isn’t anything on more recent years, though I think the past ten years would still be classified. For comparison’s sake (and there is significant attention paid to how “advanced” (I need a punctuation mark there that looks less sarcastic than quotation marks but more ambiguous than no punctuation) the British intelligence service and the Soviet intelligence apparatus are while America had almost nothing), I’d love to read a history of the primary intelligence agencies from other nations. It was fascinating to see the transition from a time without electronic records, surveillance, or data – how much easier it was to lie (as the early directors of the CIA did, copiously) to the president and congress and continue to fail in the same exact ways repeatedly.

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The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan: I’ve been dying to read my dear friend Jessamine’s novel since it was announced, and that only intensified after another good friend read an advanced copy and couldn’t stop raving about it. She lent it to me so that I could read it while awaiting my “bookshelf” copy to ship in January. I was so absorbed in it that I told my partner I wanted to watch something with him as soon as I finished the chapter I was on, and really meant that…and then I read another chapter…and another…and literally could not put the book down. It’s gripping, inventive, and terrifying, with impeccable prose. I would have read it in one sitting if I didn’t start it in the middle of a period of work and travel.

The Guide, by Peter Heller: Heller’s The Dog Stars made me cry as much as a book ever has (well, it was one passage specifically that was up there with Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and one of the short stories in Jesus’ Son), but I think I recall the romantic element in that novel feeling a little forced, and the romantic plot line in this felt similar. What I did like about The Guide were the descriptions of fishing and the way COVID was a realistic presence – similar to how the world feels now – and less a threat for its own destructive capabilities and more for how people are able to weaponize isolation in nefarious ways under the auspices of health. I had a very difficult time imagining the main character as a 25-year-old man – I could have believed mid thirties or forties – and overall the narrative was a bit hackneyed. But I read most of it while unable to sleep for a period of 90 minutes in the middle of the night and it was entertaining enough. I did have a good time trying to figure out what the sinister secret would be (I was incorrect).

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata: I loved this novella, which a friend recommended to me as “engrossing and short.” In some ways it reminded me of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen – not because both are set in Japan but because both are set in highly particular spaces (kitchens, a convenience store) and the attachments to those spaces provides so much information about the respective main characters. Furukura, the titular protagonist of Convenience Store Woman, reads as autistic and perceptive of the ways in which she is and isn’t able to/interested in fitting into the cultural mores of modern society (get married, strive for a high-paying job, etc) and how unable others are to accept that her interests and aims are different from theirs. She recognizes that her life will be easier if she pretends to have the trappings of a “successful” adult life, and that creates the central plot of the story. I found the second most important character nearly unbearable, but Furukura’s observations about him made me reconsider…at least momentarily. After the novella ends, there’s an essay by the author that made me wonder how directly autobiographical the book was – the author, too, was a convenience store worker for years, and although there’s a sense that the essay is playful and not entirely serious, there’s also a sense that it’s actually pretty literal. Of course this made me immediately look up the author to find out if she’s written any other books, and there’s one that came out just two months ago in English – a full 250-page novel, which will be my next read if I’m lucky enough to find find no waitlist at the library.

Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata: I was indeed lucky enough that the ebook of Murata’s second novel was available immediately. (Side note: I don’t know where I got the 250+ page figure – it’s actually just under 200.) And…this was tough to read. The main character is substantially different from the protagonist of Convenience Store Woman (in some ways, the main character’s sister has some of the elements of Furukura, though the main character herself abstains from societal norms like marriage), but the major themes are similar. The things that happen to the protagonist, though, are far more upsetting. And as the novel continues…it didn’t pull me in the same way that Convenience Store Woman did. It becomes increasingly disturbing in a similar vein to Eugene Marten’s Waste or Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (though there is no necrophilia), but less effectively, and the tone of wide-eyed innocence and lack of comprehension of social mores felt forced rather than illuminating.

The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, by Matthieu Simard: Another novella? Yes! Another eerie, present or near-future dystopia of human folly? Definitely! Another translated work? Correct. There’s a deep sense of dread throughout, and even though elements of both the past and present of the primary couple are spelled out, somehow both feel murky, as if the present tense of the novel is a spotlight around which all else is dark. Deeply unsettling.

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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.

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Red Crosses, by Sasha Filipenko: This is brief, rich, and bracing. In every way but one it does not remind me of Philip Roth, but the framing device is the exception – a first-person narrator is not the main focus of the novel (though this one has a much more devastating backstory than Zuckerman is typically given); rather, he functions as a set of ears – stand-in for the reader – for the story of another character. While I thought that the framing device functioned beautifully overall, I wanted more of a conclusion to the narrator’s own story. The motifs of crosses and bridges are compelling and the ending is a hard slap of cold water – I would call the novel delightful, and I suppose I am calling it delightful, though it feels slightly wrong given that much of the narrative centers on Stalin and the terrible lack of choices citizens of the USSR faced during his reign.

The Lamplighters, by Emma Stonex: I think that whenever I read a book that takes place on a tiny rocky island – or in this case, simply in the middle of the sea on a lighthouse moored to nothing – I return to the same mental image, as if I’m visiting one place from dream to dream. It helps that every book seems to draw from the same color palate – slate, pewter, all of the lesser stones – and emotional range (which is not a knock against them). This novel is a variation on the closed-room mystery, except that this room is a hundred foot tall tower whose sides can only be breached by the worst of storms. All three of the lighthouse keepers go missing at once, the iron door locked from the inside. In the first 50 pages the author (by way of a character’s internal monologue) lists all of the speculated theories about the disappearance, so I was very curious to see how she came up with something unexpected. It’s hard to say without spoilers whether she did so or not, but I think it worked in the end!

The Turnout, by Megan Abbott: Abbott’s novels always provoke an extreme response in me – frequently it’s admiration and intense interest, as with The Fever and The End of Everything; sometimes it’s disappointment because the settings and characters cater to pet interests, like gymnastics, but the characters’ actions are so difficult to believe; once it was an exaggerated eyeroll (Give Me Your Hand). Ballet, the focus of The Turnout (unsurprisingly), ranks up there with gymnastics for me, so I was cautiously hopeful…atmospherically, this felt more like a Shirley Jackson novel (not a bad thing in itself, but it clashed with the modern yuppie ballet moms and their over-scheduled, 2010s-popular-named offspring) – the siblings in a crumbling old house, the dead parents, the odd familial and romantic relationships. I was slightly aggravated the entire time that although we learn that the main characters, sisters, are one year apart, we never find out which is the elder. The one I determined to be the older sister, possibly just by virtue of the narration being in her perspective, seemed overly invested in her sister’s sex life to the point where I wanted to shake out the book and say get a grip, lady. I grew more invested as the story continued, although I could see what was coming a mile away, and ultimately appreciated the overlay of very modern concerns – architectural contractors! yuppie parents! – with the gothic setting worked more effectively than I had expected. I still prefer her earlier novels.

100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: I first read part of this some years ago – probably after reading a list of “30 Books to Read Before Turning 30.” I didn’t finish because I was having such a hard time keeping track – of time, of events, and mostly of names. When I interacted with the book again, it was because one of my students was writing an essay about it, and the pieces that I read convinced me to try again. Now I’m reading it alongside a (different) student, one chapter a week, paying closer attention and referring back to the family tree the precedes the book as often as it takes.

Infinite Powers, by Steven Strogatz: I love Steven Strogatz. Every time I’ve heard him on a podcast or seen a YouTube video featuring him, he’s seemed so kind and so truly in love with mathematics. I’m reading this book – a history and explanation of calculus for the layperson – with a student (who is not taking calculus yet, and there’s definitely an argument that we should have started with Strogatz’s The Joy of X, but I felt the pun of Infinite Powers would be more appropriate, and I wanted to demystify calculus since my student will likely take it next year). Strogatz also has a named math/communications competition for high schoolers in association with New York’s MOMATH museum, which is fitting since part of his life’s work has been to expose more of the post-secondary world to higher math.

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