Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder: Oh boy, this was a wild and fantastic ride. A friend pointed out (when I recommended this book) that there’s an emergent body of literature dealing with domestic drama + a single element of the fantastical, such as children who burst into flames when upset or women turning into rabbits. Transmutation is the thread between them; in this case, a woman’s experience of motherhood and domestic tedium results in her turning into a dog – Nightbitch – both incrementally and occasionally all at once overnight. I wondered briefly how the author would write an ending that matches up to the conceit, but I needn’t have worried. Parts of this are hard to read – intentionally – for the sentimental, but that’s a fair price of admission.

What to Miss When, by Leigh Stein: Leigh is a close friend and I have almost her entire oeuvre, though I need to acquire her first book of poetry, Dispatches from the Future, to complete my set – especially since this, her second poetry collection, is such a fantastic experience. I read it all at once, which is probably neither necessary nor ill-advised for most collections but, I would say, enhances the event. This is an album, not a collection of singles, and the poems play off of one another in both direct and subtle ways. Quarantine, illness, the internet, performativity – these all intersect in Leigh’s work, which in this collection takes on a variety of voices – often within the same poem – both of the Decameron-era and of our post-post-modern online existence.

Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe: In my mind, for the first quarter of this book, the title was “House of Pain,” which I realized was incorrect only when I Googled it to make sure I was spelling the author’s name with the right number of Es and was returned results for the “Jump Around” band. Whoops. I should be more careful with Radden Keefe’s titles, given this and the fact that I kept calling Say Nothing “Tell No One.” My first recollection of the name Sackler was as the name of a building at Tufts med school (which my then-boyfriend was attending) – Sackler B was where they had some of their classes. I doubt I thought much of it until years later, but I also don’t think the Sackler family itself was so heavily implicated in some of the longer works about the opioid epidemic (Dreamland, Dopesick) I’ve read (though it’s totally possible they were and this is a failure of my powers of observation and/or memory). I recall plenty of discussion about the pharmaceutical industry in general, and possibly even Purdue Pharma, but little about the Sacklers themselves. This book covers both the family members themselves and their role in creating/marketing oxycontin, comprehensively and compellingly. I heard some complaints that the first section, on the rise of Arthur Sackler and making of a dynasty, was too long, but I disagree. I think getting back to the roots of these dynastic families, especially those that end up nearly singlehandedly funding something so destructive (eg Blackwater…), is critical.

Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman: I know I’ve said this before, but I need Laura Lippman, Tana French, and Jane Harper to rotate putting out novels so that I’m never without a new one from one of them. This was a bit of a departure for Lippman, and played with ideas of authorship and ownership, going somewhat meta. It was hard for me to tell what degree of sympathy she felt (or intended the reader to feel) about the protagonist; half of the time it seemed obvious that he was the sort of change-resistant epitome of privilege that refuses to recognize his misdeeds, and the other half it seemed like he was supposed to be the one we were rooting for. Not to oversimplify…

The Premonition, by Michael Lewis: I thought I might not be up for a COVID-focused book so soon (since the others I’ve started haven’t taken), but most of this is about preparedness (or the impossibility of such) and public health and focuses on two doctors who attempted to thwart COVID when it began and were dismissed by the CDC, the White House, and their superiors. Of course this is a narrative of the events from their perspective and could be colored by how clearly Lewis respects them, but it’s fairly damning (most particularly of the CDC, US health care, and bureaucracy in general). I did prefer the first half, which takes place before 2020, although it sent me into something of a spin over the safety of things like facials (which I occasionally get) and pedicures (which I don’t, in part because I already harbored these concerns before reading this!) I can’t say I enjoyed this as much as the other Lewis I’ve read (The Undoing Project) but I put that 100% down to subject matter. The writing is delightful.

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Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead: Oh man, this is a fucking fantastic book. The writing is incredible on a sentence and imagery level, but the plot and the interwoven storylines are equally good. I occasionally felt that it could be tighter, but that seems like an impossibly petty quibble when I also didn’t want it to end. Maybe it was a feeling similar to but distinct from the feeling you get as a reader when a book is full of amazing images, but they all compete with one another and it’s harder for any individual image to really stand out. It doesn’t seem like that should translate quite to “plot” or “pages” but I think that’s what I’m feeling (and I know from her acknowledgments that the book was originally 1000 pages instead of 600!)

Sapiens, by Noah Yuval Harari: I think I heard about this when it first came out, or shortly thereafter, and was under the mistaken impression that it was…fiction? I have no clue as to where I got that idea other than a vague memory of someone saying that the book ends with humans going to space, which I must have taken literally i.e. all of humanity has to leave Earth. Anyway…obviously it’s nonfiction, and in general is an interesting read. It’s so broad, though, that there’s very little room for depth. In that sense it reminded me (weirdly, I guess?) of The Beginner’s Bible that some relatives gave me when I was six, which simplified every story from both testaments into a paragraph or so. There are definitely some arguments thrown out far too casually and without much backing – one of my Kindle notes was “facile and specious” – especially towards the end of the book – and a few takes that translated more into raised eyebrows and wtfs from me.

The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris: I should admit I’ve read both the reviews drawing parallels between this novel and the movies Get Out and I’m Sorry to Bother You and the reviews lamenting that those are the only comparisons being made, and…I understand the comparisons! I did try to rack my brain to think of other novels or films with the same intersection of acerbity, growing unease, and ultimate departure into the fantastical/science fiction/horror (I would say, though, that Sorry to Bother You feels much more similar in tone) that this book shares with those films, but failed. Maybe the point of the laments is that readers feel the need to draw comparisons between this and other works when this is such an intricate work on its own (but comparisons are fun!). I don’t mean to diminish the plotting or tone of The Other Black Girl, which could also be reviewed as “a masterful act of high-precision tightrope walking and social commentary.” I read it almost in one sitting.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen: I enjoyed the writing, but the narrative felt too well trodden. I did enjoy the sudden (to me – I didn’t read a synopsis or a back of the book or anything beforehand) appearance of Johannes Kepler, though. So…good ratings for voice and style but lacking in terms of plot and originality.

Until Proven Safe, by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh: A history of quarantine, the research for which began several years before COVID but the publication of which was just this summer. The authors do a commendable job, I think, of balancing the inclusion of current events with the larger scope of the book (I started to read a nonfiction account of COVID-19 that came out recently and…found it super boring). I’m interested enough human quarantine for reasons of disease prevention that I would have read an entire book about that, but was extremely happy to be surprised by sections on plant quarantine/biodiversity/non-native species, nuclear waste disposal, and the measures taken to prevent Earth and outer space from contaminating one another! There were so many fascinating details – that cocoa trees are quarantined in the English countryside for up to two years before they can make their way from one tropical region of the world to another on the other side of the planet! That some pig farmers in Northeastern China attack their competitor farms by dropping drones of contaminated pig feed on them! That there’s a nuclear vault in the US made entirely of salt that we’ll almost surely never be able to keep future humans from opening while it’s still radioactive, because when have any humans ever heeded warnings on locked vaults or archaeological sites, especially if we can no longer interpret the symbols the warnings are written in? Totally fascinating.

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The End of October, by Lawrence Wright: So I’ve only read one of Lawrence Wright’s numerous nonfiction books (Going Clear, the most comprehensive look at Scientology of our time), but that was enough to know he’s a great nonfiction author. This…is fiction. It’s simultaneously very prescient in that it’s a plague novel that came out in April of 2020 – originally I thought, oh, maybe this was a fun thing he did at the beginning of the pandemic – and not all that prescient in that people write plague novels all the time, so one was bound to hit at the right moment. I’m definitely the audience for pandemic fiction, but this was so silly. Ridiculous plot elements, heavy-handed dialogue, backstories that were both overwrought and yet unmemorable at the same time…I finished it because it reads fast and I’m something of a completionist (not a compliment to myself), but I very much look forward to reading the next Lawrence Wright work of nonfiction and forgetting about this foray.

Phase Six, by Jim Shepherd: …I needed another pandemic novel as a palate cleanser. Not that I ever needed an excuse for a dystopian, disease-ridden, or otherwise post-apocalyptic journey. This is set in Greenland, which immediately made it interesting. I know that sounds reductive, but Greenland! A place almost as difficult to travel to as Antarctica, but where people actually live. But…it fizzled after that. There was a B-plot with a character that seemed totally superfluous to the story, and the A-plot itself was unsatisfying. I found myself forgetting the characters and their backstories and not particularly invested in any of them. Even along plot lines there was nothing to really hold onto. I do appreciate that it’s hard to publish a pandemic novel right on the heels of COVID (the press material for Phase Six notes that it was completed before COVID, so it must have been edited fairly late to include references about how humans had learned nothing from that pandemic). But…regardless of circumstances, I found it lacking.

City of Ash and Red, by Hye-Young Pyun: It was a rainy day and I thought to myself, do I really want to go for a trifecta of pandemic novels? Yes! I do. I want to work my way to a good one. Unfortunately…the trifecta I hit was one of disappointing pandemic novels. This was so anonymous and abstracted, down to the main character being “the man” and the locale being “Country C,” that it slipped away from my train of thought if I let my concentration waver for a fraction of a second – but it wasn’t especially rewarding when I was able to focus on the page. In the second part of the book, the focus shifted from abstract illness to more tangible mystery (and also: rats!) and grew more interesting. It ultimately was too vague and generalized to truly grab me.

After a run of disappointing pandemic books, I am pleased to report that I found a Netflix show perfectly tailored to my interests: pandemic, but in Russian (so I can practice). Though I am biased by my predilections I find the show, To the Lake, well acted and written so far (I’m three episodes down), although I started to worry that it was going in some directions I’ve already seen in early seasons of The Walking Dead (though no zombies so far).

The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, by Lawrence Wright: Back to Wright’s nonfiction. I discovered early on that I probably should have read The Looming Tower before reading this, but…I watched the TV show adapted from it and it felt like it would be something of a retread. According to some disappointed reviews, The Terror Years repeats material from The Looming Tower, but I’ll probably still read that one at some point as well. These are essays, which I find more compelling when they’re gathered together in book form. I had a New Yorker subscription for a while and found it overwhelming. Of course, Kindle books don’t just magically show up each week on my device, and it was the arrival and subsequent piling that drove the feeling of not-reading-fast-enough. But it seems a weak excuse that I need a formatting change in order to propel me through what is ultimately the same text.

Hoarders, by Kate Durbin: At first I…had a hard time with this. Not the content, but the form. I thought it might have worked well if it were much shorter (even shorter than its 185-ish pages), but it was all just a list. Yes, in aggregate it gave a sense of overflow and overwhelm, but that sense was apparent after chapter one and didn’t seem like it was going to evolve from there. That said, I found myself more and more affected as the chapters piled up, which I imagine was one of the intended effects, and some of the sections on their own are highly affecting.

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Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson: Incredible work of research, extremely significant, and additionally a tremendous read. It’s obviously not a “delight” to read, but even given the depressing facts of its subject, it does somehow feel like a “quick” read, one that you can’t stop moving through. Part of it is the structure – while each component of Wilkerson’s overall thesis is treated with depth and nuance, the work is broken up into sections and subsections that provide a strong framework for relating all of the interconnected pieces to one another. While I was reading Caste I was also in the middle of rereading A Fine Balance, set in 1970s India, and reading When the Emperor was Divine, which takes place during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; though it would undermine Wilkerson’s book to suggest that only some other books (or stories, or lives) relate to the idea of caste – since her claim is that it’s inescapable as a framework and threat – those two books are related to caste in specific and particular ways. I would love to read more of Wilkerson’s thoughts on the origins of caste – what causes a stricter caste framework to arise in certain times and places (the three she focuses on are the USA, India, and Nazi Germany, though she mentions South Africa as well) and not others? Or are there caste structures always at play in every society but to different degrees?

When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka: I love a novella, and it seems like publishers are often reluctant to publish them (I’m defining a novella as between 100 and 200 pages, somewhat arbitrarily and of my own accord). The narrative is broken into sections with alternating narrators: the woman, the girl, the boy, the children, and finally the man. Unfortunately…the man’s section misses the mark pretty hard. Compared to the rest of the novella it feels trite, possibly in part because the man has been absent (physically) from the rest of the book, but mostly because it doesn’t really make sense.

Run Me to Earth, by Paul Yoon: This is, I believe, only the second novel I’ve ever read that’s set primarily in Laos (the first was Tom Robbins’s Villa Incognito). It’s set in The Plain of Jars near Phonsavan, which is a place I wanted to visit but which was on the other side of Laos from where I ended up traveling. The ending is more of a fade-away than a conclusion, but one that feels natural, like a day coming to an end.

The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi: A mystery composed of fragments that never feel disjoint. As with Emezi’s novel Freshwater, I read this nearly in one go.

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride: My aunt recommended this to me with the note “It’s hilarious” and by page six it was obvious that she was right. I was reading it in bed and commenced the kind of laughter in which your attempts to contain it make you vibrate and are probably more dangerous than just letting it out in the first place. The images, even in chapter one when there hasn’t even been time to fall in love with the characters yet, are so singular and delightful. Upon finishing: Yes, this is a jewel. Utmost recommendation. I immediately checked to see if it had been optioned for film and it looks like there’s potential for a TV series. One of the characters reminded me of no one so much as Wile E. Coyote ineptly attempting to sneak up on a target. Options are fast and making TV is slow but I hope I get to see this; I hold my breath for the casting.

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The Lightness, by Emily Temple: This isn’t a “closed room” mystery (or, necessarily, a mystery at all, though it is suspenseful) – it takes place on a mountain – but it has that feeling all the same. And I thoroughly loved spending time there. The narrator’s verbal tics cloyed a little (“and etc,” “what have you,” “as they say” and defining words/tracing lineage) – perhaps in part because I recognize them (the linguistic elements, at least, not so much that repeated phrases) in my own writing and so am more sensitive to whether they’re working or not. I think the use of “etc” undercut the narratorial voice, as if hedging its bets about whether what it was saying was worth saying, and that it would have been much stronger without it. But this is a quibble.

Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault: This work of nonfiction opens in 2008, and it was easy for me to imagine the long, arduous process of gathering stories and compiling them as they were still taking shape – I was so impressed thinking about her decades-long process (which is very much part of the book). The “mill town” in question is Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault grew up and where a paper mill operated for many years. Some of the prose is straightforward and factual, but the book is pocketed with sections of incredible description – combinations of words I’ve truly never seen placed together before – that create a coherent mosaic of styles. The writing in these sections is utterly mesmerizing. I don’t think I ever describe writing as breathtaking, and I would gladly describe some of Arsenault’s words in this way. The book’s content is, of course, 90% depressing.

The Divines, by Ellie Eaton: Is this “dark academia”? I’m not up on literary trends or new categorizations, just as I’m not caught up on the latest neighborhood designations in NYC, but I’ve certainly been reading many novels that take place in high school/college settings…though maybe it was ever thus? (Evergreen?) **After finally Googling “dark academia literature” (I was thinking Secret History but hadn’t gotten much further than that), it’s mainly what I expected – one of the novels from my last post, Catherine House, shows up, as does Trust Exercise, the National Book Award winner that it seems everyone but me loved. Perhaps Oligarchy and The Divines belong to a separate boarding-school (all-girls, specifically) backdropped set of dramas (even The Illness Lesson, which I need to deliver back to the library by hand tomorrow, would figure in here, though set in a much earlier time).

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, by Clarissa Goenawan: The atmosphere in this narrative is impeccable, as is the structure (three parts, each from the perspective of a different main character affected by the death of the title character, who remains inscrutable until the end of the novel). The themes of invisibility, being known, and holding onto secrets are drawn out deftly, though I did feel that the story ended more abruptly than it could have. Perhaps I just wanted more.

Writers and Lovers, by Lily King: Before the first chapter had even concluded I’d stopped at least ten times to think, “Damn, I wish I had made that statement.” It’s not just that the writing itself is fantastic, but that these extremely acute observations are scattered so densely throughout the prose. Somehow, when I put this on hold at the library, I had forgotten that Lily King wrote Euphoria. I was thinking of Writers and Lovers as a debut (there is a reference to Sons and Lovers in the first half of the book – I haven’t read it but I’m conjecturing that the similarity in titles means there’s some homage or riff on the D.H. Lawrence in King’s book). My nitpick is that there are a lot of men’s names flung at you in the first few chapters and I couldn’t keep landlord from ex-boyfriend from brother from other ex-boyfriend straight, especially since most of them were not present in the novel’s current time. As it’s set in 1997 with a writer protagonist just three years younger than King herself would have been then…of course I wonder how much is autobiographical. In any case – truly great.

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Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas: I find myself very intrigued by how archetypal the narrator of this novel felt, how similar to the protagonists of other books I’ve read recently, and how difficult it is to spell out exactly why she feels that way. I find myself thinking “they’re all the sort of hot messy girl who is detached and doesn’t care” but then recognizing the ways in which half of them actually care deeply about something or everything and don’t fit that trope. There’s a certain feeling of detachment I get from all of them, a sense that nothing can faze them. I’m thinking of the narrator of Blue Ticket by Sophie McIntosh, but there are other echoes I can’t quite recall. Catherine House is a sort of cross-breed between cloistered, debaucherous academia (eg Secret History) and dystopian mind/body alteration through science. I didn’t love it overall, but I admired the writing, and the author was so adept at creating sadness that I might rank one element of the plot up there with the other saddest things I’ve ever read, like Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” a particular scene from Jesus’ Son, or Kathryn Harrison’s scenes about trying to help kittens open their eyes before they were ready. The ending, though…I’ve recently read a few books whose endings have been just perfect, and this one was unsatisfying.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, by Laura van den Berg: I loved Find Me and then inexplicably never read van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel. Why! Must remedy. These are excellent stories. I feel a perpetual sense of sadness about short stories, though, because I feel lacking somehow (or lacking of something) when, long after or even immediately after finishing the collection, I don’t remember half of the stories – not what they were about, not individual lines, not plot points. I suppose there are a very few exceptions to this – the exceptions tend to correspond to extremely memorable plots or surprising lines, though, not necessarily to the short stories that have stunned me the most (for example: Deborah Eisenberg and Lorrie Moore are two of the greatest short story writers and I can only tell you that Eisenberg’s most recent collection had the best description of a puppet show that I’ve ever encountered and…actually, I can recall the general feeling and multiple lines from Moore’s “Like Life.”) Now I’m trying to recall each of the stories from some of the best collections I’ve read recently – Sabrina and Corina, Blacklight, Man v. Nature – and I do find that I can give a pitch of at least three stories from each. There’s still something gently disconcerting, though, about not being able to pull up each short story, examine it briefly, and put it back. I know that I’m leaving out half of the experience of a short story collection, ie the experience you have during the actual time you’re reading the stories. And I know that fuzzy or nonexistent memory of stories past could be perceived as a boon, because it means you can reread your favorites anew again! but it gives me the empty feeling of a winter Sunday. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (which is a brilliant title) is amazing with place; most of the stories triangulate around Florida, Boston, or Italy, though there’s one set in Mexico.

A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry (reread): And I loved it just as much the second time. There are many 600-page books that feel like a slog, and a good number that feel enjoyable but long, and then there are those that read too quickly and end too soon. The ending breaks me, but clearly I went back in to be broken again. Mistry is incredibly adept at using words I’ve never heard before without any sense of pretense or deliberate erudition, and his ratio of astounding images to straighter narration is perfect. I assigned A Fine Balance to one of my students and, though I try not to take responses to novels personally, I was elated when she loved it right from the prologue. The structure, the expansiveness balanced with detail…one of my oldest friends recommended this to me years ago and now I pass that recommendation on universally.

The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg: The author’s journalistic take on story of a double murder, single disappearance; also the story of the history of a part of Appalachian West Virginia; also the author’s personal narrative of living and working in that part of West Virginia; all compelling.

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin: This was so good but I just finished it and don’t think I can describe it without crying/continuing to cry. Instead I’ll just say that Chloe Benjamin is, to my knowledge, one of the only residents of the Venn diagram center of “successful writer” and “people who follow all of the same gymnastics competitions/commentators/twitters that I do.” One final note – other than to reiterate how much I loved this book – how is “immortalist” not a recognized word?

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There, There, by Tommy Orange: This starts in a hundred little pieces and constellates toward a supernova at its conclusion (forgive my mixed star metaphors). It’s one I’ll reread, both because I did have some trouble keeping track of all of the characters throughout and because although it’s not a mystery or a thriller, it would read much differently once you know the ending. I know I’ve just abused interstellar metaphors, but it’s also like a slow-panning shot that zooms in tighter and tighter, and the distant, blurred figures of the first read are sure to be much more recognizable the second time. Each voice within the novel sounds different from every other voice, but all recognizably from the same author, one who is clearly deploying his abilities precisely and deftly.

Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid: While I was reading this, I was thinking about coincidences within plots (specifically, I was thinking about a plot point in Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had, though they aren’t particularly similar) and the relative likelihood/contrivance of the plot twists in the realistic fiction I’ve read (and also thinking about Philadelphia, this novel’s setting, and how it’s often described as a small town and so ripe for coincidence…maybe this is me talking around the fact that I found the major plot coincidence in Such a Fun Age contrived) – anyway, it was funny to then see Claire Lombardo thanked in the acknowledgments. I read much of Such a Fun Age between 5 and 7:30 am, because although I usually am able to go directly back to sleep if I wake up before I mean to, I realized my Kindle was sitting on the nightstand and continuing the book seemed like a better idea. Other than that one plot point, the plotting is extremely good and the social commentary just right, though some of the characters felt pretty flat.

Luster, by Raven Leilani: This was absolutely off-kilter and mesmerizing. Somehow it reminded me of Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper in that both novels feature characters taking completely bonkers actions that you, the reader, are fully willing to accept because the writing is so good. I may have read it with a permanent shocked-emoji face, clutching my kindle as if afraid I was going to miss a single beat of the story.

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett: So good; I enjoyed the diverging and converging over time and place, though sometimes wished I could linger with each character longer before jumping to another’s perspective years later.

Oligarchy, by Scarlett Thomas: I think I found this on Lit Hub’s “most anticipated” books of 2020 or 2021, a tremendous and intimidating resource. It’s a quick read, note even 200 pages, and initially seemed to cover pretty well-trodden territory – girls’ boarding school, teenage-dom, eating disorders – but was hiding a different story, a more darkly wacky one, in its second half. I would rather that story had been more prominent from the beginning (I think that when I read the blurb about the book it may have alluded to Oligarchy being more than a typical boarding-school drama, but I had forgotten by the time I read it since I had been on an epic ebook borrowing spree) and that some of the more cliched moments and language early on had been avoided, but I’m glad I didn’t stop reading it. It ended abruptly, but I’m intrigued enough overall to look for Thomas’s earlier books.

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Little Eyes, by Samantha Schweblin: Ooh. This was like a Black Mirror episode in book form, and also reminiscent of Ted Chiang. The hook of the plot is essentially: surveillance furbies. Delightfully, the short sections that jump from narrator to narrator and place to place (most of the characters repeat numerous times, but there are a few one-offs) mimic the technology of the “little eyes” themselves, like hyperlinks into different stories, and every horrifying ending is horrifying in a different way.

Blue Ticket, by Sophie McIntosh: There’s something very impressive to me about an author who can create multiple, distinct dystopias (this is probably the case with Schweblin, also). As with The Water Cure, I enjoyed this. I did wish that the central character felt less elusive, more concrete; I had a hard time conjuring her in my mind or even remembering her name.

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar: Ahhh…this is so (not to be punny with the name of a main character, but…) lovely. The three voices that tell the story are so fully realized and endearing in different ways, and the prose is very musical – in the “Lovely” narrated chapters, this comes from the author’s deployment of the present participle in place of simple present tense, which sounds like an easy trick but, I suspect, would sound contrived in less capable hands. It’s also wrenching.

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Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener: There’s a particular choice the author makes that I suspect is very love-it-or-hate-it: only alluding to, rather than naming, any tech company or piece of software or hardware she describes in her memoir. Facebook is “the social network everyone hated but couldn’t stop logging into,” eg. It’s slightly Greek with longer epithets but it’s also really, really annoying–both when it’s obvious who she’s referring to (like Amazon) and when it’s unclear (like her description of Pixar). I can understand what led her to this choice – she writes about three different companies she worked for, where she likely had non-disclosure agreements and couldn’t state their names, and probably decided to just elide every proper noun in the same way. For me, it felt forced and it distracted.

Follow Me to Ground, by Sue Rainsford: Book reviews will describe this as “superlative-ly adjective and spare” – I read it in a day. Eerie and contained.

The Searcher, by Tana French: New Tana French! New Tana French! This is the second of hers that isn’t Dublin murder squad (AKA not narrated by a detective who has some connection to one or more previous narrators who were also detectives in Dublin), and I have to assume that’s partially in response to the perception of police, particularly in America (this isn’t fully assumption; it’s alluded to in the novel, as the narrator this time is a retired American cop). Though – I don’t think her prior novels glorified the police, and I suppose I think of detectives and police officers as a Venn diagram, not a circle. Her previous novel wasn’t narrated by a detective either, though, so maybe it was a more organic decision than I’m making it out to be. I will say – I do miss Dublin as a setting. The Searcher felt slightly anti-climactic, compared to the complex narrative and shifting backstories of Witch Elm, though of course still masterfully done…and some of the protagonist’s musings about the police and social justice were a little on the nose.

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Hagglund: Books about religion, atheism, spirituality, and existentialism are generally a hard sell for me, because I burned out thinking about them constantly as a kid, and I’m aware that the balance I’ve found of being okay might be robust with regard to most life issues but harbors a particular weakness for this specific concern. That said, there’s a brilliant conceit at the heart of this book – one I’ve never heard articulated before: that democratic socialism is the best form of government because our right to our time (which is, by secular definition, finite – the argument Hagglund makes that life’s finitude is what gives it meaning has never really pierced me right, nor is it the original element of his thesis, but fortunately that isn’t his entire thesis) is crucial to allowing us to live meaningful lives. I will say that I don’t disagree with this premise – rather, it’s perfectly sound and logical – but that it doesn’t fully resonate with me. I “believe” it, but I don’t “feel” it. I’ll also say – and I doubt I would have read This Life if this weren’t the case – that I’m extremely glad Hagglund makes clear at the outset that his book is not going to be depressing and that he considers all of the ideas he’s putting forth to be uplifting ones. (I have gone out of my way, as much as I can, to avoid things like Kierkegaard or anti-natalist David Benatar (Hit me with your best…nought?) The book is split into the two subtitular parts, and I’m not finished with it yet; I’ll probably have more to say.

Long Bright River, by Liz Moore: Another mystery that deals with police corruption and an ambivalent officer; I had just spent two weeks in Philadelphia before reading this, so I had my Google maps out to look up the places from the book. Liz Moore could be the heir to Laura Lippman; she has the same plotting + writing combination.

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The Illness Lesson, by Clare Beams: The cover is amazing – a string painting of a woman and birds, all hovering from puppet strings. The book is equally striking and sinister. I want to focus on something–not trivial, I don’t think, because it’s a serious skill, but something that’s beyond the most obvious of the author’s talents: the novel is set in the 1860s and the language (dialogue and narration) manages to feel both modern yet faithful to the time. It reminded me of the way that the TV series Chernobyl was mainly cast with British actors (or in some cases non-British actors using various British accents) rather than having a huge number of non-Russian speakers attempt to speak English with Russian accents. Maybe that’s not a great comparison because one of the complaints I heard about the series was that the accents (and the diversity of them) were jarring…but I found it easy to suspend disbelief and let the British accents recede into the background (maybe a function, granted, of western-centrism) and that was how I felt while reading this, too. But if you did watch Chernobyl and found that the accents rent the realism out of it, I don’t think you’d find the same in this book. The writing and the plotting are too good.

How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C Pam Zhang: This is so brilliant. I will not be surprised if it wins the Center for Fiction’s first novel prize (it’s on the short list). Incredible images. It brought to mind Cormac McCarthy and Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, in large part because of the western frontier setting but also tonally. There’s a fair amount of pinyin (Mandarin transliterated) throughout, which I was pleased to find I understood (a year of Mandarin in college + Duolingo). I read this concurrently with Gone Away Lake and was chuffed by what felt like a non-trivial coincidence that both books involve a past lake that has since either dried to salt or turned to swamp. Truly there is not one misstep in this book, except that it ended.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel: It’s not Station Eleven, whose interweavings were just unmatchable, but it has a similar languid quality and is fully engrossing – just not quite as singular. It’s an unfair comparison, perhaps, but only speaks to how much I loved Station Eleven. However! I have to confess that while I remember the contours and details of Station Eleven, I did not remember the characters’ names, so I didn’t make the connection that two minor/mid-sized characters in The Glass Hotel are from Station Eleven…which adds to this story in a very pleasing and resonant way.

Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston: I was almost a third of the way through this tale of jungle exploration before I knew for sure that I had read a story of the same lost city (but not the same expedition) before. Shortly after, Preston mentioned the expedition from Jungle of Stone (though he didn’t mention the book – maybe it’s in the notes at the end) and confirmed my recollection. Jungle of Stone was a big disappointment to me so this book was excellent compensation. I really wanted to like Jungle of Stone, but it was just such a slog. Not so Lost City, which has the sense of immediacy that Jungle lacked and a better balance of history and present. He also touches on the issue of calling something a “lost” city, eg lost to whom, unknown to whom, etc (though obviously the book still has it in the title…marketing!)

Into the Abyss, by Carol Shaben: I kept thinking this was a book I’d always heard about, but now I realize that what I’ve always heard about is the Werner Herzog documentary of the same title. The book, which is very captivating and unrelated to the Herzog doc, only reaffirmed my intent to never fly in a plane smaller than whatever takes you from Charlotte NC to Melbourne Florida on American Airlines. I think the only time I’ve been in anything smaller than that was on a family trip to Hawaii when we took the flights between islands, though I don’t think those were even that small – not “puddle jumpers.”

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