Come With Me, by Helen Schulman: The description for this pushed a number of buttons for me – nuclear radiation! near-future technology! – but I was expected something that veered more speculative than this ended up. That in itself I didn’t mind, and I generally enjoyed reading this, but…it felt like a draft to me, one that, were I the editor, my comments would have been along the lines of: 1. Too many components that aren’t given their due because the book is so crowded with them; 2. The characters’ voices lean towards parodic in their combination of whine and self-awareness, but it doesn’t seem like an intentional choice (for them to be insufferable – at least, it seems like the husband, Dan, is supposed to be to some degree sympathetic); 3. In addition to the crowding of ideas and plots, there are characters whose voices are heard once and never again – in a way that felt like filler rather than commentary. I like the idea that a novel can have an excursion into a minor character’s life without having to explain itself, but this felt like digression.
Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green: As someone who has OCD/writes about OCD, I was really happy to see a portrayal of OCD that takes the form, primarily, of obsessions. Not to say there isn’t room for the more visible forms of OCD – the compulsions – but sometimes, it seems like that’s all there is. I happened to be reading this when my boyfriend wanted to show me a video of John Green (on CrashCourse: Philosophy) talking about free will and hard determinism vs. libertarianism, and the next passage in Turtles All the Way Down referenced Godel, so it was all quite synergistic.
Sounds Like Titanic, by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman: Jessica and I were in the same MFA program and had several workshops together, so I saw the very nascent beginnings of this more than a decade ago. It’s fantastic, and as soon as I bought it I started reading it. There is nothing I like so much in nonfiction as a writer who can weave multiple threads of plot and theme together in a way that illuminates all of them more brightly – synergistically, more than the sum of their parts – and Jessica does so deftly.
A Really Good Day, by Ayelet Waldman: My only exposure to Waldman’s work was her NYT article about loving her husband more than her children. Which…although it isn’t something I would personally write about (unless under a pseudonym), doesn’t seem like the Most Terrible Thing That Has Ever Been Said (but I’d like to hedge my bets and point out that I do not yet have children, so maybe I’ll feel differently when I do!) It certainly seems less egregious than writing, under your real name, about having a favorite child (again, what do I know – but while it seems like an important conversation for parents to have amongst themselves, and I’m not trying to shame anyone…it seems unnecessarily cruel to write about it in such a way that your kids could read it). (Sidenote: A memoir I read over and over as a child, titled Karen, includes a scene in which the author (Karen’s mother) prays that God won’t let her husband die of…I think it’s TB or measles or something like that…because she could bear losing one of her children, but not him.) Anyway! The controversy over Waldman’s article seems sillier after reading her work, because she’s so clearly prone to exaggeration for effect, facetiousness, etc. I found her wildly entertaining, personally, and although I doubt I’ll be microdosing with LSD (or anything other than gummy vitamins with very low percentages of your daily recommended allowance) any time, soon, it was pretty fascinating.
The Tangled Tree, by David Quammen: I have to admit that as I read this, I frequently wished I were instead reading Spillover for the first time…but that’s no fault of Quammen’s; zoonotic diseases are inherently more dramatic than Carl Woese and archaea. Also, there’s a certain amount of background material common to lay science books, and I’ve read so many recently that I found it hard to get excited about another overview of gene transfer, or narrative of Darwin’s background. That said, I like Quammen’s voice and the attention to lesser known figures like Woese and Lynn Margulis.
