Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee: I found this…okay. I think I’m not the audience for sweeping family narratives in which there’s no one main character or family (I felt this way about Homegoing as well), where history and plot, rather than character or writing, are the focus. There are books I love (Waterland, for one) that reach backward into history to explain the circumstances of the main characters, but there are main characters. Pachinko covers almost a century and felt to me like a recounting of events rather than a novel. That’s not to say I disliked it, but it didn’t stun me.
The Wallcreeper, by Nell Zink: How totally absurd and farcical and delightful. This novel has a clearly defined and deployed plot, but the plot isn’t ultimately so important. The writing is the main event, regardless of what it’s about, and every observation is amazing. As a minor side note, I really like the shape of this book, which was originally published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project and is more square than most paperbacks.
Crisis in the Red Zone, by Richard Preston: It never fails to tickle me that Preston is one letter away from Reston, the name of the facility that had an Ebola scare in the late 80s. Somehow, I feel like he would enjoy that. This was much better than Panic in Level Four, possibly just as a result of being a more focused and cohesive narrative. There’s some backstory about the discovery of Ebola in the 1970s that goes on for too long, but the material about the 2014 outbreak is compelling and handled well.
Marlena, by Julie Buntin: This was a gut punch. So bleak but impressive. In some ways I did want more of the New York present-day narrative, but not badly enough for it to be a real complaint. In trying to figure out how to describe the (excellent) writing, I have in the back of my mind the blurbs that describe it as “sumptuous,” among other adjectives that – to me, at least – are somewhat murky in how they actually relate to prose. So I’m sticking to the mundane: this book was great.
The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan: So I’ve finally stopped confusing Carl Jung and Carl Sagan, and yes, I understand that should be an embarrassing admission. I read this book hoping that it would be…comforting? The title would have sent me running as a child. I consumed it over a pretty long stretch of months (and to be honest, am only halfway through it as I write this), because I had it on my computer but not my Kindle. The chapters are discrete essays, though, so it hasn’t suffered as a result of my pokiness. I love the generosity with which Sagan treats human beings, even if their beliefs don’t measure up to his standards of rigor.
