Exhalation, by Ted Chiang: I started reading this thinking it was a novel (which sounds…uninformed, but when a book comes directly to your Kindle from the library it’s easy to forget the details beyond fiction vs. nonfiction). There are nine stories in the collection and they fit together beautifully. I don’t mind when story collections are disparate in subject matter but cohesive in style, or even if they aren’t cohesive, but it’s always satisfying when a group of stories is thematically related. These are almost like a season of Black Mirror (down to some of the technology involved – “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling is very reminiscent of Black Mirror’s “The Entire History of You,” which came out two years before the story’s first publication (which doesn’t necessarily mean Chiang saw it before writing the story, or that it’s a negative if he did–it’s not derivative; it just reads as if the memory-footage software is a thing that actually exists in the world and both pieces of media are writing about it)) when taken together. The title story was almost too brutal to read in that, for me, it mimicked depression even though that isn’t the subject, but it was one of my favorites. The exploration of possibility is really the thing in this book, more than the writing itself, but there are also places in which the writing is lovely.
The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry: I have read some about the 1918 flu (I haven’t read Pale Rider yet), but it’s a topic on which I could read more if it’s new or particularly well written. The writing in this is fine, but…possibly as an effect of how much I’ve read about disease and epidemiology, I found it almost unbearably boring at first. The beginning chapters are about the beginnings of modern medicine in America (and in particular modern medical training, medical schools, labs, and so on) and while that’s a worthy topic, there were so many names and details that I just thought, “Can’t we jump to 1918 already?” By the time we reached the actual crisis, reading it felt like a chore. Too many details about exactly what happened when, rather than the feel and shape of the crisis.
Self Care, by Leigh Stein: My friend Leigh has written a satire that is completely of the moment, and her one-liners are in a class of their own. I started this fairly late at night and read the first 175 pages before falling asleep, finally, at 3 am, and finished it the next day – which is how I typically read Leigh’s books, because they’re always compulsively readable, but perhaps this one more than most! The words that best describe it are all very biting: mordant wit, trenchant observations, slanted humor.
The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo: This is such a nice long book to settle into, and thoroughly enjoyable. As an only child I was especially interested in the marriage of two only children who then had four daughters – not to make it all about me! but the novel provided both the familiar and the foreign in that way. Something about it reminded me of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I tend to tire of family sagas when they start way, way back and only spend chapters with each set of characters before moving on to their descendants, and much prefer this type of family story, which leaps around in time but very deftly and not by sacrificing characterization – you stay with the same set of people for the entire 500 pages, but come to understand them by seeing them at different ages and relationships to one another.
Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker: A thoroughly fascinating look at one family and the history of schizophrenia research. The structure is really engaging, though the characters are hard to keep track of (not much to be done about that, since the family has twelve children…) – I had to keep going back to the introduction to remember who was who! A very minor complaint overall.
