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.”
