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.
