The Kissing Bug, by Daisy Hernández: Apologies while I (perhaps undeservedly) go a bit hipster-epidemiologist and state that I’ve been afraid of Chagas disease as far back as at least 2011, when I added it to a saved email draft containing – among other detritus – a list of diseases to check if I ever have an unexplained illness. It hits the scare triggers for me – potentially deadly and largely undetectable until it’s too late (unless you proactively test for it, which no one who had spent her entire life in the midwest/northeast/Bangkok would have done). I’m glad it’s getting more attention in the United States now, though unfortunately much of that is probably due to its creep northward into Texas and California. Hernández is a writer with personal familial experience of Chagas disease, so as far as epidemiology books go this reads more as a personal narrative rather than lay science, but also has the research element – something of a cross, tone-wise, between Porochista Khakpour’s Sick (a writer writing about personal experience with illness) and Pamela Weintrub’s Cure Unknown (a science writer balancing science writing with personal narrative). Before hearing about this book, I heard Hernandez on the Chagas episode of This Podcast Will Kill You. I’m glad that Chagas is coming more to the fore of US consciousness, and after reading The Kissing Bug I am less fearful of what once seemed to me a completely silent assassin of a disease.
Last Resort, by Andrew Lipstein: This book is the pinnacle of inside baseball if the baseball player is ME (is that how the expression works? Or does inside baseball mean it’s interesting primarily to baseball fans, not necessarily players?). Fort Greene setting? Publishing world? Questions of plagiarism/ownership/death of the author? (Okay, those are universal – and to say that the book is inside baseball is not a knock, it’s just that the larger themes are probably more interesting to most readers than the narrator’s opinion of Walter’s restaurant or the descriptions of memorial obelisk in Fort Greene Park). Oh BOY was this published at the perfect time on the heels of “Kidney person” discourse on Twitter (it just occurred to me to wonder if the narrator doesn’t own a smartphone purely so the author didn’t have to deal with the narrator reading a Twitter stream). The bullet points of the plot – none of which are spoilers – is that a writer visits a friend and hears an unbelievable story about the friend’s vacation, AND reads the story the friend has written about the events…and then the writer writes a novel based on his friend’s experience. The author (of the actual book) managed to make me feel horrified for both parties, both of whom are wronged (say what you will about transformation; if I as a writer told a writer-friend the story of something outrageous and unusual that had happened to me and they took the outlines for their own work, I’d be furious – but at the same time, the possibly-plagiarizing-narrator seems ultimately MORE wronged (for reasons that may constitute spoilers, so I will avoid being explicit)). As a teenager and young adult I was petrified of being on either side of plagiarism – equally scared of inadvertently stealing as I was of having my thoughts purloined.
The protagonist is kind of a tool, but a fairly inoffensive one (and of course he’s a bit of a dick by design) (why are so many names of literal tools insults in their own right – hoe, rake, etc?), and though there’s one (seemingly uncharacteristic) clumsy use of symbolism, there are some truly hilarious moments and lines. For some reason – newness? – when I checked the ebook out from the library, it was only available to read online and not on Kindle. So I read it at my computer in a combination of glee and terror that made my face look like the grimacing, teeth-grinding emoji brought to life. And then, nearly 2/3 in, there’s a plot development that made my jaw drop in the way that every event and decision in Raven Leilani’s Luster did – an utter “They did WHAT?” moment.
How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu: I hear people complain about plague novels (in general) but…any tragedy that affects multiple parts of the world, let alone the entire world, is going to give rise to an entire canon of media about it (though that likely doesn’t apply to this particular novel, which must have been written before the pandemic to be published in January 2022 – and the pandemic of this novel is completely unlike anything the world has experienced in 2020 or in history). But in re plague novels in general – think about how many World War II movies and novels there are! I would call this a novel in stories – some characters are consistent from one to the next, but only briefly – as every chapter (the book identifies itself, in subtitle, as a novel) is set in the same universe on a forwardly progressing timeline of a world stricken by “the Arctic virus.” It reminded me of Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation in mood and of Tommy Orange’s There There in how it builds to its conclusion, which quite frankly was absolutely exultant. I had literal chills as I read the last few pages and absorbed the connections they illuminated among characters. So, so phenomenally good.
The Third Pole, by Mark Synnott: I often wish I could read Into Thin Air again for the first time, and with that hope I started this recounting of a more recent set of travails on Mount Everest. And, actually, a much older one – the book narrates an attempt (by the author and others) to utilize both drones and mountaineering to determine whether George Mallory and Sandy Irvine actually summited Everest before their deaths, which would have meant that they were the first known to do so, rather than Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay. I may need to reread Into Thin Air again or find a closer analogue, but I enjoyed this for its own attributes, though there may have been too much time spent detailing just how handsome every single person in London found George Mallory and on the clothing and grumpiness level of each archivist Synnott encountered during his research. And while I admired the author’s ability to recognize and call out his own hypocrisy (particularly in regards to climbing with vs. without oxygen and in striking off on his own and putting his guides’ lives/livelihood in jeopardy), it was still pretty glaring hypocrisy. In some ways it’s more difficult to condemn because some of these decisions are being made while hypoxic and in an altered state of mind…but that’s a known phenomenon. I’ll conclude that in order to avoid having to make those decisions in the first place there are a number of things the author could have done before he was in an oxygen-starved, addled state, but it’s also easy for me to say from a place of never having experienced oxygen deprivation and having no desire to ever set foot on Mount Everest. (As for the oxygen – I’m no purist and have no moral issue with incredible feats being accomplished with the use of tools; that’s evolution of extreme sports, though there are secondary concerns about safety (eg people who aren’t in strong enough condition to summit Everest and for whom oxygen may mask deficiencies only enough to get them into real danger and/or crowd the mountain to a dangerous level; guides assuming more risk by carrying oxygen for customers; waste from discarded oxygen containers).
Reprieve, by James Han Mattson: This is, for sure, both very clever and very smart. It was highly effective in keeping me tense and unsure of what was real and what wasn’t until its final chapters, but the allegorical elements felt extremely heavy handed. The author’s commentary on fear, race, and power would have been more potent if it wasn’t spelled out so explicitly – if it instead gave the reader more space to contemplate. Conversely, I wanted more insight into the motivations of the antagonist.
