Little Eyes, by Samantha Schweblin: Ooh. This was like a Black Mirror episode in book form, and also reminiscent of Ted Chiang. The hook of the plot is essentially: surveillance furbies. Delightfully, the short sections that jump from narrator to narrator and place to place (most of the characters repeat numerous times, but there are a few one-offs) mimic the technology of the “little eyes” themselves, like hyperlinks into different stories, and every horrifying ending is horrifying in a different… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Books of 2020, Part 7
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener: There’s a particular choice the author makes that I suspect is very love-it-or-hate-it: only alluding to, rather than naming, any tech company or piece of software or hardware she describes in her memoir. Facebook is “the social network everyone hated but couldn’t stop logging into,” eg. It’s slightly Greek with longer epithets but it’s also really, really annoying–both when it’s obvious who she’s referring to (like Amazon) and when it’s unclear (like her description of… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 6
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…. Read more »
Reading into the Past: Tell me if the Lovers are Losers
In the office at my new apartment there are built-in bookshelves (they’re not built into the wall in the fancy sense of being permanently embedded there – there are shelves that we didn’t put up ourselves, is what I mean) that hold all of my middle grade and YA fiction with room left over for assorted sheet music, electronics, and (on the top shelf of the five) anything we want out of sight that we don’t have storage space for… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 5
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… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 4
Maid, by Stephanie Land: I started reading this right before attending my first Zoom event of quarantine, which was a memoir panel including Land. It’s a very compelling story, and I really enjoyed hearing her speak! The book itself to me felt like it was missing an editor – there were sentences that were so syntactically hard to parse that I had to read them multiple times to figure out the (usually straightforward) meaning, and many that drifted into cliche…. Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 3
Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng: I grew up in a suburb similar to the Shaker Heights setting of this (also in Ohio, though Cincinnati instead of Cleveland; ours was not a planned community like Shaker Heights, and I think it was slightly more conservative/less self-congratulatory about being progressive, but maybe I just didn’t clock that attitude as a kid…) just a couple of years after Ng, so the references all hit. The plotting is good, though a little predictable… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 2
The Need, by Helen Phillips: This book is fucking amazing. It’s my last read of the ten books long-listed for the National Book Award in fiction, and I definitely would have made it a finalist…it’s so amazingly odd in its beats. It’s also hard to discuss without giving too much away. I think I’ve heard people describe it as being “a trick,” “about a child,” and “the story of a paleobotanist,” and when someone asked me about it I wavered… Read more »
Plan-demic
Two really excellent decisions that took place with no pandemic in sight but now seem as if they were perfectly planned: My boyfriend gave me an Aerogarden for my birthday last year, and now there are salad greens growing in my bedroom Two Christmases ago I had all of my middle-grade and young adult fiction shipped to my Brooklyn apartment (it was…a large number of pounds of books, because as a kid I never wanted anything but books, and my… Read more »
Day 30
I think I intended to title a post “28 Days Later” (original, I know) but time is so stretchy that 28 days came and went and I didn’t have this tab open, so I forgot. Then I started it again on day 30. Now it’s day…37? 30 days. That’s a whole unlimited metro card. My brain is not moving seamlessly anymore, but thinking only in discrete units of time. One month. How many more? We are of course lucky. We’re… Read more »
