Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink: I’m not sure whether this crossed my radar because there’s a current TV series based on it or if I just saw it recommended somewhere – focused on the week of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this was published in 2013. I’m curious if there’s any sort of follow-up or update nine years later. Though – unavoidably, because of the number of people involved – it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all of the threads and individuals, the chronological structure helped. It’s difficult to read – easy to both wish people had made different choices and to recognize that they were in an impossible situation, one I could try to imagine myself in but surely without any real insight into what I would have done. There are some obvious systemic failures, of course, but the individual choices – made by doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and others, under general conditions of sleep deprivation, dehydration, and extreme heat – are harder to judge. At least initially. As I read on, I started to judge more. Then wavered. Then read about all of the hospitals where this didn’t happen, and judged again, thinking surely I would have chosen differently. The book’s strength lies not in neutrality – it’s not neutral – but in complexity.

Cover Story, by Susan Rigetti: Reading this right after Five Days at Memorial could have felt like extreme whiplash. It didn’t, but this was…well. There are a couple of clever elements, but the writing was excruciating (I think that was a choice – to make the narrator’s diary unbelievably naive – but that didn’t ease the burden of reading it) and the premise was less “a wink and nod to some recent events with a fresh take” and more “a pastiche of recent events, beat by beat, and combined in silly ways.”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin: This story of a long-term partnership between video game designers was delightful. The experience was somewhere between that of reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or a long family saga. I had quibbles – one of the main characters’ families felt strangely absent; the narration at times was so expository as to sound robotic – but nothing worth dwelling on. The playfulness with form was a highlight, as were the characters themselves, in particular the way the author was able to present two versions of the same events that each sounded completely reasonable.

Plum Island, by Nelson DeMille: I’m going to need another 90s thriller to read for comparison in order to gauge just how egregiously misogynistic and insensitive this was…I suspect more than most. It was more ludicrous than offensive – lines such as (about a female detective) “she had a colt 45 in her holster and 36Ds holstered in her blouse” or something similar. I mean! Hard not to laugh. While the author is clearly trying to write a main character who’s a proud asshole, I had the impression he was pleased with himself (as the character is) and picturing a roguish Harrison Ford portraying the protagonist in a film version. So…schlocky and dated and somewhat offensive. I wanted to read a schlocky thriller about biological warfare, and I did get that. Unfortunately, I also got the narrator, ludicrous plotting, and a second half that dragged on and on. Not much to recommend.

The Only Plane in the Sky, by Garrett Graff: I read this – not entirely by design, but I had it on my Kindle and opted for it when I noticed the date – on the days around 9/11 this year. It’s not, of course, an easy read, but I do love oral histories. Fragmented (more than some oral histories) but wrenching.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk: I knew very little about this before reading, other than that it’s set in Poland and won the Pulitzer Prize. I think that was an ideal way to go into it; I had no preconceptions about the “sort” of story it would be, and for the first third of the book I felt totally content to follow the main character through her routines without really caring if anything “happened” (I say this even though there is a death within the first five pages). Beautiful, beautiful writing. I was somewhat baffled by all of the astrology, but it didn’t detract. I’m already looking forward to rereading.

Rules for Vanishing, by Kate Alice Marshall: I’m not really the audience for this – I went into it thinking it was YA, and I think that’s accurate, though I later heard people describe it as middle-grade – but there have been a number of YA novels I’ve been compelled by as an adult. So…maybe I’m not the audience for this genre (supernatural horror). I’m not sure how much I would have liked it regardless – really, really overwritten, and not a solid enough set of rules or origin story for the horror. But again, I may be evaluating it with the wrong pen.

The Runaways, by Fatima Bhutto: Each section of this novel is split among its three main characters, each of whom is connected to Pakistan and whose paths wind together as the book moves forward. The desert scenes are incredibly evocative (perhaps all the more impressive because of the emptiness of the landscape) and effective. But I found some of the character arcs (one in particular) unconvincing, contrived in service of the plot, and the ending jarring but not necessarily illuminating.

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, by Alison Esbach: The title is kind of misleading, and I’m not sure how much of the central plot was intended to be revealed only later in the book. It’s hard to write something entirely in the second person. I liked the main character – I thought she was hilarious – but the focus on the high school golden boy didn’t do much for me, even given the basis for it (which becomes clear maybe a quarter of the way into the book.

The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer: Though this was written 60 years ago and set in Germany rather than Poland, it reminded me tonally of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – the solo female narrators, both of whom presented themselves as “older women” though I think the protagonist in Tokarczuk’s novel is in her 60s while the unnamed narrator of The Wall is only in her 40s (I guess in 1963 that counted as older?); the missive nature of the texts; the attention and care to animals; and the sense of isolation. When my partner asked what my book was about and I told him the premise – an invisible wall appears around an Alpine region and every living thing outside of it dies, leaving one woman alone in the world with the animals inside of the boundary. “Is the wall a metaphor?” he asked, and, actually, it’s not. I’m sure you could find a way to interpret it as such, but it’s definitely more of an instigating plot device to examine solitude.

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Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Ignorant of this novel’s publishing date, I was initially incensed that I had heard so little about it in the past…and then I realized it’s a very new addition to the world, published in April of this year. Set in the 1970s and 2016 (I assume so as not to…have to deal with Trump), it’s the story of medical ethics, good intentions gone wrong (and bad intentions gone worse), complicity, and control. There’s a bit of…almost obsessive justifying/qualifying/disclaiming that appears suddenly and that feels like it comes more from the author than the narrator, but I sympathize with the compulsion. Highly compelling.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers: Not to make myself look out of touch in two entries in a row, but I hadn’t heard of Richard Powers until The Overstory came out. And I don’t think that’s terribly unusual, even though it seems wild to me that I wouldn’t have heard of an author who had already won a National Book Award and published a dozen novels. There are so many books every year, so many authors, and if you aren’t following the major awards (which, until about 2018, I wasn’t) you could miss an incredibly prominent name. The upside is that now I have an entire back catalog of Richard Powers to read. A third of the way into The Overstory I was ready to declare it genius. The first 150 pages are the slow growth of a network of people whose lives will eventually overlap, in sections long enough to be memorable but brief enough to leave you wishing for more time with each character. Each explores, directly or obliquely, the character’s relationship to trees. Eventually, the human characters collide with one another. Occasionally I had quibbles about plot points or sentences, and I sometimes wished for less sudden violence – I felt like an open nerve as I read – but when I finished the novel my verdict was still: genius. Extraordinary.

The Fourth Man, by Robert Baer: Am I truly about to read a book about a spy who has not yet been caught, which by definition will have no neat resolution? Yes, because it went so quickly once I started, and because – as I told myself – perhaps the publication of the book (a nonfiction search for a KGB spy within the CIA) would lead to the case being finally solved, the way I’ll Be Gone in the Dark nudged along the Golden State Killer’s capture (or maybe it didn’t really have much of an impact but I read it after he was arrested?). I found myself losing interest in this because it was so focused on logistics at the expense of narrative. And – spoiler not spoiler – you never find out who the spy was! What a disappointment. It could have worked if it were written in a way that was interesting beyond the question of who the double agent was, but it was not.

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel: At long last! I loved Station Eleven, very much enjoyed The Glass Hotel, and have been waiting for this for years (in my heart) and months (on the library waitlist). This was a thoroughly delightful read, but I have to admit that as I read I kept thinking “these sound like the musings of a very talented writer while she’s on tour” (granted one of the main characters is a writer on tour, so fair enough, but…listen, if I could write a great book that way believe me I would). I was further delighted by the realization that St. John Mandel must live in my neighborhood, because in one scene she describes the park and restaurant around the block from me (later, when the story briefly stops in my hometown of Cincinnati, I felt even more special!). Still wished it were longer, as it was so cozy (in spite of all the world-ending) inside of it.

The Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits: Much of this theory – that the “merit-based” social structure many perceive as an antidote to the prior system of leisurely aristocratic landowners is actually nearly as destructive – rang true for me, in particular the frenzied panic with which parents invest in their children’s educational scaffolding (I say this because that’s what the frenzied panic is – it’s about the outcome, the competitiveness, the going on to more and more elite institutions, not about the actual education itself (though many parents are also invested in that; it does not generally cause panic), especially since, as a tutor, I’m part of and complicit in that scaffolding). That said, I had questions throughout about where the author was really deriving his conclusions. For example, he discusses in great detail a community in the suburbs of Detroit where everyone makes more or less the same income (or, rather, the difference between the richest and poorest is vastly less than elsewhere in the country) and can afford the typical mid-century middle-class aspirations like a comfortably-sized home, the ability to buy necessities and non-necessities, etc. Markovits sees this not as a boon but as a problem, because he associates it with stagnation and feels that the people of the community have no ability to join “the elite.” But…he doesn’t include any quotes from members of the community that speak to what seems to be his fear alone. The quotes he does include give the impression of satisfaction with life. So – is it really a problem? He’s focused on how the poor have gotten closer to a middle-class lifestyle while the divide between middle-class and elite widens, but I feel it’s worth saying that, although I agree that the insane divide between the .1% or the 1% or whatever top stratum and “the rest” is Very Bad, it would be worse if the middle class had grown closer to the elite while the worst off had fallen further behind in terms of money and opportunity. No?? He also laments the loss of “middle managers” and trades like tool and die cutting, in which someone could make a comfortable living without a college degree or without aspirations to enter “elite fields,” but later seems depressed by the way even management jobs have been splintered and stratified…but aren’t the lower offerings of the management jobs similar to, you know, a middle manager?

This was written in 2019. What about influencers, Patreons, etc? Definitely a provocative and engaging read – though felt repetitive at times – but I did have to laugh a little when the section on “so, what should we do about this?” was basically a 10-page epilogue. I kept thinking about this book as a companion piece to This Life by Martin Hagglund, in which the answer is “socialism” – I don’t know that that would be Markovits’s answer (though it seems like a European model would do quite a bit to alleviate the exaggerated disparity); it struck me that he might want more of a return to mid-century focus on what he calls mid-skill workers, which is an interesting idea that leads to questions about what society values – “progress”? General happiness and well-being? Equality? I think I’ll revisit this text in a few years – much to digest.

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The Sentence, by Louise Erdich: The first half of this is absolute unfettered delight while simultaneously philosophical and profound. The characters – especially narrator Tookie – the descriptions, the language play, the voice – it’s hilarious. In its distinctiveness, its humor, and the sense of “here is a master at work” it was akin to James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. In the second half, COVID appears. At first I was disappointed, wanting to remain in Tookie’s individual timeline, but that was misguided. It was just as mesmerizing to be with Tookie during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.

A Place For Us, by Fatima Farheen Mirza: Overall I enjoyed this and certainly feel that the author is talented, but the pacing and register of the novel really slowed it down – there are so many descriptions that all feel of equal weight and a persistent sense of “how wondrous is it all!” that doesn’t allow anything to feel truly wondrous. I didn’t mind the shifting perspectives at all – though one family member really gets short shrift – but often the switches in time period felt arbitrary, as if they were occurring simply to keep up a pattern rather than to serve the narrative.

The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn: It seems I’ve been conflating Kate Quinn and Kate Atkinson for a while (likely because Atkinson has a novel, Transcription, that sounds right out of Quinn’s oeuvre – World War II, England, spies), but this was my first Quinn novel. It was quite immersive and I grew more invested as I read despite feeling, initially, that it was dragging a bit. It might have dug a bit deeper into the concepts of betrayal, allyship, and patriotism, but ultimately a great read, both as mystery and history.

The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier: Does anyone work from a conceit better than Kevin Brockmeier? In A Brief History of the Dead there’s a second world, or a limbo, inhabited by people who have died but who are still remembered by at least one living person. In The Illumination, physical and emotional pain become visible in the form of light. Six short stories (or long chapters), each with a main character, connected by a noteboIt seems I’ve been conflating ok that falls into their possession. There’s another trick hidden in one of the chapters, in which a character notes “and after that, everything happened in tens” and then every sentence for the rest of the chapter is ten words long. Small things nagged – there’s a turn of events in the second chapter that made me recoil slightly, and the fifth chapter gets hard to follow at times – but the writing is often exquisite.

The Least of Us, by Sam Quinones: Dreamland, Quinones’s 2015 book, is one of the most compelling works of journalism/narrative nonfiction I’ve ever read. His follow-up is also engrossing and enlightening, but doesn’t have the same cohesion or converging narratives that Dreamland did so well. The Least of Us is more fragmented, and it’s hard to keep track of the individuals across the different sections of the book – it might have worked better to have each person’s entire store in one contiguous space. I don’t agree with every single policy idea Quinones puts forward, but in reading I trusted that I was in the mind of someone who is deeply invested in the opioid/heroin/now fentanyl and meth crises and who has thought carefully about how to approach it. The most startling thing I learned was that there are two different processes for cooking methamphetamines, and around 2016 the P2P process – which doesn’t require pseudoephedrine and thus is easier in terms of supplies, but which creates far more toxic byproducts (even beyond the effects that meth typically has) and can cause temporary psychosis and permanent brain damage – became far more common among suppliers, and that may account for a significant amount of the increased homelessness major cities have seen in the last five years.

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When the Stars Go Dark, by Paula McClain: An engaging mystery with depth and atmosphere – the descriptions of coastal northern California towns and redwood forests are captivating. There were three occasions, though, on which I thought “Surely X character would not do Y – oh, here goes X character doing Y” in a way that felt contrived for the plot.

Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas: Fifty pages in, I thought, “Do I hate this? I might hate this.” I definitely squawked several times in the early chapters, was taken aback, was put off. At the same time, it’s trenchant, mordant, and funny. One hundred and fifty pages in, I was somewhat repulsed by nearly every character, and also cognizant that my repulsion might say something about me and that the author might be aware of this and have intended it. By the time I finished, I was both impressed and annoyed. Absurd, madcap, and definitely not boring.

These Silent Woods, by Kimi Cunningham Grant: I recognize that the ending to this was “unrealistic,” but it was satisfying nonetheless. I’ve so frequently and recently read novels with ambiguous, quiet, or unresolved endings that I was craving a neatly packaged ending like salt. Sometimes the voice of the narrator slipped a bit for me, but overall I found this compelling. The voice of the eight-year-old, though, wasn’t difficult to accept, even though she made for a precocious and unusual child.

The Other Side of Perfect, by Mariko Turk: Reading contemporary YA performing arts novels out of nostalgia, but finding that I may simply need to continue revisiting the performing arts fiction from my own childhood to satisfy that nostalgia yearning (I do, in fact, have a book on my shelf called Another Way to Dance, which has a pretty similar ring to it although the two don’t track the same plot). I read a piano-prodigy-novel a few years back called The Lucy Variations that I wanted to be as good as my childhood favorite The Mozart Season, and I had the same basic experience. Which is perfectly logical; these were not written for me! And favorites from growing up get preserved in amber (and also have the benefit of speaking the way you spoke, having the same technology you had, being set in the same world…). Maybe I should do a test with YA fiction from my generation that I never read growing up – see if it’s that I’m too old or that it’s the era that matters. In the meantime, I wouldn’t mind more literature for adults set in ballet companies! **On revisiting this train of thought after finishing the book (which, I confess, grew on me as I read), I realize I’ve read recent fiction that’s billed as YA (We Are Okay by Nina LaCour, for ex) that has been thoroughly enjoyable, and also that I didn’t wholesale endorse all of the YA I read as a kid (That Summer by Sarah Dessen never did it for me, even when I was 12). The Other Side of Perfect was a bit didactic, but ultimately successful. I think I just wanted something that is still thoroughly behind-the-scenes of performing arts rather than “what comes next.”

A Flicker in the Dark, by Stacy Willingham: I don’t know if there was something subconscious going on when I was reserving these at the library – dark, woods, stars, flicker – or if all of the recommendations sprang from the same source. This was not especially memorable – I could predict most of the plot points and the writing itself was uninspired.

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The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka: Before I read the first page, this reminded me of Yannick Murphy’s This is the Water, which also takes place primarily in a local swimming pool, from an unusual perspective (second person for This is the Water, first person plural for The Swimmers), in which the pool is a metaphor or vessel for exploration of the rifts in the community. There’s a panoramic quality to both of them, a distance. In some ways that made it harder for me to engage at first- there are recurring characters but no one stood out as a main character (handled differently, I could imagine the pool itself being the main character), and it felt more like a study than a story. That shifted around 50 pages in (which is significant – the book is only 130 pages) and from there everything took off in a masterful way, and then everything that came earlier took on greater meaning.

Clean Air, by Sarah Blake: I can’t help comparing this to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which was, even among his movies, quite ludicrous. Fortunately, there’s no pretense of “something incredible and amazing will be revealed” that turns out to be ridiculous instead of interesting – here, the premise is clear from the start: hyper-pollination causes massive health problems for humans, in an ironic twist on what one might expect to cause climate apocalypse. It’s also a better play on COVID than I’ve seen in almost any book that’s come out post-pandemic. A minor thing that annoyed me: there was a fair amount of over-narration, description of every mundane thing. “I peed. I wiped myself” etcetera. The protagonist’s daughter is written so well, though – I don’t even mind when children in books are a little unbelievable (people in books are often a little unbelievable), but an absolutely spot-on four-year-old is a delight to read.

My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite: I’m sure it’s considered very wrong in some spheres to be unable to suppress hysterical laughter while reading about murder, but in my defense this is satire and also hilarious. Did it stick the landing? Not really, but I recommend it with no reservations anyway.

The Latinist, by Mark Prins: Given that I took Latin for six years in middle and high school (and went to the Ohio Junior Classical League state Latin convention for five of those…a literal toga party in which adolescents were unleashed in the ballrooms of a conference hotel to compete in certamina and art contests and take Latin tests for ribbons), I was predisposed toward this. Not at all disappointed – it’s somewhat similar to Possession, though without the historical timeline, and the academic and literary discussion is thoroughly impressive. I’m almost finished with it and…I don’t really know why it’s categorized as a “crime thriller” unless that’s a spoiler or we’re (deservedly) taking professional undermining as crime now? It’s not a spoiler – it’s in the first few pages – for me to say that plots like this one, which involving professional sabotage, are the hardest for me to handle (on TV sitcoms, it’s someone borrowing something and then the thing getting lost/stolen in a series of unfortunate and avoidable events – this is near-constant on Seinfeld), especially when it’s an older man attempting to hamstring a younger woman’s success.

And…now having finished the whole novel, unfortunately the ending does not work at all and detracts from the book. No regret in reading it as what came before was so compelling, but ugh.

The Unseen World, by Liz Moore: I really admire writers who can cross genres so deftly (I’ve also read Moore’s Long Bright River, which is very much a literary thriller), though the two Moore novels I’ve read are united in being, ultimately, about parenthood. This unfolded as a mystery in its own right, and was even more mysterious to me because I had inadvertently seen (and subsequently tried to forget) a spoiler for the novel, which I then badly misremembered into something that doesn’t happen at all (and I’m not sure what the actual spoiler, if there even was one, was).

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We Are Okay, by Nina LaCour: I could tell that this novel was going to break my heart from the first chapter, but I kept reading it anyway because of how atmospheric and cozy it is. Reading We Are Okay is like being in a snow globe full of glittering flakes but wrapped up in your warmest, softest blankets. Even the cover art, which when I look at it again is a girl standing on a bed in front of the ocean and moon, but which I initially thought was a young woman walking on the face of the moon through outer space with an enormous gentle giant of a planet in the foreground, contributes to the mood. This was just a lovely, lovely book.

The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton: I had never read a Michael Crichton book! I’m not sure why, given my proclivity for disease narratives that are halfway between science and science fiction. It’s tricky to read a book from 1969 that’s heavily reliant on technology and innovation without applying modern standards…but I think my quibbles were valid regardless, eg “we missed an important memo because the machine didn’t ding!” seems like the 1969 equivalent of “I knew that a highly important text might come through, but I didn’t once check my phone because it didn’t make any noise! Whoops, turns out I had the ringer off.” I enjoyed this as it was, but it felt like two-thirds setup and then very minimal crisis and resolution. I had a persistent feeling I was skimming without meaning to, and no matter how much I tried to force myself to slow down I didn’t ever really feel like I had the five main characters straight in my mind. Each needed an epithet, like in Greek myth or epic, to remind me who was in focus. The ending came and went so quickly – it felt like a movie that had been planned as the first of a trilogy (and maybe it is that in book form; I know there’s at least a sequel).

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut: I love the conceit behind this – I guess I would call it a collection of stories?: imagining the thoughts and emotions of the mathematicians and scientists behind a handful of world-changing discoveries and inventions. But it was a little unmooring not knowing which elements were fictionalized. I think I would have preferred if everything outside of the minds of the characters was factual and the liberties taken were interior (and maybe that’s how it actually was – in which case I would have liked clearer indications). Although the chapters are self-contained, they not only clearly belong together and resonate off of one another but also could hardly have a fraction of the impact when taken alone. I…enjoyed this, but felt like part of it was missing, and that it could have been so much more.

Death With Interruptions, by José Saramago: I read Blindness years and years ago so I don’t fully remember if it had the same feel as this – the story felt very non-visual to me (which, of course, would be somewhat appropriate for Blindness). That is, I couldn’t picture the setting, what anyone looked like, and so on, because there was so little description. The dialogue was often hard to attribute because there were no quotation marks and on every page there was a veritable thicket of commas. At the same time, the examination of bureaucracy and the dialogue are so witty and sharp that it was often delightful reading anyway. When I was about two thirds of the way through this, I left my Kindle in Philadelphia and my loan expired, so that was tragic (Reading With Interruptions).

The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook: I loved Diane’s collection Man v. Nature, and I’m glad my temporary separation from my Kindle drew me to pull this from my shelf (I love analog books…but I love reading in the dark more). I was expecting an apocalyptic/dystopian setting, and that’s somewhat accurate, but more nuanced (don’t get me wrong – I also love straight up dystopia, but it was a different and fresher experience to have a world in which everyone is suffering through climate change but only a small group are living truly different lives than we are). The writing is stunning – and would be stunning no matter the subject or setting – but I have a weakness in particular for stunning writing about southwestern landscapes (or maybe just western journeys in general – thinking of books as different as In the Distance, How Much of These Hills is Gold, The Hunger, American Elsewhere, The Indifferent Stars Above, Blood Meridian…) and their flora and fauna. The characterization and nuances of the plot match up in strength to the writing.

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The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold: The “five” are the five known victims of Jack the Ripper, with virtually no attention to their deaths themselves and a pure focus on their lives, which were bleak. I appreciate the author’s intentions to focus on the women as people rather than victims, but have to admit that I wouldn’t have minded a bit more information about the aftermath and investigations. There are other books for that, though.

The Book of M, by Peng Shepherd: Everyone loses their shadows and, subsequently, their memories. A premise not unlike that of Saramago’s Blindness, but even more speculative. It took me some time – maybe the first fifty pages – to be drawn in, but then the braided narratives (three, or four, depending on your definition) grew more compelling. It felt very cinematic – the thing it reminded me most of is The Walking Dead, with “shadowless” instead of “walkers” and without the element of contagion, but similar in the small bands of survivors coalescing into different sects with widely varying strategies for living in a dystopia. Ultimately, it was too far into the fantasy realm for me – I’m very into speculative and dystopian fiction but prefer that the unrealistic conceit, if there is one, is a starting point or backdrop rather than an integral and developing part of the plot. The fantastical elements did yield some captivating images, but they (the fantasy plot parts) were much more at the forefront than I would have preferred.

Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier: Whew this was a ride. Extremely readable and well-plotted, though the character motivations weren’t always fully realized. Even though it required a little more suspension of disbelief than some thrillers, I finished it in two days and didn’t figure out the specifics of the plot even when I thought I was onto them.

The Ballerinas, by Rachel Kapelke-Dale: I am ever hopeful for a quality ballet thriller, or even non-thriller, especially after being disappointed by The Turnout. Sometimes I think I’ll just reread all of my middle grade and YA performing arts novels instead of facing disappointment. And…though categorization isn’t always useful and genre lines are often blurry, it may be that this book could have been marketed as a YA novel – and that’s why it worked for me. Or, rather, it was its hybrid quality that landed so well – dual timelines, one following adolescent ballerinas and the other their adult counterparts. That said, there were revelations (in internal monologue) toward the end of the book that felt overwritten, didactic – the themes and conclusions that a reader should have been able to draw from the events were made too explicit. It may be that I’m turning a harsher eye to that element because it reminds me of flaws in my own writing, but there were too many sweeping statements, too many ideas tied up neatly and presented to the reader.

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, by Ashley Winstead: It seems that either something about the pandemic made everyone want to write about murderous college students or I started sourcing book recommendations from a different sphere. I can confirm that I broadened my search for new reading material, but I don’t think that fully accounts for just how many murderous college students populate current literature (nor do I think the dark academia/resurgence of The Secret History adequately account for it). This was a slightly strange blend of nuance and camp, trope and surprise.

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The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore: Something I think about quite a bit is whether we have – as a world, as a society, as scientists – gotten better at determining when materials/elements/products are going to be toxic too us than we used to be, or if we just believe we are because we’ve discovered and ceased using lead, asbestos, radium, etc. It’s possible that we are actually better – that we aren’t simply relying on having ruled out some of the most poisonous things and that instead we have better testing methods and more foreknowledge of how substances react with our bodies…but I’m skeptical. I don’t have a substantially better way to navigate the world, though – I avoid microwaving plastic even when it says it’s microwave safe, because why are plastics suddenly okay to microwave when previous iterations weren’t, I don’t use real silver flatware (much to my mom’s annoyance when she wanted everyone’s silverware to match at Christmas…), and I have generally avoided going through the scattershot radiation x-ray machines at airports. And all of those precautions may be unnecessary or even misguided (I’m imagining that glass and ceramic are more time-tested in microwaves, but is that really true? Did all three materials exist when microwaves were invented?), but they aren’t time-consuming nor do they come with any ill effects (I suppose what I’m saying here is that I not only got the COVID vaccine as soon as I was eligible but also had my immunity titers for things like MMR and DTAP tested years ago and got boosted for those, too).

The book, though, is less about a lack of understanding of the substances we interact with – it starts off that way, but it’s quickly apparent to numerous scientists that radium is dangerous – and more about lack of workplace safety and the ways in which young women were sacrificed and ignored in favor of production and profit. The “body horror” as I’ve heard it called is gripping and terrifying, and it starts not even fifty pages into the book. I wished I had a better way to keep track of the characters; I understand the author’s desire and commitment to naming as many of the radium girls as possible, but it was difficult to recall their individual characteristics when they reappeared. This became easier eventually, as five of them become the focus when they bring a lawsuit against their employers, who by that point are completely mercenary, misogynist, and immoral in their response. It’s an infuriating but captivating read.

Admissions, by Kendra James: I love the double-play of the title – admissions to boarding school and colleges, yes, but also confessions about boarding school and examinations of what it’s like to be one of a few Black students there. It’s not as if non-boarding private schools and public schools are devoid of the same issues, but they’re amplified by the closed-in environment and the ways in which the students (at this school at this time, in particular) were left to fend for themselves against casual racism and isolation.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay: I think there’s a derided American tendency to romanticize the UK (attended by a significant amount of baggage about which parts of UK – or primarily British – society and history Americans tend to romanticize, eg wealthy and white), but I’m much more susceptible to mooning over Australia. The descriptions of flowers and trees and nature alone make this novel worth reading, and the contrast of an all-girls boarding school in a rambling (it’s not just me) Victorian mansion set in the Australian bush is tantalizing. But…the setup and atmosphere and building action did more for me than the conclusion.

The Impossible Climb, by Mark Synnott: More mountains more problems. Uh…the way the author describes women (one passage in particular) is incredibly off-putting, as is the weird voyeurism about Alex Honnold’s personal life and bodily habits (Honnold does not come off well and it’s hard to tell how much of that is a product of the way the author writes him). I didn’t mind the way various threads (the author’s own climbing experiences, the history of climbing, and Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan) were woven together (if I hadn’t seen Free Solo and read enough about Honnold already I might have minded more) but…yeah, bad taste.

Fiona and Jane, by Jean Chen Ho: This was…good. There’s not really a diplomatic way of saying that without it sounding like “what I actually mean is it was not amazing” but I don’t really mean it that way – just that it was sort of quiet and pleasant. I think it being linked stories rather than a novel contributed, but ultimately it was more that no singular event was given huge weight, even though both title characters there were numerous significant events. I don’t automatically respond to books that feature significant events, anyway – some of my favorite books are those in which nothing really happens – but this felt like a drawing in which everything was the same shade of pale. I would definitely read something else by this author, but the book was nice but unmemorable for me.

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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.

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