The Lightness, by Emily Temple: This isn’t a “closed room” mystery (or, necessarily, a mystery at all, though it is suspenseful) – it takes place on a mountain – but it has that feeling all the same. And I thoroughly loved spending time there. The narrator’s verbal tics cloyed a little (“and etc,” “what have you,” “as they say” and defining words/tracing lineage) – perhaps in part because I recognize them (the linguistic elements, at least, not so much that repeated phrases) in my own writing and so am more sensitive to whether they’re working or not. I think the use of “etc” undercut the narratorial voice, as if hedging its bets about whether what it was saying was worth saying, and that it would have been much stronger without it. But this is a quibble.

Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault: This work of nonfiction opens in 2008, and it was easy for me to imagine the long, arduous process of gathering stories and compiling them as they were still taking shape – I was so impressed thinking about her decades-long process (which is very much part of the book). The “mill town” in question is Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault grew up and where a paper mill operated for many years. Some of the prose is straightforward and factual, but the book is pocketed with sections of incredible description – combinations of words I’ve truly never seen placed together before – that create a coherent mosaic of styles. The writing in these sections is utterly mesmerizing. I don’t think I ever describe writing as breathtaking, and I would gladly describe some of Arsenault’s words in this way. The book’s content is, of course, 90% depressing.

The Divines, by Ellie Eaton: Is this “dark academia”? I’m not up on literary trends or new categorizations, just as I’m not caught up on the latest neighborhood designations in NYC, but I’ve certainly been reading many novels that take place in high school/college settings…though maybe it was ever thus? (Evergreen?) **After finally Googling “dark academia literature” (I was thinking Secret History but hadn’t gotten much further than that), it’s mainly what I expected – one of the novels from my last post, Catherine House, shows up, as does Trust Exercise, the National Book Award winner that it seems everyone but me loved. Perhaps Oligarchy and The Divines belong to a separate boarding-school (all-girls, specifically) backdropped set of dramas (even The Illness Lesson, which I need to deliver back to the library by hand tomorrow, would figure in here, though set in a much earlier time).

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, by Clarissa Goenawan: The atmosphere in this narrative is impeccable, as is the structure (three parts, each from the perspective of a different main character affected by the death of the title character, who remains inscrutable until the end of the novel). The themes of invisibility, being known, and holding onto secrets are drawn out deftly, though I did feel that the story ended more abruptly than it could have. Perhaps I just wanted more.

Writers and Lovers, by Lily King: Before the first chapter had even concluded I’d stopped at least ten times to think, “Damn, I wish I had made that statement.” It’s not just that the writing itself is fantastic, but that these extremely acute observations are scattered so densely throughout the prose. Somehow, when I put this on hold at the library, I had forgotten that Lily King wrote Euphoria. I was thinking of Writers and Lovers as a debut (there is a reference to Sons and Lovers in the first half of the book – I haven’t read it but I’m conjecturing that the similarity in titles means there’s some homage or riff on the D.H. Lawrence in King’s book). My nitpick is that there are a lot of men’s names flung at you in the first few chapters and I couldn’t keep landlord from ex-boyfriend from brother from other ex-boyfriend straight, especially since most of them were not present in the novel’s current time. As it’s set in 1997 with a writer protagonist just three years younger than King herself would have been then…of course I wonder how much is autobiographical. In any case – truly great.

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Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas: I find myself very intrigued by how archetypal the narrator of this novel felt, how similar to the protagonists of other books I’ve read recently, and how difficult it is to spell out exactly why she feels that way. I find myself thinking “they’re all the sort of hot messy girl who is detached and doesn’t care” but then recognizing the ways in which half of them actually care deeply about something or everything and don’t fit that trope. There’s a certain feeling of detachment I get from all of them, a sense that nothing can faze them. I’m thinking of the narrator of Blue Ticket by Sophie McIntosh, but there are other echoes I can’t quite recall. Catherine House is a sort of cross-breed between cloistered, debaucherous academia (eg Secret History) and dystopian mind/body alteration through science. I didn’t love it overall, but I admired the writing, and the author was so adept at creating sadness that I might rank one element of the plot up there with the other saddest things I’ve ever read, like Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” a particular scene from Jesus’ Son, or Kathryn Harrison’s scenes about trying to help kittens open their eyes before they were ready. The ending, though…I’ve recently read a few books whose endings have been just perfect, and this one was unsatisfying.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, by Laura van den Berg: I loved Find Me and then inexplicably never read van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel. Why! Must remedy. These are excellent stories. I feel a perpetual sense of sadness about short stories, though, because I feel lacking somehow (or lacking of something) when, long after or even immediately after finishing the collection, I don’t remember half of the stories – not what they were about, not individual lines, not plot points. I suppose there are a very few exceptions to this – the exceptions tend to correspond to extremely memorable plots or surprising lines, though, not necessarily to the short stories that have stunned me the most (for example: Deborah Eisenberg and Lorrie Moore are two of the greatest short story writers and I can only tell you that Eisenberg’s most recent collection had the best description of a puppet show that I’ve ever encountered and…actually, I can recall the general feeling and multiple lines from Moore’s “Like Life.”) Now I’m trying to recall each of the stories from some of the best collections I’ve read recently – Sabrina and Corina, Blacklight, Man v. Nature – and I do find that I can give a pitch of at least three stories from each. There’s still something gently disconcerting, though, about not being able to pull up each short story, examine it briefly, and put it back. I know that I’m leaving out half of the experience of a short story collection, ie the experience you have during the actual time you’re reading the stories. And I know that fuzzy or nonexistent memory of stories past could be perceived as a boon, because it means you can reread your favorites anew again! but it gives me the empty feeling of a winter Sunday. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (which is a brilliant title) is amazing with place; most of the stories triangulate around Florida, Boston, or Italy, though there’s one set in Mexico.

A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry (reread): And I loved it just as much the second time. There are many 600-page books that feel like a slog, and a good number that feel enjoyable but long, and then there are those that read too quickly and end too soon. The ending breaks me, but clearly I went back in to be broken again. Mistry is incredibly adept at using words I’ve never heard before without any sense of pretense or deliberate erudition, and his ratio of astounding images to straighter narration is perfect. I assigned A Fine Balance to one of my students and, though I try not to take responses to novels personally, I was elated when she loved it right from the prologue. The structure, the expansiveness balanced with detail…one of my oldest friends recommended this to me years ago and now I pass that recommendation on universally.

The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg: The author’s journalistic take on story of a double murder, single disappearance; also the story of the history of a part of Appalachian West Virginia; also the author’s personal narrative of living and working in that part of West Virginia; all compelling.

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin: This was so good but I just finished it and don’t think I can describe it without crying/continuing to cry. Instead I’ll just say that Chloe Benjamin is, to my knowledge, one of the only residents of the Venn diagram center of “successful writer” and “people who follow all of the same gymnastics competitions/commentators/twitters that I do.” One final note – other than to reiterate how much I loved this book – how is “immortalist” not a recognized word?

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There, There, by Tommy Orange: This starts in a hundred little pieces and constellates toward a supernova at its conclusion (forgive my mixed star metaphors). It’s one I’ll reread, both because I did have some trouble keeping track of all of the characters throughout and because although it’s not a mystery or a thriller, it would read much differently once you know the ending. I know I’ve just abused interstellar metaphors, but it’s also like a slow-panning shot that zooms in tighter and tighter, and the distant, blurred figures of the first read are sure to be much more recognizable the second time. Each voice within the novel sounds different from every other voice, but all recognizably from the same author, one who is clearly deploying his abilities precisely and deftly.

Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid: While I was reading this, I was thinking about coincidences within plots (specifically, I was thinking about a plot point in Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had, though they aren’t particularly similar) and the relative likelihood/contrivance of the plot twists in the realistic fiction I’ve read (and also thinking about Philadelphia, this novel’s setting, and how it’s often described as a small town and so ripe for coincidence…maybe this is me talking around the fact that I found the major plot coincidence in Such a Fun Age contrived) – anyway, it was funny to then see Claire Lombardo thanked in the acknowledgments. I read much of Such a Fun Age between 5 and 7:30 am, because although I usually am able to go directly back to sleep if I wake up before I mean to, I realized my Kindle was sitting on the nightstand and continuing the book seemed like a better idea. Other than that one plot point, the plotting is extremely good and the social commentary just right, though some of the characters felt pretty flat.

Luster, by Raven Leilani: This was absolutely off-kilter and mesmerizing. Somehow it reminded me of Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper in that both novels feature characters taking completely bonkers actions that you, the reader, are fully willing to accept because the writing is so good. I may have read it with a permanent shocked-emoji face, clutching my kindle as if afraid I was going to miss a single beat of the story.

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett: So good; I enjoyed the diverging and converging over time and place, though sometimes wished I could linger with each character longer before jumping to another’s perspective years later.

Oligarchy, by Scarlett Thomas: I think I found this on Lit Hub’s “most anticipated” books of 2020 or 2021, a tremendous and intimidating resource. It’s a quick read, note even 200 pages, and initially seemed to cover pretty well-trodden territory – girls’ boarding school, teenage-dom, eating disorders – but was hiding a different story, a more darkly wacky one, in its second half. I would rather that story had been more prominent from the beginning (I think that when I read the blurb about the book it may have alluded to Oligarchy being more than a typical boarding-school drama, but I had forgotten by the time I read it since I had been on an epic ebook borrowing spree) and that some of the more cliched moments and language early on had been avoided, but I’m glad I didn’t stop reading it. It ended abruptly, but I’m intrigued enough overall to look for Thomas’s earlier books.

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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 way.

Blue Ticket, by Sophie McIntosh: There’s something very impressive to me about an author who can create multiple, distinct dystopias (this is probably the case with Schweblin, also). As with The Water Cure, I enjoyed this. I did wish that the central character felt less elusive, more concrete; I had a hard time conjuring her in my mind or even remembering her name.

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar: Ahhh…this is so (not to be punny with the name of a main character, but…) lovely. The three voices that tell the story are so fully realized and endearing in different ways, and the prose is very musical – in the “Lovely” narrated chapters, this comes from the author’s deployment of the present participle in place of simple present tense, which sounds like an easy trick but, I suspect, would sound contrived in less capable hands. It’s also wrenching.

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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 Pixar). I can understand what led her to this choice – she writes about three different companies she worked for, where she likely had non-disclosure agreements and couldn’t state their names, and probably decided to just elide every proper noun in the same way. For me, it felt forced and it distracted.

Follow Me to Ground, by Sue Rainsford: Book reviews will describe this as “superlative-ly adjective and spare” – I read it in a day. Eerie and contained.

The Searcher, by Tana French: New Tana French! New Tana French! This is the second of hers that isn’t Dublin murder squad (AKA not narrated by a detective who has some connection to one or more previous narrators who were also detectives in Dublin), and I have to assume that’s partially in response to the perception of police, particularly in America (this isn’t fully assumption; it’s alluded to in the novel, as the narrator this time is a retired American cop). Though – I don’t think her prior novels glorified the police, and I suppose I think of detectives and police officers as a Venn diagram, not a circle. Her previous novel wasn’t narrated by a detective either, though, so maybe it was a more organic decision than I’m making it out to be. I will say – I do miss Dublin as a setting. The Searcher felt slightly anti-climactic, compared to the complex narrative and shifting backstories of Witch Elm, though of course still masterfully done…and some of the protagonist’s musings about the police and social justice were a little on the nose.

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Hagglund: Books about religion, atheism, spirituality, and existentialism are generally a hard sell for me, because I burned out thinking about them constantly as a kid, and I’m aware that the balance I’ve found of being okay might be robust with regard to most life issues but harbors a particular weakness for this specific concern. That said, there’s a brilliant conceit at the heart of this book – one I’ve never heard articulated before: that democratic socialism is the best form of government because our right to our time (which is, by secular definition, finite – the argument Hagglund makes that life’s finitude is what gives it meaning has never really pierced me right, nor is it the original element of his thesis, but fortunately that isn’t his entire thesis) is crucial to allowing us to live meaningful lives. I will say that I don’t disagree with this premise – rather, it’s perfectly sound and logical – but that it doesn’t fully resonate with me. I “believe” it, but I don’t “feel” it. I’ll also say – and I doubt I would have read This Life if this weren’t the case – that I’m extremely glad Hagglund makes clear at the outset that his book is not going to be depressing and that he considers all of the ideas he’s putting forth to be uplifting ones. (I have gone out of my way, as much as I can, to avoid things like Kierkegaard or anti-natalist David Benatar (Hit me with your best…nought?) The book is split into the two subtitular parts, and I’m not finished with it yet; I’ll probably have more to say.

Long Bright River, by Liz Moore: Another mystery that deals with police corruption and an ambivalent officer; I had just spent two weeks in Philadelphia before reading this, so I had my Google maps out to look up the places from the book. Liz Moore could be the heir to Laura Lippman; she has the same plotting + writing combination.

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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.”

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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 elsewhere. The shelves span the width of the room and – stacked two rows deep – my books take up two of them (my adult fiction and nonfiction are on a different shelf in the living room). I have them arranged according to a system that states:

1. Series books (Babysitters Club, Sleepover Friends, The Gymnasts, Silver Blades, and dozens of lesser-knowns that ran for only 5-10 titles) form the back lines, not because we’re embarrassed by them (we have no shame) but because when books are numbered, they’re easier to find, even when they’re behind other books.
2. The rest of the books are organized loosely by topic but mostly by free association: here are books about performing arts prodigies! Here are escape stories! Funny yet poignant goes here, adjacent to all-funny-all-the-time. Witches and aliens to the right, realistic young ladies to the left.
3. Nothing is on the top shelf because I couldn’t reach it even standing on a cushioned piano bench that threatened to topple if I didn’t distribute my weight evenly enough.

For my first reread (in years, really – I know I reread Where the Red Fern Grows in the past five years, and I read The Mozart Season regularly, but other than that…) I went with a campus novel. Like The Wonder Years, it was written in the 80s but set in the early 60s. I still have to remind myself that the title isn’t actually Don’t Tell Me Lovers are Losers. I remembered the key plot points before I started, but what I was mostly after was the feeling it gave me when I originally read it. It’s a hazy thing, but when I reread a book from that long ago in my own history, I’m taken back in my mind’s eye to the same images my brain conjured when I first read the book. And as such, I’m taken back to where and when I was then. Not in the particulars – I wouldn’t claim to remember, for the vast majority of books, where I was sitting when I read it or what year it was (though there are a few like that) – but in the sense I have of the world. (Yes, it occurs to me that this may just be tremendously narcissistic). Reading was the backdrop to everything I did while growing up. After orthodontist appointments, I was allowed to buy six paperback books from the local bookstore (these averaged $2.50-$3.50 (new!)). My parents eventually banned books at the dinner table.

Back to Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers: the title is very curious to me. I think I may have avoided it when I was a pre-teen because it sounded like it would be salacious, and I was at the time essentially a Victorian figure prone to vapors who ran at the very thought. But it’s not about romantic love, per se – just attachment (and the men who appear are exclusively brothers and fathers – there aren’t even any male professors). The back copy is very melodramatic – “Hovering on the brink of womanhood” – but the writing skims over the top of cliches without succumbing (I mean – Cynthia Voight surely did not write the back copy). The three main characters are not tropes – if they were, the narrator (Ann), the proper, preppy one from a “traditional” background would likely also have perfect grades and be “the smart one.”

After finishing this I read Clare Beams’s The Illness Lesson. I think I’ll alternate between adult books and journeys into the past as we take shaky steps into fall, election season, and the remainder of quarantine. Next up: Gone Away Lake.

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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 thematically related. These are almost like a season of Black Mirror (down to some of the technology involved – “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling is very reminiscent of Black Mirror’s “The Entire History of You,” which came out two years before the story’s first publication (which doesn’t necessarily mean Chiang saw it before writing the story, or that it’s a negative if he did–it’s not derivative; it just reads as if the memory-footage software is a thing that actually exists in the world and both pieces of media are writing about it)) when taken together. The title story was almost too brutal to read in that, for me, it mimicked depression even though that isn’t the subject, but it was one of my favorites. The exploration of possibility is really the thing in this book, more than the writing itself, but there are also places in which the writing is lovely.

The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry: I have read some about the 1918 flu (I haven’t read Pale Rider yet), but it’s a topic on which I could read more if it’s new or particularly well written. The writing in this is fine, but…possibly as an effect of how much I’ve read about disease and epidemiology, I found it almost unbearably boring at first. The beginning chapters are about the beginnings of modern medicine in America (and in particular modern medical training, medical schools, labs, and so on) and while that’s a worthy topic, there were so many names and details that I just thought, “Can’t we jump to 1918 already?” By the time we reached the actual crisis, reading it felt like a chore. Too many details about exactly what happened when, rather than the feel and shape of the crisis.

Self Care, by Leigh Stein: My friend Leigh has written a satire that is completely of the moment, and her one-liners are in a class of their own. I started this fairly late at night and read the first 175 pages before falling asleep, finally, at 3 am, and finished it the next day – which is how I typically read Leigh’s books, because they’re always compulsively readable, but perhaps this one more than most! The words that best describe it are all very biting: mordant wit, trenchant observations, slanted humor.

The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo: This is such a nice long book to settle into, and thoroughly enjoyable. As an only child I was especially interested in the marriage of two only children who then had four daughters – not to make it all about me! but the novel provided both the familiar and the foreign in that way. Something about it reminded me of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I tend to tire of family sagas when they start way, way back and only spend chapters with each set of characters before moving on to their descendants, and much prefer this type of family story, which leaps around in time but very deftly and not by sacrificing characterization – you stay with the same set of people for the entire 500 pages, but come to understand them by seeing them at different ages and relationships to one another.

Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker: A thoroughly fascinating look at one family and the history of schizophrenia research. The structure is really engaging, though the characters are hard to keep track of (not much to be done about that, since the family has twelve children…) – I had to keep going back to the introduction to remember who was who! A very minor complaint overall.

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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. I know that the author had an essay that went viral, and I wonder if the publishers rushed the book to press to capitalize on that?

The Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala: At one angle, I don’t know why I chose to read a memoir of someone losing her entire family – husband, two children, parents – to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and it’s true that this knocked me over and left me sitting quietly staring into the distance. But Deraniyagala’s writing is beautiful and affirming, and it was only a further delight to Google her later and discover that she is now married to the actress Fiona Shaw, who plays a CIA agent on Killing Eve. You can find images of them together, elated and buoyant, across the internet. After trying and failing to imagine what such a horrific loss would feel like, it was incredible to see her now.

Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe: When I was trying to Google this book so I could search for it at the library by author, I Googled “Don’t Say a Word” or “Tell No One” or something like that (+ book) and…this came up anyway. Smart algorithm. I have to confess that for some reason I cannot keep a hold on who’s who among the IRA, the various branches within the IRA, the loyalists, the republicans, the Catholics, the Protestants, to the point where I wrote down on an index card which went with each other (I have a similar blank spot in my brain for which of “complementary” and “supplementary” sum to 90 degrees and 180 degrees).

It’s really eerie, for lack of a better word, to be reading this right now – the Troubles in the 1970s in Ireland are not an analog for the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality happening now in America, but the pervasiveness of violence and the difficulty of determining what, exactly, is going on at times (ie are there “outside agitators” looking to profit or escalate, or is claiming that there are outside agitators dismissive of black pain and anger? Are there white supremacists infiltrating the protests or abetting the police?). In Say Nothing, there are double and triple agents among the British army, the IRA, and the loyalists, and the only certain thing seems to be violence.

Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson: What a fun read. I spent the first fifteen or so pages – until the all-girls school was mentioned, I guess – thinking the main character was male. I don’t know if that was unconsciously related to the author being male (probably), or if the protagonist was an avatar for the author and he hadn’t quite disguised it enough, or something else. It’s not important, but it added to the narrator’s initial cypher-like quality.

Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden: Edward Snowden has a very archetypal face; I can think of three guys I know who have the same essential appearance. I think that’s part of why I feel an affinity for him (the other part is that, whether based on reasonable evidence or not, I’ve always thought of him as the “good” version of exposer with Julian Assange being the evil counterpart). He’s also my age. I do remember being affronted – and I’m sure this was some kind of projection on my part, given that I knew nothing of the situation – that he left the country without telling his girlfriend, the ultimate ghosting, and thinking that couldn’t he have at least told her in a letter, rather than making her find out with the rest of us?

And…as soon as I typed that I realized how numb-skulled it was for me to still be wondering how that had played out, given that it happened seven years ago. I think at the time I heard “his girlfriend knew nothing about his discoveries, revelations or planned departure!” and then inexplicably remained incurious. Obviously he kept her in the dark for her own safety, and – not a spoiler, I don’t think, since he mentions it early on – they’re now married.

Anyway. I still have a favorable impression of Snowden after reading this, still think whistle-blowers should be protected rather than exiled, and also feel the book was engaging and interesting. I’m curious (and this time I won’t just sit around wondering…) whether he had a ghostwriter or just an editor. There were a few lines that stuck out as a potentially-not-Snowden-himself writer attempting to manufacture “voice,” but the curation of anecdotes from Snowden’s childhood and early adulthood was done well. Aha – in what took me seven fewer years to answer, I have learned that Snowden had a collaborator-ghostwriter hybrid, Joshua Cohen, who’s a novelist.

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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 – I say that as someone in general awe of successful plots, since that’s the hardest element of writing for me. Now I’m watching the series on Hulu, which is…okay.

Recursion, by Blake Crouch: My initial thought about this was “It’s so fun!” but I grew a bit weary of the premise and the spinning off of that premise as the book went on. It was still fun in the end, though the writing was really uneven – sometimes decent, other times sounded like it had been written by subpar AI. I will NOT dare to wade into questions of “what makes a novel a genre book/what makes a novel literary fiction” (okay, I’ll dip in a toe…marketing, in large part), but – I’m going to transgress here – I think I was expecting it to be more literary (I see from looking at a few reviews that it really wasn’t marketed as such, so if we’re using different measurement devices for different genres, I was probably judging it by the wrong rubric). I did like the premise, but it’s hard to sustain something like that.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell: This blew me away to the point where I’m not sure I can even type about it without either sobbing or laughing one of those uncontrollable laughs that often crosses over into crying. It’s an amazing story, with an ending that hits perfectly, but the writing on a sentence level is even more phenomenal. All of Russell’s images are genius, but I was particularly taken by her skill with verbs. Incredibly deft and clever without ever feeling cheap. Swamplandia! is absolutely singular, but the prose and setting brought to mind both Geek Love (and in the acknowledgments Russell notes Katherine Dunn as an influence) and Barry Hannah. I haven’t read either of Russell’s short story collections, and having those in my future makes me as happy as anything has since quarantine started. I’m beside myself with feelings.

Dopesick, by Beth Macy: I read Dreamland (also about the opioid crisis, and very compelling and well done) two years ago and wondered initially if this would feel at all like a retread…but the first review I found for Dopesick noted that it was published in 2018, while Dreamland was from 2016 and pre-Trump. Okay, sold – but ultimately I’m not sure it made much of a difference. Dopesick is a more region-focused look at the epidemic, and doesn’t delve at all into the more removed origins of heroin (which Dreamland does in depth). Dreamland was definitely much more compelling to me, but there’s certainly room for more than one book and angle.

Freshwater, by Awaeke Emezi: I’m not sure if I saw this on a list of recommended books or if it was something I clicked on while scrolling through the “available now” Kindle offerings of the Brooklyn Public Library, but I started it late at night (early in the morning, technically) and stayed up later than was advisable reading the first 1/3 of it before falling asleep with the Kindle resting against my hand. I don’t want to say too much about it because I think the experience benefits, the way certain movies do, from not having too much information going in. The opening is elliptical but not hard to follow or piece together; the writing is sharp and poetic. Two points of fascination: on their website, Emezi describes this as an “autobiographical novel” and I wonder to what degree they mean; the name Awaeke is eerily close to “Awake.” Emezi has another novel coming out in August, so that’s something for me to look forward to.

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