David Yoon
On the surface the Galvins were the picture perfect family. Mimi comes from upper-crust Texan wealth while Don, soon to become an Air Force Academy official, exudes confidence. They will grow their family until it encompassed 10 boys and 2 girls. But turmoil is a constant companion to the family. Six of the boys would eventually be diagnosed with schizophrenia bringing chaos, abuse, murder and lots of denial to the family. Honestly I'm still not sure whether Mimi Galvin was an absolute narcissistic monster or a tireless crusader hell bent on keeping the family together. It's a testament to Kolker's empathy that he can write this story where both are possible.
This is also a medical mystery - following the varied research and theories over the years. It's heartbreaking to see how advances are stymied by a lack of clear profit to be made. And to see how, even decades later, the illness still proves difficult to define.
For all the madness on display, the endless tragedies and erosion of normalcy, Kolker manages to pull hope from the mess, bookending the story with how the youngest takes on her mother's mantle and works to keep the family together. Years in the making, this is meticulously researched, pulling from extensive interviews with the entire family and the researchers looking to uncover the mysteries of this ill-understood disease.
Two rival agents slipping through time, snipping errant histories, nudging specific events forward that will blossom in significance, eradicating entire civilizations to better braid a multi-threaded universe, all in the hopes of cultivating a more ideal future.
They are the best of their respective worlds. Red exists for the Agency, a post-singularity, technocratic world while Blue fights for the Garden, a verdant utopia. As their actions intersect through time, pushing and pulling against each other to better order the universe to their side, they begin to admit a begrudging warrior's respect for the other's skill.
A respect that soon blossoms into something more. Co-written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone who would write to each other much like Red and Blue. One would fashion the letter the other creating the circumstances that the letter would be read. Elaborate intricacies, words hidden in knots, bee stings, the rings of trees and carved on an undigested piece of cod amidst the viscera of a clubbed seal.
It is a testament to their writing that I was more interested in how this love progressed than the intricacies of a time war. And an achievement that a time tossed love story could end in a way that felt earned and satisfactory.
There will be no shortage of books written about our current year. Scientific examinations of the virus, stories focused on New York hospital's response in the early months of the pandemic, speculative fictions, alternate histories, intersectional narratives and more. Zadie Smith's Intimations comes out of the gate fast (Proceeds from the book are going to the Equal Justice Initiative and the COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund for New York) and has me pining for the bygone days that marked the height of blogging.
I don't mean it in a dismissive way. Smith is of course a polished writer, her six essays are snapshots of a moment, stolen fragments with a precise attention to the little details. But it has me remembering when I'd start off the day reading from a host of bloggers doing just that, boiling down personal moments into consumable online essays. It was for them, as it is for Smith, something to do. I realize I want more of that, a connection to how individuals are navigating this moment without grandiose statements around race, polarization, social media and American individualism. Just more pre-menopausal women clinging to the bars of the Market Garden staring at tulips.
These were ubiquitous in my internet timeline, early comics appearing in Buzzfeed relating Mira Jacob's son's early obsession with Michael Jackson. It's in that low-fi, consumable, internet meme visual style that's immediately recognizable and dying to be shared. Jacob's paper cutouts look out at the reader in a stunned, apathetically imploring, semi-ironic way that immediately speaks to my tiny GenX heart. There was no way I wasn't going to eventually snatch this one up.
It's heartfelt, wry and piercingly of the moment. Raising a bi-racial boy, contending with Trump voting in-laws, rich white lady micro-aggressions, fluid sexuality, being brown post 9/11 and Michael Jackson. Mira Jacobs is the hilariously sane person you need in your life to call up for drinks to commiserate over our current dumpster fire moment, feel righteous indignation at the world's injustices, and somehow leave with a tiny bit of hope in your heart.
The fun of Bourdain's debut Get Jiro! is completely erased with this prequel follow-up. The imaginative LA world where chefs rule like crime bosses and corporate fast food and ethnic mom and pop shops line the outer ring disappears in a tokenized dream of Japan with yakuza bosses and filial competition. Bourdain barely manages to wring enough of a plot to explain Jiro's tattoos and proficiency with a blade while completely sidestepping why the golden son of a massive empire would apparently forego all sleep to cook rice over and over again in the hopes of one day making sushi. There's not even that much in the way of food here. Just a hastily whipped together confection that seems completely devoid of calories.
Choi Hyonsu is awaiting execution for the murder of his wife, an 11 year old girl, and her father. He would also be charged for opening the Seryong Dam floodgates which wiped out half a town and drowned 4 policemen. Ever since, his son Sowon has pinballed from place to place. Anytime he would get comfortable, magazine articles would mysteriously appear on classmates desks, on landlord's doorstops, and dropped off at places of work. Revealed as the dead-eyed son of a mass murderer, Sowon would find himself forced to move again. It seems his only ally left in the world is Mr. Ahn.
Until Mr. Ahn disappears leaving a manuscript that recount the days leading up to the Seryong Lake Disaster. There's clearly more to the story than what Sowon has already pieced together.
What little mystery promised by the setup is easily teased together and so it becomes more an examination of moving forward when everything is already lost. How one reacts to personal tragedy - from retreating inwards to lashing out. It's that Korean obsession with outsized emotions and the work of struggling through the days. An existential thriller that spirals out into an overblown, climactic summer movie nail-biter.
It's called Mexican Gothic and right away it starts delivering on the title's promise.
A cryptic letter from her cousin Catalina complaining of restless dead, ghosts that whisper in the night, and a house sick with rot sends Noemi to El Triunfo.
There, set atop the sheer rock walls of the mountain and shrouded in a cold fog, lies High Place, a Gothic mansion complete with European dirt for the gardens. A bit of a conceit to sell the gothic story but I find that it's inspired by an actual place called Real del Monte, a British mining town in the highlands of Mexico complete with an English cemetery.
Inside the moldering walls where electricity is rationed necessitating gas lamps and candles, Noemi finds Catalina a pale shadow of her former self. Her English husband Virgil is irritatingly dismissive, there are eugenics journals in the library, and the pater familias Howard Doyle despite lying barely alive and afflicted by the ravages of putrefaction is still holding the house captive in his sway. Noemi soon finds herself victim to strange dreams and bouts of sleepwalking.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia doesn't miss a single gothic beat here and builds the mounting tension with a confident hand. I'd argue the climax switches from creeping gothic dread to tent-pole Bruckheimer spectacle but it'll make for great TV when the inevitable adaptation comes.
Deacon Cuffy “Sportcoat” Lambkin walks out into the plaza of the Causeway Housing Projects, bombed on homemade King Kong and shoots 19 year old drug dealer Deems Clements' ear clean off. Despite not remembering a thing about the incident, Deacon “King Kong” is clearly a dead man walking.
Despite its pulpy start, this is really a golden hued memory of growing up in the projects in the late 1960's. While Spielberg defined the 80's in suburban America, this is McBride's recollection of growing up in Red Hook Brooklyn where his parents founded the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church.
It's a vibrant multi-cultured community where the Irish cop is honest and in love with the black minister's wife, where the Italian smuggler wants nothing more than to settle down with a plump wife but still lives with his mother who gardens with the drunk black deacon. Where the Dominican numbers runner is honest and the drug dealers leave the plaza empty till noon so the churchgoers can gossip around the flagpole.
It's also about second chances late in life and the possibility of love. It's a far warmer story than the opening would have you believe and in McBride's hands that's still a great thing. Throw in a McGuffin or two, some botched assassinations, some miracle cheese and an army of red ants and you've got a rose coloured recollection of growing up in the Brooklyn projects from an accomplished storyteller.
This reads like a lost Tim Burton movie directed by Wes Anderson. Flipping through the first chapter I kept waiting for the character that Johnny Depp was going to play in the inevitable screen adaptation. Turns out it did make to the stage for a brief musical run.
It's Encyclopedia Brown all grown up. Apparently your child prodigies don't exactly navigate adulthood well. Billy Argo is 30, recently released from a mental hospital and still not quite over the mystery of why his beloved sister killed herself. He finds vague work selling hair replacement products. Wig and moustache sets with names like The Junior Executive, The Noble Hunter and The Mysterious Stranger. Past nemeses, now doddering old men like Professor Von Golum keeps forgetting that they plan on killing Billy.
Time hasn't been kind to other kid detectives. Billy runs into the Hartly boys, now working the movie theatre, their detecting days long past when it was discovered their father was running a counterfeiting ring. Frank is heavily medicated after a bad accident at the Old Mill and Joe lost his gig as a mall cop when he shot a shoplifter in the leg.
And I'd happily linger in this off kilter world as Billy navigates his own existential crisis. Cryptic letters hug page gutters to be deciphered (check the copyright page) and the books' french flaps hold a decoder ring to solve other puzzles. Chapter 14 gets stolen entirely.
But it's uneven. Horrible crimes flare up unbidden. Entire buildings and people disappear never to be explained, a little boy tortures his primary school classmates - Bobby Cohen will never walk in a straight line again. And I get it, the adult world comes with adult problems but then it swings back to a shy girl who meekly steals anything pink, blossoming love and classic unmaskings. It's too big a swing - beyond Burton's Batman appearing in the midst of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure this is Todd Phillips' Joker rearing his head.
Closing out my home gardening trifecta with the most woo-woo of the bunch. It's less a book about caring for your new houseplant and more a way to readjust your thinking of our chlorophyllic compatriots. There are the heartfelt testimonials of plant owners pulled from the depths of depression and overcoming personal challenges with the help of plants. And each chapter ends with a mindful practice, perhaps consider how your attitude towards plants has changed as you've matured. And I expected what exactly from an author named Summer Rayne Oakes?
Dammit Summer, I just want to know if I'm overwatering my pilea peperomioides! She does get points for being published under Simon Sinek's imprint and getting the one and only OG botanical-bro Wade Davis to provide the intro. I enjoyed her investigation of the greening of Singapore, the long and ancient history of indoor gardening and identifying geosmin, the smell of earth. Less so the references to her Masterclass I should take to get the answers I was looking for in the first place. But hell, you gotta hustle out here when it comes to houseplants I guess.
There was little doubt that I was going to pick up this book given my love of Texas Hold'Em — but Maria Konnikova's latest isn't some poker guide to get you to the WSOP. It's part memoir, self-help guide and business read from an accomplished non-fiction author and regular contributor to the New Yorker who happens to hold a Ph.D. in psychology.
She will dedicate herself to mastering the game under the tutelage of Poker Hall of Famer Erik Seidel and a host of other poker luminaries. She will make the trek into New Jersey to camp at coffee shops to play online, building up to runs in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and Macau. But the hook, the reason you should read this even if you don't know what wins between Broadway and the nut flush, is it's all about poker as insight.
In poker, as in life, you are forced to make tough decisions armed with imperfect information. And to the careful observer, how we think through these problems hand by hand reveals a lot about your personality, your baggage, your biases, and more.
Erik Seidel early on gives Maria two critical words of advice: Pay Attention. Less certainty, more inquiry. Question everything, stay open minded and adjust as needed. Relevant on and off the felt, especially in this fraught and fearful moment. There are no perfect answers. It's about finding comfort in, and living with that uncertainty. And accepting that you can do everything right and still lose. That chance and fate are always lurking in the background ready to flush us down the river when we least expect it. I mean Maria was supposed to launch this book to coincide with her run at the 2020 World Series of Poker. A perfect marketing one-two punch that ran head first into a worldwide pandemic that had other plans.
You assess and readjust. No bad beats allowed. Good poker demands you shake it off, stay focused and continue to make strong decisions based on available information. Steer clear of superstition, notions of what you're due for, and staying blind to your own biases. Good poker play models effective behaviours in the real world. I'm all in.
Pearl is beaten at home, at school, and even by the neighbours and yet still somehow considers herself lucky given the distance of time. Looking back she harbours no ill-will to her father despite the horrific beatings. There is a graphically recounted event involving her father repeatedly smashing her with a broken badminton racket's aluminum frame, ripping open her head and hands and covering Pearl in enough blood that her sister passed out simply looking at her. Another incident where she was left near immobile on the ground, her hands suddenly gripped in a palsy from her father's unrelenting blows. Horrible and yet recalled with blunt stoicism - punishments justified as being borne out of parental love and concern. That somehow that was what was missing from her friend Jeong-Ae's life. That was what could have pulled her back from the decisions she made that pulled her down a different path that started when they decided to run away at 15 and find themselves quickly swept up into a world of brothels.
A precise work told at a ten year remove, we see Pearl as an adult recounting these events as she pieces together her own graphic novel. Ancco/Pearl imbues her remembered friendship with warmth and confidently nails the young voices that can be both brash and bullying as well as scared and naive. There is a quiet hope here amidst the violence - small, vague and entirely human. Beautifully done.
My first multi-level-marketing thriller or more existential agony from the Land of the Morning Calm?
Yes.
Se-oh returns to find her house in flames, her father dead inside - perhaps a suicide to escape his mounting debts. Ki-jeong gets a call that her estranged sister has been pulled from the river, dead of an apparent suicide. Slowly these two stories begin to converge but not in traditional Western thriller fashion, unveiling sinister cabals, lurking evil and grand designs.
It is more interested in illuminating how powerless we can be in the face of horrible events. How the world takes advantage of the naivety and vulnerability of youth. That these lives of grey shadows are only sharpened to a focus through tragedies that surface feelings of guilt, loss and anger. That under those heavy burdens does one struggle to move forward.
Maybe it's just I've been on a huge Korean works in translation jag as of late that colors my perception but it just feels like Korean works are tuned a little differently. That life is hard and there are no pretty answers to its endless struggle.
If anything it only serves to remind me how much of the classics I've yet to read. And while I can delight in those that I have, feeling smug in my recognition of phrases from J. Alfred Prufrock (the yellow smoke!) and my beloved Jane Eyre - I'm left adrift with Dickens, Cormac McCarthy and Henry James. And yes, The Hunger Grains would be the perfect name for Peeta's bakery.
So while a lot of the time it feels like i'm laughing along just based on context cues (Marius just seems like he's the worst) I'm too often lost and feeling shame over my clearly squandered English degree which was supposed to prepare me for books like this! Point removed for making me face my own literary inadequacies - I should totally know what the hell Coleridge is going on about!
So you've dipped your toe in the anti-racist syllabus with Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and now you're ready for some meatier fare. Ibram X Kendi is arguably the most recognized name in the growing anti-racist awakening that is gripping the West right now. But he wasn't always its greatest champion. Here he reflects on his own past, buying into racist ideas of laziness and lack of effort keeping Black people down in an inflamed and righteous sounding speech he made in high school. His own colorism and acceptance of White notions of beauty. His eyes being opened to his own homophobia and struggle to embrace intersectionality.
It's clear to him that no one is completely immune to the cancer that is racism when it is so embedded in our culture and such an integral part of our systems. And it is in this environment that simply calling yourself not-racist is no longer enough. You are either complicit in allowing racist ideas to proliferate or your are antiracist and expose and eradicate these ideas wherever you encounter them. Which is to say an activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.
Time to step up your game.
Darryl Cheng is the OG plant parent and green thumbed guru. As far as I'm concerned this is the must have botanical Bible for sprouting enthusiasts. He's also my originating source for so much more insight into the online plant community - which duh, happens to be a wonderfully diverse and all around uplifting safe space. I mean it's not like plant influencers are out here throwing shade (*wink) at each other and Darryl does the work of spotlighting other plant creators and resources.
In his book Darryl covers the basics. Deciphering notions of low light plants (this book might even convince me to buy a light meter!) what watering looks like, and getting your indoor oasis set up. But then he dives deep into plant propagation and the care and maintenance of specific plant types. A beautifully done reference - but do yourself a favour and check him out online as well and discover a massive world of indoor gardening knowledge.
A bit of a cliché really, everyone under quarantine and suddenly dogs are being adopted en masse while folks find a renewed urge to twiddle their green thumbs. Not wholly immune to the impulse, I've been filling up the new work-from-home space with plants. And of course there's an abundance of online love with Reddit groups, YouTube channels, and Instagram accounts to stoke those chlorophyll cravings - not to mention a new batch of houseplant reads that are a far cry from the fusty hardback how-tos found at church book sales and second hand bookshops.
Beautifully shot and lovingly designed, this is a pretty primer for the starting home horticulturalist. By far the most basic of the plant books I've snagged from the library, but no less lovely to look at.
I'm still trying to figure out why I have this book in the first place. What trusted source recommended this Finnish Weird novel? Who prompted me to set this aside so that it was the rare book on my shelf just waiting for the right time to read? Let's just say, I'd like a word.
In the first chapter we find ourselves in the midst of some illicit dealings going down at a cemetery. It seems to involve hot peppers being tested for potency by our protagonist snaking a finger under her waistband and dabbing it against her vagina? I've got questions.
The frame widens and we find ourselves in the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland. A heavy-handed dystopian world where women, or elois, are raised to be subservient mates solely obsessed with romance, weddings and pleasing their man. Never too smart or demanding, just content to raise a family and keep a tidy home. All this wrapped around a mystery of a missing sister and expanding a lucrative but illegal hot pepper trade. Neither, though resolved by the end of the novel, really work to tie anything together or work to a larger cohesive theme.
And just hammering it home. Not a lot of subtlety on display here. There are manuals for the discipline of women that sound a lot like dog training guides. Repeated emphasis that our hero never appear too smart as a woman and more akin to an etherized lobotomy patient. And maybe Sinisalo gets a bit of a pass for pulling much of her material from the real world, (there's even a Transcendental Capsaicinophilic Society!) that might generously put her in the same speculative fiction realm that Margaret Atwood treads. But make no mistake this is no Gilead.
White navel gazing targeting the woke liberal ally and arming them with the right words to announce to the world that they “get it” without the need for further action or smartly researched treatise on white fragility that deserves its place on any anti-racist syllabus? Yes.
For the Karens in your life that “don't see colour”, value “all lives”, has a cousin who married a black man, and “would have voted Obama for a third term if they could!” - this book is their anti-racism starter kit. The thing that gets them to examine their own privilege, but in the soothing tones of a white lady educator. And really, that's what some folks need.
If only so we can stop with the arguments that start with variations on the theme of “you're being too sensitive” “can't you take a joke”, “that was never my intent”, “the PC-police and cancel culture are getting out of hand” etc. We've turned the term racist into something that an individual does consciously with malicious intent, directed at another based on their race. So essentially a bad person. And it's gotten to the point being called a racist is somehow worse than being the victim of racism. It should carry all the weight of being called an asshole. Maybe you did something asshole-like. Maybe you should apologize and not do that asshole thing again instead of spending all your time invalidating the person who called you an asshole and whining about how your asshole behaviour was all a big mistake. People are not protesting for the right to call you an asshole.
So if you come out of this with the understanding that we are living within a complex racist system that permeates all aspects of our lives and that we're part of an enduring social dynamic that has privileged whites in regards to education, health-care, housing, banking, representation, policing etc for centuries that's good. And then maybe we can stop being such little snowflakes when we're called out on our racist behaviours. And then maybe we can start having productive conversations about this because I get the feeling Blacks are frankly done calling us out and trying to teach us to be better.
It's a start and hopefully one that leads to deeper reading and an invitation to actual anti-racist action and change instead of just checking off a box on your #blacklivesmatter bingo card.
Set in the same world as her universally praised, award-winning debut Ancillary Justice, I admit I was a bit leery going in. I just didn't get the first book of the trilogy and thought that it was more sci-fi for sci-fi purists. A tourist like myself inevitably felt lost. I imagine it akin to watching Avengers: Infinity War and wondering what all the fuss is about, when the last codpiece and cape movie you saw was Adam West's Batman.
It's a bit of a whodunnit, meets caper, with a sprinkling of intergalactic tension, spiralling around our protagonist Ingray Aughskold. You don't need to have completed the Imperial Radch trilogy to enjoy this and thankfully it's a more approachable stand-alone story. More Ant-man than Avengers.
Read as Luis as played by Michael Pena in Ant-ManSo it starts with a prison break right? It's supposed to be Pahlad Budrakin, who's totally going to be the lynchpin to a larger plot that's like a swing for the fences plan that's going to get Ingray's hoity-toity foster mother to take notice. Can't fail right? But it turns out e's not Pahlad. Hold up - see Pahlad is a neman who identifies as neither male or female so e's pronouns are different. So Ingray is in over her head. And then, get this, an intergalactic dignitary is killed and then representatives from remote worlds begin to pop up on Hwae. Things are blowing up down there. end scene
And then a wonderfully intermixed exploration of provenance. On whether where you come from matters as much as where you are now and who you claim to be. How malleable that notion is when it comes to identity vs artifacts.
The book is written in the matter of fact tone of a psychiatrist tasked with examining the contours of Kim Jiyoung's life to decipher what might have triggered her recent breakdown. It's a novel conceit that serves to frame the book's true purpose of exploring the misogyny that permeates every aspect of Korean life.
From childhood where her younger brother is pampered and centered, given clear preference over his two sisters - to elementary school where the taunts and bullying of the boys are dismissed with the all too familiar refrain of “boys will be boys!”
Jiyoung endures the leering glances and “playful” pinches of teachers in highschool. She graduates into a culture where only 30% of new employees hired at over 100 top companies are actually women. Those lucky few who do find employment can hope to earn 63 cents to every dollar their male peers make. Korea is recognized as the worst developed nation to be a working woman.
It's hardly a literary story and feels more like a rosetta stone to understand the works coming out of present-day Korea. In fact it should be a required companion piece to Han Kang's much lauded book The Vegetarian, providing context to Yeong-hye's oblique story.
Laos had over 2 million tons of ordinance dropped on it over a 9 year bombing campaign starting in 1964. That's the equivalent of a bomb every 8 minutes for those 9 years the US dropped in an area roughly the size of Utah. More bombs than it dropped during the entirety of WWII, and 30% of these cluster bombs have yet to explode.
It is against that backdrop that we are introduced to 3 orphans, Alisak, Prany and Noi living in an abandoned farmhouse turned makeshift hospital in the Plain of Jars. The children on motorbikes wend their way through unexploded ordinance to retrieve supplies and deliver patients. And it sounds unremittingly grim but proves a dreamlike read with the occasional bursts of searing violence.
The chapters swing across the years and traverse the globe taking us out of Laos and into France, New York and Spain. How these teenager can and cannot escape their past. Beautifully melancholic with perfectly realized grace notes throughout. Of things hid in a piano, the brush of a father's fingers against a child's heel as he drives beneath him in a tree, a bike shop and the smell of the ocean. Memories burnished to a shine and held close in contrast to those burning moments of horror. Just an incredibly written, finely wrought, hypnotizing piece of work.
It's a bit of metafiction. Willis Wu dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy, to transcend a life lived on the margins as disgraced son, striving immigrant, delivery guy or generic Asian man. He's living in the world of the cop drama Black and White, more specifically within the walls of the Golden Palace.
Willis is frustrated. He, along with his parents, live a state of perpetually having just arrived, never really arriving. All their striving, all of his hope, and still he can't escape being trapped by his most salient features, to not be seen as anything more than Asian. Guy.
But he's just playing their game by their rules. Is there anything more for him than this trajectory to Kung Fu guy?
Out in the world we're seeing Asian romantic leads, a successful Asian rom-com, Academy award nods, an imminent Asian Marvel hero. It's a far cry from Mickey Rooney in yellow-face and maybe that's progress. But that's just as narrow a world as Interior Chinatown. We're still inhabiting a world that is seeing a sharp uptick in anti-Asian sentiment and sly asides about the Chinese virus and bat-eating Asians. We're still trapped in the world of Black and White.
I get the intent and I think this would make an incredible show or miniseries. It's just the right kind of TV clever - and works within the medium of what has done more to shape American ideas of Asians. There's a lot of visual cues that would be instantly recognizable and would play beautifully onscreen. On the page, I still need some literary fireworks to carry it off.
Let's give credit where credit is due. Lawrence Wright does his research. He won the Pulitzer for non-fiction for his examination of Al-Qaed. He followed that up with an expose on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology which got turned into an HBO Documentary. Now he's trained his eye on a possible pandemic for this fictional thriller.
How did he do?
Well, we have a mysterious influenza virus that originates in Asia in the Spring of 2020 that sends economies into a tailspin, shuts down schools, overwhelms hospitals, has the American government playing catch-up while battling disinformation and wild conspiracies. Not too shabby.
The thing is his endgame is the near complete breakdown of human civilization. This was prompted by a question from Ridley Scott who, after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, wondered what would nudge humanity to this dystopian hellscape? And so he ups the ante with a bomb in Rome, rising tensions in the Middle East, and a Cold War threatening to go nuclear with Russia sabotaging critical American infrastructure. Things get pretty dark.
And here's where it veers into airport thriller territory. Unlikely hero, short, stooped and in need of a cane while being the foremost expert in disease that sees him traipsing the globe in a helicopter, private jet and a fast-attack submarine - naturally. He goes from hobnobbing with Middle Eastern royalty to working in the midst of viral hotspots. It's Dan Brown writing a pandemic novel.
So the writing isn't exactly the sharpest, but it's no less a page-turner. Where you find yourself gulping in nervous anticipation is how much he got right so far, and how much more death he predicts will arrive come the End of October.
So this unbroken, stream of consciousness, chonker of a book that suffers from an extreme case of literary Tourettes (Kleenex, tardigrades, fatbergs, Abominable Snowman) can seem a massive bit of writerly trolling. Lucy Ellmann going Emperor's New Clothes as she continues to collect accolades and prizes. But I loved it nonetheless.
Clickbait tiles, brandnames, song snippets and the contents of the freezer are the manifestation of the monkey chatter, interior monologue that all of us are barely conscious of. Like skimming through the radio dial and picking up pieces of information, it firmly establishes the set and setting of a specific moment. It's no less than what T.S. Eliot is throwing out there in The Wasteland.
And we are completely in the world of an Ohio housewife in the year immediately after the 2016 US election. And yes, reading it in the current dumpster fire, murder hornets, pandemic, race riot moment seems almost quaint. But amidst the word salad there are thoughts on being a woman in this environment, a mother, wife and daughter. Feeling both completely invisible and an object of desire. To have beaten cancer but still contending with the medical bills. To harken to an idealized American ideal as seen in Little House on the Prairie, musicals, movies and the dog whistling of the president. How problematic that era was and how white racial structures have always been a part of the water white Americans have been swimming in. I mean you can fit a lot of ideas in 1000 pages.
And kudos to whoever was saddled with performing the audiobook version of this monster. I hope you got hazard pay.