Kait
Not since Tolkien has so much walking been so exhaustively recounted, yet been almost completely tangential to the actual story. (And though there weren't any eagles, there were, like, cars and stuff to explain away.)
Harold is quintessentially British. I completely lost count of the times where he did something like walk into a shop and feel compelled to buy something because the worker was staring at him, and he was the reason they weren't able to close yet.
When he finds out an old friend with whom he's lost touch is dying of cancer, he finds that he can't find the words to say. I'd blame this on the Britishness, but I really don't know that any nationality has the proper phrasing for this, with exception of possibly hakuna matata, which is actually Swahili but not the phrasing anyone who speaks Swahili would actually use.
Anyway.
He goes to mail a trite letter, only when he gets to the postbox he decides he's going to walk to her instead. 600-some miles away.
That's probably enough of the plot. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. Except it's not really about the journey, either. It's more about Harold's life, and the walk is a penance for all of it. It's purgatory for his wife, who's at home and has held Harold in a subconscious begrudging resentment. And it's a little slice of heaven for the neighbor, Rex, who hasn't had so utility for or interaction with other people in months.
The heartache and emotion that's screwed out of Harold with every step is riveting, if punctuated with several gut-punches. The plotting of the walk itself gets fairly repetitious, as Harold vacillates between rapture and despair with numbing regularity. But peoples' reaction to Harold, his walk and the inevitable nonsense that encircles all of it are eminently believable, especially in the age of social media. And the ending, while not exactly Disney-happy, feels satisfying and earned.
I'm not saying I'd want to read a whole trilogy about the walk (and we're already two-thirds of the way there), but it's worth the effort to amble through.
It's not usually a hard question: “What are you reading about?” Most books helpfully even give you clues on the back cover, with a quick summation you can offer up. “The history of the original Dream Team in 1992.” “Jonathan Franzen didn't feel like enough people were paying attention to him so he wrote the same book three times.”
When I got that this time, I hesitated. “It's about ... a small town in North Dakota, I guess?” Which is true, but it's not really about the town, it's about the people. And while that seems like the same thing, it's not. You're not reading the detailed history since its founding, you're getting a small snapshot of a few lives. The best description I could come up with was, “It's the story of a small North Dakota town in the 80s. The events that happen are fairly normal for a small town, or at least that would be, individually. Your average small town would have one or zero of these events happening. That four or five of them are happening is nonsense, but that's kind of immaterial.”
I am not a great person to be asking for book recommendations.
The author, Chuck Klosterman, like him or love him, studies people. Profiling, describing and intuiting their reasons for existing, most of his authorial life revolved around trying to explain someone (or a group of someones).
So you can understand why, when he's trying to set a scene, it's a bit like listening to a German opera — intellectually, you understand that it's probably very beautiful, but in the moment it sounds like large bears mating. And, given that the novel takes place in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, it's not even a very interesting German opera (or ursine copulation, depending on where you were in the metaphor).
The first third of the book is dull. A slog. I tell you this so you can prepare for it — gird yourself, lay in provisions, whatever you need to do to get through it. Because it's worth it. I've seen the other side, and it is sublime.
Because Klosterman eventually gets around to what he does best — explaining people. These characters are so vivid their mood swings started affecting how I was doing in the real world. Their actions and reactions and emotions are authentic, to themselves and to human nature. Even the most unbelievable, freakish characters are eventually explained and vindicated, even if that explanation is completely batshit crazy.
Explaining any of the plot seems simultaneously like cheating you and utterly pointless — without the connecting web, plucking at any individual strand leaves you wanting for the whole. It's raw, it's gritty, it's real, and it's definitely worth a read.
When I say I'm a couch potato, I mean it in the sense that you might describe someone as a “confirmed bachelor”: Is, was and always will be, by willful unceasing choice. So I can see you looking askance at my picking up a book about the men who were vying to run the first sub-4-minute mile. To which I say, I also read a book about a bunch of nerds running a student newspaper, and oh wait where was I going with this?
Anyway, Neal Bascomb writes one hell of a thriller. All around the same time, three very different men from three continents independently decided they wanted to be the first to break what was thought by some to be an unimpeachable barrier of human achievement: Running one mile in under four minutes.
Bascomb does an excellent job of pacing the story perfectly, though he was greatly helped by actual historical events unfolding in a pretty perfect ready-for-Hollywood fashion. There's the hardscrabble American running out of poverty to the University of Kansas, or two British Empireans (a budding English doctor and an aspiring Australian scientist) ran - before the professionalization of track and field - like no person ever had.
It's engaging throughout, and my only quibble is one you frequently find in historical books: Make sure you skip the pictures until you reach the end of the book, or the captions will spoil the story. That aside, picking up this book will get you as dialed in as the runners: It never really drags, and it'll keep you going until you finally reach the end.
Cell phones are the bane of modern filmmaking. It seems like at least half (if not more) of all major conflicts from classic movies could be solved with a simple phone call (or text message) between two people who have the ability to communicate almost literally wherever they are. Modern writers have taken to have the first character be tragically misunderstood, but get so frustrated they decide not to clarify things because they're SO ANGRY or the second character is SO HURT ... only for it finally be resolved a few months/weeks/one crisis later.
Or you could have the character go to Antarctica. I'm just saying, it's an option. Apparently.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette is one young teenager's attempt to piece together where her missing mother might be. For out-and-out Seattleites (complete with a Microsoft Dad), they certainly have more adventures than you might expect.
The plot mostly moves forward through a series of miscues and miscommunications - some accidental, some not. I'm loathe to give away any of the plot points, really, because trying to muddle through what the hell happened is well more than half the fun.
I really liked the book, but I have the literary equivalent of part of a popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth that, no matter how hard I run my tongue against it, I can't quite seem to get loose.
As mentioned, the novel propels itself along with tufts and strings that hint at what happened, but only become fully fleshed out the farther you get into it: A murder mystery without a murderer. But if your whole book rests on the plot, all the dominoes you set up in the front half have to pay off with a satisfying topple in the end. In this case we get not a bang, but yet more misdirection and a plot hole between the dominoes you could fly a 747 or navigate an Antarctic research vessel through.
That's what knocked me down to a mild “you should probably read” versus a must-recommend. Regardless, though, definitely one to keep in mind.
There's too much TV nowadays. Too many movies, too much media to consume for the average person! The completist (a depressingly un-endangered species nowadays) will lament this, because what's the point of doing anything if you can't do everything?
But there's a fix! Nowadays, in addition to actual criticism (I saw a thing, and I have a background in these things/can string together two sentences about it), the internet saw the invention and flourishing of the recap, wherein we take the old TV Guide synopsis of any given TV show and expand it into its own novella.
But the biggest oddity to me is not the synopsis (or its cousin, the spoiler-laden review/complaint). It's the people who only follow a TV show (or whatever media) via these recaps: The equivalent of Cliff's Note-ing, if Cliff is actually a guy you know who you asked to give you the gist of Romeo and Juliet in the five minutes before class.
This brings me to The Dilettantes. The subject matter (college newspaper) intrigued me, because I worked at a college newspaper. I've been to college, I've met lots of collegians, and ... very few of the people the book looked like anyone I've ever met before.
And it didn't seem to be the case (as is possible) that these were just types of people I didn't meet. It more seemed like these weren't people at all, but vaguely sketched stereotypes that you might think about when trying to categorize the young people. In essence, the world was populated by someone who never actually met individual students/people, but rather heard about these “millenials” secondhand and tried to describe them: The “recap” version of character development. I think the author may be a millenial (or close to it) himself, but the analogy still stands.
As you can image, this injures the book. For a novel that hangs so much on irony (or lack of definition/artful use thereof), at best it was reaching for an arch absurdist take on the modern college experience/person, but came up fumbling and groping inexpertly. And who needs that when there's so much else out there to (not) watch/read?
Visceral. That was the word I landed on (thanks to Joan's help) that best sums up the feeling I got from reading this book. That might sound off-putting, when the crux of the book involves the child of the narrator perpetrating a school shooting. There's little gore, in terms of physical violence. It's emotional violence, almost, though its awfulness (in the sense of “awe-inspiring terror”) is in the very rawness with which the narrator, Eva, relates the internal landscape of her entire adult life, not any specific actions.
The depths to which Eva plumbs her life, her relationship with her husband, her worries about her children, her mounting fear of her sociopathic son and everything in between are scary because of their groundedness. She's not an entirely reliable narrator, due to her relating relationships between multiple people who don't get the chance to have their say, but you never get the impression she's unfair, either.
This is definitely the kind of book you don't want to see yourself in, but in many of the characters I saw not facets of my character (the easy, “Oh he likes Doctor Who and I like Doctor Who!”) but fundamental precepts through which I navigate the world.
When Eva accuses her husband, Robert, of viewing things in terms of the generic (“I'm so proud of my son”) versus the specific (“Kevin did X that I'm proud of”), it was a gut-punch because it reminded me of how I made my way through college, singling out the broad assumptive touchstones (“We're fraternity brothers who are drinking at a party!”) rather than the actual experience (“I'm drinking way too much because I'm interminably bored on a Friday night because I spend too much time not actually doing anything!”). The parallels I could draw between parts of many of the characters really made the book feel like it was taking cheap shots, and this is not a book that really needs to punch above its weight. It's already a prize fighter.
In fact, the only reason I almost didn't give it 5 stars is because I can't read it again. It was just too much to deal with, though I implore those of you who are able to stomach it to tough it out. In the end, though, I can't really fault a book for connecting too much, or for working too well. I'll have to leave it in the words of a Penn State sophomore, talking about the freshman dorms: It's the best worst thing I never want to do again.
For me, the best mark of a fantasy book is whether I'd want to live in the world.
It began with Narnia, as it almost always does. Who wouldn't want to adventure in a world where nothing ever seems to go super wrong, and even if you're responsible for the death of the creator of the world you still win the consolation prize of being the freaking King.
It's a bit easy, though, isn't it? That's why with books that were clear descendants of Narnia but had more bits of realism stuck in the way (to a point), like The Phantom Tollbooth or, more recently, The Magicians. Obviously Tollbooth isn't quite realism, but the consequences seemed much more logical and directly resulting from the character's actions more than the “Well, you tried your best” aesthetic employed by Aslan.
This is all by way of explaining my ambivalence toward The Other Normals. It's a nice idea but I feel like it's been much better and to better effect elsewhere. It's a pretty standard postmodern fantasy draw-in: Boy obsessed with a particular media series (in this case, a D&D stand-in) gets magically whisked away to the world that media was based on, goes on quests, etc. Only this one involves a lot more “intentional indecent exposure at a high school dance” than the Pevensies ever dealt with.
I had troubles with the narrator. On the one hand you can say he was more realistic because of his many flaws, but his actions seemed more random and spastic than indications of character facets to be overcome. The mystical connection between the worlds, which serves to alter events and realities, only seemed to work when absolutely necessary and seemed woefully inadequate to explain what actually happened.
I don't want to seem too negative — it's a nice introduction to fantasy, particularly the kind of fantasy that seems more real because kids like you can get drawn into it, and probably would serve as a good bridge for the tween/teen who's familiar with Narnia but not really ready for Lev Grossman's The Magicians Trilogy. For the rest of us, though, there are better places to get the same fix.
I wanted badly to like this book. It's about the nerdiest of nerds, guys who literally wore pocket protectors and carried around slide rules, and yet managed to land a dozen human beings on a rock floating through space.
Never has the use of precisely controlled unfathomably large explosions to propel a massive vehicle into the heavens managed to seem so boring. I get that the vast majority of the guys you're talking to were the engineers whose professional lives definitely peaked when they launched dudes into space, but that's where you, as the writer, are supposed to work your magic. Even oral histories tend to use editing to make things seem connected, and make sense, and maybe even work out a logical structure, please?
But no. There's a common format for works about monumental events: You start right around the most exciting time, then leave the reader hanging on a pivotal moment as you circle back and start at the beginning. The thought, I suppose, is to hook the reader's interest so you can explain what led up to it (ignoring the fact that the personal already bought a multiple-hundred-page book about the topic). In this case, the author liked it so much he used it twice: We start a few months out and tiptoe right up to the Apollo 11 launch ... then we back up to the beginning of the Apollo 11 program, when it looks like it might not launch at all. Then, after we get about to where we started ... we back up to the entire history of rocketry and missiles.
If it sounds confusing and disjointed, that's because it is.
But it's not the only issue. From ninth-grade essays up to the latest historical monographs, the best writing tends to be done by those with a passionate interest in the topic. Which makes total sense! Frankly, if you're pounding out a couple hundred pages on a topic that bores you to death, it's unlikely anyone is going to derive any enjoyment from reading it (see: Every primary/secondary education textbook ever).
But there's a distinction you have to draw between interest and advocation when you're writing objectively: In the same way I don't 100 percent trust everything Fox News or the Huffington Post says without third-party verification, I'm also gonna need a little bit more background before I swallow the entirety of Winston Churchill's History of English-Speaking Peoples (spoiler alert: The British come off pretty good in it).
Rocket Men Author Craig Nelson is a homer of the highest order who, if he doesn't actuallly believe it himself, let the astronauts and people deeply involved with the space program inform too much of the narrative thrust of the book.
To be clear, I think the Apollo program (which is mostly what this book chronicles) was a masterful effort of technology, government, politics, engineering and human spirit. Landing on the moon is probably the most significant event for the human species to date. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should be spending trillions of dollars to put a man on Mars, and I resent the implication that questioning that notion makes me unpatriotic or terminally short-sighted.
I really do think it's unfortunate. There are great stories, anecdotes and personalities on display throughout Rocket Men, and the author clearly did an enormous amount of research bringing it all together. I just wish he would have focused a little bit more effort on the writing part, too.
Books are supposed to make you feel, right? Sometimes you're supposed to come away optimistic about the human condition, sometimes you want to curl up in the tightest ball possible, lock your bedroom door and turn the lights out. Just because the feeling you get is bad doesn't mean the book is bad, or that it's not worthwhile.
So when I say this book made me uncomfortable, I want the context to be preserved. I think it was its goal - to a point. Addition is the story of a woman who's very much in the grips of a counting compulsion - she knows the number of steps it takes to get from one part of her house to the other, then to the cafe, then once she's there she eats the cake she (always) orders in the same number of bits as there are poppyseeds on top. And that's one of the more normal bits.
I don't want to give away the plot, but suffice it to say that things change (several times) once she meets The Guy. And it becomes frustrating and infuriating ... and I think that's on purpose, too? One of the great facets of the book is that in reading how the numbers affect Grace, they really start to get under the nerves of the reader. But it's not an obvious thing. I found myself affected not by the things she was counting, but by the sheer number of numbers she was keeping track of. Having to slog through every one of those numbers is analogous, I imagine - though by no means the same thing - the she was going through. I completely understood/felt like it made sense when one activity had to get called off, simply because I was so exhausted trying to keep up with the nervous counting.
What left me short was the ending. Grace goes through a number of different phases, as we'll call them, from full-on incapacitation by counting to love-fueled powering-through to counseling to back to the way it was ... and then we get to the end. How exactly everything turns out is left up to the reader, but I found myself completely unsure if we were dealing with someone who learned to deal with their compulsion and would be moderating it, was just abandoning themselves to the compulsion devil-may-care, or what. Everything up to and including running away to London would have seemed perfectly in keeping with the character's attitudes, which made it a little frustrating. The entire piece is supposed to be a character study - why can't we learn enough about the character?
Nonetheless, it's an excellent work that will appeal to the normal and the rest of us equally.
Louis Theroux makes documentaries about subjects i find fascinating, though his movies always end up making me feel a little queasy. I don't know if it's my latent journalism muscle or simply the same cringe-twinge that you might get from an average episode of The Office, but there's almost always at least one moment, after he's gone in-depth with his subjects and gotten them to expose more honesty than you'd really expect, that he says something off.
The first time I noticed this was when I watched The Most Hated Family in America, a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church's founding family back before they were individually famous (e.g., People knew the church was full of hateful bigots, but the country wasn't really on a first-name basis with any of them). 90% of the film is intensely interesting, gripping stuff. Then he corners a couple of the younger teens to ask them if they really believed this stuff, and wouldn't they rather just be normal and have boyfriends?
To me, it felt like overstepping the bounds of journalism and into the realm of pop psychologist. Not only was it fairly mean to the kids to put them on the spot like that on camera, it to me sort of undercut the documentary up to that point. Theroux clearly had a point of view; how fair a representation was everything else he'd shown us? I found that almost all of his films have similar points of uncomfortable blurring of the lines, as if he goes around not to document stories but to insert himself in the middle of them as savior.
The Call of the Weird is his book-length re-expoloration of some of his earlier American documentary subjects, in an attempt to ... reconnect with them? His motives don't really matter, as the book is largely a recitation of his films, followed by interviewing the subjects, who have little desire to open up yet again.
Theroux makes a number of reflexively defensive points: in his foreward, he talks about how he hoped the book wouldn't be just another “Look at all the freaks in America!” roadshow, or if it was that it would the purest distillation of the form (as if this is better?). In the book proper, he seems on an eternal journey of enlightenment, realizing that the former subjects have nothing to gain by talking to him, or that it's kind of silly to expect a specific former subject who had never dropped his “persona” to suddenly open up his deepest personal feelings simply because Theroux wants him to.
All that being said, the discussions of the various subcultures are fascinating, because as I said at the top Theroux picks interesting subjects and documents them well. Additionally, the most revealing part of the book came when Theroux mentioned his surprise that the UFO people were so unwilling to look skeptically at their beliefs. He talked of his own tendency toward self-doubt and “logical-mindedness,” and his inability to understand people that wouldn't look so askance at themselves. This for me explains my reactions to his documentaries, though it more suggests that maybe it's just not the best field/format for him.
In all, the book suffers from the primary problem that Theroux's documentaries do: He mapped out an entire story in his head that didn't materialize in the same way once he took it on the road. What we're left with is his attempts to reconcile the two.
Books intended for young adults tend to be more direct. There's not as much beating around the bush or tediously in-depth descriptions of the bush that grows outside the jail door to overtly-covertly hammer the theme into your head (I don't much like you, Nathaniel Hawthorne). Instead, the story lives or dies on its own merits.
And that's refreshing. Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy a good literary novel, but they often come off as possessing an excess or distinct lack of plotting. So it's nice to have a writer just tell a story.
Finding Audrey is about Audrey's “reawakening” after an bullying incident triggered anxiety issues. Along the way, her interactions with her mom (crazy), older brother (addicted to gaming), dad (out of it) and little brother (hilarious) provide lots of fodder for a solid book.
It's probably not the book's fault. I just finished up another existentially depressing treatise on modern life, so this wasn't a great chaser (not that i knew that at the time, of course).
But man, what bleakness.
Little Children is the story of how nobody is really happy or in control, and trying to change it only makes things worse. There are brief, fleeting moments of happiness that collapse into ever-lengthening echoes of despair the minute you start to time them. Also, the story of a registered sex offender (and accused-but-not-actually-convicted child murderer!) plays a big role.
So I feel somewhat justified.
I can appreciate the argument that the novel is only trying to represent “reality,” and I will concede the plotting is at least probable, if not super likely. But this is where my “two books where the predominant theme is people are terrible in a row” thing kicks in. I understand (and subscribe to!) the idea that people, in general, are kind of terrible. Individual persons, though, tend to be less so.
Every character in Little Children feels like a consolidation of the worst traits of humanity distilled into an individual, which (in my experience) is precisely opposite of how it works. People as a whole are scumbags; Your neighbor probably isn't too bad. Though we like to joke that hipsters and suburbanites are terrible people, for the most part they're just mildly annoying when they congregate and generally tolerable on their own, short of fashion sense. Perhaps there's some sort of assholic magnet that drew those people together, or maybe it was something in the water. Regardless, you don't see that kind of bitterness and poison among a group of people outside of that ABC show The Slap, which I don't think anyone is confusing for reality anytime soon.
Which is not to say this was a bad book! Merely depressing. Just make sure you're ready going into it.
I think this is the book that Dave Eggers wanted to write when he started The Circle (though, to his credit, I think it would have come together better at the end). It's an interesting premise: Dave is a serial killer, who takes orders from a mysterious cabal (via MySpace chats) to pick off the most annoying people on the internet. You know that girl who's always making drama and Instagramming her lunch? He'll put an end to that, right quick.
I'm on the fence about it, honestly. There's wry discussion of all the worst people you meet on the web, from Nigerian scammers to the people who post incendiary stories/columns simply because hatred fuels pageviews, and Internet Points are the end-all, be-all. But for satire, it feels a little on the nose. It gets better when he branches out from the straight murdering into more creative punishments/correctives, but there's still a dark stain that spreads across every page detailing his thought processes and justifications.
It's essentially trying to take the language of the internet (LOLs when no one's laughing, death threats simply for having differing opinions [or two X chromosomes, in some cases]) and manifesting it. I'm successfully convinced the internet is a cesspool, but then I already thought that anyway. I would think it better that such hatred is confined to the laptop and the cell phone. We'd all much prefer it didn't exist, but isn't anonymous vitriol preferable to physical violence?
I think my biggest reservation comes from the fact that the whole thing starts because Dave's afraid he's going to be embarrassed on the internet. For all his vigilantism (and it's clear, by the end of the book, that's at very worst supposed to be an antihero, if not downright heroic), he's motivated by exactly the same forces that, in others, antagonize him: The power of popularity, the leadership by likes. Maybe it's a literary argument that he's a product of the internet, but it certainly seems odd for the problem to be the solution.
The story of a genderfluid kid's coming to terms with themself as well as the world around them. It alternates between seeming very real and seeming very fictional, if that makes sense. Riley's (the main character) emotions and feelings definitely come across as authentic, but you're going to need some gloves to make your way through the kitchen sink of plotting.
A riveting account of the beginning of the New York Medical Examiner's office, as well as American toxicology/forensic chemistry. The book follows the life of Charles Norris, the first person in charge of that city's dead with a genuine interest in the science and circumstances of how they died.
The book takes the reader through a litany of poisons, from the dangerous quasi-booze of Prohibition to everyone's favorite, arsenic. Norris, with tremendous help from his chief scientist, Alexander Gettler, pioneered the use of science to convict criminals of wrongdoing, as opposed to a policeman's supposition/forced confession.
A very worthwhile read for any loves of history, chemistry or just a good story.
An excellent tale of petty heroes, heroic villains and the best darn sidekick one could ask for. The titular Nimona is a shapeshifter who wants to apprentice to the town's arch villain, a Megamind-esque mix of brains and failure.
Nimona's shapeshifting and utter lack of conscience bode well for his future prospects, but he reins her in with kindness just as much as she pulls him out of futility.
It's a slightly sad book, in that we must learn (as we always do) that you can't save everyone. But we can be comforted in that the best never fail to try.
Though Vowell disavows any status of historian, she's one of the many recent authors who's doing history properly. Her nuanced examinations of relative forgotten or ignored pivotal historical events for America are not only packed with information; they're digestible, too.
This is a much-forgotten aspect when it comes to writing about history by historians. Historians seem to believe that you can write “history,” or you can write for the general market. This short-changes both audiences.
It's not enough to simplify history in order to make it seem more exciting — this is the pseudo-argument at the heart of every high school history textbook I've ever read, that to include all the conflicting and somewhat contrasting evidence would be “confusing” and therefore boring. To their minds, we must all think that George Washington had his cherry tree, never told a lie and ascended to Mount Olympus when his time on this earth was complete.
Vowell and her ilk show us the flaws in the marble busts that so often serve as our only reminders of our leaders. The titular Lafayette should be considered as one of the great heroes of the American Revolution ... but only because he was spoiling for war, and at times probably endangered his troops in his lust for military honors.
But that makes him more interesting, not less. He's a whole human being with conflicting ideas and wants. He's an actual person who made decisions (and mistakes!), rather than a mythical figure who felled giants and battled trolls with immaculately coiffed wigs.
I spent half an hour trying to figure out the shorthand for this book. It's a description we try to come up with for all the entertainment we tell others about: Oh, this movie's like Batman but with zombies. That book is like Dickens if he got bored halfway through and just filled out the rest with random sentences (oh wait, that's regular Dickens).
I failed in this case. It's not really like anything. The best example I can give is it's the memoir equivalent of “literary fiction” - as defined as a genre novel that uses big words, flowing prose and a disjointed rhythm enough that people call it a work of “literature” instead of a book. It could just as easily have been fiction. The distinction really doesn't matter in this case.
It's the story of a childhood lived through videogames. It's a story that many probably relate to, though I hope to God not too much. Clune definitely writes with a voice that can keep you interested (in the way that someone grabbing you by the throat and pulls your face right next to theirs keeps you “interested”), and the man knows his way around a videogame. I was wavering the whole way through, but I guess it says something when my biggest complaint is that I really wanted to know what happened after it ended.
I don't read many thrillers, and frankly I didn't know there was such a thing as a “British thriller,” but you can blame Nick Hornby for this. It was gripping, and well-plotted - as these things go, anyway - and kept me interested throughout. It comes off a tiny bit whiny, at least to this American, but then we again we made The Patriot so we probably had it coming.
This is one of those stories that can only be told through its chosen medium, an exemplar of the form. I'm not sure I would have thought a “boy comes to term with his father's death through medical school and videogames” story could have been pulled off successfully, but there you go. It's heart-wrenching, redeeming, joyful and a little bit crazypants.
Sandra Beasley is an allergy sufferer, and she has plenty of funny/terrifying anecdotes to share. She's also well-researched on the topic, and provides lots of useful scientific information about how allergies actually work.
I was once a food allergy skeptic. Not that I totally disbelieved in their existence, of course: I was fully aware there people out there who could have up to and including fatal reactions to eating certain foodstuffs. I more fell in along the lines of accepting the need for a peanut-free table in the lunchroom, but thinking that most people were probably overdoing it a little. My skepticism relaxed significantly when I found a best friend (whom I later began dating) with a host of food allergies that could be set off by the slightest fragment of the food in question - soy, pineapple, etc. She takes care to point out when she can't eat something (every time we go out for hibachi, it's a hard-and-fast rule that there are to be no sesame seeds involved for anyone at the table).
After reading this book, though, I'm starting to think that we need to take it a step further. Like, legislating that people are only allowed to drink water in a public place, lest they inadvertently explode someone else standing nearby when they take a bite of Snickers.
Most allergy sufferers would take offense at that joke (and, I assure you, it is a joke), but not for the reason you'd expect. It's not that they're insensitive to jokes about their condition, it's that most only ask others to modify their lifestyles when it's absolutely necessary. The peanut-free table is a good example: It's not calling for a blanket ban on peanuts in schools. It's saying that, because severe reactions are possible even through airborne exposure, kids can't just bring a PB&J over and sit next to the kid with peanut butter allergies. (Some people do call for a blanket peanut-ban in schools, but this seems an unsustainable course as the kid grows up. Best to just invest in a bubble suit now and save everyone the trouble.)
All of this is by way of saying that we as a society can definitely do some (relatively easy) things to make sure allergy sufferers have a little bit easier time. (And no, I'm not just saying this because I want my girlfriend to live. Though that's definitely a factor.) We see a societal good in having AEDs on hand because for a relatively low cost, we can save some lives. Similarly, clearly (and accurately) labeling possible allergens in food is not harmful to the manufacturers. Indeed, they're not losing any more money than they already would have (because the peanut allergy guy probably figured it out on his own after the first purchase). You don't have to ban peanuts from the ballpark, but you don't have to go throwing them in lightly-packaged bags in front of other peoples' faces, you know?
Three books in, you'd think we might have been able to dispense with the world-building activities. I confess to having grown less interested with each passing installment of the Long Earth series: The first intrigued me with the novelties of and possibilities inherent in the central conceit (people can “step” sideways into what are essentially parallel earths, with just slight differences between one and the next. Over dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions of steps, however, those differences can loom quite large). The payoff wasn't there in the first novel, but I assumed as the cosmology built out more, that feeling would dissipate.
Nope.
Instead, each new story has indulged the uge to introduce yet more “novel” mechanics and contrivances, to just straight-up skip long stretches of “insignificant” time (where there are no novel inventions propagating, and thus saving us from having to read about the “characters,” what shaped them, and other such dalliances that only get in the way off our fictional science, thank you). This is no different, where now we set upon a world where you not only can step sideways, you can also step forward and backward, and there's a Dyson sphere and ...
It's all too much. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the full third that was given over to the early history of a Victorian British secret society of steppers, its incogruity and total disconnect from the rest of the story went a long way toward proving to me that this really would be better off as a series of short stories presented from different authors (a la the Afterblight Chronicles) rather than a series of novels.
You ever have the feeling that the person you're talking to is either completely insane or weirdly brilliant? This ambiguity is often cleared up when you find out just how high they are (so high right now, dude), but every once in a while there's always that hobo who seems like he has a much better idea of what's actually going on than you do, and he looks perfectly thrilled right where he is.
That's kind of how I feel about the main character. He's constantly running from event to event, plucking with strings that seem to connect them but don't, only to find out later there's a thick web of cable supporting the whole enterprise. The only cogent summary I can offer is “lonely guy starts to meet the world, except the world is full of all the people you've actually met and try to pretend you're not friends (with even though you hang out with that guy all the time).”
Reading this book feels like trying to navigate the stairs when you're drunk. Not like just trying to clamber your way down the concrete steps outside the dance bar in the middle of February, where you feel warm (because liquor) but there's a thick sheet of ice coating the left half of the stairs, and you're seizing the railing like you're onboard the Titanic trying to fight your way past some Irish dudes to the bow before it slips and carries you down into the North Atlantic. More like the first time you ever had alcohol and you managed to put away two Zimas and you were walking down an extremely narrow, steeply sloped staircase and you slipped a little bit and your arm automatically went out to try to stabilize yourself and you wound up putting your elbow through the wall?
Except it's more of a love story.