Phil Santiago

Coinciding with a return to a Survivor era of my life, I received this book a couple months into 2025 after pre-ordering it last year. I rarely pre-order books, but Stephen Fishbach promised me more "Blood in the Clocktower" YouTube videos if I did that, but as the show that popularized him taught me: trust nobody.

I can praise Escape! as being a page-turner. Fischbach commits to escalation of plot and introduces a varied enough cast of characters with potential arcs you'll want to see close out, much like Survivor does. He has flashes of damn good writing, particularly in the final act when his characters are really pushed into moments of existential reflection.

But it's important to see this as something of an absurdist plot and I wonder how it will play to people who haven't been following pop culture discussion of "the edit" or even to fans of reality TV that don't follow survival shows. At times it feels like Fishbach gave in to a thought exercise and the conclusion feels like something unearthed rather than purposefully crafted. Still, a good airplane read, as I made significant progress on a five-hour flight.

The Satanic Verses threatened to be a bad time with an impenetrable plot. Were the two characters introduced in the plane crash literal angels and demons or was this some overstuffed metaphor? Was the whole book an exercise in Rushdie's linguistics gymnastics at the expense of a solid story? It turned out that Rushdie had plotted something compelling and once I was able to progress through the experiences of Gibreel and Saladin, I came to appreciate all the context that the language imbues in what we can call the "A" plot.

Verses is a story about cultural history and the narrative it bestows upon each of us and is particularly a look at how immigrants are perceived. It's about the herculean amount of mental energy it takes to actualize yourself and it's also about how the powerful will bend the narrative to suit themselves. My favorite chapter was one I would have written off in the first third as yet another set-aside short story built to waste my time. But following the village on a pilgrimage rife with doubt, compelled by groupthink and ultimately engulfed in faith was a pretty beautiful echo of the main plot.

This book has an interesting conceit in that Diaz can escape accusations of overwriting the first part, because the author of that piece is a different character. And he can escape accusations of submitting half-finished work, because there's an in-universe reason for that. And he can escape accusations of engaging in weird conspiratorial fantasy about the Great Depression, because Obama takes him seriously.

Anyway, the third part was probably my favorite in that this is the actual plot. But I probably would have been satisfied with an entire book written like the first part? Seemed like he was channeling Ann Patchett there.

The go-to for these types of memoirs is witty, but Komail's prose truly integrates a sharp wit within a compelling life story that has incisive commentary on multiple cultures. The writing is just *good.*

Kara Swisher seems to attract a lot of ire from my circles of social media, claiming she has spent a lot of time being a stenographer to power for Silicon Valley oligarchs, or at least a useful tool in their PR machine. But if that's the case, Swisher seems to be trying to morph her career into something else and the result is a memoir that's pretty interesting to me regarding the threat wealthy titans of tech pose to us in the 21st century.

I do wish she would rely less on the Arrested Development "Narrator: Contradiction of the above statement" meme.