The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

It was in September of last year that I picked up this book. I may have read a few pages… but then I put it down, and did not pick it up again. This is fine. I think DNFing a book is perfectly reasonable. Not all books are for all people, and there are too many really good books on the shelves to waste time forcing yourself through a book you’re not in love it. 

But then The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer showed up as Available Now on my Libby app, and I remembered that I hadn’t given it much of a shot… So I started listening to it… and found myself really enjoying it. 

DNF sometimes means “this book isn’t for me.” But sometimes it means “this book isn’t for now.” I’m glad I gave this one another chance.

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

image from amazon.com

Mini Synopsis: The Interestings opens with a group of friends who meet at an arts camp during high school and then follows them as their lives unfold. I want to put a number to the group, but I can’t; the book jumps around a little, following some characters in more detail than others, and I’m not 100% sure who the core group is. If I had to choose one as the Main Character, I would pick Jules, whose life is shaped by her camp experience in many far-reaching ways. But this book is as much about the trajectory of the others’ lives, as well. The closest comparison I can make is to A Little Life, which follows four friends, but I would argue that Jude is the clear Main Character. 

Like A Little Life, there is more to this story than just longform character sketches. (Although – while there is trauma in this book, there is nowhere near the level of trauma in A Little Life.) While superficially the book is about these friends and how their lives weave and fray, it explores much broader themes. The security and comfort of found family. Betrayal and forgiveness. Art and how it can lift us up and break us down. Self-invention and reinvention. Our expectations for ourselves and the people we love. Marriage and friendships. Parenthood, and its successes and deficits. Death and its effects on the living. Morality. Ambition and the definition of success. Wealth and the doors it opens. 

In part because it expands over multiple decades, this book also touches on some of the major concerns underpinning the zeitgeist of specific time periods: sexual assault and believing the victim; the AIDS epidemic; feminism and misogyny; the 9/11 attacks; the folk music scene; mental health. It covers a lot of ground. 

What I Liked About This Book: I liked learning about the characters. Jules, her friend Ethan, and her husband Dennis in particular felt well-drawn and believable. As a writer, I’m always falling into the trap of creating more and more backstory for my characters, and so I really enjoy reading backstory. Following a person from point A to point B, with all its meandering and circling-back and stops and starts along the way. This book has a lot of that. 

I liked the gentle, non-preachy way that this book explored some of the bigger themes it takes on. In particular, the author plucks at the idea of Being An Artist, tangled up with the idea of Being A Success, and I really liked how all the different artsy young people found their way in the world – some through art, some without. 

What I Didn’t Like About This Book: Some of the characters felt a little more like caricatures than like real people. Like they were stuck in to make a point about Beautiful Bad Boys or High Strung Women. Probably it is too much to ask, that every character be given equal weight and depth. But I ended up wondering whether some of the characters were just plot devices and not much more.

This book was sprinkled with random genitalia. I don’t have a problem with genitalia in books per se, but I felt like genitals would just spring out at you without warning. Like you’re going along and suddenly you’re reading about someone’s labia or anus. (This tendency did, however, result in one of my favorite lines of the book: “Everyone and everything was shocked: Ethan, Jules, the hand, the breast, the nipple.”)

And – this may be the most nitpicky thing I’ve ever written – I did not like that one of the prominent characters had the last name Wolf. This is so stupid, but it grated on me every time the narrator read about this character’s family and called them “the Wolfs.” I mean, it’s CORRECT. It’s a last name, not a creature! And yet it drove me nuts, because my brain nudged in every single time to say “WOLVES.” So this is clearly a fault that lies with me, the reader, not with the book itself but it still bugged me enough to list it here.

Finally, my biggest criticism of the book is that it was a little… too meandering. It is not a plot-driven book! Which is okay! There are threads that connect throughout the story, but… I guess I got a little impatient, waiting for things to wrap up. If I hadn’t been listening to it, and if I hadn’t been listening to it at double speed, I wonder if I would have given up on it again. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t. Not because there were startling epiphanies or anything, but because it was a very nicely told, nicely written story. 

Should You Read This Book? I found the writing to be engaging and the characters to be interesting, and the way some of the characters and themes come together and break apart and find one another again felt honest and poignant. I also really loved the gentle probing of the subject of art and its value and its different forms.

I think if you like novels about friendship or longer-term coming-of-age novels, you will enjoy The Interestings. Some books that I think are comparable in some ways are: A Little Life, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Shotgun Lovesongs, and This Is Where I Leave You. Maybe even The Heart’s Invisible Furies – oooh, or possibly The Cartographers! (Although there is nothing remotely magical about The Interestings.) If you like any of those novels, this book should resonate with you. 

Books I Read in June

June has been an extremely busy month, which is my excuse for only reading three measly books all month. In fact, the only book I read with my eyes was a book I started back in MARCH. The other two were audiobooks. And really, there’s no excuse for reading only two audiobooks when I can listen to an entire novel in three to five days. 

images from amazon.com

Books I Read in June

• Third Girl by Agatha Christie – I started this book in March, when I went on a brief Agatha Christie binge. (I load up my Kindle with Agatha Christie books from the library and read them on the airplane.) This book draaaaagggged for me. I felt like it was oddly repetitive, circling round and round the same events without ever making me feel closer to the answer. And while I am not the biggest Hercule Poirot fan, his presence in this book felt so lackluster. But! I finally finished it! 
• Beach Read by Emily Henry – This is a book that appears, from its cover, to be a romance. And indeed there is a romance inside this book. But this book read to me more like literary fiction than romance. Which is not saying anything negative about either genre! I liked the story – about Gus and January, two writers who try to beat their own writer’s block by switching genres – and I especially liked the literary fiction lessons Gus gave to January. As far as a romance goes, this is slightly more of an open-door romance than I’ve read to this point, and I admit to feeling quite alarmed when certain storylines took place while I was in the carline to pick up my kid from camp. My favorite part of the whole book was a section where Emily Henry/January describes how “women’s fiction” is seen as somehow inferior to “men’s fiction,” which is not even called men’s fiction – it’s just fiction. It made me so mad. And it made me mad that Beach Read is a) called Beach Read, which implies something more frivolous and frothy than what it is, and b) looks the way it does, with bright colors and a couple cheerily ignoring each other on the cover, because that also misleads the reader into thinking it’s something that is isn’t. And I like (apparently! as of this year!) romance and fully believe it is as relevant and worthwhile as any other type of fiction, but this book isn’t romance and feels miscategorized to me. The whole idea that women read and write fiction that is somehow less important or less valuable or less intellectual than men infuriates me. Anyway, that was just a small portion of the book – although I think it is a larger theme that plays out in the broader storyline – but it felt important and worth noting. Emily Henry, in an afterword, mentioned that this book is really a treatise on writer’s block, and that felt accurate and right and very satisfying. I too would like to enclose myself in a cozy beach house, subsisting on only beer and macaroni and cheese, until I produce a surprising and wonderful novel. Great book; would recommend. 
• Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun by Elle Cosimano – It’s been a minute since I read the second Finlay Donovan in the series, and I forgot how much I enjoy Cosimano’s style of storytelling. I think this one – the third in the series – is my favorite so far. I love Finlay’s relationship with her nanny/accountant Vero, and I love how they always manage to scrape past danger by the skin of their teeth, and I really enjoy how Finlay’s issues with her own writing tie in to the book itself. Reading these books is just fun. 

Here’s hoping July is better, bookwise. I am not calling this current lackluster volume of books a reading slump, but… I do have MANY unread books on my shelves and none of them is calling to me. 

What was the best book you read or listened to in June? I could use some inspiration.

Books I Read in March

March was an okay reading month. I only read five books during the entire month, which is fine; I am not in a competition to see how many books I can read. The month started out strong, but devolved into Agatha Christie novels. Which is not a bad thing! I love Agatha Christie novels! And the three I read this month were some of my favorites of her canon. But there was nothing particularly exciting about the month, is I guess what I mean. Plus, one of the books I read was kind of disappointing. 

Only one of my March reads was a physical book. One was an audiobook and three were ebooks. Only one author was new to me. 

images from amazon.com

Best Book of the Month

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: This was my favorite book of March by FAR. I was skeptical about picking this one up, considering it’s about video gaming, a topic that does not interest me. But I ended up LOVING IT. You can read my full review here. 

Perfectly Solid Books

The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz: I have been eagerly awaiting this book since I finished the third book in the series. This wasn’t my favorite – and, in fact, I had to look up the synopsis because I couldn’t remember a thing about it except that Anthony Horowitz (the character) is a murder suspect. It was a fine book, engaging and full of suspects who all seem equally likely to have murdered the victim. I like that we saw a little movement in the relationship between Horowitz and Detective Hawthorne. 

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie: I went on vacation in March and took my Kindle with me, after packing it full of novels. This was the one that held my attention, and it led – as Christie books so often do – to more Christie books. In it, Poirot has to figure out why lively Nick Buckley keeps finding herself in the middle of life-threatening incidents. I usually prefer Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, but I liked this one quite a bit.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie: Dr. Morley dies in his dental suite – but Hercule Poirot, one of his patients, isn’t sure that his dentist died by suicide the way the evidence seems to point. This was a fun one and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Hollow by Agatha Christie: A man dies while visiting friends for the weekend, and Hercule Poirot has to figure out who among the visitors wanted him dead. I loved this one because it had such vivid portrayals of all of the characters, and, partly, because Poirot played such a small role in the novel.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I just this moment finished listening to The Secret History by Donna Tartt. My first reaction upon finishing it is very simple and very loud: HOW was this Tartt’s DEBUT NOVEL? 

The Goldfinch is one of my favorite books of all time (although it is beginning to fade a bit in my memory; perhaps I need a reread), but the fact that Tartt BEGAN with The Secret History blows my mind. 

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Tartt’s Wikipedia page includes a couple of quotes from former professors, each of whom said that she was a genius. Plus her third novel won the Pulitzer. So she clearly has incredible writing chops.

And now I want to know: what are some of your favorite debut novels? (Some of my other picks would be: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, The Push by Ashley Audrain, and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.)

Anyway: this book was a fabulous read.

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Mini Synopsis: Richard Papen transfers from California to Hampden College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont, where he joins a clique of five classics students studying under the eccentric and brilliant Julian Morrow. Richard, from the perspective of an adult many years removed from his time at Hampden, reflects on the murder of one of his classmates, and how it affected the relationships among the members of Julian’s tight-knit group. 

What I Liked About This Book: I find it hard to put words to what I loved about this book, which is, at its essence, its composition. It is, more so than many books, a finely woven tapestry with a murder at its center, the individual threads invisible until you look closely. 

This book is a murder mystery, of sorts – although you know the murder is coming, and you know its victim, and you even know who did the killing. The work of the story, then, is to reveal not only how the murder came about but why – and why it was a reasonable and necessary act, at least in the minds of those at its center. 

As the story unfolded, I was not only pulled into the plot and the complex relationships of the characters, but I was also wowed by how tightly crafted the story was. Tiny mentions early in the novel would resonate later in unexpected ways. 

While I wouldn’t say that this book reveled in language, or that it was particularly beautifully written, I did find myself delighted by some of the imagery. Quick, deft metaphors would stick with me as particularly apt descriptions – “a spider of anxiety,” or shadows so crisp they looked like cutouts on the grass. 

I loved the larger themes that Tartt touches on in this novel as well. Beauty, morality, consequences, wealth and social status, ownership/possession (of facts, of people, of information, of currency), guilt, philosophy vs reality, superficial appearances, excess, individuality and group dynamics. It is rich with thought provoking situations that resonate in today’s social climate. 

What I Didn’t Like About This Book: As with The Goldfinch, my main criticism is likability. Tartt masterfully, I think, brings the characters to life, lays bare their weaknesses and motivations. And yet I didn’t find a single one of them to be likable or even empathetic. It’s not that I found them unlikable. They were simply neutral in my head. So I wish I had been able to drum up some sort of emotional response to the characters, but I couldn’t. 

This book also had a Great Gatsby-an feel to it that, for me, grew very tiresome. So much drinking, so much smoking, so many drugs. Some of those things are necessary because they drive the plot forward, the drinking and drugs and smoking are thematically appropriate, and yet… the characters’ lives just felt overwhelmingly saturated by Dionysian excess which made me very weary.

This book was published in 1992, so there are certain aspects of the language and content that seem outdated. A few homophobic slurs and racist comments, specifically, have stuck with me after the fact. I always wonder, would those things have leapt out at me back in the early 90s the way they do now? Or was that kind of casual hate truly just… “acceptable”? I think the hateful language makes sense in terms of the characters who espouse these vile views, but it’s still unpleasant to come across. 

One last thing I didn’t like (and this is really stupid): the cover. I have seen this book a million times since I read The Goldfinch a decade ago, and every time I have found the cover so off-putting I have never been able to pick it up. Isn’t that silly? It’s not an offensive cover, just… dull, I guess? I don’t know. To each her own!

Should You Read This Book? I really enjoyed this book. It swept me up and felt utterly satisfying, even though there were no surprises. (Even the most shocking bits were hinted at well before they happened, which reaffirmed my feeling that this book is exquisitely well crafted.) If you liked The Goldfinch, you would probably enjoy this. I am struggling to find other works to compare it to – perhaps some of John Boyne’s work has a similar feel to the writing and the unfolding of the story. 

I listened to this one, and Tartt herself did the narration. It took me awhile to become acclimated to her speaking style, but it grew on me. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

My first book of March was an audiobook that I could not put down. I started it on Saturday and between the moment I heard the first sentence and the moment the end credits stopped playing on Wednesday morning, I kept finding excuses to listen. Errands that required longer-than-usual drives? Yes, sign me up. An extra grocery shopping trip that required me to rearrange the fridge and pantry shelves? Check. Long walk? Definitely. I have rarely had so much clean, folded laundry or prepped-ahead-of-time food. 

This is all to say that Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is an extraordinary book. Beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful and addictive. 

image from amazon.com

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Mini Synopsis: Sam and Sadie, ages 12 and 11, meet in a Los Angeles hospital and bond over a shared love of video games. Their bond and their love for gaming grows and changes as they age, following them as they shift between California and Boston and back, with detours and side quests along the way. This book has many beautifully explored and often intertwining themes: friendship and trust, loss and love, art and artistry, personal growth and interpersonal grudges, the forces we can and cannot control, failure and success, storytelling and ownership, who we are together and apart, and video games. 

What I Liked About This Book: To my significant surprise, I loved that this book has such a fascination with video games. I should note that I am not a video game player. Yes, back in the 1900s I owned and played an Atari, an NES, a Super Nintendo, a GameBoy. My then-boyfriend and I played Myst together in the early aughts. Occasionally, my husband and I will play a computer mystery game together, and I admit to a many-years-running obsession with Toy Blast on my phone. But I have never really done more than dabble. I would even go so far as to say that video games disinterest me. But that’s because I never had someone show me how to consider them the way the author of this book did. 

What books are to me – escape, inspiration, perspective shift; an opportunity to try on new identities and cultures and experiences and abilities for a finite time; a retreat, a safe haven, a comfort; an antidote to boredom; a solace from grief; a chance to exist apart from the things that shape you – that’s what video games are to Sam and Sadie and the game-loving friends they surround themselves with. 

There are snippets of gaming lingo and terminology, but I never felt like Zevin was dropping them into the narrative purely to prove she’d done her research. They felt like part of the voice, part of the fabric of the story. I never felt talked-down-to or lost. I felt included. 

And the games are so much a part of Sam’s and Sadie’s personalities, such an irresistible force holding them together, that – and this sounds stupid, considering this is a work of fiction about imaginary people – they wouldn’t exist without video games. There’s a point in the book where Sam, talking to Sadie, says something like, “But where would be without gaming?” and she says something like, “We would be friends! We would have lives!” and I wholeheartedly object to that. 

What I also loved about this book were the characters. In some ways – please don’t immediately close your browser when you read what I am about to say – this book had echoes of A Little Life for me. That was a book I adored, a book whose writing I deeply admire, a book that devastated me. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has some moments of trauma in it, and it has heartbreak and devastation and loss. But it is *not* A Little Life. The similarity, for me, was in the characterization. Both novels are sweeping – covering large swaths of the characters’ lives. Both novels have troubled protagonists who endure significant hardship. But I think what links the novels together in my mind is the group of friends and family members that fold the protagonists into their center. There is so much love here, so much empathy and support. Even characters that, on the surface, seem unlikable see the protagonists for who they are and try to make their lives as easy as possible. I just love that. It imbues even the saddest stories with so much hope. 

We are back to video games: I loved each and every video game that appeared in this book. Well, okay – maybe notDuck Hunt and Oregon Trail, although I enjoyed playing each when I was a kid – but especially the games that Sadie and Sam made together and separately. I wonder whether real life video games are as philosophical and far-reaching as Ichigo and Solution, because if so, I have vastly underrated them. (It seems I have done so anyway.) 

Each game seemed so real – and I find it so incredibly impressive that a writer could not only write a beautiful, sweeping novel like this, but also envision multiple video games – and they acted, for me, as both video games and metaphors/allegories for what the characters were going through, which added such a rich, layered quality to the story. 

I loved this novel’s meditations on loss. There is the inherent hopeful optimism in video games as a medium, a theme that the author returns to many times during the book. The idea that even if you die in the video game, you can just start over from the save point. Even SAM, the initials Sam typed into his grandfather’s ancient pizzeria Donkey Kong machine, remain burned into the screen long after his high score has been wiped from the machine’s memory. There is always another beginning in a video game. That strikes me as such a profound way to view video games specifically and art in general, that art can displace reality to such an extent. This vision of infinite lives is coupled with an almost paradoxical acceptance of the inevitability of death. 

I loved that this novel is about video games, but also about Shakespeare and storytelling and Emily Dickinson and poetry and art and music. 

I almost put this in the “what I didn’t like about this book” category, but I thought about it and realized that I did like it: This book was unusual and arresting, but it was also predictable. As a person who loves books, I recognize and appreciate that many (most?) of them follow established patterns. There is a prescribed shape to a book, or to a genre of book, and to burst beyond the boundaries of that shape can be exciting… but to work within the frame can also be quite comforting. I would guess that video games are the same – that there is a lot of creative freedom and variety among games, but that they mostly (all?) fit into certain recognizable shapes. This book was a recognizable shape. I felt comforted that I knew what was going to happen, that I could steel my heart a little bit. 

One last thing that I loved: This book was incredibly visual. It begins and ends with a Magic Eye painting – an autostereogram that hides a 3D image behind a colorful two-dimensional scene. (Alas, I have never been able to see the 3D images.) In between, there are paintings and maps and strawberry-and-bird printed textiles and sculptures and paper cranes and TV game shows and Shakespearean plays and so many many video games for Pete’s sake. Everything in this book demands to be seen, to be experienced visually. And yet it was all rendered so incredibly vividly in text.

What I Didn’t Like About This Book: My main quibble with this book is related to what I mentioned above in terms of predictability. There is a plot point that happens because it has to happen, but it is nonetheless extremely upsetting. I appreciated, from a storytelling perspective, how this plot point was elaborated upon. However, it felt… I don’t want to say “cheap,” because what happened had to be huge and earth shattering, to fit within the framework of the story, and it was. Maybe “forced” is a better word? I am not going to quibble with the outcome, which was obvious from very early on in the book, but I think there could have been other ways to accomplish what the author needed to. I guess I have two quibbles: this makes me think of another, smaller plot point that also felt needlessly traumatic slash dramatic. I know that authors are expert at crushing their characters’ spirits, but sometimes it feels like the same result could be achieved without doing quite so much devastation. Especially, for me, when the trauma doesn’t serve a larger purpose in the story. For me, the first plot point I mentioned had a purpose; the second, smaller plot point did not seem to have similar resonance, even though there were opportunities to have followed through. It is hard to talk about this without dropping spoilers, but I am happy to discuss in more detail via the comments.

Should You Read This Book? I feel so protective of this book that I don’t know what to say here. Of course you should read it. It was beautiful. I feel as though I will be thinking through its meditations on big themes for a very long time. But… what if you don’t like it? What if you find the descriptions of video games to be tedious? What if you don’t understand why Sam is the way that he is? And it seems like this book is hugely divisive, so I feel like there’s a good chance you won’t feel the same way I do. I guess I will say, I loved this book. If you read it, I hope you love it too. 

What I Read in January

January was an excellent reading month. I read ten books – two were rereads, six were outside my typical thriller/mystery genre (reading outside my genre is one of my bookish resolutions this year), and three were by new-to-me authors. Three were audiobooks, and two of those were rereads. Four were library books and the rest I am lucky to own.

📚Best Books of the Month📚

📖 The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel – I just adored this austere, thoughtful book about the financial collapse of a Ponzi scheme and the people at its periphery. Why I didn’t immediately dive into St. John Mandel’s next book is beyond me. Perhaps that’s in store for February. Full review here.

🎧 Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo – This was the reread of the month. I have been waiting for the sequel since I read this in 2019. When I finished the sequel, I felt compelled to go back and re-listen to the original. (And then listen to the sequel again.) When I first listened to this book, I thought it was going to be your run-of-the-mill murder mystery, with some dark academia tones. It was that. But it’s also a richly-imagined fantastical thriller in a world populated by ghosts and people who can harness magic. If I had read that last sentence, I never in a million years would have picked this book up. I would have scoffed at it. But it was everything I love in a book. Complex, interesting characters that were both relatable and repellant. A plot that had me breathless to know what would happen next. Vivid, expressive writing with imagery I still can’t get out of my head. Suspense, mystery, narrow escapes, dark humor. I found the world of both books to be so detailed and well-planned and the characters to be so well-drawn that I would read a thousand books about Alex Stern, Daniel Arlington, Abel Turner, and Pamela Dawes and their adventures beyond the veil. 

🎧 Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo – This was the much anticipated sequel to Ninth House. I loved it. It was everything a sequel should be: It answered the questions set forth in the original, it deepened my understanding of each of the characters, it explored new corners of this particular world and how it operates. I enjoyed it so much, I listened to it a second time after I re-listened to the original.

📖 Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus – When this book first started getting attention, I ignored it. Not for me. But then I started seeing it everywhere, online and in bookstores and in all sorts of publications. I started to feel left out. I like reading the books that everyone else is enjoying. So when I saw it was available at my library, I took that as a sign and checked it out. It was, of course, everything everyone said it would be. Elizabeth Zott, a chemist living in the early 1960s, has to endure sometimes horrific, sometimes infuriating acts of sexism, over and over. Instead of pursuing her research, she ends up hosting a cooking show on television, geared toward housewives. But in many ways, she is really leading a revolution. I adored Elizabeth and her unflagging ambition. I found her circumstances so mind-numbingly awful and I spent a lot of time being angry. But I could not stop reading. 

📚Really Good Books📚

📖 The Couple at the Table by Sophie Hannah – I will read anything by Sophie Hannah, and I was so excited to read this latest mystery starring detective duo extraordinaire Simon Waterhouse and his wife Charlie Zeller. Featuring one of the most vile and unlikable murder victims I’ve ever encountered, this book was twisty and delightful. Full review here.

📖 The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd – A friend recommended this book as something I would enjoy, and she was exactly right. This is, essentially, a murder mystery that takes place in the New York Public Library. Right up my alley. But there is a fantastical element to this book, too, which would probably have kept me from reading it if I had known about it. And yet it turned out to be so enjoyable! Full review here.

📖 The Appeal by Janice Hallett – My husband mentioned that he’d read about this book and thought I might like it, and then somehow we were on our way to Barnes & Noble to buy it. (One of the many reasons my husband is awesome.) This book’s format is what made it so fascinating for me: it’s told (almost) entirely in correspondence among the 15 suspects of a murder. While the “big reveal” wasn’t my favorite, I really enjoyed getting to know the various characters purely by way of their texts and emails. And I thought it was fascinating how much character can be revealed about people whose voices we don’t ever hear directly. 

📚Books That Were Just Okay📚

📖 Upgrade by Blake Crouch – Usually, I love a Blake Crouch novel. While his writing isn’t my preferred style, his books are typically fast-paced, cover interesting topics, and explore fascinating scenarios which are more than enough to make up for a little stylistic deficiency. But this book was… slow. The book asks a really interesting question: what would happen if a scientist figured out how to upgrade everyone’s genetics so that they were, in essence, superhuman? My main takeaway from the book was that Crouch did a ton of research into genetic editing and wanted the reader to KNOW it. 

🎧 I Know Who You Are by Alice Feeney – This was the kind of twisty thriller that I have come to expect from Feeney, and enjoyable in its way… but some aspects of it were so incredibly disturbing that they kind of ruined it for me. I have a very high tolerance for disturbing, but found myself feeling really repelled here – not just from the fictional events, but from the book itself. I also thought that the big reveal here seemed a little too farfetched to be believable. And there was a huge plot hole near the end that is still bothering me.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

My first book of 2023 was The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. My husband just listened to this one and recommended it to me after hearing, ad nauseum, how much I adored Station Eleven (review at the link). He is one of my most accurate book recommenders and The Glass Hotel did not disappoint.

image from amazon.com

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Mini Synopsis: It’s hard to write a synopsis for this book, because – as my husband would say – there isn’t a whole lot of plot in this story. I’d say it’s loosely about a woman named Vincent and her life, and the people who most impact her, and some of the people on those people’s periphery. The cover copy – designed to be intriguing, of course – talks a bit about some of the more plot driven events that happen to Vincent and the people around her, things like a disturbing threat that appears on the window of a remote hotel and a woman’s disappearance at sea and a Bernie-Madoff style Ponzi scheme collapsing… but to me, those plot points were simply anchors that the author used to keep all the characters moored in the same ocean. As with Station Eleven (sorry, it is difficult to stop drawing comparisons between the books because I read them in such close proximity), this book deals in massive themes: loss, trust, morality, happiness, the liminality of so many aspects of existence. But I felt like the story – or maybe the author – wasn’t particularly clear on a stance about any of these themes, although in a way that felt poignant and true to life.

What I Liked About This Book: Emily St. John Mandel is a top-tier writer. She has the ability to craft a sentence in a way that feels true and vivid and fresh… while keeping everything very spare and holding her characters at a bit of a distance from the reader. I can’t remember who mentioned this recently – another blogger with whom I enjoy discussing books, but I’m so sorry I didn’t note down who it was – but I believe she said that she didn’t feel any connection to St. John Mandel’s characters. (I am pretty sure she was referencing Station Eleven.) And that felt accurate to me, in both novels: the characters are held at a bit of a remove. While I can understand how this would be a detraction, for me, it was a positive. I liked the sensation of drifting above the characters, learning intimate details about their lives and their thought processes, without becoming overly invested in them. I don’t know why. The experience of reading St. John Mandel’s books is almost, for me, like viewing a really outstanding painting than like reading. The world falls away in both cases, but in the former, I am still me, allowing the work to exist while still being aware that it is art, not reality. (Of course, I also love books that sweep me away so fully that I fall in love with their characters and feel their emotions and experiences as though they were my own. See A Little Life or The Time Traveler’s Wife or The Friend (review at the link). Those books swallowed me up. Their characters became so real to me that it is hard, even now, to remind myself that they exist only inside the pages of books. But I really enjoy the role of observer that St. John Mandel creates, and it was more obvious to me in The Glass Hotel than in Station Eleven. I felt like I was reading extremely well crafted character sketches rather than reading a cohesive novel. This all sounds like criticism, when it is praise. I loved this technique, this style. And there was a story, even if it didn’t feel like it was the point of the book. The point was to arrange characters around and inside of an event and see how they would react. 

Another thing I liked is that there is so much knowledge contained in this book and yet it doesn’t feel like you are once hit over the head with it. What I mean is, St. John Mandel must have had to do an extraordinary amount of research into Ponzi schemes and investment fraud and shipping routes and criminal investigations at sea and all sorts of other specialized subjects because when she addressed them, they felt real and vivid and evidence-based… but the information shared in the text of the book was very sparse, and felt important to the context rather than tidbits slipped in to impress or to showcase the amount of research the author put in. (I think we have all read books in which authors tell you WAY more than the story needs you to know about a subject, either because they are passionate about the subject or because they think it’s relevant, and it ends up feeling pedantic and show-offy rather than useful to moving the story along.)

I loved the ghost story aspect of this book. It was delicate and enlightened new aspects of the characters’ psyches. It helped tether various characters to one anchor. 

I loved that Emily St. John Mandel brought back Miranda, and her boss Leon, from Station Eleven. They weren’t major parts of the story, but their presence made sense, and I loved thinking of The Glass Hotel as a universe that split off from the universe of Station Eleven into its own devastation. 

What I Didn’t Like About This Book: I didn’t like that it’s hard to say, in a pithy way, what this book is about. I am having trouble describing it, which is 100% a lack of skill and imagination on my part rather than a fault of the book. 

Should You Read This Book? I am hesitant to recommend this, because I feel protective of this book. It seems like many readers who adored Station Eleven didn’t have the same warm and fuzzy feelings about this book. But for me, it just cemented in my mind that Emily St. John Mandel is a writer of astonishing imagination, insight, and talent. She makes “writing a book” seem effortless. She makes me want to be a better writer. I want you to read it. …but only if you promise to love it as much as I do. 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Once upon a time I would have said that dystopian fiction was one of my favorite genres. But then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and I stopped finding them appealing. 

It was only this month that I dipped my toe back into the dystopian waters with Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s National Book Award finalist novel from 2015. 

(I read 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard earlier this fall, a highly readable thriller that takes place during the lockdown days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and while some of the memories it dredged up made my stomach churn a little, I got through the references and thoroughly enjoyed the novel. So I figured I would be okay to try another book about a pandemic – this one the fictional Georgia Flu.)

This is probably the best book I’ve read all year. Maybe the best book I’ve read in a long time.

image from amazon.com

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Mini Synopsis: The book opens on the night famous actor Arthur Leander dies onstage during a performance of King Lear. Child actress Kirsten Raymonde, then eight, watches the paramedics’ failed attempts to revive Arthur, who was her colleague and friend. The night Arthur dies is also the night that the Georgia Flu transforms from a far-away specter of death into a nightmare pandemic that kills 99 percent of its victims in under 48 hours.

The book’s chronology does not stay with this “first night” of the pandemic. It jumps forward twenty years, into a future devoid of civilization as we know it. Kirsten has survived the Georgia Flu and is now part of The Traveling Symphony, a band of roving actors and musicians who travel by horse-and-pickup-truck-body caravan between the far-flung settlements of the new world. Then it jumps back to various points in time before and during the first days of the pandemic, between different characters who, we discover, are all loosely connected. 

What I Liked About This Book: For me, the book was nearly perfect. The writing was crisp and beautiful and each chapter felt almost like its own short story. I loved how the author ended, sometimes, on images from nature – snow falling, owls regarding the characters, ships bobbing in the ocean – which added beauty and gravity to what the characters were experiencing. 

The plot itself wasn’t particularly exciting or different – it felt familiar; in the vein of dystopian fiction everywhere: people navigating the challenges of an inhospitable world. And yet there was urgency in the characters’ questing that propelled me forward. Where would they go, what would they find, what was going to happen to them, how did they arrive at this point? I felt deeply invested in every character centered in a chapter, even though I would only call one or two of them “main” characters. 

The pandemic aspect of the book was deeply sobering. Even if it was written five years before the Covid-19 pandemic, about a completely fictional (and much more devastating) disease, it felt recognizable in a way that made me – a very lucky person, whose friends and loved ones have been largely untouched by this real-life pandemic – feel extremely lucky. It made me viscerally, vividly aware of the knife’s edge that we are all living on. I could not have read this book two years ago. The things that happen in these pages are nightmare fodder, unthinkable and haunting, and yet I know now how extremely possible they are. I spent a lot of time thinking about whether I would survive a pandemic at the level of the Georgia Flu (unlikely), and whether I would want to be a survivor (as a younger person, I would have said yes, definitely! but now that I am older, I don’t know if I have the stomach for it), and whether I have any skills at all that would be valuable in a post-civilization age (no). I spent a lot of time wondering whether any of the systemic deficiencies the book laid bare have been addressed since 2015, or since our own real-life pandemic (sadly doubtful). The whole thing felt very real, a haunting what-might-have-been/what-still-could-be. It was so deftly handled, so beautifully told, that I did not close the book and collapse in a heap of tears; it also helped that the story jumped around a lot, so that we could see befores and afters where people were not merely surviving but living.

It also helped that this book was not “just” a dystopian novel. This book explores, though it does not answer, big questions. Immortality. Civilization. Community. Work, and the legacies we leave. 

The things that are immortal in this book: Art. Community. Fear. The desire to preserve, to storytell, to set ourselves inside a larger history. Communication. Survival.

I want to say hope is a major theme, as well, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate, even if hope does exist between this novel’s pages. I want to say memory and love, but again – those things exist but are not carried forward in the same way. I spent a lot of time thinking about that — why some things survive and others don’t — and how the author decided what would survive, and whether she got it “right.”

My only criticism of the book is that I wish it had gone on longer. I want to know how the characters’ stories play out. I want to see more of the world after the pandemic swept through, I want to find out whether survival – which is insufficient – endures. There is a TV series based on the novel, and I want to watch it. I hope it’s as well-done as The Leftovers, and that it feeds my hunger for additional stories and details. We’ll see. 

Station Eleven was an extraordinary book. I wish I could read it again for the first time.