January Reads

Here's my January wrap-up:

THE CITY AND IT'S UNCERTAIN WALLS by Haruki Murakami (not pictured)

I didn't love the Murakami -- but I don't need to rehash all that as I already covered all my thoughts on that here.

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RUTH by Kate Riley

This was a great read for the start of the year, a thoughtful and funny story about a woman with a real independent streak who spends her whole life living in an Anabaptist community in the States and Canada. It asks, what makes a life full, is it community, is it private thought, is it engaging or disengaging from the world? The details about the community itself are fascinating, and our main character, Ruth, is beautifully drawn. It's a quiet book, which took me out of the noise of the every day. I really loved it.

Oh, and it has a PHENOMENAL last line. We writers spend a lot of time thinking about our first lines, our opening paragraphs, but the last lines of this novel truly took my breath away.

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STATE OF PARADISE by Laura Van Den Berg

One of the reasons I think it's so important for artists to keep working through difficult times is that it produces books like these. State of Paradise follows a ghost writer who has returned to Florida with her husband to weather COVID with her mother and sister. It also tracks a dangerous virtual social media hardware company, that gets a foothold distributing headsets during the pandemic, and references the ravages of bad policy on education, on climate, and the sort of collective insanity we all find ourselves living through at what felt like the endtimes. It's a wonderful, funny, mindbending piece of work.

And I highlighted this passage to share with you, because I heartily agree with the sentiment:

She's right, I think, after I submit my resignation. The novel is a pretty outdated technology, but that is exactly why we need it. The form is so archaic that it can't be fucked with.

As an aside, I have really enjoyed the novels that came out of COVID. Perhaps I'll do round up of those down the line.

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THE DOG STARS by Peter Heller

Wow I loved this book. It's one of the end of the world stories that was written years before COVID but imagines an America very close to our own, after a flu has killed upwards of 90% of the population, and left even the most isolated communities with a blood disease that is slowly killing them, too. Our narrator is one of the lucky survivors, holed up on an airstrip with his dog, and another man, an ex-military prepper sort. He shares his memories of his life before the flu hit, and his hopes to find other people to make community with, eventually -- but his day to day is hunting for what game is left, gardening, and protecting the air strip and himself by show of force. It's set in Colorado, and a huge chunk of the book happens in and around Grand Junction, which is a corner of the planet I adore, so that was great too.

I'm a huge fan of Peter Heller's other work, too, which is often set in wild places.

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Onward to the February reading! I'm currently halfway through THE POWER. More soon!

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