This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2/5 STARS

How’d I find it? As with a number of my most recent reads, this was in a large stack of goodies checked out from Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Why not 3 or more stars? This collaboration serves up truly sumptuous language— “an ant’s sip of juice” and “cloying honey-heavy light” —but doesn’t sell me on Red and Blue’s love. When I peeked behind the pretty words, I realized that half of this quick read is an unvaried epistolary exchange, and the other half’s low stakes and sentiment feel flimsy. I see your hand trembling, book!

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

5/5 STARS

What’s it about? Though When We Cease to Understand the World defies easy description, think of it as a treatise about the responsibility of discovery and the cost of our species’ relentless pursuit of knowledge. Labatut takes on this theme through accounts of Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and other luminaries as they redefined their disciplines, be it quantum physics or mathematics. Running through the book is an undercurrent of dread as scientific breakthroughs inevitably become tools of war.

How’d I find it? Shout out to Enoch Pratt Free Library for always having the hot titles available. I strolled in to pick up a hold and there this was, waiting.

Who will enjoy this book? When We Cease to Understand the World felt like a book by Milan Kundera, one of my all-time most beloved authors. Labatut’s blend of fiction and history, use of humor, and the slipperiness of madness and obsession hearken back to the Czech master. Fans of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer will also enjoy.

What stood out? Hot damn, this is a good one. Labatut picks apart the insularity of academic research by visiting great minds at work in the battlefields of World War I or at a sanatorium among convalescing patients, settings that highlight the loneliness and mania of genius. The blurry line between fact and fiction keeps the reader unsettled, uncertain — thoroughly effective in a book that feels like a warning.

Which line made me feel something? From the section “Prussian Blue:” “An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantryman of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it”

Generations by Lucille Clifton

4/5 stars

What’s it about? Lucille Clifton sketches her family tree as she journeys with her family to her father’s home for his funeral. Each section is dedicated to one of Clifton’s ancestors, but others crowd in with their own tales and entanglements, mimicking the jockeying and overlappings within any family. Honest, powerful, and brimming with love and pride.

How’d I find it? I found this book by happenstance at Enoch Pratt Free Library and can never resist an NYRB title. This was gobbled up over beers while a football game held surrounding friends rapt.

Who will enjoy this book? At less than 90 pages, Generations is worth any reader’s attention. Folks who liked Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith, who opens Generations with a beautifully written introduction, will particularly appreciate this title.

What stood out? The structure of the book reinvents the memoir genre. Clifton curates an impactful collage of photos, dialogue, secondhand stories, memories, lines from Walt Whitman, and snippets of her journey to Buffalo. This is the experience of a funeral in real time, recreating the barrage of interconnectedness that loss unleashes, the lore we fall into when surrounded by the people who made us possible.

Which line made me feel something? “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. ‘We come out of it better than they did, Lue,’ my Daddy said, and I watch my six children and know we did.”

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

1/5 stars

How’d I find it? With much anticipation, I picked up my copy at Atomic Books on publication day.

Why not 3 or more stars? I know. I eviscerated Fourth Wing like a clubtail. Don’t expect much different from Iron Flame. Xaden’s jaw is ticking, Violet is lifting her chin, and Ridoc is clapping people on the back. Repetition of key plot points, characters’ states of mind, and personality traits ensure quick consumption of this book’s 622 pages, with twists served up so gently and obviously that you feel like a genius for having guessed them. I give this five stars for entertainment value and anxiously await the third installment.

Jaw tick count: 11

The Girls by Emma Cline

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? As a true crime fan, this novel enticed me while browsing at Busboys & Poets after lunch.

Why not 3 or more stars? In 1969, teenage Evie becomes a tangential member of a group that eventually commits horrific acts of violence, a crime that is mercilessly teased over many pages until its ho-hum reveal. Nuggets of interest abound — Russell, the unlikely Pied Piper; the fame and fortune of Evie’s actress grandmother; Evie’s obsession with group member Suzanne; present-day Evie’s reckoning with her past — but all paths peter out. While The Girls wants to say something about female relationships, sexuality, and identity, it doesn’t reach beyond well-trod territory. It excels, however, in head-scratching descriptions of minutiae, such as “breaths like the beads of a rosary.”

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

4/5 stars

What’s it about? A medical student recounts her training as a doctor, meditating on her path to medicine, the failures of modern care, and the mystery of existence. DeForest plays with truth and perception in this odd, dark novel that lingers.

How’d I find it? I had read a review of this book in the New York Times last year and came across it at Enoch Pratt Free Library. I enjoyed this enough to want to buy my own copy to flip through again later.

Who will enjoy this book? The tone, length, and bending of reality in A History of Present Illness reminded me of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, but its ennui shares much with Jenny Offill’s Weather.

What stood out? Every dreary, dreamy book on existence brings something a touch different to the table, and A History of Present Illness serves up the jaded view of a physician reckoning with death, all the more convincing since DeForest is a neurologist herself. I loved how our narrator tells the reader little lies throughout, manipulating and editing her story as she goes. She’s a challenging character through which to experience medical school and residency, and it makes for compelling reading.

Which line made me feel something? “Remember looking in the mirror as a child, saying your name? This face, you’d think, these hands. This house and yard and mother, going to bed without dinner on cabbage night, jumping from the roof of the shed. The bravery of it all, the obvious import. But this is how it ends: surrounded by strangers, your clothes cut off with shears, cold blue hands, and gone then, with your body humiliated and left alone to stiffen.”

Small Game by Blair Braverman

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? I picked up my copy at Greedy Reads, drawn by a mention in a New York Times review of Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis.

Why not 3 or more stars? A new reality TV show called Civilization gathers a group of hopefuls in a remote location so they can eke it out for six weeks to claim a cash prize. The reality television aspects are never developed or explored, main characters remain enigmatic to the end, and the anticipated reveal does not come. What might Braverman have said through Ashley, the contestant who leads with looks and charm, about the price of fame? How could the ill that befalls production have been fleshed out to illustrate the book’s themes of hubris, betrayal, greed, and perseverance? Instead, the book remains fascinated with wilderness skills and languishes with Mara, our disinterested protagonist, at its helm. A survival experiment gone awry makes for a titillating premise, one that Small Game only scratches at.

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

4/5 stars

What’s it about? Jamel Brinkley’s smartly written debut offers nine snapshots of young people grappling with sexuality, masculinity, race, and family. Set mostly in New York City and its environs, A Lucky Man confronts pain while stoking hope.

How’d I find it? I chanced upon this copy at a book sale at the Chevy Chase Neighborhood Library.

Who will enjoy this book? If you liked Edward P. Jones’ Lost in the City, which centers on DC, and Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, pick up A Lucky Man.

What stood out? I wanted Brinkley’s characters to talk to each other, to hold each other close, to say what they mean. The brothers in “J’ouvert, 1996.” Wolf and his father. But A Lucky Man isn’t about tidy endings. These stories gesture towards beginnings, the moments that define our lives later. Brinkley possesses a delicate ear for storytelling. With rare exceptions (certain moments in “Everything the Mouth Eats” come to mind), he knows exactly when to pull back and when to feed the reader more.

Which line made me feel something? From “Infinite Happiness:” “When you boiled it down, his language had just a handful of words, and few of them made any sense. They evaporated as soon as they left his mouth. He was so confident when he said them, even though his entire store of knowledge and wisdom was suspect. It didn’t matter in the end, because of the way he made you feel.”

Waterlog by Roger Deakin

5/5 stars

What’s it about? Roger Deakin recounts his adventures swimming the waters of Britain in this enchanting diary of nature, humanity, and longing for lost places. A fervent must-read.

How’d I find it? I read an excellent review by Leanne Shapton in Harper’s and rushed out to Solid State Books to buy a copy.

Who will enjoy this book? The following works and writers found in Waterlog offer the perfect readalikes: Robert Macfarlane, who authors this edition’s afterword; Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson; and The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. I add to these Rob Cowen’s Common Ground, one of my favorite books.

What stood out? Witty and vivid, Waterlog is a book that makes you want to breathe a little deeper and love a little harder. The “endolphins” created by wild swimming — described by Deakin as a revolt against “the official version of things” — stir in me a desire to go out and explore for myself. This book sticks with you, tunes you into yourself and your environment.

Which line made me feel something? “Striking out into the enormous expanse of cold sea, over the vast sands, I immerse myself like the fox ridding himself of his fleas. I leave my devils on the waves.”

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

3/5 stars

What’s it about? A plague unleashed in 2030 by melting Arctic ice threatens the existence of humans in this ambitious novel about love, human connectedness, and responsibility for our shared future. Linked stories spotlight grief in its many guises via an exciting array of plot devices (space missions and a talking pig and purgatory, among others).

How’d I find it? I periodically check on my favorite authors’ readalikes to get new book ideas, and this came up as a recommendation for David Mitchell readers. And oh boy, do I love David Mitchell books.

Who will enjoy this book? The cover likens How High We Go in the Dark to Station Eleven and Cloud Atlas, but I would recommend it more for fans of The Passage series by Justin Cronin.

What stood out? I loved Nagamatsu’s creative swings. The City of Laughter terrifies in its sugar-coated benevolent executions, and the rise of funerary megacorporations heralds a grim new order. It’s obvious in the writing that Nagamatsu wants us to feel the earnestness of his project, as he doesn’t miss a chance to slather on the sentiment. This book is emo. I would have liked to spend more time in its interesting reality (the purple pendant!) and less in each character’s impending or recent loss.

Which line made me feel something? “I saw tiny vessels breaking free of the planet, great cities floating above in rings of glass. I saw a civilization that could destroy itself before it even reached the nearest star. But I also saw a world that would be the first witness the quiet of intergalactic space and walk on the ruins of whatever remains of us.”