October Reading Recap

I continue to be grateful for books to distract myself with:

→ LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam: On a warm summer day, Amanda, Clay, and their two young teens escape Manhattan for a vacation at an Airbnb way out on Long Island. The beautiful house they've rented is too remote for cell phone service, but it has internet, satellite TV, and most importantly, a swimming pool. The first days of vacation are perfect, but on the second night, after the kids are in bed, Amanda and Clay are startled by a knock at the door. It's the owners of the house, or at least people claiming to be the owners, and they say the city has suddenly gone dark in a power outage. Electricity is still flowing at the house, but the internet and TV are out, so there's no way to confirm their story or learn what's happening. After an uneasy series of conversations, the owners go to sleep in an empty bedroom, and they all wait for the situation to become clearer. The next day, with no clarity in sight, everyone tries to cope with anxious speculations and the awkwardness of each other's presence. But it's such a beautiful house, and such a beautiful day for enjoying the pool, that it's hard to really believe anything is wrong.

This book is so good, and so tense. Alam's sentences are perfect, whether he's relaying a character's vaguely shameful thought, describing the detritus on a car floor, or providing an ominous, omniscient peek at what's unfolding in the world beyond the vacation rental. The nuances of all the character interactions make this as much a story about the horror of being stuck in an uncomfortable situation with strangers as it is about the horror of possibly impending doom. I recommend this book highly, but with the warning that it is profoundly unsettling. I read the last third in a shaky adrenaline rush that had me jumping out of my skin when my doorbell rang. It's that effective a story.

→ FIND LAYLA by Meg Elison: Layla's goals in life are to become a scientist and to protect her little brother from their unstable mother and horrific home environment. She works hard to excel in junior high, to ignore the classmates who bully her, and to prevent anyone from discovering how she and Andy live. Layla dreams of escape, but it's hard to imagine a good way out when you live in an apartment you have to exit through a window because the front door no longer opens.

The experiences and surroundings that Layla describes are deeply upsetting, but Elison keeps the story from descending into misery by portraying Layla as so competent and confident that the reader remains hopeful. Layla's great narrative voice pulled me in immediately, and the escalating series of events kept me engrossed. There's no easy happy ending for Layla, but she does get free, as Elison did of the childhood circumstances she drew on for this riveting novel. I'm so impressed, and relieved for them both.

→ STRANGER FACES by Namwali Serpell: In this collection of essays, Serpell ponders faces in a variety of cultural contexts. Each of the five essays is tied to a specific piece of history or media and combines footnoted research with more abstract theorizing. One essay starts by focusing on the life and portrayals of Joseph Merrick ("the Elephant Man"), moves into the ways faces are rendered in different styles of art, and ends up at Cleopatra and Michael Jackson. Another analyzes scenes in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho to show how the film plays with faces and reflections. Throughout the collection, Serpell discusses how ideas of beauty, race, and gender influence our reactions to faces, both in life and in art.

I wouldn't have picked up a collection like this if not for my enthusiasm for the author, and it was an interesting reading experience not entirely to my taste. I generally enjoyed whenever the essays provided historical information and more concrete cultural criticism, but my attention wandered at the parts I'd call philosophical musings. My favorite essay was the last one, which explores emoji usage and how we communicate with those little digital faces. I'd recommend this book to readers inclined toward this sort of essay, and I'll take the opportunity to once again recommend Serpell's incredible novel, THE OLD DRIFT.

→ In RED PILL by Hari Kunzru, a writer travels to Berlin for a fellowship, eager for the opportunity to focus on his writing, something that's been difficult at home in New York since his daughter was born. He finds the expected working conditions at the center unfavorable for focusing, but when he holes up in his room to write, his concentration isn't any better. Mostly he wastes time online, takes long walks in the depressing winter landscape, and binge-watches a police procedural called Blue Lives. He's increasingly bothered by odd references he notices in the show's dialogue, and by concerns that everything he does at the center is being watched. Eventually (after a disconnected section relating a different character's experiences in East Berlin) the writer meets the creator of Blue Lives at a party. They spend a disturbing evening together, and his paranoia grows.

I found this novel oddly paced and structured. While the narrator's obsession with Blue Lives and its creator becomes central to the story, most of the first half is about other matters, and I'm not clear why all of it is in there. Kunzru writes well, which kept me interested enough in the slow, cerebral narrative, but I was discouraged by feeling that I didn't really get what he was doing. The book ends with an emotionally wrenching section that in some ways clarified the point of everything else, but in other ways left me more frustrated.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Book Riot, Leah Rachel von Essen investigates How the USPS Chooses Its Literary Stamps: "The Literary Arts series has featured an author on a stamp every year since 1979. They try to choose a wide range of literary figures, both in terms of diversity of gender, race, and in subject matter. The first stamp in the series featured John Steinbeck. Artists featured have included Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Katherine Anne Porter. The stamps feature a portrait of the author with a background inspired by the themes of one or all of their works."