March Reading Recap

Since the month of March was several years long, and reading was about all I could focus on, I have a lot of books to recommend this time:

→ 88 NAMES by Matt Ruff: John Chu works as an online sherpa, guiding gaming newbies through virtual reality adventure games. After a series of jobs gone wrong that might be the fault of a disgruntled ex-employee/girlfriend, John is approached by an anonymous wealthy client offering an outrageous sum, and making a set of outrageous demands. This is immediately followed by an even larger offer from another mysterious figure who wants John to take the first job but report everything that happens. When it starts to look like the first client might be someone high up in the North Korean government, things get even weirder.

Ruff has long been one of my favorite authors for the originality of his stories, the amount of thought he clearly puts into his worlds, and the moments of humor threaded through everything he writes. All these traits are visible in this novel, which dissects topics like racist RPG tropes and online gender dynamics while sending the characters on a fun and often funny adventure with unexpected twists. I enjoyed all the ideas the story explores, and the fast-paced plot kept me engrossed during a very distracting time.

→ THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St. John Mandel opens with Vincent falling from a ship into the ocean and having a vision of her half-brother Paul, who she hasn't seen in a decade. The story then goes back even farther to the time when a younger Paul, fresh out of rehab, tries and fails to get his life back together. After his actions lead to the death of a man he barely knows, Paul flees Toronto to track down Vincent in Vancouver, accompanied by a ghost of the dead man. Later both siblings find work at the remote, luxurious Hotel Caiette, where their lives intersect with other characters and veer wildly apart.

This novel jumps around between time periods and vaguely connected characters in a similar way to Mandel's previous book, the post-pandemic STATION ELEVEN (and the two share a couple surprising points of connection). It's much harder to summarize this story, which has Vincent and Paul and the hotel at the core but spends long stretches away from these and eventually involves the 2008 financial crisis, shady investment funds, the shipping industry, and more ghosts lurking around. If there's a unifying theme, it's probably the way chance and coincidence bring people together and shape lives. I was drawn into the story immediately and remained hooked as it went off in different directions and introduced more excellent characters. This is a strange but strangely compelling novel that taught me some things about the subjects it contains and some things about writing.

→ SABRINA & CORINA by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: The short stories in this collection are all connected by the setting of Denver, Colorado, and characters who share a Latino and Indigenous heritage, and in some cases come from the same large family. There are other recurring elements: pairs of characters who end up on different life paths, pairs who form new bonds, and many sad outcomes. The writing is strong, and Fajardo-Anstine is great at depicting small but important character moments. All writers have repeated moves that become evident when stories are collected, and while I wasn't a fan of some here (too many dreams for my taste), I liked the common structure of a background thread that affects and comments on the main plot.

The first story, "Sugar Babies", blends several threads to good effect. As an archaeological dig takes place at the edge of her town, a thirteen-year-old is assigned the school project of caring for a sack of sugar like an infant at the same time her mother comes back into her life. "Galapago" follows an elderly woman dealing with life changes and has a hell of an opening sentence: "The day before Pearla Ortiz killed a man, she had lunch at home with her granddaughter Alana." In "All Her Names", while the main character wrestles with complicated emotions surrounding her husband and an old love, an episode involving graffiti art sends the story in an unusual direction. Fajardo-Anstine has indicated that she's working on a novel, and I look forward to reading it.

→ WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE by Maria Semple: After her mother vanishes two days before Christmas, eighth-grader Bee sets out to piece together email messages, private school memos, and other documents to understand what led up to Bernadette's disappearance. Bee has a wonderful relationship with her mother, who everyone else in their suburban Seattle (which is to say, Microsoft) community views as eccentric, aloof, or downright mean. Bernadette is all these things at times, especially when confronted by the other parents from Bee's school. She's also deeply fearful of the world, outsourcing all possible tasks to a virtual assistant in India and worrying about the overwhelming challenge of the family's upcoming Antarctica cruise. Most of all, Bernadette is unable to move beyond the failures in her past that caused her to flee to Seattle, a city she's come to loathe.

I enjoyed this unusual story about an unusual family. The writing is funny at times, in a savage way, but more often the tone swings from disturbing to absurd. While the level of detail in the emails, letters, and so on requires a suspension of disbelief, the epistolary format works well to present how a variety of characters view Bernadette in very different ways. She's not an easy person for anyone, but she also hasn't had an easy life, and I was fascinated by the story's reveals. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this.

→ In MEANDER, SPIRAL, EXPLODE: DESIGN AND PATTERN IN NARRATIVE, Jane Alison considers the ways stories can be shaped. While fiction is commonly mapped onto an arc, Alison describes other possibilities, such as oscillating wavelets, inward or outward spirals, and segmented cells. To demonstrate each pattern, she presents short excerpts from a few novels or short stories along with a careful analysis of how the shape plays out through the work.

I really like the concept of this book, and it's well executed, with clear explanations and illuminating examples. Still, I wished for more: more analysis of each shape, more examples, and especially more concrete ideas about how to bring these patterns into one's own writing. But this last wish is not necessarily Alison's goal or responsibility, and I did get certain sparks of inspiration from reading, even though the book wasn't all I hoped.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Adam O'Fallon Price teases apart the happiness inherent in writing, or having written: "Professor Kahneman, I think, would agree that for a person who does not really enjoy the act of writing—like my old workshop friend—the pleasure of having written a thing could never, for him, outweigh the pain of the writing itself. Novel writing presents a radical example of trading experiential happiness for anticipated reflective happiness, surely one of the most extreme examples of this kind of activity that humans regularly engage in."