April Reading Recap

The three novels I read last month were all different from each other, and pretty different from any other books I've read:

→ WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL by Rahul Kanakia: Nandan's friends are constantly giving him advice about wooing girls, so he's glad to be the voice of authority for a change with his more hapless classmate Dave. After an evening of partying on the Santa Cruz beach and strategizing over girls, Nandan is surprised but drunkenly pleased when he and Dave hook up. Nandan isn't sure how to label his sexuality, because he certainly hasn't stopped thinking about getting back together with his ex-girlfriend, but at least he's having fun figuring it out, except when he really isn't.

WE ARE TOTALLY NORMAL deals with the anguish of teenage uncertainty about attraction, friendship, and how to fit into the world. While the story is structurally simple, with nothing in the way of subplots, the thoughts Nandan is grappling with are complex and nuanced. His narrative voice reads as realistically adolescent to me, without feeling as emotionally overblown as YA sometimes is to my jaded adult self. Kanakia is a strong and careful writer, and I look forward to more of her work, particularly the adult novel she's revising now.

→ NEW WAVES by Kevin Nguyen: Margo and Lucas become good friends at a New York City tech company, where they both deal with the grind of daily racism. She's a rare black woman engineer, either ignored and told to assert herself, or warned to be less aggressive. He's Asian and always assumed to be an engineer, then looked down on for actually working in customer service. The two of them commiserate in bars after work, share conversations that are alternately deep and ridiculous, and drunkenly steal proprietary data one night after Margo is fired. And then Margo dies in an accident, and Lucas is left with the password to her laptop and the growing recognition that he didn't know his best friend very well at all.

This is an emotionally engaging novel about grief in the digital age and the difficulties of human connection. It's not, as the jacket copy suggests, a heist or a mystery, beyond the mystery of people trying to understand one another. The early part of the book led me to expect a more strongly plotted story, so I was disappointed that certain threads didn't wind up somewhere more significant, but I appreciated the cerebral and somewhat messy novel this turned out to be. Nguyen is very perceptive about how both people and technology work, and this story contains great depictions of tech culture, office life, and complicated friendship.

→ THE NIX by Nathan Hill: Samuel is a disillusioned English professor, a failed novelist, and a secret videogamer. His mother ran off when he was young, and her whereabouts have remained unknown, so he's stunned when Faye shows up in the news after attacking a conservative governor. Even stranger are the reports of her history as a political protestor, a part of her life Samuel knows nothing about. The story unfolds in multiple timelines to reveal the past events that brought Samuel and Faye to this point, and a variety of side characters also get their turns in the spotlight.

This novel was a lot of fun to read, with amusing lines, absurd incidents, and a fairly light tone despite upsetting material that includes compulsive behavior, betrayal, and police brutality. Samuel and Faye are sympathetically flawed, complex characters, and the people around them are an interesting mix of realistic, cartoonish, or both. Hill does a great job weaving together the collection of unusual plots so that the insights combine in a satisfying way. The story covers many fascinating topics and settings: the protest movements of several eras, massively multiplayer online games, Norwegian folk tales, and much more. The book is long and could have been shortened throughout with less description, but it rarely drags. Recommended if you want to spend some time in an intricate, odd, and often funny story world.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Laurie Penny at Wired breaks down why This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For: "I was expecting Half-Life. I was expecting World War Z. I've been dressing like I'm in The Matrix since 2003. I was not expecting to be facing this sort of thing in snuggly socks and a dressing gown, thousands of miles from home, trying not to panic and craving a proper cup of tea. This apocalypse is less Danny Boyle and more Douglas Adams."