Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is a novel about a young Iranian man who comes to America as a child, as Akbar did. The man, Cyrus, enrolled at Keady University in Indiana, which I found hilarious. Akbar went to Purdue University and Gene Keady was at one time the basketball coach at Purdue. Cyrus is in recovery, struggling to deal even after many years, with his mother’s death in an Iranian jet that was shot down by U.S. forces. He’s writing a book he calls The Book of Martyrs and he is obsessed with an Iranian artist who is appearing in her own installation at the Brooklyn Museum. The language of the book is great and maybe at times a little too clever, and the book is more about what Cyrus realizes than what he actually does. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was fantastic.
The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed is a terrific science fiction novel. In the near future, scientists are dealing with the aftermath of a “hyperpandemic” that has decimated the human population and left most of the rest infertile, compounded by the effects of irreversible climate change. When it appears likely that the human race will be wiped out, a plan to send fertile specimens to another planet emerges, but that is shifted for technical reasons to one that will put them in suspended animation for 10,000 years, in hopes that they can repopulate the planet then and avoid the mistakes. The book is in two timelines, one in the near future searching for a fertile female, and one in the distant future with one of the scientists, a fertile male, looking for signs of human survivors. This was a really enjoyable read, due out in June, but I received an ARC.
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is a biography of the world’s richest man. At 600 pages, it’s a slog, and I wasn’t interested much in all the different companies and technical details of the products in Musk’s portfolio. What I was interested in was what a shitty person he is to the people in his life, including wives, colleagues, and employees.
The Shattering: America in the 1960s by Kevin Boyle was my book club’s selection for April. While most of the members of my book club grew up in the 60s, so we were aware of the events the book describes, it was great to read about them all in one place and to see how they were all connected. I was keen to read this book after I met the author and heard him give a talk at a bookstore in Galway, Ireland last year.
