The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes was my book club’s pick for October. Hayes writes well, and it’s hard to argue with his premise, but it all seems a little too obvious. Anyone who owns a smartphone and follows even one social media platform is aware of the demands on our attention. It’s an addiction like any other, and overcoming it requires extraordinary measures, like hiding in a cave, metaphorically or otherwise.
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green is a non-fiction book on a pretty grim topic. I’ve always enjoyed Green’s writing, even though his novels are intended for young adults, and this one is also engaging, despite the subject matter. Mostly his narrative focuses on one particular TB patient in Sierra Leone, and that gives the book an arc that keeps the reader turning the pages. You want to find out what happens to Henry, and so you read on.
Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi is a terrific short novel set in Lisbon in the 1930s. Pereira is a journalist who has been reduced to writing culture articles for a newspaper that is independent but still sympathetic to the dictator Salazar. He’s uncomfortable with the political situation and grows more so when he meets a young activist who is helping to organize the resistance to the Spanish fascists but also, by extension, Salazar. The title is a repeated refrain throughout the book, suggesting that Pereira is pleading his case, explaining how he became involved.
The Cave by José Saramago is a fantastic book written in his typical stream-of-consciousness style. Cipriano Algor is a potter, but the market has shifted away from his earthenware products to plastic. He switches to making figurines, but there’s no market for those, either. Ultimately, his pottery closes, and he moves with his daughter and son-in-law into the commercial center in the city. Predictably, this makes no one happy, and the discovery of a cave beneath the center makes them all realize they’ve made a mistake.
Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine by Padraic X. Scanlan was my book club’s pick for November. It is a very detailed account of the potato famine in the mid-19th Century—a little too detailed some members felt. I knew a little about the famine before, but I wasn’t so aware of the politics that contributed to the problem and then failed to address it, leaving so many people dead.
Burner and Other Stories by Katrina Denza. The author asked me to blurb this book, and here’s what I wrote: Katrina Denza’s debut collection, Burner and Other Stories, is a powerful and moving portrait of relationships—warts, harsh words, divorce, and all. You’ll probably recognize these characters as your neighbors, friends, or family, going through the challenges of estrangement, loss, and disappointment. As we all must, they find ways to cope and learn that life goes on. In a spare, compact style that has a knife’s edge, Denza has given us a wonderful assemblage of stories that expose the complex underbelly of daily life.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami is an early Murakami novel that is wonderfully weird and complex. Last year, I read his most recent novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls, which recycles some of the material from this book. In my reading, the walled city makes more sense here than in the newer book, both narratively and symbolically.
Thanks for the overview. It saddles me with knowing about more books than I could handle but it is vicariously satisfying!