Solitaire Book Club: The Council of Animals

The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell. I don't know if it's just me or the zeitgeist of the entire publishing world, but this is another novel set in a post-apocalyptic world. This time, humanity has caused an unspecified Calamity (an extinction-level event, at least for people); the few survivors, mostly under-prepared for subsistence living, are clinging to a tenuous existence; and  representatives of the different animal groups meet to decide whether to kill and eat these remaining humans. What follows, through episodes of debate, diplomacy, subterfuge, and misadventure is a lesson in trust, compromise, creative problem-solving, and tough-decison-making. McDonell imbues the animal protagonists with enough relatable intelligence and personality to fully anthropomorphize them but never loses their purely animal instincts, perspectives, and behaviors. The result is a narrative that is both real and fantastical, both instructive and entertaining, and always engaging.This was a read-in-one-go book.

Closing the circuit

So, in regard to this previous announcement, the SAWgust Project has ended early (for me) and details can be found in this post.

Solitaire Book Club: Clean Air

Clean Air by Sarah Blake. So, on the surface, this book is a post-apocalyptic novel set in a world where pollen has become deadly, self-driving cars and remote-controlled farming equipment are ubiquitous, and humanity lives in air-filtered homes, masking for any brief forays outside. That would be enough for most typical sci-fi novels, but Blake goes further to mix in mediums and seances, ancient Japanese spirits, and a no-nonsense cop on the trail of a serial killer - and it all works. But beneath all this cool and complex context is the story of woman struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants and where she fits in the world.

Solitaire Book Club: Severance

 Severance by Ling Ma. If you mashed together SylviaPlath's The Bell Jar, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and Steven King's The Stand, you might get something like Ling Ma's novel about a millennial New Yorker trying to come to grips with career choices (or lack thereof), romance (or what passes for it), family relations, and her Chinese heritage, all while being swept along in a growing - and eerily macabre - global pandemic. The narrative alternates between pre- and post-apocalyptic settings, juxtaposing "normal" life with the new world disorder, throwing differences - and similarities - into harsh relief. In these Days of Covid, the book (from 2018) seems positively prescient in its depiction of pandemic conditions and response. A great read.

One quibble: what is it with modern authors eschewing the use of quotation marks to identify dialog? C'mon, they're not that complicated, and they do help. I blame Frank McCourt...

Solitaire Book Club: The Price of Salt

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. Reading this classic novel of romance between two women in mid-century New York was like watching an old black-and-white movie: not only are the conventions and artistic techniques different, slower, more thoughtful, but the quotidian details of life, the zeitgeist, and the social mores are also so unlike our own. And yet, beneath all the dissimilarities, the totally familiar universals of human longing, desire, love, and hate course through veins of the characters. And in the end, the characters are the core: the reader cares more deeply about them the more is revealed by the narrative. Seventy years on, the story still compels.

 

Bonus feature: The image above comes from the copy I borrowed from the library. The "major motion picture" referenced on the cover is the 2015 Cate Blanchett/Rooney Mara feature called Carol.

The book was originally published under the name Claire Morgan because Highsmith did not want to be pigeon-holed as a "lesbian-book" writer. It was later re-issued as Carol, and is often published under both titles and, of course, with Highsmith's true name.

Solitaire Book Club: How to Take Over the World

How to Take Over the World by Ryan North. So, if you wrote a book that was just a series of silly plans for world domination a la comic book supervillains or James-Bondian evil masterminds, it might be just a little over the top. And if you wrote a book that was just a series of factoids and summaries of the latest engineering and technological advances in the fields of transportation, housing, agriculture, energy, and so on, with a little historical perspective, it might be a bit dry. Ah, but if you pretend to be writing a manual for taking over the world but are in reality educating the reader about specific scientific principles and possibilities - well, I guess you get a NYT bestseller. This book was a lot of fun and as informative as any PBS documentary, and I was enjoying immensity until I had to return it to the library unfinished because someone else had it on hold. Curses, foiled again!

Solitaire Book Club: Other Worlds Than These

Other Worlds Than These edited by John Joseph Adams. I have waxed enthusiastic elsewhere about my love for the science-fiction anthologies of my youth, and while this latest collection is only ten years old, it held that same power to transport me. I am a big alternate-history fan, and this book's theme is counterfactual-adjacent: portal worlds and parallel worlds. (Think Narnia for the first and the Star Trek Mirror Universe for the second.) The selections lean a bit more toward the SF than fantasy, which was fine with me; in any case, there are 30 stories told over 548 pages so there's plenty of variety and you can even skip one or two if they are not to your taste. It is a great choice for summer deck time reading, with stories ranging from lighthearted and clever to deeply disturbing, written mostly in a span of ten years before and after the turn of the millennium.  The book does close with a Robert Silverberg story I am sure I first read in high school fifty years ago, so for me, that was the cherry on top.