One of my hottest takes: the Winter Olympics are better. I know I am in the minority here, but my love for figure skating is too big to really get into the summer edition. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love watching the Games, though! Simone Biles! Katie Ledecky! Suni Lee! I will watch the most random things (women’s pole vault!) and get so invested in it…especially if the USA wins a medal. I am never a more obnoxious patriot than I am during the Olympics.

In Books…

• Geek Love: A repellent book about repellent people. It traces the story of the Binewskis, where the parents have inherited a carnival. They decide to grow their own freak show, with mother Lil taking drugs and exposing herself to radiation during her pregnancies to try to ensure children with serious abnormalities. Their oldest, Arturo, has fins instead of arms and legs. Elly and Iphy are conjoined twins. Olympia, our narrator, is a hunchbacked albino dwarf. The youngest, called Chick, looks perfectly normal on the outside but has a special power all his own. The book follows Oly through both her childhood years with her family as well as a time in her adult life, when she and her mother are the only ones left…well, them, and Oly’s daughter Miranda, who was raised as an orphan by nuns and who Oly now lives in close proximity to, though she’s a total stranger to the younger woman. This is a character-based book, which should have made it appealing to me, but none of the characters were compelling. Oly’s blinding love for and devotion to Arturo is never really explicable. We’re told he is intensely charismatic, and he indeed engineers his way into a following that extends far beyond the carnival, but it’s never really understandable WHY he is attended to by virtually every member of his family. And to me, the book seemed to hinge on whether or not you were willing to buy into Arty’s power over his family. Katherine Dunn seems to find her own idea of Arty fascinating enough that she never bothers to make him actually all that interesting. The twins and Chick are far more sympathetic but get short shrift in the narrative. Dunn relies heavily on shock value in what seems an attempt to disguise her failures of character development: characteristics of the Binewski children, of course, are meant to be shocking, but also the themes of incest and horrifying violence. I found it difficult to read because there was nothing that actually grabbed my interest at any point. I didn’t like the characters, or find them engaging, or want to know what happened to them. I loathed this book.
• Hum: In the near future, May Webb has recently become redundant at her job refining language models for AI. Panicked about what that might mean for her household finances, since her one-time professional photographer husband Jem relies on cobbling together odd jobs through a gig app to supplement her salary, she accepts a large sum of money to undergo surgery that will make slight tweaks to her appearance to see if it can fool facial recognition technology. The surgery is performed by a hum, the androids that have become ubiquitous and replaced many human workers in even skilled occupations, where they constantly offer personalized advertisements. In a world where climate change and wildfires have burnt many forests to the ground, she caves to the impulse to spend a chunk of her new money to buy her family a few days in a large botanical garden where the wealthy can relax in nature. While in the garden, there’s an incident involving her two children, Sy and Lu, making May infamous as she returns to real life once her vacation is over. While the narrative definitely deals in the outsize role technology already plays in our lives, which Helen Phillips posits will keep growing in scarily probable ways, I don’t know that I would have read this if I knew how much it is about parenting anxiety. I have a lot of parenting anxiety of my own and do not need my entertainment to offer me more. The plot is relatively thin and the characters aren’t much deeper; where this novel really puts its focus and succeeds (at least somewhat) is in Phillips’s elegant, insightful prose and its thematic exploration of the isolating effects of tech. I could almost feel May’s frustration at sitting around a dinner table with her husband and children, each absorbed in their own devices, in my own chest. Children are terrifyingly unknowable as is, and a new ability to shut out the world through ever-more immersive devices just amplifies primal parental fears about their kids growing up and away from them. The ubiquity of the advertising, the way that the hums seamlessly move from providing services to delivering an ad specifically meant to appeal to you, is also brilliantly rendered, with May constantly being on the receiving end of a pitch for hand cream. You can feel how it would wear away at your resistance bit by bit, to have to say no all the time, to not know when to put your guard up between your actual interaction and when the ad begins. There’s a pervasive air of paranoia throughout the narrative. Is it really being paranoid if you’re really being watched? It’s skillfully rendered, but it wasn’t actually very enjoyable to read to me. I feel like this one calls for being in the right headspace.
• Play It As It Lays: Maria Wyeth is an actress in her early 30s living in Los Angeles, and her life is falling apart. Her marriage to director Carter Lang is failing, the pair falling into infidelity and repetitive arguments. Their young daughter, Kate, has an unspecified neurological condition and is hospitalized. Maria loves her daughter and visits frequently, more often than the hospital staff would like. She has no real friends…her only sort-of female friend, Helene, is more a frenemy than anything else and has a fraught marriage of her own to BZ, a close friend of Carter’s. Her parents, who raised her in a ghost town in Nevada outside Las Vegas, are both dead. Maria deals with her emptiness and aimlessness by spending hours cruising the highways of southern California. She becomes pregnant again, but confesses to Carter that she’s not sure if he or her married lover is the father. She seems ambivalent about the pregnancy, but Carter insists that she have an abortion or he will take Kate away from her. She acquiesces, but afterwards she is haunted by stories of children losing their lives and visions of snakes. Her marriage finally fully breaks down, she takes a lot of sedatives and eats so little that Helene and BZ call on Carter to intervene even as they’re both sleeping with other people. Events spiral further out of control, winding up with tragedy and Maria’s own institutionalization. This is heady, dark stuff, but Didion’s prose is razor-sharp and spare enough to keep it from becoming turgid. Her sentences cut to the quick, and she doesn’t feel the need to provide more detail than strictly necessary to evoke the mood she’s going for. There’s a plot but it’s much more about vibes, with powerful themes of alienation and the hollowness beyond the surfaces of things, which makes sense for a novel set in the dreamworlds of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, glittery facades masking the despair crucial to keeping both cities going. In the face of despair, some people somehow keep going, while others find themselves overwhelmed and unable to push forward. Maria is in the former category, for reasons both explicable (she’s the daughter of a gambling addict) and ineffable. This is definitely a downer book, but Didion is an incredible writer and I’d recommend reading it.
• Why Not Me?: I know I am a weirdo here, but I have never been that big on The Office (I watched a couple seasons, it had some great moments, but its emphasis on cringe humor does not match my own humor preferences). That being said, I have enjoyed Mindy Kaling quite a bit, from her very long-defunct blog to her first essay collection, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). I picked up this, her follow-up collection, when it first came out and then it just…languished on my shelf as I read other things. For nearly a decade. Perhaps that’s part of why it fell a little flat for me. The time in my life where I would have been most likely to be charmed by these essays is in the past. That Kaling is a talented writer feels almost superfluous to say, but it’s really her voice that’s the point here. She’s great at a conversational, chatting-with-the-most-fun-person-at-the-party vibe and the words zip along. The topics feel mostly similar to what she wrote in her first book (body image, pop culture, living and working in Hollywood), with less about her childhood and more about achieving a level of success and fame that leaves her genuinely, relatably needing to pull herself together when she realizes she won’t be nominated for an acting Emmy right before announcing the nominations with Carson Daly. She does address what even she acknowledges is her deeply weird relationship with B.J. Novack but not in a way that’s particularly revealing. While on the whole these essays are perfectly fine, witty and breezy, there are some misses, like a confession that she enjoys shooting kissing/love scenes with cute guys that did not age well and an extended riff on an imaginary version of her life in which she’s a high school teacher who connects with a cranky older teacher that I found irritating enough that I just skipped it once I figured out where it was going. There’s just not a lot of substance here, and the similarity to her first book means I’d just recommend that one instead.
• Deathless: In this book, Catherynne M. Valente takes the bones of the Russian fairy tale of Marya Morevna, wife of Koschei the Deathless, and spins out a combination of fantasy and historical fiction exploring the Stalinist era. Marya, always an odd and exceptional girl, grows up in Saint Petersburg during the end of the Tsarist era and the Russian Revolution, her once comfortable large home becoming a boarding house for twelve families. One night, she stumbles upon the home’s domovoye (a Russian house imp akin to a less beneficent brownie) and her life is changed forever. Shortly thereafter, she is approached by the legendary Koschei the Deathless and without much in the way of other prospects, she leaves with him to be his consort in his home city of Buyan. In Valente’s telling, Koschei is the Tsar of Life, locked in unending battle with his brother, the Tsar of Death. Buyan is host to all of the classic figures of Russian folklore, from various chyerti (imps/sprites) to the one and only Baba Yaga. She learns that she is just one in a long line of Koschei’s companions, mostly named Yelena, who have followed inexorably the traditional story in which they leave Koschei for a young, handsome human man named Ivan and betray their former paramour to his death. Marya is determined to forge her own path, and for a time she does, succeeding in becoming his wife…before an Ivan of her own appears, luring her back to what is now Leningrad. If you know enough history to know what happened in Leningrad in this era, you know it’s only a matter of time before things get very, very dark, taking Marya to places she could have never imagined. Valente’s tale pulls off a neat trick, both retelling and offering meta commentary on Russian fairy tales and folklore traditions more broadly, emphasizing the way the stories change in little details here and there as they’re retold but hew to the same structure, the same inevitable ending. Marya herself is a fairly well-developed character, but most of the other people involved remain the sorts of stock players typical to fairy stories. I think it’s this sort of self-conscious awareness of what it’s doing that made it hard for me to really connect with and get drawn into, despite its skill. I appreciated it more than loved it. At only about 350 pages, I actually felt like it could have used a little more space to accommodate all its plot developments and give them room to breathe a bit, let me feel it more and think about it less. It’s clever and well-told, and I would recommend it, but I was a little bit frustrated with it all the same.
• The Likeness: Irish detective Cassie Maddox once worked Murder, but after a case went spectacularly sideways, she transferred to Domestic Violence. Before either of those, though, she worked Undercover, living as a college student named Lexie Madison while she tried to bust drug activity on campus. When the assignment ended, the Lexie identity was retired…so why does a body turn up one day that looks just like Cassie, with id showing her name as Lexie Madison? This Lexie was a Ph.D. student in English, living in an old manor home in a small Irish town with four other grad students, who detectives suspect of involvement in her death but they can’t crack. Cassie is persuaded to re-assume Lexie’s identity in the desperate hope that she’ll be able to get information from the inside that will solve the mystery of Lexie’s death…and even who she might have been before she was Lexie at all. Cassie slips in to Lexie’s shoes, but the further in she gets, the less sure she is that she ever wants to step out of them again even as she tries to figure out if “her” best friends might be behind the whole thing. You just have to buy in to the central premise behind the book, that these two unrelated strangers look so very much alike that one could be substituted in for the other among their best friends and not be immediately rejected, in order for it to work at all. While I could mostly go along with it, I would find myself getting pulled out occasionally, wondering things like how Cassie could have possibly pulled off Lexie’s teaching obligations without a background in literature, or how much phone videos really could have prepared someone to ape every single aspect of someone else’s persona so well that she could fool the people who lived with her every day. It made me think about all the little things about my husband that would be impossible to know unless you literally lived with him but would immediately ring alarm bells if they were to change, like the way he ties his shoes or leaves the bathroom fan running. This book is often recommended as a read-alike for Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and while I can see it, I think that might be setting people up for disappointment. While it does share elements with the cult classic (centered on a group of students who set themselves apart being joined by an outsider, a murder, a dark atmosphere), the comparisons ultimately were mostly shallow to me. Daniel, the de facto leader of the group, has clearly been inspired by Henry, but he’s the only one of the friends who really gets any real development as a character. The book is mostly actually a character study of Cassie. I’d been told before reading this that the Dublin Murder Squad series were only loosely connected and don’t need to be read in order, but I don’t know that this one would work without having read In The Woods. The trauma of how that case turned out, of the loss of her best friendship with Rob, are incredibly important to the way that Cassie thinks and acts and feels throughout the novel. While I liked it, I had a hard time really getting drawn into it until the last hundred pages or so. I do recommend it, though, and look forward to reading more books in the series.

In Life…

• Girls weekend in Portland: Took my annual vacation with my childhood best friends, and this year I picked Portland for us to visit! It seems kind of bonkers that I’ve lived out west for over a decade and just now visited Portland for the first time, but it was really fun and I’ll definitely be back! We had a fantastic time visiting the Japanese Garden, shopping in Slabtown, seeing Multnomah Falls, eating and drinking, and just hanging out with each other.