Book 7: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel
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This was my first St. John Mandel book, though I've seen the Station Eleven series; this definitely gave me shades of that. Great prose, excellent vibes overall. Maybe a little slight on plot, but that's absolutely forgivable as the book doesn't overstay its welcome. I'm actually not sure how I'd describe the plot without giving it away, as the whole thing unfolds very holistically and recursively. Just read it.
For those who have read it, I will say
the plot itself reminded me a lot of old EC Comics; there's a trope in those where an explorer/soldier is sent to investigate a supernatural occurrence (some terrible, hairy beast is attacking people in the woods), suffers a freak supernatural accident (the hero falls into a time tunnel or some radioactive muck), then discovers they themselves have become the menace they've been sent to fight (I've grown hair all over my body and when I tried to ask someone for help they thought I was attacking them!). I don't necessarily think the similarity was intentional beyond "I'm my own grandpa" being a verdant trope.
Book 8: The Defence, by Vladimir Nabokov
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Ordered this after finishing Pnin earlier this year; love Nabokov but haven't explored the biblio in full. This story concerns a chess grandmaster who becomes obsessed with the game and suffers a nervous break. I enjoyed the beginning half or so, as we're introduced to the grandmaster Luhzin and watch his love affair with the game begin in childhood. The second half gets a little dull as it's mostly concerned with the adult Luhzin's beleaguered wife trying to shield him from any exposure to chess. There is a funny part where a movie they're seeing includes a brief chess game, to great tension on her part; and the motif of light filtered through leaves dappling surfaces with a chessboard pattern is quite potent. Still, kinda a disappointment. Both surprising and kinda encouraging to have an author who makes me go "I wish I could write like that," and read something by them which I find lacking.
Book 9: Calde of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
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Book 3 of the 4-volume Book of the Long Sun series (and eight overall of the Solar Cycle!). I think I have a grasp of what's going on here; there's a bit less subtext or subtlety there (though enough that I'm still listening back to a lit podcast recapping it, though only once finishing the book rather than as I finish each chapter as I did with New Sun (did you know there are like six Gene Wolfe podcasts??)).
Anyway, Patera/Calde Silk is getting into all sorts of troubles in the medieval/futuristic town of Viron. While the overall series genre/tone is that of a swashbuckling detective series, each volume is a different "type" of book (the first being a detective story, the second being a vacation/travelogue); this one is a war story. A lot escalates and culminates with this book, and knowing Wolfe that means he's left space in the concluding volume to just drastically zoom out and confuse the heck outta me with the fourth volume.
Book 10: Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu
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I've heard plenty of buzzing about this one from a few friends as well as in the media, and it did not disappoint. Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, befriends Japanese-American Ken at Berkeley; at first the ephemera-obsessed culture snob Hua writes off frat-boy Ken, who's sincerely into Dave Matthews and Pearl Jam. Over time, they bond over a shared quest for authenticity and the familiar struggle of finding a place in a culture that aggressively edges you out.
Hsu is a great writer, weaving anecdotes and musings on late-night conversations with digressions on philosophers and sociologists' treatises on the nature of friendship. By citing works he was studying during their friendship, he calcifies the search for identity as universal yet intimately unique from person to person. This one gave me a lot to think about; it got me way nostalgic for my own college days in CA (albeit a decade later) and one particularly close and similar friendship I had over that period. Of late, one of my big regrets of youth has been that I spent so much time worrying about who/what I'd become, I often didn't enjoy or opt for the more enjoyable/free parts of the process. It was a balm to see someone embrace the impatience as part of the process.
