STACKED

books

Thriller Roundup

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I’m still on a huge thriller kick, seeking a book to match the love I’ve had for The Girl on the Train since I first read it two years ago. Paula Hawkins’ novel is one of the few mega-popular titles that I loved just as much as everyone else. Nothing has really impressed me that much since, but most of my choices are solid and a fun way to occupy a few hours. Here’s a rundown of the some of the recent ones I’ve read and enjoyed.

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

Anna is agoraphobic and fills her time with talking to people in her online support group, playing chess, watching old movies, drinking too much alcohol, and spying on her neighbors through the window. When she sees the woman across the street with a knife sticking out of her stomach, she tries to notify the police – but they don’t believe her. The woman’s husband presents a different woman as his wife, and their teenage son, whom Anna had met and formed a rapport with when he visited before, refuses to speak about much of anything. This is a psychological thriller very much in the vein of The Girl on the Train, featuring an unreliable narrator who witnesses a horrible crime but won’t be taken seriously by anyone involved. Finn takes his time developing Anna’s character, which can make the book seem slow at times. Before the event that caused Anna’s agoraphobia, she was a child psychologist with a husband and a young daughter. Now she and her husband are separated, and her daughter is with him, leaving Anna alone in the house. She helps other people in her online support group with their own agoraphobia, while simultaneously recognizing that she’s unable to help herself. The suspense builds slowly and deliberately, directing readers first at one suspect and then another, including Anna herself, and while many readers probably won’t be surprised by the ending, it’s executed well and quite satisfying.

Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

Ani FaNelli experienced something horrible as a teenager at Bradley School, a prestigious boarding school near Philadelphia. As an adult, she’s tried to reinvent herself with a high-paying job, fancy clothes, and an impressive and handsome fiance. She’s made herself into a hard person, and it’s easy to dislike her, at least initially. She comes across as a bully, invested too much in her own appearance, the appearance of others, and of course, wealth. But there are flashes of someone kinder underneath, and this person is revealed slowly over the course of the book as we learn exactly what happened to Ani in high school. There’s a twist to the story about halfway through the book, and it’s this twist, violent and shocking, that the world within the story actually knows about, and the one that Ani is preparing to talk about publicly for a documentary. This is less of a thriller and more of a psychological study of a woman and how different traumas can affect a person. There’s no big reveal near the end, but it’s satisfying in other ways. Knoll reveals, bit by bit, what happened to Ani and how she’s been coping (and not coping), so by the end, we have the full picture. In that way, it has a bit of a mystery element to it, but readers shouldn’t go into this one expecting another Gone Girl. It’s disturbing, yes, but in a very different way.

The Child by Fiona Barton

I was a bit disappointed by the first Fiona Barton book I read, The Widow. It’s difficult to say why without spoiling the ending, but the experience did give me lower expectations for her second book. Luckily, this one is pretty solid. When the body of a baby is discovered in a backyard, buried many years ago, it brings the lives of three women together: a mother, her grown daughter, and the journalist investigating the case, each with her own secrets and motivations. The identity of the child, and its relationship with the mother and her daughter, is teased out over the course of the book. The story is told from three different perspectives, each woman’s voice and personality distinct from the others, all of them arresting. This is a mystery with solid answers to its main questions: who is the child, and what (or who) is responsible for its death?  The path the story takes isn’t always predictable, but it does make sense – there are no twists simply for shock value. With good writing and a satisfying ending, I recommend The Child for anyone looking for an entirely female-driven mystery.

 

 

Falling In Love With Audiobooks Again

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In the early days of STACKED, I was a big audiobook listener. I had an hour-long commute each way between home and work, and I could sail through audiobooks pretty quickly. An hour each way is about a disc each way, meaning I could get through a decent-length audiobook in a little over a work week. I worked my way through a number of adult fiction titles, some award-winning YA titles (I’d found that it was often easier to get those titles on audiobook rather than wait on the holds list for print), and nonfiction. And pretty quickly, I discovered that nonfiction on audiobook really worked for me.

But then I got a new job at a new library that was in my town. My commute went from an hour each way to a mere five minutes total. I tried audiobooks but they didn’t work for me. There wasn’t enough time to sink into them, and more, the job took a lot out of me, and I cherished the silence I got in that short commute.

Keep in mind, too, that this was in the days before digital audiobooks were ubiquitous. To listen to an audiobook meant getting a CD set or hoping you could score a Play Away. There wasn’t a convenient way to listen to audiobooks that weren’t in the car at this point, so listening during free time or during tasks at home meant a lot of work to get CDs to a device.

While I like technology, I much prefer laziness when it comes to things like that.

I left that job and worked from home for about a year before getting a job with a thirty minute commute each way. But, having gotten out of the habit of listening to audiobooks, I couldn’t motivate myself to do it.

But now, eight or so years later, working entirely from home and having done so now for four years, I have become obsessed with audiobooks again.

It began, though, with podcasts.

Gretchen Rubin, whose habit-forming book Better Than Before did not resonate particularly well for me, has a podcast with her sister Elizabeth I really enjoy. And it was there I figured out exactly why it is audiobooks are working for me again: the concept of the blank slate. It is with a hard reset or change in your life where you’re most likely to make change.

That hard reset, it turns out, was moving.

When I had to clean and pack the home we’d lived in for eight years, I started using Audible to buy an audiobook every month — this was a job perk, and I decided to take advantage of it. As it turns out, listening to an engaging audiobook while you’re scrubbing baseboards or emptying cupboards makes the time and tasks much more enjoyable. Being able to tote those audiobooks digitally in my literal back pocket made it easy to move room-to-room without cords.

I packed and cleaned and listened to audiobook after audiobook. I moved those items from our home in one state, across the border to another, and listened to an audiobook in the car as I drove. An hour each way, on top of the hours of packing and cleaning, meant blowing through book after book.

And then, the habit continued.

I’m not moving now. Most of my stuff has been unpacked. But I’m still picking up audiobooks and listening, adding additional credits to my account each month and splurging on daily deals for titles which sound interesting and ring in at just a couple of bucks.

I listen every day when I am getting ready in the morning. Twenty minutes here and there adds up. Pair those minutes up with spending ten or twenty minutes at the beginning and/or at the end of the day laying in bed and listening, and eventually, it’s close to an hour of listening each day. For audiobooks ringing in at 10 or 15 hours, it only takes a couple of weeks of listening here and there to finish a book. Particularly good audiobooks are motivation to get errands done out of the house, too: I can listen to forty minutes of audiobook if I choose to go to one of the bigger grocery stores in the next town. And each week, when I make the trek to teach yoga an hour away, I can blow through two more hours of listening.

Those little pockets of time add up. But more than add up numerically, they’ve added such a nice change of pace to my day and created a companion to the quiet that I otherwise find myself in. I’m a quiet person and keep a quiet home, but going all day without much noise or companionship because of my work setup can get overwhelming. Audiobooks give a sense of not only company, but it’s company that I get to control. When I need the silence to think, I can have it. When I need a story to let my mind wander, I can have it.

This blank slate of moving — this reset on my life — has given me the opportunity to fall back in love with audiobooks.

I’m excited to dig into the collection of audiobooks available at my new library, as Libby is now an option for borrowing and downloading easily.  I’ve relied on Audible for the time being because I’ve got enough books available to me there that one credit a month has been sufficient — though I cannot recommend digging into Janssen’s guide to Audible for anyone curious about it or curious how to save money using it (those daily deals are GOOD).

I can’t wait for the weather to finally turn and I can resume a daily habit of walking outside. I can only imagine how many more audiobooks I’ll be enjoying while creating new paths and adventures in this new place.

“What If” and Choices in SF: Version Control by Dexter Palmer and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

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I’ve been on an adult science fiction kick lately, seeking out the hottest and best recent standalone titles. Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road kicked it off earlier in the year, and since then, I’ve been craving more of the same. Two titles – Version Control by Dexter Palmer and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch – have helped sate this craving. Fortunately for me, not only are they well-written and exciting science fiction, they also feature two interlinking tropes that I can’t get enough of: time travel and parallel worlds.

version control palmerIn Version Control, physicist Philip Steiner has been working on a Causality Violation Device for the past decade. This is really a fancy phrase for time machine, but he hates it when anyone calls it that. A time machine is fiction; the CVD is real. Or it would be, if it worked. He and his assistants are on test number three hundred something and the result is always the same: nothing. On the surface, Palmer’s novel is about Steiner, his wife Rebecca Wright, Steiner’s lab assistants (also respected scientists), and Rebecca’s best friend Kate. It traces Rebecca and Philip’s meeting and marriage, their respective jobs (Rebecca works for the dating site where she met Philip), their relationships with their friends, and the fallout from Philip’s obsession with the CVD. Perspective shifts at times between all of these characters, though it focuses mainly on Rebecca (with Philip a close second), and much of the novel seems to be a story of a marriage that is falling apart. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Rebecca and Philip suffered a tragedy a few years ago, one they haven’t really recovered from.

But this is science fiction, so that isn’t the whole story. From the beginning, readers will notice small details that are different about the world Rebecca and Philip inhabit. It’s the present-day, but self-driving cars are ubiquitous. The president will pop up on people’s electronic devices every so often, addressing them by name and complimenting them on a particular detail of their dress, for example. It’s…weird. Off-putting. Intriguing. Rebecca has a general feeling that something isn’t quite right, and when others start to feel this too, psychologists put it down to a side effect of the overuse of technology like smartphones. But because this is a science fiction novel, readers will know right away it has something to do with the Causality Violation Device, that folly of Philip’s that has never shown any evidence of actually working.

Palmer’s novel is clever in many ways. It’s divided into three parts, each more intriguing than the last. The finale is elegantly perfect, reasonable in context of the “physics” Palmer has created for his story, and satisfying in a story sense as well. In fact, I wish I knew some people who had read this so I could discuss the ending with them and just how perfect it is. His version of time travel is also fascinating, different from any other kind of time travel I’ve read about before in fiction.

The book is a big self-indulgent at times. It’s long and wanders down a few paths that aren’t strictly essential to the main plot, like the world of online dating. But in Palmer’s capable hands, these lengthy asides are fascinating, and they lend further insight into this world that is just barely wrong. He tackles casual sexism and racism through a couple of characters’ points of view as well. The asides and deeper themes give the book a more literary feel. One Goodreads reviewer wrote that this book might be “too SF for the Literature with capital L-lovers and too literary and ‘normal’ for the die hard SF-lovers” which I thought was apt. But if you love both Literature and SF, you’ll love Version Control.

dark matter crouchDark Matter is also the story of a marriage, though the tone is quite different. Whereas Version Control was deliberate and thoughtful, Crouch’s story reads much more like a thriller. Jason Dessen teaches physics at a mid-rate local college in Chicago. He’s married to Daniela, who gave up a promising art career to stay home with their son Charlie, whom she became pregnant with before the two were married. Jason himself gave up a much more lucrative physics career because their son (who was born premature) and his marriage required more time than he could give as a scientist stuck in a clean room for twelve or more hours each day. He often wonders what his life would have been like had he not had to do that; he wonders if Daniela has regrets, too. But overall, he’s happy with his choices.

Then one day, as he’s driving home, he’s abducted by a masked stranger. He’s knocked out; when he wakes, he’s in an unfamiliar laboratory and the people around him are welcoming him back home. But this world is not his world. He and Daniela never got married. Charlie was never born. People seem to believe he’s a celebrated scientist who won a major award and has been missing for the past eight months. After a brief time believing he may be crazy, Jason figures out he’s actually been forcibly sent to another version of his world, one where he made the choice to break up with Daniela when she became pregnant and pursue his career instead. Crouch shows us that the person who abducted Jason is now inhabiting his own life, sleeping with his wife and raising his son. Original Jason embarks on a journey to get back, no matter how impossible it seems. His love for Daniela drives him, haunting him across the multiverse as he runs into version after version of her.

The major fault I found in Dark Matter was its drawn-out beginning. It took too long for Jason to finally realize he’s not crazy, he’s not in his own world, and there are in fact infinite versions of the world that he now has the ability to travel through. Anyone who’s read any SF will have figured all of these things out long before; this concept is not new to the genre and is a primary reason why many readers will have picked up the book in the first place. While the beginning is interesting in a character sense, it’s once Jason learns the truth that the story really takes off. Crouch’s multiverse is fascinating, and I loved reading about the many different realities – terrible and wonderful and just plain weird – that Jason explores on his journey to find the one where he belongs. About a quarter of the way from the end, the story goes full-on bananas in the best kind of way, and I was worried that Crouch had written himself into a corner. But he found the solution for his characters (the only one possible, really), and the end is supremely satisfying.

Interestingly, the words “abortion” and “rape” are never used. In the world that Jason wakes up in initially, Daniela was pregnant and then she wasn’t. In Jason’s original world, Jason’s abductor is having sex with his wife without her knowledge of who he truly is. I don’t know if these two elisions were a conscious choice on Blake’s part, but they are two more aspects of this book for the reader to unpack.

The common themes between Version Control and Dark Matter are obvious, and they’re ones science fiction is perfectly suited to tackle. Are my choices permanent, or can they be changed? Should I even wish to change the past? Would I have turned out to be the same person I am now had I made a different choice – big or small – five years ago? Fifteen years ago? What is it that makes me uniquely me? How much impact do my choices make upon the rest of the world? Readers will come away from both of these novels pondering these timeless, thorny questions. Both books are highly recommended.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

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before the fall hawleyA private plane carrying eleven people crashes in the Atlantic. The only two survivors are Scott Burroughs, a mostly has-been painter, and a four year old boy, the son of a Rupert Murdoch-type media mogul named David Bateman who founded an analog of Fox News. Burroughs swam the several miles to shore while towing the boy and as a result is now a celebrity of sorts. But his celebrity status is wholly unwelcome, as he’s hounded by reporters and his every move is monitored. Soon, perhaps inevitably, he’s targeted by a “journalist” who works at the right-wing television station and begins to insinuate that Burroughs had something to do with the crash.

Before the Fall follows each of the victims of the plane crash in the years, months, and days preceding the accident. They include each member of the Bateman family (David, his wife, his nine year old daughter, his four year old son), the Batemans’ bodyguard, their friends the Kiplings, Burroughs, and the plane’s crew. Each person had an interesting life, in the way the old British saying “May you live in interesting times” is often interpreted to be a curse. The Batemans’ young daughter was kidnapped (and recovered) as a toddler, the Kiplings were being investigated for money laundering, one of the flight attendants was being routinely harassed, and so on. It’s in illuminating each of their lives that Hawley’s writing shines. I was initially concerned that his depiction of Maggie Bateman, David’s wife, would be the blueprint for how he wrote about all the women in the story (Maggie as a young woman gave up a career as a schoolteacher somewhat reluctantly after marrying David and now all her thoughts are consumed by her children), but I was relieved that this was not the case. The women in the story, as well as the men, are varied, with unique experiences, thought processes, and personalities. Hawley (and the audiobook narrator Robert Petkoff) excel at getting readers deep into their characters’ minds, and reading about their lives only compounds the tragedy of their deaths.

When he’s not chronicling what happened before the fall, Hawley’s story follows Burroughs after the fall, including the way he deals with the reporter hounding him and slandering him on air. This storyline in particular is hugely satisfying and didn’t play out the way I anticipated. Hawley deftly skewers Fox News and its talking heads (Bill O’Reilly comes to mind as a timely analog for the reporter who targets Burroughs here) and highlights the way certain media outlets fabricate the news instead of reporting it. There’s also the added wrinkle of the incredible amount of money the young boy has just inherited, and the book includes a small but fascinating subplot about the boy’s aunt and her husband under whose care he is now placed.

Readers may be disappointed by the ending; the reason for the plane crash is simple and involves only a couple of people out of the many that Hawley’s book follows. This is a very television-esque kind of way to tell a story, and Hawley, who currently writes for tv series Fargo and Legion, is very good at telling it. So even if you’re a fan of novels where all the disparate threads join together into one satisfying tapestry at the end, you’ll likely still be riveted by Hawley’s story, which does precisely the opposite. Perhaps that is the point. People lead complicated, messy lives, and often, their deaths are without purpose. For most of the people on the plane, the crash really was just a tragedy – they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and their lives had nothing to do with their deaths.

This is a good pick for readers who enjoy character-driven, rather than plot-driven, thrillers.

Scientology: Two Book Reviews

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I’ve been fascinated with Scientology for a while now, for a number of reasons:

  • I grew up without religion, which makes almost every religion a source of interest for me as an outsider;
  • There’s a huge Scientology church right by the University of Texas campus where I went to grad school;
  • It’s an American-founded religion;
  • It’s based on the writings of a science fiction author;
  • It’s intensely secretive and scandal-laden in a pretty awful way;
  • It’s so new compared to most other religions, meaning we are essentially witnessing its adolescent years. Will it manage to find a way into the mainstream, fade into obscurity, or remain a curiosity for most Americans (and others around the world)?

Whenever a new nonfiction title on Scientology is published, I tend to pick it up. By far the best is Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, which was made into a (much too short) HBO documentary of the same name a few years ago. It remains the standard for journalistic, accurate (and quite damning) information on Scientology, its founder L. Ron Hubbard, and its current leaders, namely David Miscavige.

The two books I read recently differ from Wright’s account because they are first-person. In Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, Leah Remini (of the tv show The King of Queens) writes about her time as an actress in Hollywood, growing up in the church, and eventually leaving it. In Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me, Ron Miscavige writes about his own time in the church and his decision to leave it, with a focus on his son, David.

troublemaker reminiOf the two, Remini’s account is better written and more illuminating. I listened to both of these on audio, and Remini narrates hers herself, adding a lot of personality (she has a pretty strong New York accent). She was a second generation Scientologist who got into the church as a child after her mother started attending. She believed in it wholeheartedly for many years, but slowly grew disillusioned after she started to notice things that were off or outright harmful, including particularly bizarre encounters at Tom Cruise’s house and at his wedding to Katie Holmes. Remini may be best known Scientology-wise as the person who filed the missing person report for Shelly Miscavige, David’s wife, who hasn’t been seen in public in almost a decade.

Remini’s first-person account adds more to the Hollywood dimension of Scientology, and we also get a good feel for Remini’s personality. She writes about her career as an actress and her personal life outside of Scientology as well: how she landed her first roles and eventually was cast in The King of Queens, her affair with a married man who eventually became her husband, her thoughts on motherhood. While this kind of stuff probably won’t be the reason most people pick up her book, they’re still pretty interesting thanks to Remini’s off-the-cuff style.

ruthless miscavigeRon Miscavige’s book is less successful. His writing style is drier and more repetitive, but his life also just isn’t terribly interesting up until the point when he begins to talk about Scientology. He’s not necessarily a boring person, but his adventures during his childhood, marriage, and raising a family are all pretty normal, and they’re not buoyed by particularly good writing. The Scientology bits are definitely more engaging, but mainly they just made me sad. Ron writes that he decided to write this book when he discovered David had hired people to follow him after he had been out of the church for many years, and when those private investigators saw what they thought was Ron having a heart attack, David told them not to interfere, “if he dies, he dies.” Awful, yes, but worth writing an expose on your son?

I didn’t find Ron’s stories about David as a kid particularly insightful or illuminating. At one point, he writes that David may be a sociopath but he isn’t sure; this is something a reader could have gathered from any first-person account with David Miscavige, and Ron hasn’t had a first-person encounter with his son in many years anyway. Despite Ron’s blood relation to the most powerful person in Scientology, there was remarkably little new information in his book, and he references third parties extensively. It made me wonder if it was really worth it for Ron to write an entire book about how his son is awful. By all accounts David Miscavige is a worm (understatement), but maybe we didn’t need to hear that from his father. Then again, I was the one who chose to read the book.

What I did find interesting about Ron’s account is that he still believes Scientology holds a lot of truth and goodness, he just thinks the leadership has twisted it into something awful. This is not a perspective you usually get from an ex-Scientologist.