Forget 5Ks and half marathons, I think I have to become an ultramarathoner.
Forget 5Ks and half marathons, I think I have to become an ultramarathoner.
I can tell you two things after reading Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects.” First, if you say that a character is left handed, like all geniuses, I will flag that page. Second, Flynn remains someone I would not want to end up with in a dark room.
Some of us have a much easier time growing up than others. That’s not a startling revelation, but it’s good to be reminded of that from time to time as we go through the world and encounter people whose experience with this world is very different from our own.
Knowledge is a weird thing. You can go your entire life completely oblivious to a fact, and then have it come up multiple times right in a row.
Somehow I only posted one time in March. Whoops. Expect much more from April, which technically could be like three posts, but hopefully many more.
One that I could have done last month was posting about Pierce Brown’s “Morning Star,” the third book in the fantastic Red Rising series. If you haven’t read any of them, I insist you immediately reevaluate your life choices and then start.
If I got kidnapped while doing my job, it would be pretty difficult for me to consider continuing in a position where that could happen again.
If I call you Sunny Jim in the near future, blame Nick Hornby.
When I was 14, the only manual labor I had to do was mow the lawn with a ride-on mower. I went to school with no fears of being sent home for being unable to pay. I spent afternoons doing homework, playing baseball and video games knowing a filling meal was coming for dinner every night.
In 2008, I needed a push to read more and set a goal of reading 20 books. I did. The next year I read 21, but haven’t completed more than 18 since. Until 2015. And by that I mean the final hours of 2015, but that very much counts.
With 19 books done and the chance to hit 20 for the year so close, my initial thought was to read one of the shorter Steinbecks on my bookshelf to close out the year. Then I looked at my spreadsheet and noticed I had already read two of his in 2015 and that option quickly soured.
So I asked for help:
@cjhannas Have you read Station Eleven? It looks like a good year-ender. ?
— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) December 25, 2015
This turned out to be an excellent cjhannas move. Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” was a tremendous year-ender, which also happened to be about the near-end of the world. At least the human part of it.
I was a little annoyed at first with the way the story jumps around to different sets of characters in different places and different time periods, but as the book went on I found my reaction to a new chapter was more like, “OH! These people! Need to know what’s going on with them.”
The basic premise is that a ridiculously effective flu has wiped out most of the population and those who remain live in small groups in otherwise abandoned cities or as travelers. Or as a traveling group that performs Shakespeare plays when they stop in a town.
There’s an old actor and his bevy of ex-wives, a young actress and her comic book, a reformed paparazzo, a prophet, an artist, and a swimming pool with double moon light. Mandel drops hints and reminders about how they all connect that leave you saying, “Riiiiight, yes yes,” as the pieces fit together and all the players figure out more and more what the post-flu word is.
At times it’s a little depressing, but also made me think a lot about what would happen if the lights went off and never came back on. And yet, there’s an underlying hope in some of the characters about returning to what they once knew that is refreshing in such a setting.
It was also hard not to think about the Fox show “Last Man On Earth,” which doesn’t explain why many of the people in the world died, but has a similar focus on the small group that is left. That show is intentionally much more comedy focused but touches on similar ideas like the first task of figuring out if you’re the only one left, and if not, how do you find the others? In that case the main character spray paints “Alive in Tucson” on billboards and eventually some people show up.
In the book, people meet by accident in small travels, and then wonder and dream about the world beyond.