Review of The Living Mountain

 The Living Mountain
Nan Shepherd
Publisher: Canongate Books
Date of Publication: October 2019 (my edition); first published January 1977

Hiking nowadays is a bit of a science. Food and water required are calculated based on duration and elevation. Duration and elevation are calculated based on exercise completed during the past week and earlier. Different gear is marketed to every conceivable type of hiker. All that calculation and preparation can impart more of a sense of conquest than contemplation. Nan Shepherd’s version of hiking was not a science. It was hardly even hiking. It was an expression of love for her mountains, Scotland’s Cairngorms, a quiet, open, enraptured investigation. The Living Mountain is a snapshot of Shepherd’s mountains in all seasons and all conditions, an effort to describe and understand the Cairngorms as a living and unpredictably tutelary entity.
Shepherd’s work, though just topping 100 pages, reads like Guinness and chocolate cake: rich, seductive, almost too much for the palate to take in one sitting. It was almost too much for Shepherd, too; though she spent most of her life on, or in the shadow of, her Cairngorms, it took her more than three decades to publish what she wrote. “[I]t is to know [the plateau’s] essential nature that I am seeking here,” she writes on the first page, claiming her quest as one almost spiritual in its honesty and intensity. From this quest, her prose takes on a variety of qualities. She explains to the experientially impoverished the mountains’ fickle and illusory shifts of fog and distance, and how to walk on certain grasses barefoot. She can be as lyrical as a bard about sleeping outdoors, and whispers, awed, of her encounters with birds and deer. Her writing gives a sense of frustration with the limits of human language and speech to convey the full scope of her physical and perceptual encounters. Yet her writing also shares a sense of intense joy from being able to write about the Cairngorms, a joy of being able to translate her experiences and wonder into words.
Shepherd’s writing, like her treks, is both enriching and almost exquisitely wearying, both dense and lighthearted. Her physical and linguistic exertions focus outward, reaching for her own comprehension even as she reaches for her readers’ attention. This is not to say she is without moments of simple joy and fear, wandering barefoot in summer or caught in a freak blizzard in winter. But her book is meant to create soft feelings for a hard rise of earth, a sensitivity to more than a sensitivity for[ku2.1] a landscape that nurtures and destroys in ambivalent, unpredictable turn. She is necessarily rooted in her own body, but her understanding of the Cairngorms is formed by constantly probing the capabilities, the joys, and furthest stretches of her physical and perceptual limits. She extends herself into the mountains, learning them by devoted attention and immersion.
The Living Mountain is a devotional. It is romantic, but it is also pragmatic, an invitational acceptance of those who open themselves to landscapes, as Shepherd has, and a dismissal of those who see mountains only as finite, conquerable points. Read it in bites. Savor this locally sourced single malt distillation of Shepherd’s lifelong sense of deeply rooted wonder.

Review of House of Names

House of Names
Author: Colm Toíbín
Publisher: Scribner
Date of Publication: March 2018 (my edition); first published May 2017

Ancient epics sing of a decade of war fought over possession of one woman and the pride of many men. They tell of the wrath of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus, the pride and obstinacy of Agamemnon. They tell of Agamemnon’s return home, and his murder by his own wife in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. House of Names is an imaginative adjunct to one of our oldest and most retold tales from the perspective of some if its lesser-known victims and perpetrators. This particular story begins with the rage and grief of Clytemnestra, a mother deceived, bereft, and abandoned, and spins out the story of herself and her children Electra and Orestes, a family twisted and wrecked by that rage and grief.
What makes this story so darkly credible is the corrosiveness of suffering and the relentless brutality. There are brutalities of all scales, from Agamemnon’s murder to the particular methods of rape and execution. This is not a happy story. It is not meant to be. The characters’ motives and circumstances impel madness and martyrdom. They give particular shape to Orestes, a child when his sister (Iphigenia) is sacrificed. Forgotten by a mother hell bent on infinite revenge, he is forced prematurely into manhood by the necessities of survival. He must kill, but he also clings to an ill-fated faith in love and companionship. It makes him likeable, and it also dooms him to obscurity because he is resistant to partaking in the cruelty that drives the power structures surrounding him. The anonymity that shapes Orestes’ adult life, and the impossibility of him experiencing normal, relatively easy partnership after the rending of his family, show the cost of lust for blood and power in ways both sharp and tender.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of this story is cohesively developing a family so irreparably damaged, untrusting, and unforgiving. Clytemnestra’s backstory and the sacrifice of Iphigenia are recounted—in a somewhat explanatory, unsatisfyingly declarative manner—and then she is developed into a character terrifying and terrifyingly naive. She fails to protect the family she kills for, including herself, and she tries to fix her grief and helplessness by committing atrocities similar to the ones for which she murdered her husband. These qualities make her complex, and parallel other characters of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but they are developed somewhat independently from the stories of her children. Electra and Orestes’ lives are not self-enclosed, but their stories are self-enclosed. 
This is a story worth reading for the intention, even if ancient myths do not compel you. Different from its Homeric progenitors, this story is stripped of gods and their vagaries, leaving only human characters to bear the full weight of their darkness. The Odyssey is in many ways a story of human folly and visicissitudes of want and ambition. House of Names follows this thread of self-exploration, breaking from the way in which the epic is told but perhaps not why it is told. The characters are connected mostly by shared death and bitterness; that doesn’t make for an easy story to develop or read, but it is a story worth telling – and heeding. 

Review of Piranesi

Piranesi

Author: Susanna Clarke

Publisher: The Folio Society Ltd. 2025

Date of Publication: May 2025 (Folio Society edition)

 

    In his whole world, two people live. In the whole world, the bones of less than twenty people have been found and honored. The world is a labyrinth of ancient halls peopled only by statues, tides sweeping their bottom layer and constellations lighting the top layer, the one livable floor in the center. For the narrator the halls and his sole fellow occupant are all the life he needs– until a third person appears, and the narrator begins to question what his halls and his mind might hide.

    There is a slippery quality to the writing that comes from the partially mad narrator for whom the book is named. Piranesi reveals the world in journal entry chapters. The reader learns of labyrinth life through his awe and curiosity, his reverence for unexplained statues and bones, and his careful documentation of the threats and resources of the tides. It is a method of world-building both frustrating and seemingly elementary. Piranesi queries the logistics of his world and admires its beauty, but seeks only to inhabit it fully, not know either its purpose or his within it. This leaves the reader equally alone to grapple with the improbability of his labyrinth and his incomplete conceptions of it, limited by the physical and mental bounds of his curiosity and experience. Piranesi must be trusted, skeptically – his is the only account of his world. The reader is held in suspense, not just skepticism, by the tension between his naivete (its own kind of madness) and his knowledge.

    There are two primary kinds of madness in Piranesi’s world. There is his own, revealed piece by piece as caused by others. And there is the madness of the Other, his one living companion, who demands of the labyrinth purpose and gifts, not just the requirements of survival. The greed and impatience of the Other alongside Piranesi’s patient, accepting contentment give Piranesi a comparative humanity that gentles the effect of his naivete on the reader. Yet just as the reader comes to trust him as a narrator, Piranesi loses trust in himself and his world. His grief and the maturity with which he approaches the massive uprooting of his life beg the question of what is more mad: accepting and embracing the world as it is, or trying to force it to explain and accommodate, as the Other does.

    The subtleties of this book made me appreciate it more after reading than during reading. The slow build of madness expressed as innocence, the vague sense of unease without one focal point, and Piranesi’s explanation of the setting in a way that only makes sense to him make the read unsatisfying at times. But the same things that leave the reader discontented are the ones that I found myself discussing days after finishing the book. Pick it up when you have time to be a quietly frustrated, a little sad, and willing to question whether Piranesi’s madness is more riddle or gift, what we lose when we ask the world to explain itself.

 

 

Review of The Da Vinci Code

 The Da Vinci Code

Author: Dan Brown

Publisher: Doubleday

Date of Publication: March 2003

 

In Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call. The curator of the Louvre has been found, murdered, inside the museum. On his body remains a stupefying cipher, leading to hidden meanings in Da Vinci’s works. To solve both the murder and the cipher, Langdon joins forces with French cryptologist Sophie Neveu. Langdon and Neveu become involved in an intense race against an anonymous, powerful actor trying to solve the same mysteries. Unless they can beat their threatening opponent, the curator’s secrets, and critical historical truth, will be lost forever.

This book reads foremost as a page turner. There are car chases, villains on the edge of madness, and layers of riddles with answers just out of reach. The Paris setting gives Brown opportunities to divert characters’ attention to local scenery and tourist attractions when the characters—and sometimes the readers—need to catch their breath. The combination of the story’s reliance on real art and organizations, its nerdy protagonists, and the mystery thriller genre makes the book a reinvigorating read for students or academics accustomed to more dense literature.

Brown’s choice of genre does create some challenges. His story can sometimes feel like an unresolved conflict of interest between dangerous, fantastical adventure, and explaining the conspiratorial historical context on which the adventures rely. The opening scene, the murder of an art curator by an albino religious zealot, suggests that the real world will provide a physical launch point for the events of the story, but that the plot takes a less familiar path. Brown’s writing oscillates between two primary styles: paragraphs on art and architecture, and dialogue between Sophie and Robert. The culture sections read more as miniature lessons than transitional plot points. The research is impressive and interesting, and anchoring for a story whose progressive mysteries revolve in large part around ancient religious artifacts and famous art. However, given Brown’s interest in the pure history of the real works he uses, the dialogue between Sophie and Robert has to remind the reader why the lessons are relevant to the fiction. They are a bridge between action and elucidations. This comes at the cost of character development, and weakens the depth of scenes that rely on exchanges between the two.

Brown’s writing can also be a bit clunky when it comes to establishing a scene. He writes from a third person limited perspective, which suits the mystery genre. Yet a lot that has to be shown and made intriguing to the reader in every scene—why a particular riddle is so challenging to solve, why the codebreakers are on the run, etc. To show all the angles and risks involved without giving away the rest of the story, Brown switches between characters, often backtracking a bit when that switch occurs. It is an effective method of explaining different motivations and fears driving his character’s actions. However, it can create abrupt interruptions in both the flow of the story and the reader’s engrossed attention.

But like many a Paris adventure, The Da Vinci Code is fun. It is fast. It’s just a little crazy. The puzzle solving relies on the interweaving of real and imagined history, creating a desire to know what of that history is actual fact, what stems from religious or academic convictions, and whether the characters are driven by fictitious or legitimate beliefs. The riddles and puzzles require physical action and risk to solve, giving tangibility and immediacy to the characters’ experience. Even though the protagonists are not the most developed individuals, they are likeable and vulnerable. Hope for their survival and their victory propels the story, as does eager curiosity. Brown’s style may not be for every reader. However, his book is perfect for a day of travel, a stormy evening, a voracious late-night binge illuminated by a dimmed book light - whenever a reader is lucky enough to have time to let themselves be uncritically consumed by the thrill of fantastical questions, urgent dangers, and startling possibilities.

 

Review of North Woods

 North Woods

Author: Daniel Mason

Publisher: Random House

Date of Publication: September 2023

North Woods is an amalgamation of beautiful longing, displaced love, familial friction, and the forced alienation of the past from the present. It is a lovely literary lament that blurs and intermingles the vitality of the living and the dead. Old American ballads tell ghost tales between chapters. Each character is both elevated and humbled. Farmland is wild, then tamed, then rewilded, then retamed, until old beams are tangled with tree roots, until the separation between what is and what was and what will be becomes tenuous and ephemeral. 

An escape into virgin woods. A rough cabin becomes a home. A refuge for a soldier, an anchor for a lovesick mother, a winter shelter for a cat thought to be long gone. The cabin’s orchard, a source of delicious success and bitter agony, of blossoming enlightenment and brutal loss. As the home expands and crumbles, as the area around it endures its own alterations, the past woven into the story of the home pushes to the surface. The land and the home it harbors beg to divulge their secrets, whether or not the human inhabitants want to listen.

Tension drives much of this story. It exists between the inhabitants of the home—between the residents enthralled with the land and the residents that begrudgingly endure its trials. It exists between the wilderness beyond the house that sustains the spirit and the tamed land that sustains the body. It exists between the past held in dirt and bark and apple seeds and the present that tries to smother and forget it all. The tension drives the story because the tension is the story. The house is a perfect focal point because of the tension inherent in construction of an immovable dwelling—the attempt to integrate into a landscape by changing it. It is too artificially solid to adapt to the land and too fragile to permanently join with the land, much like the people that come to occupy the house. The more that its inhabitants struggle, and the more that the land around it suffers, the more life the house resides in those who have already passed through it. Loss feeds the supernatural presence in the story. Ghosts that are both victims and perpetrators of loss adhere to the place that sustained them and the human love they wanted, had, and lost. The evolution of the land is entirely entangled with the longing, ecstasy, selfishness, and grief of human relationships. In all this confusion, there arises a sense of purposelessness. Maybe there is meant to be a derived message: change is always burdened with loss; land is ceaselessly burdened by stories; every action has an aftermath. Maybe readers are just meant to deeply feel a cascading kaleidoscope of loss, pinned at its center by this place in the North Woods, and learn from it. 

The intertwining of timelines and characters feels remarkably natural in this book. What begins as the narrative of one person turns into the narrative of three, then five, then a host of animals, and so forth. Each tale is slotted into the next as folklore with concrete evidence and impact. No thread overwhelms another, yet each retains a tangible presence. It is a lovely way to make clear how the past informs the present. The last chapter is thus tasked with neatly tying off a pattern of growth. The character chosen to be the vessel of this finality is unsure of herself and burdened with various personal problems. She lacks a bond with the physical home that grounds the book. Her purposelessness diverges from the tenacious ghosts with whom she shares the North Woods, and prevents her from having a concentrated impact on either the landscape around her or the reader beyond her. All these factors make her story feel like an unraveling and an attenuation rather than a natural point of finality. The downturn of this ending does have one positive: it indicates the quality of the rest of the book.

North Woods is an exercise in imagination. The integration of fables, fiction, various time periods, and an old house pinning it all together may not be for every reader. It is dispirited and hopeful, curious and lamenting. It is for readers with an unnamed, unclear longing for a piece of the world and a piece of the past they will never experience. 

Review of Babylon's Ark

Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
Author: Lawrence Anthony, with Graham Spence
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Date of Publication: March 2007

 

               In March 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, beginning the Iraq War and what would be the end of Sadam Hussein’s rule. Within a month, the capital, Baghdad, had fallen. One of the first civilians to enter the country and reach Baghdad was Lawrence Anthony. A prominent conservationist from South Africa, he feared for the residents of the Baghdad Zoo, trapped in cages in one of the city’s worst conflict zones and additionally devastated by looting. Working with local staff who risked their lives to come to the Zoo every day, Anthony scrounged food and materials from bullet-riddled streets and earned the compassion and aid of American soldiers. This is the story of starved royal lions, black market zoo busts, intense and reckless bravery, and a beautifully stubborn effort to rescue some of the most hopeless victims of human brutality.     

What makes Babylon’s Ark a great story is that it is entirely, heartrendingly real. If there are any gaps between Anthony’s memory and his tale, they are invisible. With each chapter comes a new challenge and a harrowing solution. Anthony’s struggles range from finding a cold beer in a powerless Middle Eastern summer to rescuing a deplorably caged bear from one of the most dangerous parts of Baghdad. These struggles are remarkable not just for their face-value risks, but because of the improbable dedication they require to solve. Anthony’s bullheaded, well-meaning charge into a war zone earns the respect, protection, and gradual assistance of American soldiers. The Zoo staff and other Iraqis that join the support team are not so protected. With Hussein’s loyalists still on patrol and anti-American sentiment at an all-time high, visible collaboration with a foreigner—even if he is South African—could be a death sentence. Not only that, but all resources provided by Iraqi locals are scrounged from a city intensely and violently plundered with scant attention to the animals caught in the (literal and figurative) crossfire. Many messages are conveyed by the story, and more still explicitly stated by Anthony. The most atrocious casualties of war are those who are helpless. Cross-cultural communication is invaluable. When we destroy the environment that both awes and feeds us, we imperil not just human life, but human decency.

               Anthony’s literary skill falls a bit short of his conservation prowess. Particularly earlier in the book, excessive and awkward linguistic flourishes encumber an already detailed narrative and an oddly romantic air to a ravaged, hostile city[ku1] . However, in a story this eccentric, some strange language is arguably just another adventure for the reader. Anthony’s tangents about trials at his home game reserve or oddly specific details of his interactions with soldiers suit the story of a man devoted to an unusual life path and sanguine about the associated risks. The book seems to accomplish its purpose: to use the story of the Baghdad Zoo to encourage awareness of interdependency between humans and nature, and to encourage care for the animals we look to for inspiration – and who depend upon our care and regard. Anthony’s chronicle is a reminder that true stories can and should embolden us to attempt the improbable. The world is a little bit better because Anthony did.

Review of Ink and Bone (The Great Library #1)

Ink and Bone (The Great Library, Book 1)
Author: Rachel Caine
Publisher: New American Library
Date of Publication: July 2015

 

Should knowledge be shared or controlled? Can powerful institutions change? Rachel Caine is both writer and director in this blockbuster book that is at once fast paced and philosophical.

Tota est scientia. Knowledge is all. The Great Library of Alexandria is a globally dominant force, governing the flow of knowledge to the masses. Alchemy makes possible the instantaneous delivery of literature, but personal ownership of books is forbidden. Jess Brightwell, born into a family of black-market book dealers, grows up bound to, and watched by, the Library. His belief in the institution’s value withstands his own persecution—until he is sent to the Great Library to become his family’s spy. While training and competing to enter the Library’s service, Jess and his peers are tested for loyalty to an institution they increasingly question. Controlling knowledge requires an unyielding and sometimes brutal authority over the people who seek it.

Within three pages, Jess is running. Ink and Bone begins with a chase scene, and the action movie tempo continues from there. The story is heavily plot driven, and creates intrigue from danger and secrecy. Caine’s careening exhilaration is highly compelling, but has benefits and drawbacks as a writing device. The world of the story is incrementally revealed, steadily feeding the plot’s momentum as the pace accelerates and subthemes develop. What this need for momentum limits is the development of the characters. The characters feel right in number to enable plot twists and give some depth to the fictional world without becoming a legion of extras. However, there are also enough that the time and detail required for them to deepen and evolve would overburden the plot. The characters’ inclination to action movie stereotypes actually underlies the thrill of the book. Among the roster is an innocent good guy, a bully and his cronies, a mysterious woman, and the protagonist just trying to survive. They are guided by their backstories in their patterns of decision making, their interactions with their peers, and even in the paths laid out for them by people with greater power. Their sojourns and trials are excitingly fraught, but somewhat predictable.

Despite these limitations, Ink and Bone is purposeful as well as exciting. Jess is the most quickly and fully detailed character, allowing him to be the lens through which the world of the story can be satisfactorily revealed. The quick plot provides light content for younger readers, who can also engage with the clearcut emotions of the characters. Even for older readers, the pace and story are riveting and there is also substance to contemplate in the structure and secrets of the Library. Jess’ familial ties to the black market shape what he values and criticizes in the Library, prompting consideration of how the power of knowledge and the written word can change based on their management. For audiences drawn to more fast-paced content, this is a wonderfully fun adventure through a world with ruthless pursuit, robed villains, and where independent thought is at once demanded and dangerous. For those steeped in more solemnly topical literature, this book feels painfully relevant to a time when the power of words and writers seems at once essential and imperiled.

Review of Birds Without Wings

Birds Without Wings

Author: Louis de Bernières

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: June 2005

 

This is a story with a beating heart.

A small village in southwestern Anatolia. Ottomans who speak in Turkish, write in Greek, and pay homage both to Allah and to Christian icons. Children, already betrothed, play at the noises of goats and birds. Women tend to the young and the dead, and men tend to their crafts and their games of backgammon. Nothing remains the same once the land that is to become Turkey enters war in the early twentieth century. New patriotism, new loyalty, and new sacrifices change not just political order, but people.

Birds Without Wings is incredibly compelling and equally dense. Bernières shapes his story through his characters, their lives, and the changes that both undergo. The characters are given individual definition by Bernières’ skillfully varying style and diction. Birds Without Wings is historical fiction, though in a deeply personal sense; the fullness of the characters enriches the substantive sense of the period in which they exist. Perhaps the only drawback of this approach to storytelling is that it limits and directs how Bernières relates critical background. Interwoven with the history of the village of Eskibahçe is the history of the Ottoman Empire’s conflict and downfall in the early 20th century. Rather than just saying what happened and risking a disruptive tonal shift, Bernières writes the experiences of several characters in those conflicts. One is Atatürk, Turkey’s founder, called by his birth name Mustafa Kemal in the book. The others are small town inhabitants caught in sweeping, violent political fervor. The transmitting of Ottoman and Turkish history through those vessels both humanizes large-scale history and allows Bernières to direct focus to particular messages. However, this approach - keeping international turmoil intimately linked with personal turmoil - also limits the scope of what the author can share.

For all the words spent explaining that critique, take this as a counter: this book is powerful in its content, direct but not suffocatingly polemic in its messages, and luxuriously rich in its prose. It is not a happy book. Death and disappearance are frequent. The pain endured in Eskibahçe as a result of frustratingly senseless political decisions suggests the suffering of millions more. Yet Birds Without Wings has the qualities that leaven a book hefty in content and emotion. There is consistent humor, both obvious and subtle. There is love of all types, tested and strong. There are themes that give the book clear purpose. There are little details given to each character, presented like a gift of intimacy to the reader who witnesses them. Bernières has meticulous control over his writing, giving weight to each sentence and a sense of thoughtful care to the story at large. This is a book whose characters’ voices will rise vibrantly from the page, and whose content will captivate those drawn to stories both pertinent and lyrically potent.

Review of Orbital

Orbital

Author: Samantha Harvey

Publisher: Grove Press

Date of Publication: October 29, 2024

 

         In space, the body rebels. It sleeps and wakes based on instructions from machines. The air it breathes is recycled and recirculated. The mind becomes the body’s sole authority on what demands and is worthy of attention. It must be hard to both control and obey that mind when circling the Earth 16 times a day. Orbital covers one day in the lives of several astronauts—16 trips around the globe. It is a meditative, lonely, lyrical veneration of the place we inhabit, gently mournful about how we inhabit that home.

         This is not science fiction that leans hard into technological specificities. It is instead dedicated in its effort to truly occupy the headspace of people observationally suspended, both weightless and quite literally detached, from the only home they know. Harvey does not diminish the enormity of her characters’ accomplishment. Instead, her astronauts’ wonder at their position is counterbalanced by their intense love for a home that they have worked so hard and risked so much to leave. It is not the space they are in that eventually binds them; it is their new ability to observe and reflect on their lives from afar. Each view of Earth is written with similar structure and content, giving the space station the static, familiar role of home. The space station has to become as familiar to the astronauts as the home they came from before they can look at Earth with a mix of fresh awe and critical detachment. The writing moves quickly from one astronaut’s mind to another, and uses the views as a form of rhythmic continuity physically connecting the astronauts’ varying temperaments. Those transitions communicate that shared experience does not always create shared perspective. However, they can make it difficult to keep track of which defining traits belong to which character. The integration of an immense physical journey into the ruminations of, and changes within, each astronaut creates the sense of action continually mounting without a climax, not unlike the astronauts’ perpetually forestalled fall toward Earth. While this might frustrate some readers, it gives some movement to a meditative book.

         For a book in part about observational detachment and grounding perspective, the marketing on and within the cover was frustratingly distracting. A defining point of the rear cover summary—that the space mission narrated is one of the last of its kind—is not referenced or relevant in the story itself, rendering the mention a weirdly misleading attention grab. Also detracting from the insular contemplation that defines Orbital, inside the front cover, before the title appears, there are numerous pages of promotion and praise blurbs. As a reader, I would prefer to enjoy a story without having to wade through pages of gushy pap from the publicity team before I even read the first paragraph written by the actual author.

         But this gripe is with the words that describe Orbital, not the ones that comprise it. The book itself is a reflection on the purposes and effects of exploration, why and how we love, and the results of being untethered from the known world. To those who enjoy a faster pace and a more grounded story, this book is probably not for you. To those for whom the mental journey complements and enriches the physical, do consider an Orbital sojourn.

Review of The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Scribner

Date of Publication: January 1971

    There’s nothing like waking abruptly from the middle of a dream, feeling on the verge of falling out of bed, to make you question reality. My body is tingling and strangely foreign, while my mind tells me that I have gone nowhere since I fell asleep. I feel entirely awake even as my frightful, still imagining subconscious tries to tell me that nothing I experience is real. This is the world in The Lathe of Heaven—abuzz, disorienting, and torn between the governance of the mind and an anarchy of the senses. It is terrifyingly brilliant and disorientingly familiar.

    George Orr is a man without much substance or significance. Yet he has discovered that he has the power of affective dreaming. He can literally change the world. Distraught at his capability, he consults a psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who sees and seizes an opportunity to improve the world. As Orr’s control over his power decreases, he becomes increasingly desperate to keep the world as it as and reign in his mind.

    In the case of George Orr, dreaming the world anew means that he is the only one who knows what was lost and what was gained in the change. It is an incredibly isolating premise. Not just the abstract world at large, but the people around him change, the place where he earns his keep changes all the time, and even his home can change in one night between sleeping and waking. Each time Orr has an affecting dream, he endures all the grief, fear, hope, and resignation that someone else might endure over the course of several years of change and loss. Le Guin does a beautiful job of conveying the toll of constant, isolating loss and novelty. Orr has no choice about whether he stays the same. He is both more deeply connected to his world and more deeply disconnected from it than anyone around him. His sanity is admirable, his desire to eliminate his power is humbling, and his ironic helplessness is pitiable. Because of all that Orr is and all that he cannot be, he is the perfect encapsulation of how awful it can be to be ordinary.

    This story amplifies many familiar doubts. George Orr has the hypothetical power to create an ideal world, yet no actual control over his capability to do so. His memories of each life “lived” blur together. He loves people who in some of his worlds never lived. In The Lathe of Heaven, idealism is of tenuous value, loving someone may become a waste, and while the mind is the only real source of truth, it can reinvent the truth at any time. Orr is a character that readers can empathize and connect with, yet not want to become. That is what makes him so human, and that is part of what makes the story so powerful.

    Le Guin’s writing is as magnificent as the character and story she tells. Her character descriptions are consistent without becoming repetitive. She shies away from excessive worldbuilding, as Orr’s world is always changing, but there is enough to give shape and flavor to each iteration. The details she does share evoke a place both crowded and lonely, aptly chosen for a protagonist experiencing Orr’s cruel capability. Her dialogue feels straight out of the minds of her characters, unfiltered and structured hastily as it leaves their mouths. Her diction aids a mounting sense of disturbance and disorientation. I finished Le Guin’s book and felt as though I was situated in the wrong world, that my mind should be able to position me within the covers I had just closed. Upon finishing Le Guin’s book, I had the sense that somehow, her worlds were more real than mine, even as they perpetually unmade themselves.

    This book is for the people that live in their heads and question the workings of their world and the limits of perception. It is for the people who wish they could be something other than themselves. It does what the best science fiction does: amplifies and extrapolates the strange, uncomfortable aspects of the world we think we know.

Review of The Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea

Author: Ray Nayler

Publisher: Picador

Date of Publication: May 30, 2023

 

                  A few specifics first: this story involves octopuses, creepy corporate bosses and henchmen, and pirate ships. Now a little more meta. People sometimes incline to notice the bizarre and miss the obvious. The Mountain in the Sea takes this idea and applies it to our current social structures and belief in what we know. It points out how we willfully fail to learn much of what is readily apparent and most critical, how any growth can become cancerous, and how people can withdraw so deep into themselves that they lose track of their actual center. Don’t give up! Just like my review, this story just takes a little bit of time and attention to get truly interesting.

                  The world in the book exists vaguely as it does today. Nations govern. Technology corporations increasingly blur the lines between business and government. People fight to save the planet and to kill each other, depending on the day and place. In this quasi-modern era, the massive tech company DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. A small team forms around the mission of studying them: marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent half her life researching cephalopod intelligence; a battle-scarred security agent; and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. Their efforts are complicated by forces larger than DIANIMA attempting to seize the octopuses for themselves.

                  The concepts that inspire Nayler’s worldbuilding are well tailored to the story he tells. As technology leads to the development of more specialized jobs, new tech is as likely to be used for abuse as for enrichment. There is the feeling that both governments and non-governmental international organizations are either dictatorial or on the verge of losing control, and that people’s control over their own lives grows scarcer as well. Threats to survival grow even as resources diminish. These concepts, rooted in contemporary social experience, provide a solid departure point for Nayler’s advancement beyond our current inventions and discoveries. Where the story threatens to overburden itself is Nayler’s messy worldbuilding. The first portion of the book is filled with a number of novel technological creations, fictional corporations and their unnamed actors, and the required character development. The amount of novel items and social organization without sufficient elucidation is distracting. Excessive worldbuilding is sometimes paired with over explanation of Nayler’s characters. The characters are thought exercises as much as people – a quality I personally enjoyed – but the more a character is a vehicle, the less it is a person. Nayler’s alternating between the perspectives of several characters can also complicate how he uses those characters. They often feel more separated than connected due to the extreme variations between who they are and the circumstances that challenge them. As the story focuses more directly on the complicated thought processes of those characters, it clarifies in both its primary points of interest and its emotional heft. However, that focus on experience rather than place needs to occur a little sooner. I was most captivated by this book when I could picture the forehead wrinkles of a scientist frustrated by the impotence of her knowledge, or when I could feel the sadness of a person stuck in a place where they don’t belong. That re-connected me with the story. The problem was I often needed re-connecting because the writing had interrupted my connection.                   

For all of my gripes about the distractions of this book, there were some key elements that I liked. I look for books that make me both think and feel. Nayler inverted the typical linkage of those two things: The Mountain in the Sea made me feel because I was thinking, and not the other way around. I loved the choice to manifest our ignorance in the form of the endangered, knowledgeable octopuses, and the fact that the various actors in the book went to extremes to seize, understand, and use those octopuses. The ending is left entirely open, and that becomes surprisingly satisfying once the dilemmas and mental processes of the characters become the true focal point. I would suggest that readers regard this book as an otherworldly thought exercise to get the most out of their reading experience.

Review of Cloud Cuckoo Land

 Cloud Cuckoo Land

Author: Anthony Doerr

Publisher: Scribner

Date of Publication: September 2021

I am still catching my breath, emerging from this story. So my beginning offering is a collection of thoughts, harvested from my reading experience.

For the last 200 pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land, I felt as if I was preparing to fall. The story builds upon itself like a great tsunami, each word sucking me in reverse up to the crest of the wave.

We use the word “amateur” to refer to someone who is yet a fool in the field in which they play. Amateur has spiraled out from the Latin “amator,” lover, from “amare,” to love. To be a fool is to love is to do as we should and as we often must.

To know one thing is to be aware of ten other unknowns. Knowledge is power and knowledge is fear, and that is a dangerous combination.

To tell stories is not just a diversion, or a game, or a conjuring from rarefied air. Stories are survival, repeated survival. All of them, real or imagined, are underpinned by a hope that something formed through the words will capture and lift and submerge the reader in a whirl and depth of feeling that they have not yet experienced and may not yet comprehend. Maybe from that lack of solid knowledge, an amator will emerge, look onto the world anew.

And now, for the characters.

In the fifteenth century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book – the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross.

In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.

And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of paper the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.

They are grappling with adulthood in worlds in peril, and they find resilience, hope, and an improbable, improbably preserved story.

To create a character is an intimidating task. To create five different main characters, each with their own separate stories, is difficult on yet another improbable level. Like all the best storytellers, Doerr has a level of mastery that lets the reader disregard the effort and fully inhabit the tale. Each adventure, each setting, each nuance of those five characters, is so transfixingly tangible that they are near impossible to forget even over the course of 574 pages. The book does not feel burdened by the weight of the numerous times, tales, and emotions it recounts. Instead, it feels oddly, definitively, complete. The compendium of the characters’ collective lives creates a mounting sense of need to read the book, not simply to get to the end, but because the characters are quite literally the past, present, and future: Constantinople, modern-day Idaho, and interstellar odyssey. They are not always pretty people. They are always changing, and always seeking constants that will help them abide and preserve the places that make them. But they grow, and they hurt, and they love, and they come to feel so familiar that I grieved parting from them.

That delicious grief owes to Doerr’s gift for the linguistic mechanics of storytelling, allowing a collection of words to become a single current, one that carries and coheres. Each sentence is an artful, thoughtful construction that urges the reading of the next. Each paragraph or section within a chapter is a story in miniature. He leaves no detail up to chance, be it the weight that a name holds, the feeling a sound instills, the motion in a particular moment. The imagination of the book is directed by Doerr’s words instead of being contained by them. The links that ultimately appear between the stories his words create are firm enough to solidify the similarities between his characters’ trials, but light enough to let those stories exist independently as well. In that way, the shape and fluidity of the words compares to the structure of the book itself.

To those who enjoy fantasy, history, intrigue, and a dynamic invention, this book is for you. To the poets, the curious, the ones who feel everything frighteningly deeply, the existential thinkers, the adventurous, and the bold, this is for you as well. Please. Dig in.

- D. K. Nuray