Holes by Louis Sachar

 Holes by Louis Sachar-233 pages

I have seen this movie a couple times and had previously thought about reading this book. However, I didn't get around to until now. I saw it on the shelf at a local bookstore and saw the Newbery Medal sticker. I thought it would be great to read it for this month's challenge. I enjoyed reading this book. The movie doesn't stray far at all from the book (which is likely because the author also wrote the screenplay), which is not common. I really enjoy the movie and the book. 

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan - 288 pages

Okay, so if you love books/bookstores, clandestine mysteries, high fantasy nerdery, and don't mind a couple easy-way-out plot devices, this book is your man.  Or...book.  Whatever, the point is that if Dan Brown, Tolkien, and Ernest Cline had a three way baby book, this would pretty much be it.  It is a shameless geek out about old books, mysterious legacies, high fantasy, secret societies, Googling EVERYTHING, AD&D references, movie props, computer hacking, and buddy adventuring, wrapped up in earnest humor and a glow in the dark cover (seriously, it glows in the dark!).  What is not to love here?! 

Challenger Deep - Neal Shusterman

Challenger Deep - Neal Shusterman - 320 pages

This was...something.  Something disturbing, something hilarious at times, something that inspired sympathetic longing, and something that frankly hurt to read.  This is Caden's seafaring voyage through the treatment of his mental illness, and Shusterman is brilliant at weaving the real and the almost real and the hopefully not real here.  Challenger Deep is the deepest trench in the ocean, and in Caden's delusions, he is the first mate on a pirate ship heading straight for it to collect sunken treasure.  The captain of the ship is changeable and dangerous, his talking parrot cryptic, and each plots against the other with Caden's help.  Caden's fellow hospital dwellers come along through parts of his voyage as different members of the ship's crew, but in the end, it's just Caden and the sea and whatever's at the bottom of it.

What made this such a painful read was the artful way Shusterman wove the real and almost real together, based on his own son's experience with schizoaffective disorder.  Drawings from his son's time in the hospital moonlight on pages throughout the book, illustrating Caden's descent, and the tangible evidence of those drawings promotes a visceral realness to this not-quite-fictional account.  Caden's resignation (and the author's implied resignation) about the difficulty of living with ongoing mental illness make it a bittersweet journey; you're going to want a happy ending, but even if Caden finds his equilibrium back on the high seas, you know he's going back again eventually.  It'd be easy to close the book with a riding off into the sunset victorious moment to satisfy our want for definitive, permanent wins, but what you'll get here is much more honest.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick - 288 pages

Provocative and full of alarming racism from all sides, this book depicts an America that's not the America we know today.  In the wake of a German/Japanese win of WWII, the former U.S. has been split as spoils.  Americans are second class citizens (although frankly, each racial faction regards every other as second class), and everyone is caught up in the power struggle between East and West.

The Man in the High Castle is the author of a book (within the book) which tells the story of a WWII in which the Allies won the day, and that for me was where Dick's creative spirit really shone.  Essentially, his in-book version of what could have been had we won left out FDR and Truman, and extrapolated from there how the world would have shaped up without them.  It's alternative history within alternative history, all skewed by the point of view of whichever character (including, I think, us as readers) happens to be mulling it over in the moment.  His take speaks to inevitability, the crush of power and defeat, and the limits of what humanity can inflict and endure.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel - 352 pages

Arthur Leander is an actor literally dying for his craft on the stage during King Lear, and then the world ends.  Georgia Flu sweeps across the world and wipes out 99% of humanity, leaving the rest scrambling to survive.

The real heart of this book is its cast of characters, all revolving in some way around Arthur.  One man tries to resuscitate him on the stage.  One man is his lifelong friend.  His three ex-wives, his son...all of them connected in some way to Arthur and in smaller ways, to each other.  The most fascinating of these is the girl who was on stage with him for King Lear; in the aftermath of the flu, she joins a travelling symphony and makes her way around the barren Midwest, acting out Shakespeare for the people left along the way.

If you're looking for something heavy on plot, you won't find it here, but what you will find is a deeply engaging, melancholy, regretful, and thoroughly destroyed (in some cases) cast of characters who manage to keep each other alive in memory and deed.

Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer - 208 pages

For a depressing time, call this book.

No, really.  Here we are, hanging out with a biologist on an expedition with three other scientists who have been sent to explore Area X.  They know that the previous twelve (is it twelve?) expeditions have all failed in one way or another; some people come back with terminal cancer, others don't come back at all...so why would anyone volunteer to go again?  As the book unfolds, the biologist's reasons become semi-clear, but not before a conspiracy of her fellow expeditionists, the people that sent them, and even Area X itself are thrown in the mix.

The thing is, this book reads like a bad dream.  Everyone is broken, including the narrator, and that equates to neurotic internal dialogues and paranoia.  There's violence and revelatory discoveries and betrayal, but the narration wrestles around in a scratchy, depressing blanket of bland descriptions and not quite enough clear information to really make sense of anything.  You can infer, you can guess, but the answers just aren't there.