Brilliance by Marcus Sakey

It was predictable. I probably won’t remember it. But it was very entertaining. It was kind of like surprisingly good lemonade.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

He is a doctor. He is not a writer. He had a very good idea. People pushed him to write a book about his good idea, relating it to all sorts of other professions and targeting the common, everyday reader, who reads all sorts of nonfiction self-help books with boring sentences he can methodically work through word by word and understand without effort. I am not mature enough to feel more than pity toward such a reader. By targeting these people, Gawande probably made enough money to help implement other excellent ideas though, which is wonderful. But I’d rather just read about his surgeries (surgeries in which he used his checklist), which seemed much more energetically written than the book as a whole.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

It was hard to put down, but that was just because I can’t stop any serial killer story until the serial killer is stopped (ideally by thoroughly confirmed death). It was decently creative, although the absence of explanations regarding the House made it seem as though the author had a couple good ideas and flew with them instead of spending years working out the details. But that seems to be usual in this genre. While I’m not sure if it was some property of the book, or simply the timing of my reading, it did lead me to some rather serious analysis of my fascination/fear with/of serial killers. Thinking back now to the results of my analyses, they do seem connected to that specific book. So while the characters weren’t particularly attractive and the plot only seemed to contain one predictable SERIAL KILLER thread, it was actually quite thought-provoking.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It started well. The complexity of the entire work appeared in one initial rush, promising that human truths would be articulated through words and layered references I would never choose myself, but that would suddenly appear to be the only things anyone could possibly chose to explain a certain concept. How could Harold Bloom have failed to appreciate this? But after the first couple hundred pages, I understood. The glow disappeared. The complexity resolved itself into two parts. There were the way-too-autobiographical-sounding, painfully detailed substance abuse/violence sections (the violence seeming less autobiographical than the substance abuse, but both so difficult to read that I found myself twisting my legs together more and more tightly on the subway in response to a visceral sense of violation) and the look-at-how-complete-a-world-I-can-create-and-be-impressed sections (Eschaton). The language lost its glamour as well. If I notice an author use a specific word, it is usually for one of three reasons: 1) it is a beautiful, ideal word for that particular situation, often adding value to the sentence because the root makes it punny or just being rare and pretty and appropriate, 2) it is a word I really do not recognize, in which case I need to ascertain whether it’s because of my own ignorance or because it was invented by the author, or 3) it’s an unusual word that the author is attempting to squeeze in somewhere where it doesn’t necessarily belong, but they want to use it just because they like the sound or they think it’s impressive. After multiple noticeable uses, “halcyon” went from a Category 1 to a Category 3. By the entirely unsatisfactory ending, I no longer enjoyed the style (at all), but I do feel as though I understand substance addiction and recovery a lot more than I probably actually do.