Three Great Books #46

Including the thriller that got me out of a long slump.

Dead Money, by Jakob Kerr

I’ve been in a reading slump since February. This book — a thriller set in the San Francisco-area tech scene — jolted me out of it. It begins when a custodian discovers the body of Trevor Canon, CEO and founder of the Uber-esque startup Journy, who has been shot to death in his office. Canon held a big chunk of Journy’s equity, but it’s frozen due to a very recent change in his will. So Mackenzie Clyde, an investigator for the VC firm that sank $5 billion into the company, is assigned to help out an ambitious young FBI agent in solving the murder (and tracking down Journy’s CTO, who seems to be missing). Whodunnit? How did Mackenzie get this singular job in the first place? And why does she feel like she’s being followed? This is fun and twisty, with a very satisfying ending.

The Sirens’ Call, by Chris Hayes

I know I’m not the only one who struggles to focus my attention on the things that truly matter — friends and family, a good book, taking a walk and listening to the birds chirp — rather than on the endless stream of compelling but meaningless crap served up by my phone. In this book, MSNBC host Hayes argues that our limited, and therefore valuable attention is “the very thing that makes us human,” and that the tech companies, media companies and politicians looking to extract it from us are basically “cracking into our minds.” He writes that “every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.” Hayes’ own job in the attention economy gives him a unique perspective, and I thought his analysis — and how we might individually and collectively change our trajectory — was eye-opening.

Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld

I flew through this thoroughly enjoyable short story collection by the author of “Prep” and, more recently, “Romantic Comedy.” Many of these stories focus on middle age, a time when we have a better perspective on life than we did two decades earlier, but are still woken up in a cold sweat at 3am thinking about embarrassing things we did in 7th grade. (Or maybe that’s just me.) In “The Richest Babysitter in the World,” the narrator looks back on her college job as a babysitter for a family seemingly based on early Amazon-era Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott. In the closing story, “Lost But Not Forgotten,” we get an update on Lee Fiora, the protagonist of “Prep,” as she attends her 30th high school reunion. Sittenfeld’s characters lean into their friendships, examine their current and past romantic relationships with a gimlet eye, and wrestle with their creative ambitions. They also take comfort in lives that maybe aren’t as exciting as they’d once hoped for, but provide their own kind of joy. As Lee Fiora says, “If I’m right that all of this is ordinary, I’m enormously grateful for it; our ordinary life, our closeness, is thrilling to me.”