Three Great Books #6
Mysterious fungi, a nontraditional serial killer novel, and really good advice.
The Unfamiliar Garden, by Benjamin Percy
A comet has swung within 500,000 miles of Earth, and its debris trail has caused a massive meteor shower with some funky aftereffects. When the meteors started to fall, fungus researcher Jack Abernathy took his daughter Mia to the woods; while he was absorbed in collecting specimens, she disappeared, seemingly into thin air. Five years later, he and his wife Nora, a police detective, have divorced and are burying their sadness in their respective jobs. But there’s a new fungus among us (several, actually), and some very odd things are happening – a series of murders that seem related to an already imprisoned killer, and some strange stuff growing in Jack’s lab – that put the two back on the same path. Meantime, the wonderfully named Isaac Peaches gets an offer to work in a quasi-government, top secret site where there is some hands-on experimentation under the supervision of a deranged boss. This sci-fi mystery is the second in a trilogy – the first concerns the gold rush surrounding deposits of a novel metal laid down by the meteor showers -- but each book stands alone. It’s dank and creepy and ultimately uplifting, and I will never look at mushrooms the same way again.
Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka
For quality-of-life purposes, I have generally sworn off books dealing with serial killers. This one makes a great exception. We do hear from the killer, Ansel Packer, sitting on death row in the last hours before he is due to be executed (though he has a plan to avoid that fate). But the book is structured around the voices and stories of the women whose lives he affected: Lavender, his mother, who escapes a horrific relationship and wonders what becomes of her children; Saffy Singh, the detective who knew Ansel in childhood and then pursued him as an adult; and Hazel, his wife Jenny’s twin sister. They’re far more interesting than the narcissistic Ansel. For anyone who is grieving, this will strike some chords, especially the section that imagines the gloriously mundane lives that the murdered women would have had if they’d lived. And there’s a wonderful section about how we carry the ones we’ve lost in everything we do. Sad and beautiful.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
Burkeman’s bracing/terrifying/liberating message is that we have a pitifully short stay on this earth (about 4,000 weeks on average, not at all guaranteed) and that our attempts to control that time are basically a folly. We’re going to miss out on most potential life experiences, we’re never going to do everything on our to-do lists, overplanning and worrying in an attempt to direct future events are fruitless, and, by the way, there is really no sure hack for beating distraction – we just have to dig into important tasks and embrace the discomfort of difficult, meaningful work. This might sound depressing, but I found it all weirdly comforting, like I was able to set down a giant backpack of agita I’d been hauling around. Burkeman writes that the “real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” Since reading this book I have chosen to neglect stressing out about the logistics of my kid’s spring soccer practice schedule, policing my fellow apartment building residents’ imperfect recycling hygiene, and worrying about what anyone will think of a potential career pivot. And with that freed-up mental space, I wrote the first issue of this newsletter in more than five months.
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