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I've noticed we have a lot of readers in the community, and my personal goal this year is to finish a book a week. Like an actual book every single week, not an average of a book a week. So I thought I'd share, especially since this week's read was so good, I finished it off this morning. Let me know if you want me to ping you when I do more reviews~ I can't say every book will have something worth saying about it, so this will probably only happen for the particularly good or particularly awful ones.
Title: How High We Go in the Dark
Author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
Format I read: audiobook
Links: Goodreads and Storygraph
The premise: Climate change has been melting the polar ice caps, and buried in the ice was a human ancestor who died of a mysterious infection. This infection gets exposed and leashed upon the world as the "arctic plague." The first chapter covers the reveal of this, and the subsequent 14 chapters covers how this plague affects humanity.
My thoughts:
I really found this to be one of the most interesting plague aftereffects stories I've read. A lot of those stories have the plague is SO devastating that humanity is set back hundreds of years technology-wise as the people who manage to survive don't actually have the knowledge or ability to keep things running. So they kind of always end up being "modern people, but living like medieval people."
This takes a very different approach. The arctic plague ends up being devastating enough that it drastically alters the way people live and makes death-related services a major staple of the economy, but it is not so devastating that things like technology cease to basically exist. Each chapter both moves forward through time and covers a different person's perspective. Some of them are more science-y, like the doctor who is trying to grow organs to increase the supply available for organ transplants on the impacted plague victims. Some of them are more average person sorts, like an artist who is capturing people's moments in life and the impact of the time and plague on humanity.
I don't want to spoil anything, but it's not afraid to be deeply weird. I think the audiobook format I read it in really helped elevate it, because I found myself thinking, "Eff it, who cares if this is absurd, this is fascinating." For the spoiler inclined, an example of this absurdity is: the first wave of the plague primarily affects children, so someone wealthy establishes a theme park where the final ride gently euthanizes children, with the idea being to make the kid's last day on earth a joyful experience and a lasting happy memory for the family and to give the kid a "normal" day when they've been injected with so many experimental things in their last weeks. It's so weird! But it's told from the perspective of one of the theme park employees who takes the duty very seriously, so I found myself going along with it. It's such a deeply human story that I almost think that the willingness to explore potentially very weird solutions results in amplifying the somber feelings that humanity would experience alongside such a devastating plague.
For the COVID tired, the plague is explicitly not airborne and beyond that, affects people in a way that bears no resemblance to COVID, so I did not find myself thinking about COVID while I listened to it. It felt like a genuinely fresh take on the "plague?" genre.
It was weird and human and I loved it.
Title: How High We Go in the Dark
Author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
Format I read: audiobook
Links: Goodreads and Storygraph
The premise: Climate change has been melting the polar ice caps, and buried in the ice was a human ancestor who died of a mysterious infection. This infection gets exposed and leashed upon the world as the "arctic plague." The first chapter covers the reveal of this, and the subsequent 14 chapters covers how this plague affects humanity.
My thoughts:
I really found this to be one of the most interesting plague aftereffects stories I've read. A lot of those stories have the plague is SO devastating that humanity is set back hundreds of years technology-wise as the people who manage to survive don't actually have the knowledge or ability to keep things running. So they kind of always end up being "modern people, but living like medieval people."
This takes a very different approach. The arctic plague ends up being devastating enough that it drastically alters the way people live and makes death-related services a major staple of the economy, but it is not so devastating that things like technology cease to basically exist. Each chapter both moves forward through time and covers a different person's perspective. Some of them are more science-y, like the doctor who is trying to grow organs to increase the supply available for organ transplants on the impacted plague victims. Some of them are more average person sorts, like an artist who is capturing people's moments in life and the impact of the time and plague on humanity.
I don't want to spoil anything, but it's not afraid to be deeply weird. I think the audiobook format I read it in really helped elevate it, because I found myself thinking, "Eff it, who cares if this is absurd, this is fascinating." For the spoiler inclined, an example of this absurdity is: the first wave of the plague primarily affects children, so someone wealthy establishes a theme park where the final ride gently euthanizes children, with the idea being to make the kid's last day on earth a joyful experience and a lasting happy memory for the family and to give the kid a "normal" day when they've been injected with so many experimental things in their last weeks. It's so weird! But it's told from the perspective of one of the theme park employees who takes the duty very seriously, so I found myself going along with it. It's such a deeply human story that I almost think that the willingness to explore potentially very weird solutions results in amplifying the somber feelings that humanity would experience alongside such a devastating plague.
For the COVID tired, the plague is explicitly not airborne and beyond that, affects people in a way that bears no resemblance to COVID, so I did not find myself thinking about COVID while I listened to it. It felt like a genuinely fresh take on the "plague?" genre.
It was weird and human and I loved it.
