Our Potential Virtual Worlds

A couple of takes on the near-future as the virtual world becomes just a little more real than the real world. Although neither is a total nightmare, both are just disturbing enough to make you rethink your online life.

More Than This by Patrick Ness
(Candlewick Press, 2013)
Format: hardback via library

From Goodreads: "A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighborhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What’s going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this. . . "

After the Chaos Walking trilogy, I expect the following from Ness: boys on the brink of manhood, thrown into the deep end of a world that is not what they thought they knew, navigating it with the help of well-met new companions. More Than This delivers it all, though in an alternate present (or near-future, perhaps) rather than on another world. Seth wakes in his deserted childhood hometown after drowning a continent away, and his mysterious solitude is no more explicable once he finally meets some fellow recently-departed teens. As he struggles with the traumatic memories of his life, this post-life world is sometimes hell and sometimes just a mystery, until it turns out that reality and life were not at all what he, or perhaps anyone, expected. 

The Circle by Dave Eggers
(Knopf / Random House Audio, 2013) 
Format: audio via library (narrated by Dion Graham)

From Goodreads: "When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge."

Here's a fun thing: think of all the online stuff you do - social, financial, recreational - and imagine it was all bound up in one identity. One username - a real one, tied to your government ID and banking info - one password, everything linked so you can chat about a product and buy it from one place, and the fact that you can't hide behind an anonymous sobriquet means there aren't trolls 'ruining' the conversation. Sounds convenient, until you put it all in the hands of someone with a brain like Eggers's, and then all the Ways It Could Go Wrong build, slowly at first, a little from one side and a little from another, until suddenly: yikes. Sure, high-res cameras to show the surf conditions! and make them little and cheap so they can be hidden in political hot-spots and catch para-militants in action! or, maybe in your elderly mom's kitchen so you can ensure she's taking her pills! Never mind that, just as you can access your friend's beach camera, she can also access the one trained on your mom. It's totally fine. 

Mae is an interesting character, accessible but infuriating - zigging when I wanted her to zag. Of course, those zigs are what allow Eggers to push her deeper and deeper into the Circle's world, unwitting though she sometimes is, and make the unfathomable seem almost reasonable. I willed her to just snap out of it long before I gave up on her, but her unwillingness - or inability - to untangle her life from the Circle was creepily effective and thought-provoking. 

Dion Graham grabbed ahold of the tone of this book, sounding placid and accessible and assured as he moved inexorably forward, allowing just a hint of menace to steal in even as Mae, blindly trusting, removed every filter between herself and the entire online world. He could be giving a wildly successful TED talk, and everyone would want to share and replay, spreading his message across the globe.

Two Successes, a Failure, and a Treat

A few books of note from this month.

I finally got to finish Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, with the audioproducton of Monsters of Men. It is probably not a good thing to be driving down the freeway yelling, "Fucking bastard!" at the CD player, but that is what Ness, via the conniving Mayor Prentiss, forced me to do. I mean, I'm a fairly tolerant person, and not quick to take offense, in real life or by fictional characters. But Prentiss is just so evil and controlling, and I've been attached to Todd from page one of book one of the trilogy, so seeing him caught in the Mayor's web and in the middle of  the Mayor's war was excruciating. It's a good thing I was listening to this instead of reading it to my son, as I did with the first two books, because I would have had trouble controlling my reactions, and let's face it, probably I shouldn't use that kind of language around him. Listening was also great because I so enjoyed the narrators, Nick Podehl, Angela Dawe, and MacLeod Andrews. Frankly, though, I'm going to have trouble with the next book I hear narrated by Dawe, because so much of her own natural voice informed the voice she used for Mistress Coyle, and I was cringing at her treatment of Viola and the people she led almost as much as Prentiss's treatment of Todd.

Another highlight of the month for me was Farthing by Jo Walton. This is not as dystopian as Ness's world (where things were so messed up on Earth that a faction left the planet to settle on New World, which is where all the problems between the Prentiss and Coyle and all them began.) Walton's 1950s Britain is just like our 1950s Britain, except that the British negotiated a truce with Hitler in 1941 that ceded pretty much the rest of Europe to him while they retained self-rule and everyone just put on blinders about the genocide and work camps. Walton stages a murder in the middle of a political house party, brings in an intellectual Scotland Yard detective along with the plodding local police, shines the suspect spotlight on the Jewish husband of the rebellious politico's daughter, and throws in some adultery and communists and train schedules to give it all direction and misdirection. I was so happy to discover this book, and so absorbed in the plot and characters and style. It's book as sustenance, and I am replete.

Contrast that to A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin. In short (as nothing else about it is), I gave up about half-way through and went to the web to find out how it would end. I think three and a half of the Fire and Ice books is a pretty good showing, don't you? (I also used that wiki to find out what happens in the fifth book.)

Now, for those of you who either already love audio or are skeptical about my love of audio, go here. Be sure you have your tissues handy. The narrator Xe Sands started a project to publish short readings of public domain texts, which you can find about with the #goingpublic hashtag if you're on Twitter. (Follow me! I'm dakiMel.) The link above is for Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit, which Sands imbues with such feeling and love that I defy you to read the text yourself without being (positively) informed by her narration. Also at Going Public is my audiocrush Simon Vance, so you can hear why I love him and then believe me and go listen to the dozens of hours of Aubrey-Maturin stories or wherever else you care to find him.

"...and now the check."

If only I'd picked up one more tiny little book last month. Just a wafer-thin one. Pat the Bunny or something. Then I could have a solid average of 25 books per month in the first half of the year, instead of a measly 24.83.

But, alas. I would certainly have exploded.

Anyway, as I was updating my spreadsheet with the 149 titles I did read from January to June, I noticed a few worthy titles I hadn't blogged about, so before I get to my July books, I want to talk about them.

First up, Geraldine Brooks's latest, Caleb's Crossing. I am a huge fan of Brooks, who astounds me with the breadth and scope of her subjects. Being anywhere in her vicinity guarantees me that I will be completely transported, and lose all track of my real life. And she never takes me to the same place twice. In this instance, it was Martha's Vineyard in the 1600s, when young settler Bethia's independent spirit and vast curiosity lead to a furtive and world-opening friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain's son who becomes known to her, and eventually to the world, as Caleb. The novel is based on the slim information available about the life of the real Caleb, who graduated from Harvard in 1665 - the first Native American to do so. Bethia writes of stolen knowledge, of the differences and points of communion between cultures, of words and writing and belonging. Brooks returns to these themes regularly, but never runs out of ways to explore them, or things I want to hear her say about them.

Patrick Ness uses a talking dog to immediately immerse YA (and other!) readers into the dystopian world of The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first of the Chaos Walking trilogy. It's eerie, and mysterious, and Todd, who's not quite a man yet, is thrust deep into danger that goes well beyond the crocs and the viruses and the aliens who were displaced when his people moved with never a bye-your-leave onto their world. Ness keeps the tension balanced on a knife-edge throughout, which led to many many nights, while I was reading this to the 11-year-old, of my succumbing to "just one more chapter" and not nearly enough sleep. Probably we should start the second book soon, before summer ends and regular bedtimes become slightly more important.

The Lover's Dictionary, by David Levithan, plays with the definition of "novel." Each alphabetical page is a word, explicated by a man trying to dissect and find the heart of his relationship with his lover. The definitions are brief but telling, each word chosen carefully and building together into a portrait of what is both wrong and right between them. (Levithan also has a Twitter feed with additional definitions, which is a great thing to add to your own feed, should you have such a thing. I'd wager even those who haven't read the book could get the spirit of the thing.) This is a playful, intriguing novel that gets at a truth about love while also changing a bit what you'd expect from the novel form to begin with.