A week late, but hopefully still worthwhile. (I’ve been spending some time redesigning the site—more to come on that shortly.) All fiction this time around, though I did get through most of a nonfiction book that’ll show up on next month’s edition.

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, Matt Dinniman
I promised myself I’d cap it at one of these a month, and so far I’ve been able to stick with that. Not quite the joyride the first one was, but plenty to keep me looking forward to the third one.

Daemon, Daniel Suarez: A cyberthriller in which an eccentric gaming founder and billionaire dies, only to unleash a posthumous hellstorm of digital havoc. Some inventive storytelling in here that presages today’s everpresent AI anxiety; despite being 20 years old it feels remarkably relevant. That said, it squandered its goodwill with me by setting up itself for a sequel without any sense of propulsion whatsoever.

⭐️ Flesh, David Szalay: Last year’s Booker Prize winner, though I didn’t know (or remember?) that at the time—which is probably for the best, since I didn’t go in with any outsized expectations. On its face the arc of a life from a Hungarian adolescence to an adulthood in London, it’s sparely written to match its protagonist’s emotional availability. Compulsively readable and suprisingly affecting.

⭐️ The Spy Who Came In from the Cold John Le Carre: I gather that this isn’t Le Carre obsessives’ favorite Le Carre, but it’s my introduction to his work, and I was stunned by how well he creates tension out of uncertainty. Too many people wield deception like a cudgel rather than a scalpel; I can’t stand mysteries¹ that create an expectation of being viewer-solvable, only to reveal themselves in the final turn with a parade of dei ex machina. (The show Leverage was endlessly frustrating in this regard.) Not so here. Le Carre simply refuses—either through the character of Leamas or in his own choices—to acknowledge the full extent of the subterfuge, and the result is a feeling almost like oxygen deprivation.

1. That doesn’t begin and end with a detective. Thrillers, capers, whodunits, espionage—anything that obfuscates. ↩︎