Vox

by Christina Dalcher
Dec 16-23, 2018

I've been reading nonstop lately. What else is there to do in winter?! And Vox was a super quick read that I busted out in a week.

My first inclination is to call it Handmaid's Tale-Lite. Women are repressed in the name of religion, but it's only been a year in this new way of life, and again, only in the US. Vox is like the Cliff's Notes of a dystopian society. It held my attention and stressed me out, but resolutions came quickly and crises were swiftly resolved. Because of this, it was hard for me to really dwell on the "what-ifs" presented here. But really, what if you could only speak 100 words a day? How would you make them count?

Dalcher does a decent job at character building in minimalist form. Just enough to evoke hatred for most characters. Her vocabulary isn't the best – I hate when people use the word "sex" as an anatomical description – but the simplicity flowed easily and didn't leave any room for misinterpretation.

I also think Vox is a timely parallel, in abstract form, to our current state of affairs. Again, the what-ifs.

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A Short History of Drunkenness

by Mark Forsyth
Dec 8-16, 2018

To finish the full title, A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present. A fun, hilarious history on being drunk. Not drinking in general, but getting hammered. Laugh out loud funny at times, yet still enlightening. A good break between serious novels.

I had to take not of a few funny quotes that are definitely worth repeating at party:

Trying to punch a saber-toothed tiger when you're five sheets to the wind is a nightmare.

To pass an entire day and night in drinking disgraces no one.

The number of accounts of people dropping down dead in a gin shop is phenomenal and depressing.

Crack is always served with crumpets.

He blew his money on whores and oysters.

Forsyth has a great sense of humor. Worth the read if you've ever been known to get overserved.


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The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai
Nov 15-Dec 7, 2018

I have always been emotionally affected by the AIDS crisis. I was not worried about myself, but all the unfortunate souls who were blind-sided and wrecked by such a hideous disease. So, when in the first chapter the characters are at a funeral for a friend who lost his battle with AIDS, I was immediately in the trenches with them.

I liked how the chapters alternated between the 80s and early 90s to present day. I loved the way the present and past threaded together as the story developed. I have never to my recollection read a chapter twice, but I was so intensely moved when Yale was finally diagnosed, that I had to read it again to feel that raw emotion one more time. While of course I knew it was a matter of time before he too was infected, the author managed to organically and surprisingly weave it into the story. As Yale was thinking of all the things he would never get to do, all of the experiences he would miss out on:

"All the books he hadn't started."

And in present day, his best friend Fiona is in Paris trying to find her daughter. Fiona is a tough character. While you can't help but feel sorry for her, her life and history have made her selfish and untrusting. Rightly so. At 21 she experienced more deaths of friends than most do in a lifetime.

"Why couldn't you ever just go through life without tripping over some idiot's dick?"

I enjoyed the subplot of the art acquisition and how it still managed to tie all the characters together. It was actually a welcome distraction to the anguish I felt for these suffering men. Makkai succeeded in telling a poignant, relevant account of a disease that should never be underestimated.

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