Ghosts, Vampires, and a Murderer
Plus a couple more DNFs. Turns out, if I had any reticence remaining vis a vis kicking books that don’t tickle my brain to the curb (or properly horrify it), it’s been pulled up by the roots. And, damn, it’s liberating. My general practice is to give a work 50-ish pages - some stories do call for longer lead-ins than others - but, hey, one of the books I started this week tossed a gross racial stereotype into the first chapter so it got shitcanned after less than 10.
What did I enjoy? Let’s give give the rest of our air time to those:
The Hong Kong Widow by Kristen Loesch (Berkeley, 10/7)
I know, I’m actually the actual, proper amount of time ahead for reviews. Go, me!
The Hong Kong Window is a fascinating book that slips back and forth in time, giving readers glimpses of modern Chinese history over the course of a single life; an intimate portrait of events that shook the entire world; bloody history tinged with the strange, supernatural, and intimately horrifying.
Listen, I’m not going to lie, a ghost story is always a great way to hook me.
But well researched fiction is one of my favorite ways to absorb history and culture and there was a lot in The Hong Kong Widow I hadn’t encountered before. I especially love a novel that translates the microcosm of world events to the microcosm of an individual life - those of you who have been here for a while know I’m one for character driven stories and a novel that can give me someone to care deeply about (and I cared about our main character Mei very much) while also teaching me new intricacies and nuances about the recent history of a country I find fascinating but have mostly learned about through a single, broad, and biased lens (beyond what I’ve sought out on my own, which is limited because alas, three years of Mandarin is not enough to read a book)? chef’s kiss
In short, The Hong Kong Widow is double my jam. And all the more impressive for Loesch having struck a perfect balance of the two elements of the story. While it’s true the characters she’s working with exist in a space where the supernatural and the mundane to touch one another, deliberately or accidentally, far more often than they do for many, the balance between the two is all the more important for those collisions, not only for the characters to continue to exist in their spheres but for their stories to continue, for them to live the lives we are watching unfold. For them to get up in the morning, to go to work, to raise children to survive loss, to reconcile, and to find peace. I also think she did an exceptional job jugging multiple timelines, especially considering she was piloting the same character in all of them using different tenses and voices; hard enough to do when each timeline is directed by a different character but the same one? The consistence in each was spot on and I didn’t once have to flip back to the beginning of a chapter to double check which part of Mei’s life I was inhabiting along with her.
Also? Creepy as the underworld of your choosing, perfect for the spooky season also of your choosing.
The Hong Kong Widow: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780593548011
Dead & Breakfast by Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor (Berkley 10/14)
Okay, so imagine one of those cozy British murder shows except that it takes place in a little town in Oregon and the two people trying to solve the crime are the owners of the town’s bed and breakfast and are also an odd couple, gay, married, and vampires.
That is Dead & Breakfast.
This book is absolutely delightful. It’s sweet, it’s funny. There is murder. The werewolf owns the local coffee shop and is also a lawyer. There is a very important underlying theme of bigotry and ignorance and belonging. There are exceptionally incredible puns. There are some twists on vampire lore that will make you laugh so loud you will scare your pets. Great dentist jokes.
I… I just really needed this book right now. I’ve already recommended it to several friends I wish could read it right now but are going to have to wait until October but I’m sure will need it then just as much, if not more. I kept texting two of my writer friends bits and pieces as I was going along because I knew they would appreciate not only the silly but the clever and the touching and the vision of vampire Oscar and Felix (yes, we are all olds) on a teal, tandem bike.
Also, there is a reference to Maria Dahavana Headley’s Beowulf translation, which would have sold me if I hadn’t already been very, extremely sold (it is the best translation, and if you do not why, I will be very happy to tell you IN GREAT DETAIL).
In a world where I’m increasingly fine with one-offs, I really hope there are more of these.
Dead & Breakfast: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780593952719
Beowulf: A New Translation: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780374110031
Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (Crash Course Books)
There is a reactively new genre in town (insofar as genre is a place to put things on a shelf): the biography of disease. I’ve been listening to a lot of them lately, including: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (which won a Pulitzer in 2011), Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (interesting note that many books get wrong: Louis Pasteur was not a physician, he was a chemist), and most recently, Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. My current listen is: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Part of the reason I’m listening to them is because I think they’re fascinating; nothing exists in a vacuum, including disease and the way different conditions are viewed affect the way those who develop them are treated which, in turn, influences how, when, and how much money is spent on developing treatments. It also affects the populations for which treatment is prioritized and how much the companies that hold patents charge for those treatments - which is a central theme of Everything is Tuberculosis.
The other reason I’m listening to so many of these disease biographies is that I’m writing one: for those of you who aren’t aware, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May. Pancreatic cancer is a particularly devastating diagnosis: it’s often not found until quite late in its progression and it is also, often, aggressive. Emily died at the end of July. I looked to see if there was a history of pancreatic cancer and I couldn’t find one so I decided I was going to write it in the hopes that getting all of the information together in one place would help someone smarter than me figure out a way to treat this cancer that, on top of the above, is also notoriously difficult to treat. It’s my tribute to Emily. I had to teach myself the (very) basics of quantum theory, so you know I’m serious because I am fucking terrified of physics.
But, let us return to the matter at hand.
John Green (yes, the novelist) has written a very important book to remind us that tuberculosis still affects millions of people around the globe every year. And they could all very easily be cured except that the countries that control the supply of the pertinent medication are greedy bastards who use worlds like “cost effective” when weighing people’s lives and make up fake statistics to support lazy economics. The fact of the matter is, rather than support the infrastructure that would lower rates of TB and make it easier to treat with first and second line drugs, wealthy nations continue to use myths about middle-class and poor nations to justify withholding assistance to put nutrition, housing, and medical programs in place, and then complain about the need for a constant supply of third line drugs for resistant disease, refuse to supply it, and thus create even more resistant disease that requires individual tailored drug regimens patients can’t afford and for which there aren’t sufficient medical facilities to provide.
So the answer to the perpetual question? Yes, we are the assholes. And cutting off the funding for vaccine research doesn’t just affect us. It affects the entire world.
Everything is Tuberculosis: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780525556572
The Emperor of All Maladies: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781439170915
Rabid: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780143123576
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781400052189