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This is not a tremendously deep book but still an entertaining one. It imagines what it would be like for all the passengers stuck on a flight to each receive the cause and year of their deaths. The protagonist delivering these turns out to have a past connection with telling people's fortunes and with actuarial science, and the way her over the top behavior affects the lives of a bunch of the passengers makes up the rest of the story. It is a long book with alternating chapters devoted to the protagonist and to the passengers. The author does her best to give the characters fleshed out lives, not stereotypical, not too perfect, not too despicable. Not long after the flight is when the first few death predictions start to come true, in a case of novel logic.

There's enough tension maintained throughout to keep a reader engaged with the story up to the denouement which landed for me in a way I didn't exactly predict. It is put together with craft and reaches for life lessons by the end as a gift to readers who stuck through the entire tale. The author has wriitten bestselling novels and is clearly well-versed in the way popular fiction works.

I listened to this in audiobook form over the course of about six weeks. Not every story line grabbed me but there weren't any that really made me want to quit. It's not really my usual book fare but I feel like it was a solid production. I don't see myself looking for quite such a long bit of popular fiction so I don't know that I'm motivated to pick up another title by this author soon.

I found this a soothing book for our time which can use a meditation on a largely forgotten little animal told in a lovely honest style. The author happened to come across an exposed newborn hare or "leveret" one day just before the Covid-19 pandemic put nations into lockdown, and chose to give it shelter in her house. Most people my age probably now about hares by association with the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, but I can remember seeing them racing around the grasslands of Northern California when I lived there, rangier than rabbits and non-burrowing. The species of hare in this book was once extremely common in England when the rural areas were less hemmed in by urbanization and industry, leaving a mark on the language. The animal is still maintaining itself without help from humankind.

As a professional speechwriter in the UK, the author certainly knows how to use words so they land with impact for a reader. She takes us through how she managed learned what she needed to do in order that the helpless leveret could survive into adulthood. Most of what she learned came from observation, though, since written accounts of captive hares and veterinary advice was scant. For its part, the leveret proved to be more adaptable than expected, coming up with a way to live in the human world and the open countryside on its own terms. In this book, the author never thought of the hare as a pet or domestic in any way but as a wild creature that decided to allow her to glimpse the principles by which it lived its life over three years. The author grew to appreciate the lessons it gave by example: stillness, love of habit, calm, and strength, among others.

It's been ten years since I read Helen Macdonald's book "H is for Hawk" but this book inevitably brought that one back to mind. I think they both stand up as testaments of what we can learn when we see animals for what they are.

It's not for me

I was brought to this author's work by a comment by Lydia Davis who found they had an impact on her writing, which I like very much. The way I think about these peculiar little prose poms is that the author was maybe not trying to write good poems according to usual standards. He wrote self-contradictory scraps of language that leveraged what our brains believe about story and poetry to produce a particular vertigo-inducing effect he was after. The way I can imagine writing in this style is to set out writing some lines that feel consciously bad, because violate rules about plot or motivation or decency or things that nobody's bothered to name because it's always been assumed. And in the course of writing, the idea is to stay conscious of the uncanny state you can get just before the piece collapses into ruin. You can con the reader to end up in this weird error state where it doesn't seem right, whatever you've read, and yet it still insists on its own existence.

The poems are often funny, disgusting, vapid, pathetic. They are peopled with characters and things who fail to connect with one another because they are more intent on following some ritual nobody's bothered to explain to the reader. Sometimes people dies in them and it's implied that everyone can die in a way that also makes no sense. It takes a poem that is bad by conventional standards to see how badness isn't something a person can avoid. Maybe you shouldn't even try, even if it makes you look and feel foolish. There is tension in our minds because we were endowed with confusing feelings that often don't line up with our confusing thoughts and confusing words. But it's possible to write something that feels like it went badly but also succeeds in putting a reader's mind someplace no sensible poem could have brought them to.

No poem here is longer than a few small pages, because it doesn't take more than that to lead a reader to a strange destination. They vary wildly in what I think of them - many strike me as almost worthless, but a few are the kind I want to save and re-read later to figure out what just happened there. But that could just be me. It won't take long to read through this collection and decide for yourself whether it says anything to you.

I picked up this book I had on my shelves five mnoths ago to read on vacation and only now got around to finishing it. It is told as three parallel stories told in stream of consciousness style about three women experiencing trouble following the prompts of their own hearts owing partly to the people in their lives. There are many colors of blue they feel, chronic barriers to communication, secrets they feel obliged to keep, regrets about the way life has gone, and so on. We start out with the famous one, Virginia Woolf, whose story Mrs. Dalloway informs the way we experience the other two, in a prologue at the very end of her life. There are echoes between the stories concerning mental turmoil, of illness, of self-harm, and more. At the end a link between two of the storylines is uncovered which did seem clever.

I never really felt in harmony with this book, from the opening prologue which felt manipulative to me, to the way dialogue was used to depict character. I know things don't have to be expressed in a naturalistic way in fiction, but I had a hard time entering into these characters' lives or taking them seriously. Even the scenes I thought were striking along the way felt more artificial than I prefer. I can imagine coming back to this sometime in the future from a different frame of mind and maybe having a more positive response, but it doesn't seem too likely. I don't fault the author's craft as much as feel that the tale is just not for me.