Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome

#1119
Title: Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome
Author: John Scalzi
Year: 2014
Publisher: Kindle/Tor
Pages: 96

A quick and enjoyable novella that serves as prequel to Scalzi's forthcoming Lock In. Told by varied respondents in the style of World War Z, which is to say, in the style of Studs Terkel's Working, Unlocked provides the documentary background on Haden's Syndrome, which is ironically spread at a conference of epidemiologists. In most people it looks like influenza, in some number it progresses to a meningitis/brain restructuring (as-yet) not fully developed, and in a fraction of those, to a functional locked-in syndrome. This latter group is aided by new technologies that allow people with third-stage Haden's to communicate: An online community (the Agora) and threeps (remote-controlled cyborg bodies that initially look like C3PO, hence the sobriquet). This exposition serves to orient the reader to the world of Lock In, where it is the historical and technological backdrop to a story that begins with a Haden's first day on the job, a murder investigation.

The Wake (Sandman #10)

#1118
Title: The Wake (Sandman #10)
Author: Neil Gaiman & Mikal Gilmore (Introduction)
Illustrators: Michael Zulli, Jon J. Muth, & Charles Vess
Year: 1996/2012
Publisher: Vertigo
Pages: 192

A fitting end to the main Sandman opus, often moving. A good book about different expressions of grief.

The Kindly Ones (Sandman #9)

#1117
Title: The Kindly Ones (Sandman #9)
Author: Neil Gaiman, Frank McConnell (Introduction)
Illustrators: Marc Hempel, Richard Case, D'Israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormston, Kevin Nowlan
Year: 1995/2012
Publisher: Vertigo
Pages: 320

I understand the intent, but found this to be the least-well-organized collection in the series. It required a great deal of referencing back to earlier volumes, so consistently as to be cumbersome rather than enjoyable.

Here, Atropos gets the last say (but doesn't she always?).

The Goldfinch

#1116
Title: The Goldfinch
Author: Donna Tartt
Year: 2013
Publisher: Little, Brown
Pages: 773

I found this structurally proficient and very bloated. It constructively could be edited by at least a third. I enjoyed it more for being a second book set in New York with a boy named Theo than for its content. The only really sympathetic character was the mother, who dies so early in the action that it's not much of a spoiler to say so.

Tartt starts strong, but the narrative becomes torpid and dull, not unlike Theo and his father, at Las Vegas. It keeps recovering enough and dragging itself along to keep you reading, but it's less pleasurable and less delicious (though clever) than it promised in the early sections. If you like it, by all means read it. I thought, ultimately, it was okay, but not really Pulitzer material.

The Journals of Spalding Gray

#1115
Title: The Journals of Spalding Gray
Editor: Nell Casey
Year: 2011/2012
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 384

The first of two books unwittingly read simultaneously in which the major setting is New York and a boy is named Theo.

Well-edited and riveting, these journal entries highlight the obsessions and unhappiness that we knew to underlie Gray's performances, but didn't usually get to see in such raw and unpolished form. As I read, I thought that this would  be a good journal/memoir for teaching future therapists how to form initial psychological diagnostic impressions. Following Gray's auto accident, it became a very clear example of the differences between a "normal" troubled psychological state and a devastating head injury-induced state in which obsessional anxieties and dread become endless, locking loops that can't be interrupted. Gray's suicide seemed a great tragedy to me; after reading, I have more empathy and understanding for his unsustainable state of post-TBI misery and horror.

Ten Days in a Mad-House

#1114
Title: Ten Days in a Mad-House
Author: Nellie Bly
Year: 1887
Publisher: Ian L. Munro, Publisher
Pages: 96

Intrigued by Goodman's  Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race around the World and subsequently reading and enjoying Bly's own account, Around the World in 72 Days, I turned to one of her undercover pieces. (It's actually two pieces--the title piece and a brief investigation of the conditions of the hire and employment of servant girls.)

Bly recounts how she got herself committed to the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island via Bellevue. As noted in, if I remember correctly, The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic, it was shockingly easy to get committed for minor social infractions. This covert entry to the mad-house allowed her to observe and report on the deplorable conditions, general staff cruelty and indifference, and lack of adequate assessment and evaluation. Her expose led to a grand jury and both funding increases and better oversight.

My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

#1113
Title: My Own Country: A Doctor's Story
Author: Abraham Verghese
Year: 1994/1995
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 448

Verghese's very interesting memoir (though still somewhat longer than I think is called for) of his time as an infectious disease specialist in rural Tennessee during the early years of the AIDS crisis. Verghese does a great job of expressing his own fear, curiosity about, and movement toward understanding HIV and the people who are infected with it. His status as an accepted outsider in this community serves as a contrast to the unaccepted outsider status of his HIV+ patients, and his status is in turn made more precarious by his work with them.

I remember this era very well, including its unpredictable moments of both kindness and hostility, of risks taken in the name of humanness and fear unexpectedly enacted in hatred, sunning, and violence. Verghese really brings it all back.