The Curator: the book of the century

in defense of my favorite plotline. Plus a Robert Downey Jr weekend and a ton of really good restacks

When the New York Times released its list of top books since 2000, I knew almost instantly that the epidemic novel was the plotline, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel was the book of the century, for me.

[This decision was made much easier since The Secret History was published in 1992. I retroactively declare dark academia and The Secret History as plotline and novel of the 20th century, respectively.]

If, as a child, I had been forced at gunpoint to guess what my favorite adult novel or genre would be, I would have said family drama literary fiction or detective fiction. The epidemic novel? Go fly a kite! But part of my Substack and Bookstagram journey has been discovering who I am as a reader. It wasn’t what I expected, frankly. I thought I knew myself - turns out, after 37 years on the planet, I can still surprise me.

The things we turn to again and again show us who we are. We are the big rocks, yes, but also the sand and pebbles that fill the jar of our lives. With an embarrassing volume of unread pebbles at my disposal, it says something that I keep turning to the same plotline. First, Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy. Then Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven & Sea of Tranquility, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers.

Well, it says that I have health anxiety, but at least half that is thanks to Team Google-WebMD so whatever.

The disillusionment charm

If you are fortunate enough to be born into a relatively safe society, if you are observant as you grow older, the illusion starts to waver. You realize everything is made up. The money we yearn for is just a proxy for safety and security. The institutions, just towers of made-up men with answers that require faith in the system. Even sustenance has become packaged processed contrivance - Oreos are not a gift granted by nature but by machine.

This disillusionment charm is why I love stories about our world turned upside down. Objects useless. The order of things subverted. In-demand skills do not include intermediate Excel. All your money and stock market expertise will not help you slaughter a chicken to prevent your own starvation. I see myself turning to these stories repeatedly. Looking for someone to explain the present through a dystopian future.

And this drive is both pre- and post-covid, which is wild. The novels I’ve mentioned were all written before COVID. They are speculative, not historical. And yet here we are after COVID, still looking to make sense of our decaying world. I’ve had a tough few months with lingering fatigue and brain fog after getting COVID for the first time in January. It’s made me reconsider my idea of health. The virus in me is dogged, living off my reserves, igniting other dormant viruses. Its one mission is to live and to replicate, to siphon off whatever it can.

But is not a virus just another creature attempting to survive? Are we all just a plague on this earth?

My anthill theory comes in handy: the ants in the ant hill - that is their entire world. They cannot fathom the depths of life outside that hill. If you pour water and flood their colony, do they curse god? Offer sacrifice? Wonder why them? Are we god raining down death and destruction on a whim?

We are ants on the earth, ourselves a virus, slowly using up natural resources until the earth becomes unrecognizable. Finds a new homeostasis. Whether that includes us or not.

I crave stories that force me to consider my reality a scam.

Why Emily rules the rest

All of the books mentioned above deal with world-ending epidemics and all the world-shattering feelings I’ve described, but their form and craft are wildly different. Where Mandel and Nagamatsu are terse, King, Wendig, and Cronin are verbose. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a chonky book. But Mandel’s writing is unmatched in its elegance. The way she uses objects. The things left unsaid in the gaps. Less is more, which is the exact opposite of how I live my life and perhaps why I am so in awe of her writing.

Chonky books suck you in, but there is more margin for error - a character you don’t like as much as the others, a plotline that stalls. The Stand was phenomenal but dated. The Passage trilogy was life-changing but got convoluted by the end. Wanderers more fun than literary achievement, How High a connected set of short stories that will always be at a disadvantage per its form, in my opinion.

Station Eleven is a perfect book. Institutions cannot save you, consumer goods cannot save you, survival is insufficient. Every word is precise, and every sentence is meaningful. As I said in my review, this book makes me weepy and dream of buying a bookstore dedicated to books like Station Eleven.

I wrote about it and most of the others here:

Station Eleven is a perfect book

Stephen King's The Stand

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

The Curator: Dispatches from The Sea of Tranquility

What now

I asked myself this question: do any other countries write these anxiety manifestos??

I found a few with a Google search, such as To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young, but most are post-apocalyptic, not necessarily epidemic. It seems that other cultures are more concerned with being bombed into oblivion than dying from disease (not surprising, really). Please let me know in the comments if you have any other suggestions.

On my TBR within this theme is Severance by Ling Ma, Zone One by Colston Whitehead, Appleseed by Matt Bell, and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

Thanks for indulging in my day dedicated to the end of the world. Cheers! 😎

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READING 📖→

• After getting a little behind due to my day job requiring my full physical and emotional commitment, I have caught up with The Age of Innocence close read-a-long. I spent Memorial Monday afternoon living the trials and tribulations of polite 1870s New York society with a cat on my lap, writing down observations and quotes in a little moleskin. Not only does Haley give insight, but so do other readers, and my experience has been enriched by the genius observations happening in those threads. For being a classic, this book is extremely approachable and fun. I have to hold myself back from reading too far ahead!

• Languidly making my way through The Ministry of Time because it’s too good to read right before bed when my head is drifting off. I need to be present for all the strange things Bradley does with words. I am smitten.

• I do not like paying exorbitant amounts for audiobooks, so I rarely use Audible, but I was desperate for a copy of Faithless, which is somehow the disgrace of Karin Slaughter ebooks, so I got a cheap copy thanks to already owning the Kindle edition. I now enjoy the benefits of Whispersync, which plays the audiobook from the Kindle app and allows you to either switch seamlessly between the two or read along with your eyes and ears simultaneously. I know Big Bezos is the devil, but you must admit they deliver on the customer experience.

WATCHING 📽️→

We had a twofer classic Robert Downey Jr. weekend with first the John Hughes gem Weird Science and second the intelligent, terrifying Gothika. Weird Science had me wanting to be Kelly LeBrock. Gothika had me shaking Mark awake because I couldn’t watch Halle Berry being terrorized alone. Highly recommend both.

BUYING 💰→

There aren’t a ton of beauty products that impress me - mostly because

The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino

has alleviated me of my naivete - but during a recent trip to Ulta, I was pleasantly accosted by an employee who declared my dark under-eye circles needed help and slapped some of this eye cream on my face. It's not going to do the work of fillers, but it feels lovely, tightens, and reflects light so that I look less Gollum-like.

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NEW BOOKS 📚→

• A new rom-com from the author of One Day, a modern cult classic romance if there ever was one.

• A literary psychological thriller that sounds perfect for smashing over one long summer night.

• A coming-of-age story that asks if we ever really know the ones we love.

BOOKS IN MY SHOPPING CART 🛒→

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

• Underworld by Don DeLillo

• The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicles #1) by Elizabeth Jane Howard

BOOK NEWS & RESTACKS 📰→

• Book Notes
  gave us a delightful mash of bookish things that made me happy.

• Totally Recommend
  celebrates the death of the cool girl.

• Let

  The Sunday Reads
  take you on a blind date with a book (book Jeopardy!) and maybe find something new to read.

• And this piece articulates exactly how I’ve been feeling about the state of the book world lately (thank you

  Martha
  for sharing to Notes!).

AND CATS 🐈‍⬛→

hi mom

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LET’S CHAT 👻→

• What is your book of the century??

• What are you reading right now, and is it any good?

• What are you most excited to read this summer?

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In Case You Missed It 🖤

The Curator: the books & TV that raised us

The Curator: backlist books on my summer TBR

The Curator: the pleasures of buddy reading

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See you around the bookshelf!

Natalie