This month’s book recommendation is The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker staff writer best known for his deeply researched nonfiction (The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda and 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). This new book, however, is a novel, although you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it for journalism.
It’s set in a time very much like the present (the US president is “self-conscious about his girth” and keeps a tanning bed in the White House Cosmetology Room—an actual room in the actual White House), in which a viral pandemic spreads from Indonesia to the hajj in Mecca to a submarine under the Atlantic to North America and beyond. Our hero, epidemiologist Henry Parsons, scrambles to decode the virus and prevent its spread while civilization’s institutions crumble on every continent. If the plot is a little overstuffed and the dialogue speech-y, you’re unlikely to care, because the story is so eerily prescient and timely. (Wright began writing the book in 2015 and turned in the manuscript in 2017, long before COVID-19 broke out.) Wright’s journalistic background serves him well: you’ll learn a lot—painlessly—about viral reproduction, cytokine storms, and the workings of submarines. I listened to the audiobook, which is well narrated by Mark Bramhall: it’s the audio equivalent of a page-turner.
*
Speaking of pandemics, do you know the difference between “airborne spread” and “droplet spread”?
*
How clichés like “quite frankly” and “vast majority” act as warning signs in corporate earnings calls. (H/t Orin Hargraves, whose book It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Clichés, was a basis for the study.)
*
Panic buying, anticipatory grief, R0, mask shaming, and other COVID-related terms that are now part of “the lingo we’re all too familiar with,” caught by the Catchword blog. (My own Coronacoinage posts: March 16 and April 6.)
*
I haven’t yet succumbed to the lure of Animal Crossing, the hot quarantine game, but I’m evidently in the minority. The Namerology blog does a deep, interesting dive into the names of the game’s characters.
*
My friend Suzanne and I were chatting about good journalism, and she mentioned two pieces about language by the New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz—one of my favorite writers—that I had somehow missed. (They’re from 2015, so shame on me.) Here’s Schulz on how “no, totally” became a new way to say “yes.” And here she is on how “rabbit hole”—appropriated from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—became shorthand for “interested in something to the point of distraction.”
*
you can't make this up:
— Erik Pelton® (@tm4smallbiz) May 17, 2020
GUNDERWEAR
trademark application for 'underwear for facilitating more comfortable carrying of firearms'
(portmanteau alert, @brianlfrye)https://t.co/kjnc1d6k9J
*
Ten recommendations for good writing habits from fiction writer Lydia Davis, who includes lots of examples from her own writing life. (“3. Be mostly self-taught. There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you.”)
*
How to be a better writer on Twitter, by Drew Magary, a very good writer. (“Rule #219: Twitter is for your audience, not you. Even when it’s about you.”)
*
Highly plausible and completely erroneous baby-name meanings. (“Emet” really does mean “truth” in Hebrew, after all.) By Aaron Smith, via Gretchen McCulloch and Jonathon Owen.
*
In memoriam: Susan Subtle, née Dintenfass, with whom I had the singular pleasure of working on a number of occasions. Susan was sui generis: quirky, perceptive, connected, infinitely entertaining, and an influencer long before anyone dreamed up that label. Sam Whiting wrote a lovely obituary of Susan for the San Francisco Chronicle that gives you an idea of what we’ve lost.
Comments