Books are a product unlike most others. Novelists are not iPhones. The new doesn’t render the old obsolete. No matter how much you loved Sally Rooney, you would not suggest that because of her, Oscar Wilde is history. An adoration of Emma Cline would not lead you to say that she eclipses Joan Didion. One does not replace the other. Yet this is how Haruki Murakami was introduced to the world stage.
Books like these are intensely personal by nature, packed with the recipes that everyday people believe are good enough to share with the world. These recipes aren’t tested by a chef in a professional kitchen over the course of a couple of months; they’re honed over decades of Thanksgiving dinners and Thursday-night suppers with family crowded around the table. A lot of times, somebody’s “secret family recipe” for pumpkin pie is just the recipe off the back of the can of Libby’s pumpkin puree. But that often doesn’t matter, once recipes have been passed down, and when someone forever immortalizes their family’s most beloved recipe in their church’s cookbook, everyone who reads that book is better for it.
What is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole?
Although it is probably wishful thinking, some astronomers contend that a black hole may be lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. All summer, they have been arguing over how to find it, if indeed it is there, and what to do about it, proposing plans that are only halfway out of this world.
You Can Go Home Now can serve as a primer for plausible plotting, including clever, offbeat asides and subplots scrupulously woven through the narrative to keep the story compelling. “That’s the thing about murder. You just don’t kill one person; you spread death in little ripples like a pebble tossed in a pond.”
Elias proves himself equally at ease in the inner workings of a big-city police department and a 31-year-old woman’s introspective mind.
This book is like the moment when you go to a familiar outside place and suddenly you see some amazing thing you had never expected, like the time recently in one of our fields I saw a peregrine falcon take down a pigeon with a bulletlike thud out of the gray sky, and then, earthed, mantle it beneath its wings, then rip it to bloody red shreds, surrounded by wisps of fluffy down. Suddenly the sky and the field felt different and every one of my senses was in hyperdrive.
Because the law, I hear, is a technology
of power, I frenzy on a Sunday night
in search of wooden pencils
needed for the LSAT.