When I (ill-advisedly) joined Twitter in 2016, I often scrolled through an account dedicated to images of nonliving things that appeared to have a face. A smiling banana slice, for instance. Or a frowning toaster. Or a surprised-looking cottage. None of these things were intentionally designed to look like a face, but once a viewer like me registered a pair of eyes and a mouth, the face was impossible to unsee.
I perused these images to amuse myself, but actual scientists have studied this face-perceiving phenomenon. Called face pareidolia, it is a product of evolution. We see faces where faces are none because our brains constantly scan for people—specifically for the presence of friends or foes. To search for people—then plumb their expressions for meaning—is an inherently human impulse.
The crab pots are piled high at the fishing docks in Newport, Oregon. Stacks of tire-sized cages fill the parking lot, festooned with colorful buoys and grimy ropes. By this time in July, most commercial fishers have called it a year for Dungeness crab. But not Dave Bailey, the skipper of the 14-meter Morningstar II. The season won’t end for another month, and “demand for fresh, live crab never stops,” Bailey says with a squinting smile and fading Midwestern accent.
It’s a clear morning, and he leads me aboard a white-and-blue crab boat, built in 1967 and owned by Bailey since 1992. He skirts a giant metal tank that he hopes will soon hold a mob of leggy crustaceans and ducks his tall frame into a cluttered cabin, where an age-worn steering wheel gleams beneath the front windows and a fisherman’s prayer hangs on the wall: “Dear God, be good to me. Your sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
To Bennett’s great credit, “Checkout 19” doesn’t dramatize the life-saving role of books. Reading here is not embraced as mere escape, nor glorified as edification. Bennett is not selling anything or arguing a point. In the telling of a life lived through books, and in her own sometimes floridly erudite sentences, the deep magic of writing is revealed.
Whether the digital takeover of our lives is a blessing or a fatal curse might be up for debate, but it is definitely a boon to crime writers. In “The Verifiers,” Jane Pek’s debut, the world of social media, big tech and internet connectivity provides fertile new ground for humans to deceive, defraud and possibly murder one another.
In Dreadful Sorry: Essays on American Nostalgia, Jennifer Niesslein explores personal and cultural nostalgia, the way it is used and abused, and the way memory shapes our lives. In a series of deceptively sly essays about seemingly slight topics — a family road trip, a favorite movie, a class reunion — Niesslein probes what it means to remember, and what it means to forget.
There’s a terrific mix of youthfulness and gravitas to Karen Cheung’s poignant debut, “The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir.” Yes, this is a love letter to Hong Kong, but it’s one free of romanticized illusion. Cheung is acutely aware of the city’s abysmal failings: its hyper-capitalism, bureaucracy, corruption and limited voting rights.
My great-grandma Tessie used to say that if you walked into a room and saw everyone else’s troubles hanging on the walls, you would take one look and head straight for your own.
I thought of this often while reading “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss,” Amy Bloom’s searing account of her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. I had a similar experience with my mother, whose condition, over the course of 12 years, deteriorated steadily until she died. Bloom’s husband, Brian Ameche, makes an unwavering decision just days after his diagnosis: He wants to end his life. Now.
The title of Ferrara’s book, “The Greatest Invention,” might sound bombastic, but the book isn’t. One reason is Ferrara’s conversational style, rendered into lively English by Todd Portnowitz. Ferrara says she wrote the book the way she talks to friends over dinner, and that’s exactly how it reads. Instead of telling a chronological history of writing, she moves freely from script to script, island to island. It can be a bit dizzying but also great fun, and she is constantly by our side, prodding us with questions, offering speculations, reporting on exciting discoveries (and on annoying colleagues: Please don’t email her with your theories about ancient scripts).