Mark's Updates

Mark is 30% done with The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 03:34:16 -0700

Mark is 30% done with The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax.

Mark wants to read 'Bastard Out of Carolina'

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:49:27 -0700

Mark wants to read Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Mark is 7% done with I Seek a Kind Person

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 22:25:22 -0700

Mark is 7% done with I Seek a Kind Person.

Mark started reading 'I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust'

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 22:25:12 -0700

Mark started reading I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust by Julian Borger

Mark wants to read 'Death at the Sign of the Rook'

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 23:47:51 -0700

Mark wants to read Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Mark wants to read 'Tilt'

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 06:28:10 -0700

Mark wants to read Tilt by Emma Pattee

Mark started reading 'An Irish Country Doctor'

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 21:44:28 -0700

Mark started reading An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor

Mark started reading 'Bastard Out of Carolina'

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 09:24:29 -0700

Mark started reading Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Mark added 'Sea of Tranquility'

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 09:03:14 -0700

Mark gave 4 stars to Sea of Tranquility (Hardcover) by Emily St. John Mandel
bookshelves: fiction, science-fiction, historical-fiction, international-fiction
This can be seen in a way as a sequel to Mandel's previous novel, The Glass Hotel, but there really is just one strong link, and otherwise, Sea of Tranquility stands on its own.

Having read The Glass Hotel and the award-winning Station Eleven, I can see now that Mandel is fascinated with pandemics and with apocalypses, and in this novel, she combined those themes with time travel. The protagonist, Gaspery Jacques Roberts, is living an unfulfilled life on a Moon colony when he seizes the chance to join the Time Institute and become a time traveler. His brilliant sister, Zoey, also works there, and she doesn't want her brother to take the job.

The job of the time travelers is to visit places and times where something might have happened that would change the timeline of the future. In his particular case, Gaspery is investigating an anomaly that has cropped up at different times, where people suddenly see the scene in front of them dissolve, to be replaced by violin music and the sound of an airship.

Mandel has a big picture suggestion for why this anomaly is occurring, which I won't give away here, but the moral fulcrum of the novel is the idea that time travelers must never tell other people what is going to happen to their lives.

I can't really give away too much more without spoiler alerts. This novel hops around through many time points, each of which has different distinctive characters. There is Edwin St. Andrew, a young member of the English gentry in the early 1900s who, as the second son, can live comfortably for the rest of his life but will never inherit the estate; Olive Lewellyn, a novelist in the future who is on a book tour of Earth when another pandemic begins; and Ephrem, a childhood friend who gives Gaspery entree into the Time Institute, despite Zoey's objections.

With so many timelines and time travel thrown into the mix, Mandel has to use all her powers to make sure all the plotlines come together, and she manages that with aplomb, as well as throwing in more than one surprise twist at the end.

There aren't many writers these days who I want to keep track of throughout their careers, but Mandel is certainly one of them.

Mark wants to read 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 22:31:12 -0700

Mark wants to read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson