Portable Magic
Reading, for me, is entertainment and an escape from the real world. But it can also inform and stretch the boundaries of the life I live.
Currently reading
The Dreamers ★★★☆☆
The story of a "sleeping sickness" virus that sweeps through a small, isolated college town. It was recommended in an NPR article on epidemic/plague fiction as reflective of our current situation:
In parallel with today's pandemic, the characters in Walker's novel confront a shortage of face masks. There is a panicked run on supermarkets. Waves through a window to loved ones under quarantine. Talk of it all being a hoax. And, just as now, the impossibility of knowing what's to come.
And truthfully, that's the most interesting part of this book. It started well, with interesting enough characters and storylines to lift it past my annoyance with the present-tense stylings and Cassandra Campbell's breathily droning narration, but really lost momentum in the second half. At that point, I couldn't ignore the sheer ridiculousness of the scientific/medical basis of this disease, diagnosis, and treatment anymore, and the last few chapters devolved into some navel-gazing about the nature of life and dreams and relationships that just didn't work for me. I was a little relieved when I got to The End.
But the first half was good enough for an overall 3 star rating.
Audiobook, borrowed from my public library via Overdrive.