Tag: Emily St. John Mandel

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Read Exit Party Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★

“I think if you live long enough,” Nico said, “you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here. That’s what I mean.”

And

He locks the studio door behind her, thinking about the poem again. The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night. Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.

Following several characters across two alternative worlds, the story moves from voice to voice, places to place and back and forward in time. Sometimes written in the close third other sections in first person. I enjoyed all of this.

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Read Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★

In Yupik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the Nawal: one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.

And

How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? We always were a species of nomads. Eli found it easy to imagine an instinct passed down generation to generation, a permanently thrown breaker on a genetic switchboard: flight or fight, and a switch jammed permanently in the flight position, the limitless longing for travel pulled down by hooked genes.

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Read: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★📚
A subtle & grownup take on the post apocalypse novel. I think I enjoyed everything about this. Flits between characters & time before & after the Georgian Flu which kills 99% of the population.

None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.