Read Like the Wind
Brain-electrifyingly good book recommendations.
to commemorate the anniversary of lockdown, this month’s theme is insomnia. I’m not a doctor (uh, obviously), but I’ve discovered a few tricks: Lie in bed and pretend you’re a slowly decomposing fruit. Take an Epsom-salts bath and imagine the liquid magnesium sulfate osmosing through your skin, saying “Sweet dreams’’ to each body part. Or you could just read (see below) by candlelight. The flickering offers a visual lullaby.
The Decagon House Murders
BY YUKITO AYATSUJI (FICTION, 1987)
Behold, the perfect escapist drug! If I could crush this book into a powder and snort it, I would. It is a cultclassic Japanese mystery loosely based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
What you should know first is that the form of the “book” functions here much like the body of a fashion model on the runway, in that it’s a structure upon which to hang something else. The “something else” here is a puzzle. You’ll see what I mean when you start reading. The characters are flat, there’s nary a poetic line to be found, and a smart fifthgrader could motor through it. This is all intentional; the novel is a prime example of the shin honkaku genre—a Japanese reboot of the classic whodunit. The genre is defined by a few elements: Is there a shocking twist? Are the clues subtly planted? Does it take place
in an intriguing closed environment? Could a reader plausibly solve it? If so, congrats—it may be a shin honkaku.
In this case, a group of university students visits a misty island off the coast of Japan where a gruesome crime has recently occurred. They stay in a ten-sided house and are serially murdered. One of the murders involves lipstick. I won’t spoil anything else. Once again, this is less a novel than an ingenious card trick transformed into the shape of bound pages printed with text, so enter accordingly and have a ball. If you don’t believe me, just ask the universe: There’s an asteroid named after the author!
How to Order the Universe
BY MARÍA JOSÉ FERRADA (FICTION, FEBRUARY 16)
Advance copies of books occasionally come with a little note from the editor or someone who works at the publishing house. The purpose of the note is to deliver praise and hype up the reviewer for an explosive literary experience, though it can often seem as if it were written at gunpoint. The one at the beginning of this book, however, was genuinely impassioned and contained a sentence that intrigued me: “When I finished the last pages [of this novel], I truly had to stare at a wall.” I know the feeling the note describes—it’s the human equivalent of a computer’s spinning rainbow beach ball. I simply had to find out whether the book would make me stare at a wall.