Author: Jennifer Graham

Tilt, by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 227 pages)

If you’ve ever imagined yourself in the middle of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, where were you when it happened? That’s what Annie, the protagonist of Tilt, is thinking as she frantically makes her way out of a big-box store in Portland, Oregon, moments after the long-predicted “Big One” hits.

“What I’m saying is, my imaginary earthquake did not include IKEA,” Annie says.

Annie is 35 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when the earthquake hits on the very morning that she has finally pushed past her inertia and gone shopping for a crib. Up until this point, the “nursery” in the two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her husband, Dom, consisted of an empty room and a car seat still in its box. To say that she is ambivalent about this pregnancy is an understatement. Also, Annie and Dom are barely solvent, a circumstance that she blames on Dom’s unwillingness to let go of his dream of being a famous actor, even though he is 38 and his latest “big break” is being an understudy for the lead in a local production of “King Lear.”

Annie herself is something of a theater kid, but she has largely abandoned the dream of her younger self to be a playwright, having taken a 9-to-5 job that pays the bills while suffocating her soul. She is on her first day of maternity leave when the earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. It is the long-feared Cascadia earthquake, one that collapses buildings and bridges and destroys all communications and life as we know it. Annie survives with minor injuries but in her struggle to escape the building she leaves her purse, keys and phone behind. Unsure of what to do, not knowing if her apartment still exists or if her husband is alive, she sets off on foot, in a pair of Birkenstock sandals, planning to walk to the coffee shop where her husband works, some miles away.

It is a precarious journey for anyone, let alone a woman just weeks away from giving birth. Almost everything around her is broken or ablaze, people are dazed and injured or dying, and, as the hours go by, survivors are becoming predatory.

As Annie makes her way through the streets she reflects on a fight she and her husband had the previous night — and tells the story to her unborn child, which she affectionately calls Bean. It was a run-of-the-mill fight, but also one that summarizes the couple’s journey: “Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I’ve been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all of our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day,” Annie tells her child.

That constellation becomes clear to the reader in a series of flashbacks that alternate with Annie’s real-time journey and also give us snapshots of Annie’s hardscrabble upbringing and her relationship with her late mother. We learn of the bright promise that lit up Annie’s twenties, as she writes and produces a play that led to her meeting and marrying Dom. But as she settles into the monotony of her job as an office manager for a tech company, those dreams “sparkle at us from a distant mountaintop” amid a life consisting of “an infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.”

She wavers between trying to appreciate her life as it is, and wondering whether she and Bean would be better off on their own. She can’t shake the idea that Dom is failing her. But it is unclear whether he is failing Annie, or whether she is failing him. She grapples with these questions on the journey, in which she forms an unlikely bond with a young mother who is trying to reach the school where her daughter was when the earthquake hit, and as she encounters a variety of memorable characters: a bicyclist whose wife has been seriously injured, a malevolent gang of teenagers, the passing drivers who offer her a ride, a young woman who works with Dom.

Parents, Annie notices, are everywhere. “What is it about parents that you always know they are parents?” she muses. “That look that says I am serious but I also spend lots of time picking up LEGOs. Their hands tense and anxious from constantly cutting apple slices. A kind of hanging flesh around their mouth. A hurried way of walking.”

Ultimately, while this is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called “apocalypse genre,” it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans. “Nobody wants to be where they are,” Annie thinks at one point. “So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?”

But Pattee answers her character with this book, which thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. She describes the blaring of car horns as “honks [that] rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species” and Annie’s monotonous existence as “looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house.”

A narrative built around an interior conversation with an unborn child takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while, it works, and gives Annie license to deliver asides like this one, spoken to the child after a remembrance of an exchange the parents had the night before the earthquake:

“Did you hear me say that? Were you listening to all that? Seeing the dusty baseboard, cracked linoleum, and light fixtures from the eighties. Did you look at us in our baggy pajamas, in our untoned bodies, and think, Them? Them?”

Tilt is a remarkable literary debut. Every end of the world as we know it should be this good. A —Jennifer Graham

Source Code, by Bill Gates (Knopf, 315 pages)

Of all the Big Tech moguls, Bill Gates is the one getting the least attention these days. Since his split with his wife of 27 years, Melinda French Gates, announced in 2021, he seems to have struggled to find public favor amid reports of infidelity and meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. He’s not disappeared from the spotlight altogether — he still contributes at Microsoft and heads the foundation that he and his former wife founded, and he still makes book recommendations on his personal website, GatesNotes.com. On the cusp of 70, he’s not making headlines like he once did, although maybe that’s a good thing.

But he’s back in the spotlight on the occasion of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, coupled with the release of a memoir, Source Code, that is being billed as an origin story for Gates. The book covers only a portion of his life — childhood through the early days of Microsoft. That timeline delivers Gates from the minefield of writing about his marriage and divorce, although that may be yet to come; reportedly, this is the first of three volumes.

Does the world want to read three books about Bill Gates? Does it even want to read one? That’s yet unclear, but Source Code is surprisingly engaging, both as an autobiography and as a period piece — the period being the 1960s and 1970s when Gates was coming of age. It was a different time, to be sure.

Gates begins with a story about a treacherous hike he undertook with friends as a sophomore in high school. It was to take more than a week and cover 50 miles in the Olympic mountains. With no adult supervision. Again, it was 1971 — a different time. Today, child protective services might pluck the boys off a mountain mid-hike, especially under the conditions they were hiking in.

At one point the trip got quite difficult, and Gates explains how he coped, by going deep in his own mind and thinking about computer code. But the fact that he spent a day or so marching silently through the woods, while accompanied by friends, thinking about coding isn’t the most amazing part of the story. That would be the fact that he still remembered the code he had written in his head three and a half years later when he had need of it for a project that would lead to Microsoft. “I have always been able to hyperfocus,” he later writes, and that seems an understatement that explains a lot.

Gates’ brain has already been the subject of a Netflix documentary (2019’s Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates), so it’s no surprise when he writes “my parents knew that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids.” He read early and often — by age 9, he had read every volume of the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia. He had a compulsion to rock, at first on a rocking horse on which he would sit for hours, but later, even in adulthood, swaying back and forth when he was thinking. He thought of things that interested him, or that had some sort of tangible reward. (He memorized Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but only because a Sunday School teacher offered to buy dinner on the top of Seattle’s Space Needle for anyone who did so.)

He shares a note his mother saved from the director of his preschool who said “he seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life. He did not know or care to know how to cut, put on his own coat, and was completely happy thus.”

Gates rummages through childhood memories like a grandfather with no plans for the weekend and an audience at the ready — we learn about his father’s first car, a tornado that touched down in the family’s backyard, what he ate at the World’s Fair (Belgian waffles, their debut in the U.S.). It was a privileged and well-ordered life, almost Cleaver-esque. “We lived by the structure of routines, traditions, and rules my mother established. … You did not leave the house with an unmade bed, uncombed hair, or a wrinkled shirt.”

When his mom was off volunteering with the Junior League, her mother would fill in, always with “a string of pearls and perfectly coiffed hair.” Every summer, the family would spend two weeks on vacation near a waterfront with nine other families. Gates’ parents threw a roller-skating party for all their friends every Christmas. Norman Rockwell would have had a field day with many of these stories, wholesome as they are. And they are the best part of this memoir, told with the affection of age, simply because they are part of the Gates story that we don’t know. (Which is a good thing, since this is also the bulk of it — he’s not even out of high school 160 pages in.)

The scaffolding of his career is already well-known to anyone paying attention: how he became obsessed with nascent computer technology in high school and formed deep friendships with similarly inclined, nerdy friends; the ups and downs of his friendship with the late Paul Allen, with whom he co-founded the world’s largest software company. Source Code gives us engaging and often funny anecdotes along the way to their success, as well as the pain. He writes movingly of the accidental death of one of their closest friends, and of seeing his friend’s mother, after the memorial service, “curled up on the sofa, sobbing.”

Gates, of course, threw himself even more deeply into coding as he processed his own grief, and he grew closer to Allen in the subsequent years, leading up to the pivotal day when they saw the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, with its breathless article about “the world’s first minicomputer kit” which could be had for about the price of a color television.

Gates had filled out his application for Harvard on a typewriter — that’s how different his world was then from ours today. It’s easy to forget how radically the world has changed in the past half-century, but Source Code reminds us, page after page. I’m still not convinced that the world needs three books about the life of Bill Gates, but I’m at least open to the possibility after finishing the first. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Source Code, by Bill Gates

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown and Co., 341 pages)

When you toss a plastic water bottle in a recycling bin, you’re saving the Earth — or so we’ve been told for decades. But in recent years a more disturbing story has been emerging, with evidence that much of the stuff in our recycling bins is not being recycled but is being shipped, at significant financial and human cost, to developing nations.

In Waste Wars, journalist Alexander Clapp goes Dumpster diving for the truth, traveling the globe to witness what he calls “the wild afterlife of your trash.”

It’s a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries.

Clapp’s introduction includes an astonishing statement: “Since the early 1990s, when your discarded Coke bottle first emerged as a major object of global commerce, China had been the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth.” In another decade, he writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.”

But China got fed up and stopped accepting the world’s plastic, creating chaos in the global trash trade. “Within months, Greek garbage started surfacing in Liberia. Italian trash wrecked the beaches of Tunisia. Dutch plastic overwhelmed Thailand.”

The richest nations soon realized that the poorest could be counted on to take their waste — not just plastic and the remains of incinerated garbage (all that ash has to go somewhere) but also things like sewage sludge. The garbage and waste shipped to other countries is sometimes processed and sometimes repurposed, but often buried or dumped anywhere a truck driver thinks he can get away with it. In some areas sewage sludge has been broadly distributed and then paved over with “roads to nowhere.” In one area of Kenya, there are acres of six-story-high trash mountains seeping a poisonous soup that mosquitoes won’t breed in.

These sorts of arrangements have sometimes been brokered by government officials with no say by the citizens affected. In Guatemala in the early 1990s, for example, 200 families were “relocated” from their villages to make way for the processing of sewage coming from Miami, Galveston and other U.S. cities. In Turkey, a Kurdish farmer watched a truck stop outside his citrus groves, dump a load of garbage and light a match, the resulting fire nearly destroying his livelihood in the coming years.

Then there’s the e-waste. Clapp travels to a place in Ghana known as Agbogbloshie, which is a slum in which much of our electronic waste winds up. Perhaps, he says, your first cell phone and Game Boy, your DVD player, your college laptop, perished here. He writes about “enterprising young men in Ghana who have spent their lives rummaging through the piles of keyboards, desktop monitors, and smartphones that waste brokers in rich countries have shipped to Agbogbloshie; they are seasoned at restoring these busted electronics back to life — and, on occasion, using them to conduct epic long-range fraud against residents of the countries that sent them.”

At the same time, he writes, Agbogbloshie has become “a byword for ecological ruin.” Chicken eggs there contain high levels of chemical compounds, making them “probably the most poisonous on Earth.”

And yet the enterprise provides jobs. Clapp describes what he calls a “de-manufacturing line” — young men who sit for eight or nine hours a day dismantling and smashing trash: “old ceiling fans, motorcycle mufflers, speaker systems.” It is ironic, he observes, that some of the discarded objects being destroyed contain the world’s most advanced technology and yet it is backbreaking human labor — “of an almost unimaginably archaic kind” — doing the destroying.

Unfortunately, the problems Clapp uncovers have no easy fix, driven as they are by consumer demand for products that don’t just become waste themselves but produce waste, are literally wrapped in waste, every step on the way to your house, from their production to their packaging to the cash-register receipt you receive.

The book sometimes feels a bit like a lecture in which Clapp is chastising each of us for the contents of our closets and refrigerators. And yet we needed that Game Boy, didn’t we? Yes, water bottles are bad, we get it, but for many of us, so is our tap water. It’s easy to see the problem, not so easy to see the solution. Unfortunately, Waste Wars offers no way out of the mess we are in.

At the beauty store where my youngest daughter works, they recently tried to reduce plastic bag consumption by discontinuing plastic bags and offering a paper bag for 10 cents. They had to return to plastic bags within a few months because customers were so angry, they would storm out of the store.

Other countries are being more hard-nosed. In Indonesia, which is said to be the third largest contributor to plastic in the ocean (behind China and India), stores in Jakarta banned single-use plastic bags five years ago, levying a fine that amounts to $1,800. Dubai is building an enormous incinerator that it says will burn what amounts to a thousand trucks full of trash every day. But Indonesia also has plastic being sent there from other countries, and incineration has environmental costs of its own.

Depressingly, Clapp admits at one point, “As long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most, the farther from public concern — and political action — it is likely to remain.” Waste Wars is an eloquent and deeply researched call to action, even as it’s frustratingly unclear about what that action should be. A —Jennifer Graham

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

“Any woodsman who says he’s never been lost in the woods is a liar. It’s inevitable,” says Maine game warden Beverly Miller in the opening pages of Heartwood, a new novel about a woman who goes missing while hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail.

“Up here, we tend to think of being lost as something you can be good at,” Beverly, who goes by Lt. Bev, explains. But for some people who get lost in the woods, panic sets in, and “loss of mental control is more dangerous than the lack of food or water.”

And with that, we are propelled headlong into the search for Valerie Gillis, the 42-year-old nurse who vanished about 200 miles from the terminus at Mt. Katahdin, where she was supposed to end her three-month trek. Valerie’s voice is present throughout the novel, however, in letters she is writing to her mother as she tries to stay alive in what’s known as the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, growing weaker by the day.

“The first thing I should say is that you were right. You didn’t want me to hike the Appalachian Trail,” she writes, acknowledging that a “thru-hike” — the insider’s term for walking the trail straight through — “isn’t a reasonable thing to do.”

“Anyone who wants to walk two thousand miles in a row does it because they find beauty in the unreasonable. All that misery, that’s the point. The high probability of failure, that’s motivation,” she writes.

Meanwhile, her parents and husband are part of a search effort that grows larger as each day passes, even as the odds of finding her alive drop as the days tick on. “Ninety-seven percent of the time, we find lost people within twenty-four hours. The other 3 percent, we know those stories like scripture,” Lt. Bev says.

The story unfolds, not only through the narration of the game warden leading the search effort, and Valerie’s letter, but also through the eyes of Lena Kucharski, a 76-year-old disabled resident of a retirement community who becomes something of an an internet sleuther, eager to help in the only way she can.

Interspersed throughout, we are introduced to people who met Valerie on the trail — members of her “tramily,” as AT hikers call each other — as well as various tips that are phoned in by psychics, do-gooders and other concerned people. While it’s assumed there has been some sort of accident that has befallen Valerie — maybe a bad fall or medical episode — there is also the concern that someone she came across in the woods harmed her, and or that even someone she knows was involved in her disappearance.

Meanwhile, we learn of a secretive facility near where Valerie disappeared, a real-life military operation identified by the acronym SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — which is training for members of the Armed Forces and civilian contractors who might one day be trapped behind enemy lines. It sounds like the stuff of video games, but a SERE facility exists in Rangeley, Maine, among other locations.

The story has good bones, for sure, but its heart is in the development of four characters:

– Valerie, who became a nurse to “fix things” but was exhausted by the challenges of caring for patients during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic; who had come to question her love for her husband while on the trail, where she assumed the name “Sparrow” while making new friends and writing quirky trail poetry like “Ode to My Spork.”

– Bev, one of only two female wardens in the state, an imposing 6 feet tall, but with a mother, now dying, who didn’t understand her daughter’s line of work: “It’s just so unusual. For a woman to want to drive around chasing criminals,” she’d said.

– Ruben, the 260-pound Black man who decided to hike the trail on a whim and became Valerie’s companion for a while and kept her laughing with his stories of trying to find hiking clothes and boots that fit, while also trying to fit in, so to speak, on the trail: “Man, do you have to be friendly when you are a Black man hiking. You have to start waving, like, a mile away. ‘Hey, ya’ll! Beautiful morning, innit?”

– And Lena, the lifelong voracious reader who lives alone in a retirement community, where she rebuffs the attention of other residents in favor of foraging for edible plants and chatting with an internet friend who goes by the name TerribleSilence.

Gaige gives all of these characters such warmth and depth that they could each hold up a novella on their own, but she weaves their stories together and manages to keep the tension thrumming until the last few pages.

As someone who has technically been on the Appalachian Trail but never felt the compulsion to actually hike it, I found this story compelling not only as a novel but in its ample nonfiction detail. Gaige, the author of four other novels, hung out with real-life game wardens in Maine and heard their stories while researching this book, and it is full of the language, customs and experiences of thru-hikers.

Gaige has said she has been long haunted by the story of a 66-year-old hiker who died of starvation and exposure after getting lost in Maine in 2013. There are similarities between that hiker’s story and the fictional Valerie Gillis’ — both started their trek in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (Valerie plans to complete the upper stretch, then the lower), and like the real hiker, Valerie is afraid of the dark and takes anxiety medication, making a terrible situation even worse.

In simple and sparse narration that blooms with lyrical descriptions of New England landscapes, Heartwood manages to be part mystery, part thriller, part how-to-hike-the-Appalachian-Trail guidebook — or it might convince you to never set foot in the woods again. Either way, start Heartwood and you’ll likely be a thru-reader, all the way to the end. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly (Avid Reader Press, 304 pages)

It’s hard to say whether Brian Kelly really founded the travel website known as The Points Guy, or whether his father actually did, because it’s Kelly’s father who set him on this path. When Kelly was 12, his dad let him arrange the family’s vacation using points he’d accumulated from airlines and hotels, and a traveler influencer was born. Before he even had a driver’s license Kelly was hooked on the game: how to travel the world, in style and at minimal cost.

As an adult, he went on to start a website in order to share his strategies, and “The Points Guy” took off after he was featured in a New York Times article in 2011. Now Kelly is a dad himself, he’s sold the website, and he has compiled a couple of decades of travel wisdom into a book that arrives just in time to help navigate your summer vacation.

Kelly calls this the “platinum age of travel,” arguing that it’s never been cheaper and easier to go so many different places if you know what you’re doing. Problem is, he says, most people don’t — unless they travel a lot for business, or grew up in a family that had the resources to travel, most people have never learned to travel well — it’s not something that’s taught.

“You may think travel is horrible across the board, but it’s amazing when the system works for you. When I travel, I rarely wait in lines. I don’t pay for food and drinks in airports. You can do the same, and I’ll show you how,” he promises.

Kelly begins by inviting readers to decide on “travel goals” and to set a travel budget, which right away may lose him some readers whose travel budget allows a day trip to Worcester, Mass. There is a smattering of generic advice in this section, some of which seems obvious (“Stay at hotels if safety is a concern or if you’re traveling alone”), but some of which is surprising (he advises travelers to wear backpacks on your front in crowded areas lest a thief slice the bottom of your bag without you knowing it). There’s high season and low season for travel, but there’s also “shoulder” season, the bridge between the two that is often the best time to go. And so forth.

From there, Kelly organizes the book into how to win at different aspects of travel: booking, earning and redeeming rewards, accessing perks, navigating lines, traveling with family, staying healthy, dealing with problems that arise, and managing fear of flying.

Again, some of the information he shares is intuitive: Your odds of having a flight delayed or canceled are the lowest earliest in the morning, for example. The more prestigious airlines (read: Delta) are usually more reliable. Where he gets into the granular stuff is where it gets interesting, as in one of his tips for booking cheaper flights. If you are, for example, in Oklahoma City and want to go to Tokyo, he advises that you buy a ticket from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, and then book a separate flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, thus (by his calculations) making the trip half of what it would have cost booking from Oklahoma City to Tokyo. This is a practice that travel junkies call repositioning flights.

The points and miles redemption chapters are where Kelly gets deep into the weeds, and readers will need to already have some knowledge of this game, or a burning desire to learn, or a couple of over-the-counter headache relief pills to keep up. He describes the machinations involved in getting the best values by accumulating points and moving them around and looking for “sweet spots” and planning “open-jaw” itineraries. (To be fair, Kelly does acknowledge, “If you’re a beginner, this chapter may get confusing.”)

Nor did I particularly enjoy reading about all the luxuries that all you people with access to airport lounges are enjoying while I’m waiting outside my gate. (You have showers? And buffets and VIP customer service?) I’m getting a bit grumpy at this point, I will acknowledge, since Kelly had promised me that I, too, could enjoy all the perks he’s enjoying, but he didn’t mention that I might need a Platinum Amex and elite status on Delta (which requires spending $28K a year).

As for easing the pain of lines, his advice is not novel (TSA PreCheck, CLEAR and Global Entry), and there have been reports lately of PreCheck lines being longer than regular since so many people have it, so that’s not even guaranteed to help.

Things get interesting again in the “flying with families” section because, despite having flown with four kids over two decades, I did not know that there is a debate over whether children should fly in first class (Kelly has done so) and that some people fly with “sorry gifts” to offer people who are upset by their crying or misbehaving children — like George and Amal Clooney, who once gave noise-canceling headphones to others seated near them on a flight. (Kelly’s against it — “Babies have a right to fly just like anyone else, and these types of gifts set an unnecessary precedent that we need gift packages to tolerate small humans.”)

Finally, Kelly offers some valuable nuggets on dealing with the inevitable problems, such as politely asking to be upgraded to first class on a flight to make up for the inconvenience if you are bumped from a flight or miss a connection because your flight was delayed. He also suggests contacting the airline via a DM on X if your flight is running late, asking them to “protect” you (hold a seat) on another flight in case you miss your connection. “Not all airlines will do this, but it never hurts to ask. Plus, asking to be protected makes you sound like a pro traveler and someone they want to keep happy as a customer.”

Kelly is a likeable guy who is enthusiastic about what he does, and he can make you think a little harder about how to improve the travel experience for you and your family. It’s unlikely that this book will overhaul the travel experience as promised for the casual traveler, and it feels a bit long for the amount of useful information gleaned. But at least those of us still without lounge access can save money by dispensing with the “sorry” gifts. B-

Featured Image: How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly