Mind Picking : Farewell 2019

2019 was a different kind of year for me: as this picture suggests, it was a year of trying to get more active out in the community (which accounts for a lower number of books read; a repurposing of my time that I wasn't unhappy to make), and it was also a year that saw my mother-in-law go into nursing care and my own parents downsize to a smaller house in town; it was definitely a year of feeling that ultimate clock ticking away at all of our lives. On the more positive, life-building, side of things, this year saw Kennedy and Zach get engaged (and the wedding planning that they've allowed me to be a part of is certainly life-affirming) and it has been just lovely having Mallory living at home again while she takes a new direction in her schooling. From getting a new puppy in January to exploring the Grand River (a big and diverse project that took me and Dave several months to complete), 2019 was a busy and fulfilling year. 

To begin my annual recap, my top reads:


                                                    Top Five Fiction Released in 2019
 Lanny

Lushly lyrical and numinous, this is my favourite kind of read; my top pick of the Booker Prize nominees.

Inland

A bizarre plotline, set in the Wild West, with elevated writing; what's not to like?

The Nickel Boys

So well written: fascinating (disturbing) history plus heartbreakingly relatable characters makes for a perfect examination of race relations

 The Innocents

Beautiful language and a heartrending story about lost innocence and the expulsion from paradise; I would have given this book the Giller Prize.

 The Dutch House                                              Olive, Again

I'm going to award a tie to these two books for fifth place: they are very similar in their effectiveness at capturing honest, human moments. Lovely reads, both.

                                                 Top Five Nonfiction Released in 2019

 Invisible Women

My most essential/mindopening nonfiction read of the year.

 The Starlight Tour

A book every Canadian needs to read: this is happening and it's criminally disgusting.

  From the AshesI'll say again that it's not the best-written book I've ever read, but it certainty challenged my ideas about the potential of those who live on the margins.

 Furious Hours

Fascinating history/narrative nonfiction that made for a very compelling read.

 The Ghost Garden

An essential read that does a wonderful job of humanising those with schizophrenia (honourable mention here to another engaging recent release on mental health, Good Morning, Monster.)

Most years I list more favourite reads than this (could it be because I read thirty fewer books than I averaged in the previous few years?), but I'll also note that among the also-rans, I particularly enjoyed some true crime investigations (Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered, The Forest City Killer, and to a lesser extant, Chase Darkness with Me); reads that add to my previously enjoyed list of books that attempt to center women into classic tales (The Red Word and The Porpoise); and this was definitely the year that I was most inspired by nature writing as memoir (How to Catch a Mole, Into the Planet, and Surrender: The Call of the American West). In that same vein, the most influential read of 2019 was definitely Birds by the Shore: the book that inspired me to look in my own back yard for a connection to nature, and that led to me and Dave having a number of awesome adventures in, on, beside, and above the Grand River that flows through Cambridge.

Our first foray to the Grand River

To start with our Grand River adventures (related read: The Grand River: Dundalk to Lake Erie), we began by buying new bikes in order to train for The Tour de Grand; a community bicycle ride (not a race) that occurs every June. Dave and I enjoyed ourselves so much that we continued to bike 20 km of this riverside trail every opportunity we got throughout the summer. It was wonderful to watch the trees and other wild plants change throughout the season; to watch the river wend its way alongside us in intermittent glimpses; to have two deer race beside the path on our first ride; to see the colourful flash of blue jays and cardinals and my first ever oriole flit through the branches above.

I went on three different tubing experiences - twice with Dave (one of those times with Kennedy and Zach along as well) and once with Rudy - and I saw three different stretches of the Grand as I floated along. Note: the river, while fairly wide and long, is not particularly deep in these areas and it was not a lazy float; we often needed to get out and free ourselves from the rocks upon which we found ourselves stranded. K n o w l e d g e.

Nothing like a champagne picnic as we float along

In early July, Dave and I went on a moonlit night paddle with Six Nations paranormal investigators with Kennedy, Dan, and Rudy (a story I saved for Halloween, here) and it was definitely one of the more exciting and intriguing experiences of the year.

I attended two different sunrise water ceremonies with Six Nations women (once with Dave, who was very moved by the experience, as was I), Dave and I checked out the Making Waves Festival (put on by Surf Cambridge, a group attempting to have a permanent surf wave device built in downtown Galt), and we drove over the Kissing Bridge in West Montrose (the last wooden covered bridge in Ontario).

We enjoyed dinner on a riverboat cruise with Dan and Rudy:

And in our coup de grace (what we referred to all summer as our dirtbag option), we hired a helicopter to fly us along the Grand River (which was spectacular in its flanking trees of September leaf colours), eventually landing at a Tim Hortons in St George - where we got out to buy coffees before taking off again for home - and this different perspective on the river was transcendent. Bonus: We had asked Kennedy to wait at the Tim Hortons to take our picture as we landed and she was able to fly back to Breslau with us.

These experiences were not only wonderfully connective to our natural environment but most of them turned into pleasurable social events as well. Everything about our Grand River exploration totally elevated this year for me and I can't wait to continue the project into 2020. 

As I ended 2018, I was becoming less and less happy with my job at the book store. And when an opportunity arose in early 2019 for me to apply to become a local librarian, I thought that that more accurately reflected what I wanted to do with my time; as my job at the book store has become more about stocking and selling lifestyle products, I thought that getting back to working with books and readers would delight me. I applied for the job, listed a librarian who used to work with me at the store as one of my references, and then was absolutely crushed when I never even got an interview; between my current work experience and my long ago education, I really thought I was an ideal candidate. But then Dave's Mom was taken to the hospital, we were informed that she would likely never awaken from her hypotrophic dementia state, and when I contacted my managers to request an emergency leave of absence (so that someone could be with my mother-in-law day and night to await the inevitable), they were so understanding and so good to me that after Bev did wake up - and was sent home within a couple of days!! - I realised that that flexibility wouldn't have been available to me if I had switched jobs; I am exactly where I need to be and it's my relationships with the people I work with that truly define my job, not the nuts and bolts of my duties. As the year went on and I was called upon to help with my mother-in-law's care (which honestly didn't happen that often), I was reminded over and over again that my job has me ideally situated to be of such help.

And so to poor Bev: She has had a rollercoaster year - from near normal to totally incapacitated and back again - and throughout it all, her 82-year-old husband has been acting as her primary caregiver, needing to walk her to the washroom when she's able; needing to change her Depends when she's not. And as a man with congestive heart disease, our greatest fear has been that physically caring for a sick wife will literally kill Jim one day. And so, when Bev spent five days straight in bed at the end of November - not able sit up or even open her eyes - Dave called the Social Worker and insisted that his mother be put on the critical list for a nursing home. And just a few days later, she had been given a bed. Now, whether it's because they have her on a constant stream of low dose antibiotics, or whether her mental resistance is making it so, Bev has been (relatively) physically well and mentally aware enough to make it seem like she was hardly a critical case; if she had been this well at home, she could have stayed at home. And being at the nursing home is a kind of hell for her: Bev is aware enough to know where she is and insist that she wants to go home, but she's not aware enough to remember all of her falls and ambulance rides over the last year, to even remember that at least one of us goes to visit her every day. Rudy sprung her mother from the home on Christmas day to come spend the day with us and Bev was intermittently crying and laughing, "So happy to be with everyone again"; and then we had to take her back at the end of the day. Alzheimer's is a nasty disease and we'll have to wait and see what the new year brings.

Related: My own parents finally moved into Bridgewater this year, and while it's the best possible move that came none too soon for them, it is also a bit sad; a giving up to aging by two of the most independent and domineering people I've ever known. When we were in Nova Scotia this summer, I offered to come back and help them pack and declutter the lake house, and despite my parents never before accepting anything like help from me, they were both enthusiastically agreeable. I went back in September and couldn't believe just how old they had both suddenly become: Dad's eyes were suddenly gone fuzzy (a complication from cataract surgery that it would take him months to have dealt with) and he needed me to do the driving while I was there (a previously unimaginable transfer of control), and his bad knees and congested lungs prevented Dad from doing very much at a time (which also prompted him to tell me to stop whatever I was doing and sit down, too, so he wouldn't feel so bad; so little got done on that trip). And as for Mum: She looks like she could drop over dead at any minute, she hardly gets out of bed, and it was a big deal just to get her sat up on the couch so I could show her every item in the house to get a take or toss decision. So little got done that I offered to come back again a few weeks later for the actual move, and again, they surprisingly agreed. And again, my managers were lovely and told me to take whatever time I needed (reinforcing, once again, that it was actually a good thing that I wasn't wanted by the library), and I went back with Dave at the end of the month - between the two of us and some movers Dad hired, getting the move done. When I first got there on this second trip, Mum said that she wanted to go sit in the emergency room at the hospital until a doctor agreed to see her (she hasn't seen a doctor in a decade because, according to her, there are no doctors accepting patients), and despite me asking (repeatedly) when we'd be going over to the emerge, she eventually chickened out (leaving me to wonder just how guilty I will feel if she does keel over; she's a grownup, obviously, who can refuse to take care of herself, but where's the point at which someone else needs to insist? Does that point even exist?) I was left just very sad by this whole experience, and feeling helpless because they've chosen to be so far away from the rest of the family. Poop.

As for the other highlights of the year:

In January, we brought home our new puppy: a troublemaking minidoodle who is pestering me right now as I try to type. Good thing Cormac is cute and squishy. He's the one on the right in the photo. (Related reading: Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing.)

I was invited along to a fancy girls sleepover at an Inn and Spa with Rudy and two of her oldest friends:

And while I've known Deb and Jenny for many years and they've always been lovely to me, I totally felt like a fourth wheel on a tricycle; I was not surprised when I wasn't invited to tag along with them on a Christmas house tour in November (that was also the weekend of Kyler's 50th birthday party, so we can assume that's why it was never even mentioned to me).

For live shows: We watched Mallory successfully direct Catch Me If You Can with the Laurier Musical Theatre Club (even though she was no longer a student there at that point); Dave and I saw Barenaked Ladies and Bryan Adams perform at this year's GIFT Gala and a Piano Battle at the Centre in the Square, an entertaining evening that I wouldn't have thought to go to if I hadn't won free tickets; we also went to the CITS to see Elton John's Greatest Hits as performed by Classic Albums Live with Dan and Rudy and A Bowie Celebration which featured Bernard Fowler of The Rolling Stones, members of David Bowie's band, and special guest Chris Hadfield (Ground Control to Major Tom...) We also went with Dan and Rudy to see mentalist Wij Silva at the TWH Social (eerily magical) and to see a comedy show (featuring Steve Patterson of The Debaters) at the Appollo Cinema (at which I acted like a total jerk). Dave, Mallory, and I saw Stephen Page at the Elora Festival and the two of them were dazzled to chat informally with him after the show:

We went to see Art at the St Jacob's Playhouse, just because it was starring Donny Most (it was just okay); the only play we saw at Stratford this year was Othello (and it was outstanding); and Dave and I were honoured and humbled to have attended an evening with Holocaust survivor Ben Stern and watch the short film about his life, Nearly Normal Man, that was hosted at the CITS just after Remembrance Day. Rounding off the year, Rudy and I went to see Elf: The Musical at the Hamilton Family Theatre last Saturday, and that was a fun exclamation point at the end of the Christmas season.

And as for travel: Dave and I went away with his work group in February for a relaxing weekend in Niagara Wine Country. And when we went on our annual trip to Nova Scotia this summer, I had planned ahead and booked oTENTiks at several National Parks, making for camping experiences that even Dave would enjoy. Taking him with us on our second trip around Cape Breton also turned out to be a great experience for all of us.

oTENTik!

The Cabot Trail:

And it was during our semiregular summertime cottage rental at Sauble Beach that Kennedy and Zach became engaged:

In conjunction with the commitment to health and fitness that I've made by joining the gym with Rudy and getting more active in the neighbouring area with our Grand River project, Rudy and I entered the Mud Girl Run this year; soooo much fun!

I should also note here, on Dave's behalf, that this is the year he took up horseback riding as part of his own fitness/social journey; freeing that inner John Wayne with his buddies.

Other than the previously reported drama with our parents, Kyler's big birthday bash in November, and the achievement of my goal to read and review my 1000th book on Goodreads, the only other events of note would be wedding dress and venue shopping with Kennedy, and it would seem we have that (for the most part) sorted out. Such fun and just wonderful to be included.

Christmas was a busy time - but actually my favourite time to be at work; I love being an expert who can solve people's gifting dilemmas - and it is good to be here now, just me and a mellowing one-year-old fuzzy pup at my side, contemplating a busy, and overall happy, year gone by; looking ahead with plans and hope for another fulfilling year to come. 

From me and this little guy, Happy New Year!

Olive, Again

Olive said, “I don't think I can explain this well. But you go through life and you think you're something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something. And then you see” – and Olive shrugged in the direction of the girl who had served the coffee – “that you no longer are anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end, you’ve become invisible. And it’s freeing.”

Having loved Olive Kitteridge, I was super excited that the titular character would be making another appearance in Olive, Again; and while I may not have loved this sequel, it still had many many fine moments that left me by turns contemplative and touched. The honest-to-a-fault Mrs. Kitteridge is now negotiating her seventies and eighties, and as the widow gains a new love and comes to terms with what a lousy wife and mother she had always been, we witness moments of joy and sorrow, explore grief and loneliness, and watch as a bulldozing force is tamed by her deteriorating body. In what is essentially a collection of short stories centered in her fictional community of Crosby, Maine, author Elizabeth Strout, once again, demonstrates that she understands the human heart – and more importantly, can reveal it in prose. Plot details may not always be totally credible, but there is essential truth to be found in every story. I'd still say I loved this read, I just won't put it in italics.

Many of these stories revolve around family secrets and dynamics; there are deaths and infidelities and several characters who have idealised former spouses (whether dead or divorced). Olive Kitteridge doesn't feature in every story – sometimes, she's just a passing stranger on the sidewalk; yet never invisible – but when she does appear, she is often asking people to describe their lives to her (whether it's a young mother who might die of her cancer, a Somali-American nurse's aide, a former Poet Laureate, or a fellow resident at a nursing home whose life had been very different from Olive's, she is always pressing people to tell her their stories). It's obvious that as Olive approaches the end of her own life, she is trying to come to some sort of personal philosophy, and it is sad-but-true that this know-it-all buttinsky concludes, “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.” Other characters, however, do shed some light on the meaning of it all, and these are some of the book's strongest moments. In Helped, a young woman who just lost her father in a terrible accident has a profound discussion with her father's lawyer, and shares her philosophy on the existence of God:

“You know what, Bernie? I've thought about this a lot. A lot. And here is the – well, the phrase I've come up with. I mean just for myself, but this is the phrase that goes through my head. I think our job – maybe even our duty – is to –” Her voice became calm, adultlike. “To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

Exiles revisits the characters from The Burgess Boys, and after an uncomfortable visit between brothers and their unfriendly spouses, one of them concludes:

It came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.

Much is made of class: there are several missing fathers, leaving single mothers who struggle to get by; characters compare the size of their childhood homes as though that would explain the trajectory of their lives; a Unitarian minister is so liberal that she just can't bring herself to like her rich sister-in-law; Olive is so dedicated to her role as an anti-snob that she refuses the comforts her rich new husband can offer her. Olive is such a liberal that she is surprised to eventually discover a common humanity with the kind of woman who would support “that horrible orange-haired man who was president” in Heart:

For Betty to have carried in her heart this love for Jerry Skyler, what did it mean? It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much. Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, “Here's what I think, young lady. I think you're doin' excellent.” Then she sat back. What a thing love was. Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.

Again, the joys in this book were to be found in little moments of truth – things that made me think and things that made me feel – and it was a pleasure end to end.

The Grand River: Dundalk to Lake Erie

 

As well as being the river's biography in space and time, this book is about how two artists perceive the river and have come to understand its importance to the part of the planet that it flows through. In images and words we reflect on “riverness”, the private life of rivers, the dialogue between land and water, the connections with vegetation and climate and weather, with humans and their works.

I had an epiphany of sorts last spring: After reading a lovely little book by an author observing and interacting with her seaside environment, I initially thought, “Well, it's easy to have an interesting life when you live somewhere interesting.” But then I reconsidered: We all live somewhere, probably everyone lives somewhere that would seem an adventure to outsiders, and after the briefest of consideration, I decided to spend the summer really exploring the Grand River – a local three hundred kilometre-long waterway given the rare designation as a Heritage River by the Canadian government – and it took very little Googling to draw up an exciting itinerary for me and Dave to accomplish. By summer's end: we tubed and canoed the river; hiked and biked the riverside trails; attended sunrise water ceremonies with Anishinaabe women and a full-moonlit night paddle with Six Nations paranormal investigators; we had champagne picnics and dinner on a riverboat; and in our capstone coup de grace, we hired a helicopter to fly us between the riverbanks just as the trees reached the height of their autumnal hues. Nothing could be more fitting, therefore, than for me to have received this beautiful book of wood carvings and essays – created by local brother and sister artists, Gerard Brender à Brandis and Marianne Brandis – that explore the Grand River from its source in Dundalk to its outlet into Lake Erie. And although it's not quite the book that Dave thought he was giving me (The Grand River is more about the settlements along the way than the river itself), this was a perfectly interesting read for me and has inspired a new itinerary for next year. 

At water level, in the Elora Gorge, the river has a very different feel than it does when viewed from above. The cliffs are high and in many places overhanging, but the depth of the gorge is not as insistently present to the senses: rather one focuses on the river and its bed, on the banks and boulders where water and rock meet. The human visitor sees the place from the river's point of view: for it, the upper levels of the cliffs are no longer relevant, except when there are rockfalls. Thousands of years have passed since it worked on them, and it is now busy with other tasks of river-making.

Gerald's wood carvings perfectly capture settings along the Grand River and the time and effort that this method of image-making entail seem fitting for the subject; anyone can snap pictures with their phone (as I did) but carving images into wood chimes with the way the moving water carves away at rock and soil. Marianne's accompanying essays give an interesting and informative overview of the waterway's history, but if I had a complaint it would be that the pair too often concentrated on the buildings (and therefore the history) of nineteenth century settlers and industrialists; their mills and mansions took precedence over the river itself with its flora and fauna, too often leading to something like the following (about the Alexander Graham Bell homestead in Brantford):

Though only a short part of his life was spent in southern Ontario, Bell is connected to the Grand River because the first two of his longer telephone calls were made between Brantford and Mount Pleasant (six and a half kilometres away) and between Brantford and Paris, Ontario...Like the watershed's, Bell's work is all about connections.

Concentrating on the nineteenth century European settlers and their buildings also causes the history of the area to kind of skim over First Nations' presence; and while Joseph Brant and his leading of the Six Nations into the area after the War of 1812 is explained, the implications of unsettled land claims (which will be a huge factor in the future of the Grand River and its management) isn't covered at all. Even so, I was always interested in the information that was included here and felt, as I had all summer, that others had known all along that the Grand River is a fascinating place to explore and has relevance beyond the local:

One of the aspects of the Grand River's “riverness” is its function as a living laboratory: you can almost hear the dialogue between who had an impact on the river in the past, and the river's replies, and the responses of those living with and managing the river now. Back and forth the dialogue goes, with contributions from all the components of the ecosystem. Learning to understand this conversation is a major task for today's river managers and scientists, and it has implications for planet-wide water issues because, again, all rivers behave in much the same way. What works in one place is at least worth trying somewhere else.

Some of what I learned: Early settlers cut down ninety-five per cent of the forest to the river's banks, leading to flooding and erosion, and has now been replanted back to almost twenty per cent of what it was before; the ecologically significant Carolinian forests along the river's southern reaches are moving ever-northward as the climate warms; there used to be canals and locks to join the Grand River with the Erie Canal but the railway (now defunct) made the waterway obsolete; and maybe most importantly – where I live is the only urbanised stretch of the Grand River, which likely explains why I never before thought of it as a natural area worth exploring (we have high concrete embankments, meant to manage flooding, and which can be seen as the setting of “the hanging wall” in the television adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, which is filmed in our downtown). Overall, the content of this book was perfectly suited to my interests, and with the lovely woodcuts set on heavy paper, a joy to hold and a pleasure to own.

Empire of Wild

These lands were given to us by the Lord Himself. They are ours to live on and prosper from. This entire wilderness is ours for the very purpose of celebrating and honouring the glory of God. He is the answer to our poverty, for how can we know poverty in His love? And in return we need to dedicate our success and wellbeing to His holy light. This entire empire of wild is ours in order that we may rejoice in His name.

In Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian, he describes Christianity as “the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism”, and although Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild reads a bit like a supernatural thriller and a lot like a love story, it would seem that Dimaline's goal here was, ultimately, to prove Thomas King's point for him (or else why take the book's title from the Christian sermon, above, designed to trick Indigenous folks out of their traditional lands for the benefit of greedy capitalists?) As with The Marrow Thieves, I think that Dimaline has some fascinating lore to share from her Métis culture, yet also like with that earlier work, I wasn't blown away here with her writing style. This was, overall, just okay for me.

Long after that bone salt, carried all the way from the Red River, was ground to dust, after the words it was laid down with were not even a whisper and the dialect they were spoken in was rubbed from the original language into common French, the stories of the ragarou kept the community in its circle, behind the line. When the people forgot what they had asked for in the beginning – a place to live, and for the community to grow in a good way – he remembered, and he returned on padded feet, light as stardust on the newly paved road. And that ragarou, heart full of his own stories but his belly empty, he came home not just to haunt. He also came to hunt.

Joan (of Arcand) was raised in a traditional Métis community in northern Ontario, and for the past year, she has been desperately hunting for the love of her life – her husband, Victor – who uncharacteristically disappeared after a mild argument. When Joan discovers Victor in a most unexpected situation, and he insists that he has never seen her before, Joan must pull together all she knows about her husband, her people's beliefs, and her own skills and courage to attempt to bring him back home again. I liked everything that happens in the local community – the interplay with family and elders, Joan's backstory as a child and with Victor – and the legend of the ragarou promised to add an intriguingly otherworldly dimension. But I didn't much care for how Joan's world intersected with the mostly unChristianlike white fundamentalists that Victor had become entangled with and it felt like a copout to have the Métis monster, the ragarou, somehow controlled by a white man; even if he is a Wolfssegen and old Ajean helpfully made the point about the various world cultures that have wolf-based legends, it would have been a braver choice to not have a white man – a greedy resource extractor at that – be the ultimate bad guy. But, plot points aside, I want to note that this is quite an explicit read – in language and deed – and I was often wondering just why Dimaline decided to include so much sexy time. And on the other hand, the love story between Joan and Victor is really very sweet and I became invested in wanting them to find each other again:

Stitch by stitch, loop over loop, Victor was made for Joan. He knew that the day he met her in Montreal, in the bar, with her quick mouth and face flushed with drink, standing with a hip thrown forward, rubbing her eye to a grey smoke of mascara and bourbon. He could feel her now the same way he felt her that night – as inevitable, as necessary. His job was to exist so that she could keep running that mouth, keep kissing him with a thousand little kisses in the oddest spots: inside of the elbow, back of the neck, above the belly button, on the exact spot where the zipper on his jeans began. There was no other reason for him to exist. And it was enough.

Even so, despite admiring many of these touching bits, there were many passages and word choices that kind of baffled me:

The seated figure gave a deep laugh. The sound filled the clearing like vomit, like a menacing growl. And the sky grew darker for it. If he were capable of regular functions, this is when Victor would have pissed his pants.

(I read that out to a few people and no one could really imagine what it would be like for a deep laugh to fill a clearing “like vomit”.) The material here is more adult than that found in the YA-categorised The Marrow Thieves, but the writing isn't any more sophisticated or nuanced; and while I left The Marrow Thieves thinking that I'd pick up a sequel if Dimaline decided to extend that story, I'm not left wanting more from the world of Empire of Wild. Just okay.

Dead Astronauts

Once upon a time, I spoke to three dead astronauts. Past, present, future? All so proud, so determined. All so doomed.

I was sent an ARC of Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts, and despite not having read the related novel Borne, and despite having failed, utterly, to connect with VanderMeer's Annihilation, I decided to give this book a whirl – and am glad I did. This book is weird – surreal and poetic – and even if I rarely had a complete picture of what was going on, I was happy to sit back and let the words wash over my brain. This was an experience beyond passive reading – VanderMeer demands that you meet his thoughts half way with your own, and the results were worth the effort to me (others' experience may vary). Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. And as this book opens upon a completely mysterious scene, I reckon any commentary ahead could be seen as spoilers.

Somewhere out in the City, the rest of the foxes were playing. Learning. The duck still stood sentinel. The leviathan lumbered between holding ponds. She spun out into the desert. Blind. Unaware. Reckless. Stripped of sense. Unable in that moment to recover herself. The three dead astronauts behind her.

As Dead Astronauts opens, three people are making their way towards “the City”, bent on a mission of destruction. We eventually learn that only one of these people is human: Grayson is, indeed, an astronaut; a black woman and the lone survivor of a space mission who returned to a ruined Earth. Chen (who looks like "a heavyset man, from a country that was just a word now") was formerly an employee of “the Company” in the City, and is now the physical expression of a series of mathematical equations? And a cohesive organism made up of thousands of discreet salamanders? Go with it. And Moss is, well, a moss-like organism in human form, and probably the most essential member of the group: We learn that the three are in a multiverse or an alternate timeline of some sort, but since Moss' memory persists across all of time and space, she is the brief and the map for the mission. We learn that many times before, Grayson has found Moss when she returns to Earth (and many more times, Grayson didn't survive her space mission), and that this is the seventh time that the two of them have been able to turn Chen against the Company and join them in their quest to destroy it. What Grayson and Chen don't know, and what Moss does, is that they don't have unlimited attempts at this mission: as the three have learned and adapted their strategies in every do-over, so too have the City's defenders – a black duck, a blue fox, a tidal pool-lurking behemoth, doppelgängers, and a madman in the desert – been adapting, and Moss (who is involved in a romantic relationship with Grayson in every iteration) is desperate to change the script. The how and why of this world is never really fully explained, but the following describes the mystery:

Chen said: Any theory at this point made as much sense, since no theory made sense. That the fox could be inhabited by an alien intelligence. Or it could be a particularly devious AI wormholing back under the power of a self-made destiny. If the paths were open, porous, then other sorts of doors could open as well. Even though Grayson, the only astronaut among them, said aliens had never been encountered by humankind out in the universe. That human beings never mastered AI.

And making the world's origin inexplicable (beyond it being the byproduct of some terrible bio-experiments performed by the Company, spun out of control) is really okay: this world exists and there's a mission underway to destroy this world, in order to save this world. Included in the narrative are the perspectives and origin stories of the duck and fox and Behemoth and old Charlie X in the desert, as well as a story from the POV of a homeless woman living in our own near future, and the point seems to be that you don't need to imagine the end effects of unconstrained Capitalism into the distant future in order to recognise its dangers, we're already living in a dystopia of our own making (with commentary included on animal experimentation, climate change, child labour, etc., my only complaint would be that I didn't need this all to be spelled out to me.)

Some favourite quotes that seem to describe this world (and I think I particularly like the questions VanderMeer poses because they urge a mental response):

Dark bird. Dark secret. They knew not what it hid, what was artifice and what was content. Peel away that layer, find a deeper monster still.

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn't that one definition of a god?

Moss couldn't extend the field. But, at a price, she could become a door – they walked through her and she followed, and wasn't that the definition of sacrifice?

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss' experience, but a kind of monster.

A soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

And a taste of the more poetic:

Behemoth could no longer. Had no. Become Leviathan. Ravenous a sacrifice to Nocturnalia. Hunger an empty stomach that felt full. Tried to remember and forget: Nocturnalia. The house on the hill. Nocturnalia: The tidal pools that must be holding ponds. Cool nothing of mud against the hot itch of scales enflamed by rheum and cracks, comfort against battle scars under the stars, the night surcease, too, a different kind. In kind.

Overall, I was surprised at how much I liked Dead Astronauts; surprised enough to round this up to four stars.