From the Bookshelf of Apocalypse Whenever…

How High We Go in the Dark

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Discussion: Archive - Book Recommendations

Why we're reading this: Follows a cast of intricately linked characters over generations as humanity reimagines life, community, …more
[close] Follows a cast of intricately linked characters over generations as humanity reimagines life, community, memory, and grief in the after of climate plague. Literary Speculative. For fans of Station Eleven, Cloud Atlas, Ted Chiang, and George Saunders.

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Archive - Book Recommendations

Looking for realistic apocalypse setting
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What Members Thought

Mar 21, 2024 Brook rated it it was ok

This is a tough one to rate. The book has an underlying theme about how human interference in the Earth's environment and climate causes great change in the world. That in itself is fine. The change in the global climate introduces the "problem" in the novel that drives the entire storyline. That is also fine.

My favorite teacher I ever had was a high school English teacher. She used the phrase "The author is beating you over the head with a 2x4," when she wanted to point out a very obvious theme This is a tough one to rate. The book has an underlying theme about how human interference in the Earth's environment and climate causes great change in the world. That in itself is fine. The change in the global climate introduces the "problem" in the novel that drives the entire storyline. That is also fine.

My favorite teacher I ever had was a high school English teacher. She used the phrase "The author is beating you over the head with a 2x4," when she wanted to point out a very obvious theme. The letter A in "Scarlet Letter" is a 2x4. The appearance of oranges in the Godfather movies are a gentler 2x4.

This seems to actually be a treatise on how much we are fucking up the planet through global warming, but couched inside of a collection of somewhat related short stories.

It's basically Veggie Tales, where each episode has a Bible verse stuck in there somewhere. The story isn't really about talking vegetables. Or a collection of short stories that are all morality tales with the same message to be beaten over your head over and over.

"How is the story?" "I couldn't tell you, because I kept getting beaten over the head with this device."

The author even uses being environmentally conscious or environmentally ignorant as markers of good and bad people. Anyone who rides a bicycle must be a saint. Anyone who throws a piece of trash out their window is the devil incarnate. There are apparently no better markers, or Scarlet letters, to use my earlier metaphor, for telling whether or not a person is virtuous or villainous. This book, or rather this collection, is about that subtle.

I'm not getting into global climate change. I believe it is indeed leading us down a path to ruin. But this is a collection of stories, to create my own metaphor, where in each story a character's past drug use has come back to haunt them. And even if the story isn't about drug use, you know that drug use is evil, and that all of the bad things that happen in the world are just because of drug use. Maybe it's more Reefer Madness than Veggie Tales. But it is so disconcerting and took me out of every story, that I had to force myself to get past the 80% mark.

Perhaps "Birth of a Nation" is a good film, from a film critic point of view (it's not). But the 2x4 of the underlying message makes any beauty of storytelling moot.

So the stories of interpersonal relations, grieving, and coming to terms with death are at times beautiful, and indeed the worldbuilding of how the world would change if all of a sudden everyone was dying off very quickly, is interesting. But the constant 2x4 whacking you in the head made this unpleasurable by about the fourth story, and I absolutely could not finish it at about the 85% mark. I just couldn't take any more. ...more

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May 17, 2022 Amy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022-books-read, science-fiction, plague

This is simultaneously a beautiful and painful piece of literature. Every chapter is something new and surprising. However, every chapter explores different facets of death. At first, I was intrigued and captivated by the author's imagination. But it eventually just became too much. Of course, we all die, but we don't want to think about it. And I don't mind thinking about death, but I apparently have my limits. The chapter on assisted suicides for pandemic-afflicted children was definitely a ro ...more

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