Please Report Your Bug Here – Josh Riedel
This was my Florida Trip book about a month ago. It is framed as a modern take on the workplace novel, which I didn’t know was a thing. I know there are workplace shows. I guess that means it makes sense for there to be a whole swath of novels that relate to our relationships with our jobs then, too.
This focuses on a 2010-ish San Francisco start-up that has created an insanely popular dating app that is about to get snatched up by a Big Tech company. One problem: an employee has discovered a huge bug in the software that allows people to time travel. But with very unpredictable and possibly life-threatening results. With the influx of money, though, no one really wants to hear about the bug. Expect for those within Big Tech who have discovered it on their own and are trying to find a way to monetize it.
I guess it makes some commentaries on modern work life. But I found the story to be cold. Or, rather, I found the characters to all be very cold and isolated. I wanted to smack them all and tell them to pull their freaking heads away from their screens and learn how to relate to other humans. My God, am I a Boomer???
Anyway, there were some very interesting directions this story could have gone that it failed to. Which made it a disappointment.
The Word is Murder – Anthony Horowitz
I knocked out Horowitz’s Bond novels earlier this year and promised to check out some of his other work. This is the first in a series that is pretty meta.
Horowitz himself is a main character and our primary narrator. He joins forces with a somewhat disgraced former police officer, Daniel Hawthorne, as he assists on a murder case. The idea is that after Hawthorne, not the police, solves the case, Horowitz will write a true crime summation of it.
There are a series of predictable issues between the men. They don’t trust each other, aren’t honest with each other, and each questions how the other does his job. Horowitz, the newby to real murder investigations, nearly mucks it all up, but Hawthorne saves the day. There’s very much a Holmes and Watson vibe to their relationship.
The story was good enough, but not one that makes me want to jump into the series and read another installment.
Mad World – Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein
This book is nearly a decade old, but I just learned of it thanks to a mention in Tom Breihan’s Alternative Number Ones series. He clipped a quote by Echo & The Bunnymen lead singer Richard Butler when he refers to Bono as a “…gibbering, leprechaunish twat.” That is tremendous! I immediately sought out the book.
It is a series of brief sketches about New Wave bands and some of their biggest songs, mostly based on interviews with the artists themselves. Some of the chapters are only a couple pages long, none more than 10. None of them are super-deep dives. For the most part it is filled with artists you know, like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, OMD, Simple Minds, etc. There were only a couple bands I hadn’t heard of, and of the bands I knew of, only a couple songs that were new to me.
This is far from a definitive account of the era, but it is a quick, very fun read if you lived through that time.
Everybody Loves Our Town – Mark Yarm
And this was my Nineties music book, an oral history of the Seattle scene, from its earliest days well before the giants emerged to Layne Staley’s death in 2002. Most of the big names of the scene contributed, but many artists I had never heard of were involved, too, giving a truly full accounting of the Grunge era. There was a lot of shit talking, which was kind of funny given most of the interviews were done 20–25 years after actual events. Name a famous Seattle artist, and for every person that spoke admiringly of them and their music, someone else was slamming them. And then pretty much everyone laid into Courtney Love.
More than the Eighties book, this one made me reminisce about my own experiences in the moments these events occurred. Maybe that’s because I was a child in the 80s and became an adult in the 90s? Or maybe my memories of the 90s are just more distinct? Who knows the real explanation, but this book was not only illuminating, it also constantly dredged up snapshots from my own past. Which was mostly a good thing.
This Is Christmas, Song By Song – Annie Zaleski
Finally, a third music book, this one spanning decades. Zaleski breaks down 100 of her favorite holiday songs, mostly modern interpretations, basically from “White Christmas” up to Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm.” All little blurbs, so this is a book you can skim casually as time allows. And I bet you’ll learn something about one of your favorite – or least favorite – songs along the way.