October - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

 

September - Wild by Cheryl Strayed

 

August: Oval by Elvia Wilk

Berlin is changing. Economic inequality is spiralling out of control, the party is moving on.... Anja and Louis live on the mountain - an eco-community built and run by the corporation which Anja works for. It is an experiment in green living. But soon the mountain begins to malfunction. Across the city, the weather becomes increasingly unpredictable. Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to capitalism and Berlin's increasing income inequality.

Book for June - Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilisation. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

May Book - Daisy Jones & The Six

A novel charting the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up.

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they split at the absolute height of their popularity…until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. 

Spillover - a review

Spillover received the right royal thumbs-up from our get together at the end of the month. It may have been published back in 2012, but it eerily foreshadows the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic that currently has the world in its grip, providing a wealth of insight into this virulent virus and forcing us to ask questions such as ‘Why wasn’t more done to prevent this latest outbreak?’

It is a big read – totalling a whopping 587 pages but helpfully split into 115 short chapters that make it easier, and a pleasure, to digest.

Quammen kicks off with a pandemic that we’ve never heard of - Hendra. First recognized in Brisbane, Australia, in 1994, it killed a dozen horses and one man. After months of research, it was traced back to bats. This crossing of species boundaries by infectious diseases is at the heart of Spillover and is a phenomenon known as zoonosis.

Zoonosis leads on to the second important concept within these thrilling pages: reservoir hosts. The reason viral diseases such as polio and smallpox no longer plague us is that they only occur in humans. With nowhere else to hide, they can be eradicated by sustained vaccination campaigns. Zoonoses, in Quammen’s words, are more like guerilla fighters. They strike unexpectedly and disappear again, sometimes for years, while living on in other organisms where they cause little harm. Tracking down these reservoir hosts requires intrepid individuals willing to leave the confines of their laboratory - and Quammen indeed accompanies several on their travels.

Such as in the pursuit of Ebola, which we now know is a horrendous virus - the bloody details of this disease have been wildly exaggerated in the (in)famous book The Hot Zone. But it still is a horrific disease that stalks Africa, periodically popping up in humans but also killing countless gorillas. The hunt for its reservoir host continues, although bats are a likely candidate. Quammen’s vivid and personal descriptions of the fieldwork, the extraordinary working conditions, and the chance scientific breakthroughs are what make Spillover such a pleasant mix of popular science and reportage.

Of course, a large part of virological research plays out in the lab, and Quammen shows himself equally at home here. The long chapter on AIDS and HIV is a perfect example, describing the decades-long research effort that has pushed the emergence of this disease back in time, all the way to the start of the 20th century. At the same time, the family tree of HIV has exploded “like an infectious starburst”, and Quammen skillfully guides the reader down the warren of HIV-1 and HIV-2, the different groups within these, and, nested within those, the many subtypes. Oh, and of course the numerous variants of the closely related simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, found in apes and monkeys. He relies on interviews and close reading of publications to reconstruct the tumultuous and twisting history of scientific breakthroughs and blind alleys.

Quammen also shines when it comes to memorable metaphors and masterful distillation of technical details. All of this is helped by crisp writing, short and straightforward sentences, and the repeating of salient points. He knows the details are complicated, yet he enlightens you in a conversational tone without ever being condescending.

 A host of other, lesser-known diseases fills these pages: herpes-B, Nipah, Marburg, bacterial zoonoses such as Lyme disease, psittacosis, and Q-fever. We all voted for our fave viruses - one was Nipah, due to the little sweet packages that dropped from above for pigs to snuffle on.

All of these have fascinating backstories. But one point jumped out at us in particular: bats, which are, or are at least suspected to be, the reservoir hosts of many zoonoses. Why? Quammen highlights some of the unique aspects of their biology that might contribute to this: there are many species (a little-known fact is that about 20% of mammal species are bats!), they roost and hibernate at extremely high densities, and they fly. For more, see Bats and Viruses, Bats and Human Health, and the practical FAO manual Investigating the Role of Bats in Emerging Zoonoses. Oh how I will never lovingly watch the flight of a bat at night.....

Viruses are everywhere: some speak of the virosphere rather than the biosphere, while Carl Zimmer calls ours a planet of viruses. Of the Ebola virus, Quammen writes that it “is not in your habitat. You are in its.” And the virosphere is a Pandora’s box that we have ripped wide open through our actions. A recurrent and important message in Spillover is how habitat fragmentation and destruction exposes us to a menagerie of new viruses as wild animals are forced to live and die in our midst.

 Particularly fertile breeding grounds for zoonoses are the bushmeat trade and the so-called wet markets in Asia where a wide range of poached animals are traded and slaughtered. Nuwer’s Poached highlighted the exotic tastes and conspicuous consumption by wealthy diners as one of several driving forces behind the demand for wild meat. These markets were ground zero for the SARS outbreak in 2002-03, and likely too for the current coronavirus pandemic. There is some eerie foreshadowing here when Quammen asks: “Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China?” 

COVID-19 is only the latest in a long line of zoonotic diseases, and will certainly not be the last. But rather than wanting to make you more worried, Quammen wants to make you more smart. Many will have been left bewildered by the abrupt arrival of the current coronavirus pandemic. To better understand the world that has just gate-crashed ours, Spillover is (still) a magnificent piece of science reporting that weds exceptional clarity to spell-binding storytelling.

And onto our next thrilling book of non-fiction

 "The next big and murderous human pandemic, the one that kills us in millions, will be caused by a new disease--new to humans, anyway.  The bug that's responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it won't come from outer space.  Odds are that the killer pathogen--most likely a virus--will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal." 

Written in 2012, this book chillingly foresaw the Corona pandemic 8 years later.

 Spillover is a work of science reporting, history, and travel, tracking this subject around the world.  For five years, David shadowed scientists around the workld - a rooftop in Bangladesh, a forest in the Congo, a Chinese rat farm, a suburban woodland in Duchess County, New York-and through their high-biosecurity laboratories. He interviewed survivors and gathered stories of the dead, finding surprises in the latest research, alarm among public health officials, and deep concern in the eyes of researchers. 

"From what innocent creature, in what remote landscape, will the Next Big One emerge?  A rodent in southern China?  A monkey in West Africa?  A bat in Malaysia that happens to roost above a pig farm, from which hogs are exported to Singapore?  In this age of speedy travel between dense human populations, an emerging disease can go global in hours.  But where and how will it start?  Recent outbreaks offer some guidance, and so I traced the origins of Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza, Lyme disease, and other bizarre cases of spillover, including the grim, unexpected story of how AIDS began from a single Cameroonian chimpanzee...."

 The subject raises urgent questions.  Are these events independent misfortunes, or linked?  Are they merely happening to us, or are we somehow causing them?  What can be done?   But this book is intended to be more than a work of reportage.  It's also the tale of a quest, through time and landscape, for a new understanding of how the world works.