WickedGirl's Book Notes

Norman Paperman - a middle-aged Broadway press agent who has just had a heart attack and decided he is done with New York - flies to the fictional Caribbean island of Amerigo (which the people who live there still call by its old British name, Kinja) with his millionaire friend Lester Atlas, buys a faltering resort called the Gull Reef Club, leaves his wife Henny and daughter Hazel back home while he tries to make a go of it, nearly drowns on his first day and is rescued by a Navy frogman named Bob Cohn, takes up with a former actress named Iris Tramm who lives at the club, watches the hotel's water and electrical systems fail in sequence, watches Atlas fire his irreplaceable handyman Hippolyte while he is briefly off-island, and ends the novel agreeing with Henny to sell the hotel and go home. Herman Wouk's 1965 comic novel, drawn from the six years he and his wife actually spent running a small hotel in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Nick - the only straight member of a New York queercore band, working through his breakup with the complicated Tris by making her mix CDs she throws away - is at a Lower East Side club for a show when he sees Tris walk in with another guy, panics, and asks the nearest girl to pretend to be his girlfriend for five minutes; the girl turns out to be Norah, daughter of a well-known music producer, a classmate of Tris's at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and the person who has been retrieving Nick's discarded mix CDs from Tris's trash and loving them without knowing he made them; the kiss they share to sell the cover is the first event in a single Manhattan night that will involve Norah's drunk friend Caroline, Norah's complicated ex Tal, and a citywide search for the secret late-night show of their favorite band, Where's Fluffy. Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's 2006 YA collaboration, with Cohn writing Norah's chapters and Levithan writing Nick's, told in alternating first-person POV over the course of a single night.

Tom Sawyer - a clever, talkative, frequently dishonest small-town Missouri boy living with his Aunt Polly and his brother Sid in the fictional St. Petersburg, modeled on Mark Twain's own boyhood Hannibal - whitewashes a fence by selling the right to whitewash it, falls for the new judge's daughter Becky Thatcher, witnesses the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe one midnight in the graveyard with his friend Huckleberry Finn, swears a blood oath of silence and breaks it on the witness stand at the wrong man's trial, runs away with Huck and Joe Harper to Jackson's Island and returns in time to attend his own funeral, gets lost with Becky in McDougal's Cave on a school picnic, and ends the novel splitting twelve thousand dollars in buried gold with Huck. Mark Twain's 1876 boyhood novel, set on the 1830s-1840s Mississippi, and read for a century and a half as the canonical version of American childhood - alongside racial content that still requires the reader to do the work.

Edwin Rutledge, owner of the Babylon Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, has shut down his keno lounge because his IT lead Nick Chen has discovered that consumer-grade quantum computers have made the casino's pseudo-random-number generator retroactively crackable; the fix is a quantum random-number generator, which a sales rep named Prashant Singh is in town to install; what Prashant does not know is that his wife Sumi - a polymath who is the actual story of this story - has at home a second quantum unit entangled with the one her husband is installing, has used it to choose her winning keno numbers in advance, and is using a single trip to the Babylon to set up a long con on Las Vegas itself. Andy Weir's contribution to the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by Janina Gavankar.

You wake up in a dark room with no memory of who you are; a disembodied voice over an intercom belonging to a Dr. Anne Kuhn is going to take care of you, rebuild your strength through daily exercises, and gradually walk you back through the memories you do not have; your name, when Dr. Kuhn says it, appears on the page as blank spaces; the world outside the facility has been altered by a pandemic; and what Dr. Kuhn actually wants, who you actually are, and whether any version of you has been in this room before are the questions Paul Tremblay's second-person Bram Stoker-pedigreed novelette is going to walk you toward. An Amazon Original Story in the Forward Collection (2019), edited by Blake Crouch and narrated in audio by Steven Strait.

Sam, a forty-five-year-old man with a wife named Annie and a self-driving car, takes that car to Vitek - a near-future fertility lab that offers parents the option to engineer their child's genome and presents the lives that engineering will produce as three-act plays - and is shown three projected lives for their hypothetical son Daniel: Daniel One a child of constant happiness, Daniel Two a child who marches to the beat of his own drum, Daniel Three a child of effortless success; the Vitek representative also observes, in the same pitch, that Annie is in the second act of her life and Sam has been stuck in his third act for fifteen years; Sam leaves the building, drives to a bar called The Glass Half Full, drinks himself toward an answer, and runs into a stranger named Beezer with his own theory about who Vitek really works for. An Amor Towles short story in the Amazon Original Stories Forward Collection (2019), narrated in audio by David Harbour.