Reading as a Writer: How High We Go in the Dark

A friend from work who reads literary-leaning sci-fi recommended How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. I'd been meaning to read it, and then happened to spot it while accidentally wandering Barnes and Noble when a sale was on.

When I started reading this, I happened to also be in the middle of Meader, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison. It ended up being a great paired reading, as How High We Go in the Dark definitely has a non-typical structure. Being able to read this book while reading a book about structure was a bit of a gift.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I can't imagine the amount of time the author must have spent thinking about world building in order to establish a slightly varied world in each chapter. The tone reminded me of other literary-leaning books (specifically of pandemic books, like Mike Chen's A Beginning At the End or Station Eleven), I was waiting to hop back to point of views that we'd seen already, and that never happened. Again, this was due to the narrative structure, which was unlike anything else I've read. We did get some closure from a few of the characters as they appeared tangentially in other character's chapters.

Overall, I thought this was a really fun book from a structure perspective, with very wistfully sad and slightly hopeful overtones.

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