Friday Reads: Gardening

The #FridayReads is late this week. Not sure if it’s because I was watching too much Ted Lasso, or I was busy trying to figure out what was wrong with my drip line irrigation in the backyard.

I was also writing, but I’ll blame the gardening, since it fits the theme.

I finally finished Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, a novel about the very bad things that happen after a gardening group runs into a billionaire in New Zealand.

Just from that sentence, you know there’s almost no way this ends well. And you’re right. Birnam Wood is a group of young-ish, well-meaning activists who are trying to save their little piece of the world by planting gardens on public or unused land. They hear about a farm that’s been partially cut off from the rest of the world near a nature preserve, and their leader, Mira, decides to commandeer the place. But while on her first visit, she runs into Robert Lemoine, a billionaire entrepreneur who says he’s bought the farm to build his survival bunker for when the world ends.

That’s actually a thing some billionaires do: they buy New Zealand citizenship, then buy land, then build giant underground silos where they plan to wait out the inevitable global collapse.

Both Mira and Lemoine are convinced the world is on the brink of extinction, even if they don’t agree on what to do about it.

You’d think Mira and Lemoine would not get along. But Mira is not as young-ish as she used to be, and she’s trying to find a way to turn Birnam Wood from a cause into a career — and Lemoine offers the cash to do that.

They both start out their venture lying to each other. Lemoine’s lies are much bigger.

Birnam Wood is marketed as a thriller, but it doesn’t have the breakneck pace of, say, a Lee Child novel. Instead, events begin to accumulate, as Catton writes line after line of beautiful, engaging prose describing these ordinary, flawed, selfish, well-intentioned people as they encounter a stone-cold sociopath with more money than God. It’s like watching a billion beautiful snowflakes fall into place before triggering an avalanche that destroys everything in its path.

The characters are supremely well-drawn, and every time Catton brings us into one of their heads, their choices almost always seem justifiable — even the ones that are objectively wrong.

It’s a slow-moving catastrophe. By the end, it feels inevitable. Nobody could have done anything to prevent this, you might think. Except for everything they could have done to prevent this.

Probably a metaphor in there, if you want to look for it.

FRIENDS AND WELL-WISHERS

My friend Duane Swierczynski has a new book, which is always cause to celebrate. I was a fan of Duane before I ever met him. As it turns out, he’s an incredibly good guy as well as a great writer, so if you haven’t already, you should read him.

His latest is Lush, a collection of short stories about “boozy mayhem,” crossing the genres of crime, horror, and sci-fi, all centered around alcohol — the cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems. Or, if you can wait a little while, Duane also has a novel coming out that he co-authored with mega-selling author James Patterson, titled Lion & Lamb, about two rival PIs working to catch a killer.

HEY KIDS! COMICS! (BUT DEFINITELY NOT FOR KIDS)

Also read this week: 20th Century Men, a comic book where the Cold War is fought by superhumans; Flawed, a comic that plays with the tropes of monsters and the monster-slayer in a satisfying and disturbing story; and BPRD: The Devil You Know, the conclusion of Hellboy’s adventures and the end of the world in Mike Mignola’s epic series.

UPDATED TO ADD: I forgot to mention that my novel The President’s Vampire, the second Nathaniel Cade book, is on sale across all platforms for only $1.99. No idea how long this will last, so if you’re looking for a deal, get it now.

That’s it for this week. As always, your recommendations and reviews are welcome.

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