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I really try to only share books with the club that I believe are truly special—titles that do something genuinely unusual or spark a change in my understanding or perspective. Not every title can reach that place, but that doesn’t mean everything else is dross.
There’s a whole lot of other good things to read out there, so ahead of our March pick of the month announcement (coming tomorrow!) I’m taking a moment to mention three books I read recently and really enjoyed… even if they didn’t quite make it to the top of my list.
Huawei is a secretive Chinese electronics business that somehow shot from 1980s obscurity in into one of the world’s largest telecoms providers by the 2010s. In fact, it got so big that its murky relationship with the government in Beijing dragged it into the China-US trade war during the first Trump administration—culminating in the high-profile arrest and attempted extradition of CFO Meng Wanzhou (who also happened to be the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei) in 2018.
Eva Dou, a reporter at the Washington Post (RIP) and before that the Wall Street Journal, is meticulous and detailed as she tries to unravel some of the big questions about Huawei—chiefly whether it is actually an arm of the Chinese government, as many claim. There’s some great reporting and gripping moments in here, and lots of fertile ground to interrogate. A couple of things held it back for me: the early historical narrative gets a bit bogged down in details that never quite solidify—that secrecy is hard to break through—and at times the writing feels a little repetitive and newspapery. But the pace picks up as the chapters roll by and, even if it never quite finds an answer to that critical question, its detail gives you plenty of material to work out where you stand.
Sometimes a book does exactly what the title promises, and other times it surprises you by going off in a different direction. Bonhomme takes the second approach here: she’s a historian of science, and uses her research skills to dig into stories about six major pandemics that tell us a lot about who we are. There are stories of cholera, sleeping sickness, influenza, HIV/AIDS, ebola and, of course, Covid.
There’s a particular focus on the way that marginalized people are often the ones most affected by big outbreaks. I actually think, however, this is a book about the places that plagues happen: on plantations and in concentration camps, in jail cells, in our neighborhoods, in our homes and even in our beds. And some of those descriptions and revelations are hauntingly put together. The best parts of this book, though, are when she lets herself spin off the historical: when she talks vividly about her own experiences, or when the text is riven with emotion and understanding—that is when it really sings.
Non-fiction can sometimes feel stale, or like it’s searching for some genuine action that justifies the tale it’s trying to tell. But you can’t go much harder than telling the true story of when you were stabbed at least 10 times by a religiously indoctrinated maniac. Rushdie’s memoir is his attempt to deal with the brutal attack in 2022 that left him blinded in one eye and facing a range of other terrible injuries, and he wrestles with what it means to have the past come back to haunt you in truly horrific fashion.
I’ve always had a fascination with Rushdie since Midnight’s Children blew my mind, and here his strengths and foibles are all on display: soaring language slams up next to some terribly cliched thinking; there’s a humble and honest reckoning with life and death that sits uncomfortably next to a sense of hubris. There is, critics no doubt have pointed out, endless name-dropping, and a slightly strange section where has a series of imaginary conversations with his attacker. But the bizarre mixture of the elevated and the banal really has become his signature over the years, and you can’t deny him his story.
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I’d recommend any of these books if you’re interested in the topics they cover, but I’ve got one to share tomorrow that really turned my brain inside out… from every direction. I’m looking forward to announcing that tomorrow.
Onward
Bobbie