The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John is the book I chose for the "book with a reflected image on the cover" prompt of the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge this year. The cover is simply gorgeous and looks like a place I'd like to visit. I have an acquaintance who has a cabin on his own private island in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and I imagine it is something like this.

I've read Station Eleven and Last Night in Montreal by this author and find them the sort of books that sort of linger with you. I think about them all the time, years after I've finished them. Mandel writes in a way that leaves me feeling haunted and unsure of the entire world. In Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, she uses an interesting technique in which she tells a broader story by focusing on one character at a time, but switching which character you focus on as the story goes. So we start with Paul, a junkie who goes to visit his half-sister, and then we're in her perspective and then we're following the manager of a hotel where the half-sister works and then a new character and so on and so on.  It eventually ends up with the reader deep in the heart of a Ponzi scheme as it starts to unravel.

The biggest drawback to this book is the absolute slowness of the beginning chapters. I have started this book no fewer than three times and this was the only time I've been able to power through. I know that I should be sympathetic to the plight of folks with addictions, particularly children who have addictions, but I just don't find Paul's perspective to be that interesting. Once I made it past those first few pages all about Paul and his terribleness, I was able to really get immersed in the book.

4/5 stars

Lines of note:
Paul remembered something he'd noticed before, which was that Tim seemed not to understand humor. It was like talking to an anthropologist from another planet. (page 6-7)
I truly do not understand this analogy. 

They sat around in a living room with dust bunnies the size of mice, Paul and Vincent on a thirty-year-old couch and Melissa on a grimy lawn chair... (page 24-25)

Because we have a dog and a cat and lots of wooden floors, there are dust bunnies everywhere in our house. I sort of took this line as a personal attack.

...there are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much. (page 49)

This guy's job is in shipping and he loves it and I loved how Mandel showed his love through his thoughts. His absolute obsession came through so clearly in her writing.

Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you're a serious person, she'd long ago decided, or you're not. (page 105)

Sheesh. I'd hate to hear what this character thinks about me.

He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book. (page 113)

This made me laugh. I don't know why. It just seemed like something my husband would do, if I'm being honest. 

It's so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. (page 134)

There are so few pictures of my parents before they had children together. It's hard for me to think of them as young and carefree as they must have been at one time, right?

Walter was there on the pier when Raphael departed. "Keep in touch," he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they'd never speak again. (page 288)

This is the kind of thing I read fiction for. How is this a thing? I'm very literal and if someone said "keep in touch" to me, I'd send them text messages and emails and be very hurt when they stopped responding. It's one of the things that trips me up on the checklists I do every so often to see if I need to talk to my doctor about an autism diagnosis (I go back and forth on this - on one hand, the checklists seem to think I'm probably mostly fine and a diagnosis won't meaningfully change my life, but on the other hand, it's so clear that I miss social cues and when I look at the photos of people looking angry/sad/pensive, I honestly can't tell the difference in expressions, so maybe it would be worth investigating?). So, back to this passage. This is how I learn that sometimes people say things they don't mean and I feel like if I just read enough, someday I'll be able to figure out when those occasions are happening in my real life.