The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a 2025 release. It's part of my current trend towards thinking dystopian fiction will save my reading life. 

This cover is amazing. 

Sara Hussein is on her way back from a work conference in London when she is transferred to a retention center because the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming someone else. Sara has committed no crime, but her RAA's algorithm suggests she is a dangerous individual. This algorithm is a black hole, but it seems to take into account her dreams, her social media posts, and small infractions like losing your temper when dealing with one of Those People.  What was originally supposed to be a twenty-one day stay turns into months as Sara is stuck in bureaucratic limbo. 

How does the RAA know Sara's dreams, you ask? Because in an effort to help with her insomnia, Sara had used a Dreamsaver device and now the content of her dreams has raised her risk assessment score over 500. But the company also mines all of her data and there's a lot of it because in this future world that seems like it's just around the corner (or is today...) facial recognition software means that Sara's every move in the world is being recorded.

What we have here is a chilling look at our dependence on technology and how much of our privacy we give up to corporations and governments. 

I wrote once about how those DNA kits terrify me. I'm voluntarily giving up my data to a random company? Like...what's it going to be used for? Jacking up my health insurance premiums when they learn I have predisposition for an expensive illness? The government to put me on a watchlist because I have a genetic predisposition for addiction or violence? Creating an embryo with my genetic components because I have "the right genes"? And, what's more insidious is that it doesn't even matter that I haven't given away m own DNA because my sister did hers and they can interpolate from that about mine. 

So many people thought I was being a bit dramatic about the situation. But now 23andMe is being sold (to an unknown buyer - could be ANYONE) and that data is just being used as a selling point. 

Anyway, this book is important and urgent and timely and necessary. Should we stop posting our every thoughts on blogs? Should I have not published our anniversary picture on social media? Should I wear a face mask when I walk the dog? What would it take to go off the grid and not be tracked? What would we lose and what would we gain? 

The first part of this book was a bit slow and there's a section when the action veers away from Sara to another character that I didn't care for, but all in all this is a book that I am happy to have read. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others. (page 43)

I showed up at work last Friday without makeup, wearing jeans and a hoodie (it was so cold in our office). My co-worker said, "oh no! what happened?" and it was as if the earth had stopped rotating because I didn't wear makeup. 

The heat on her is such that she's afraid to use words like strike or boycott and must resort to codes like crossword or cricket. That she is losing the ability to communicate in ordinary language seems to her only the latest absurdity in a long series that started nearly a year earlier. Or perhaps it started before, but content with the small pleasures and enclosed freedoms of her life, she didn't notice. (page 294)

Sometimes when my husband and I are discussing thorny political issues, I literally say, "If the NSA is listening, this is just hypothetical." I'm sort of joking, sort of not.

I used to teach an online class about women in politics and there was an online discussion where a student censored a protest sign that had used the word bitch. I asked why she censored it since it was a direct quote from the image and she said that she just didn't use that word and thought it would be disrespectful to others in the class. I think about it a lot. Censored versions of classic novels when racial slurs are removed. The way even if I'm saying a direct quote I'll say "n-word." Is this right? Is this wrong? Is this the way to a kinder society? Or are we losing the ability to communicate clearly, even when that communication is cruel or makes us uneasy? 

Things I looked up:

Victor Arnautoff (page 9 and then frequently thereafter) -  Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.

Source. "City Life" mural, Coit Tower, San Francisco, painted by Arnautoff

lomo saltado (page 18) - a traditional Peruvian dish, a stir fry that typically combines marinated strips of sirloin (or other beef steak) with onions, tomatoes, French fries, and other ingredients; and is typically served with rice. 

Château d'If (page 72) - a fortress located on the Île d'If, the smallest island in the Frioul archipelago, situated about 1.5 kilometres (7⁄8 mile) offshore from Marseille in southeastern France. Built in the 16th century, it later served as a prison until the end of the 19th century. The fortress was demilitarized and opened to the public in 1890. It is famous for being one of the settings of Alexandre Dumas's adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo. It is one of the most visited sites in the city of Marseille (nearly 100,000 visitors per year).

nephrolithiasis (page 133) - another word for kidney stone disease

numinous (page 135) - means "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring";[1] also "supernatural" or "appealing to the aesthetic sensibility." The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy. It has been applied to theology, psychology, religious studies, literary analysis, and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.

oneiromancy (page 135) - a form of divination based upon dreams, and also uses dreams to predict the future. Oneirogen plants may also be used to produce or enhance dream-like states of consciousness. Occasionally, the dreamer feels as if they are transported to another time or place, and this is offered as evidence they are in fact providing divine information upon their return.

Ligurian Sea (page 145) - an arm of the Mediterranean Sea. It lies between the Italian Riviera (Liguria) and the island of Corsica.

Pershing Square building (page 162) - also known as 125 Park Avenue or 100 East 42nd Street, is a 25-story office building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is located on the eastern side of Park Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets, across from Grand Central Terminal to the north and adjacent to 110 East 42nd Street to the east.

Source. View from 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, looking toward the western facade

Albert Finney (page 162) - English actor

Sayyida al-Hurra (page 262) - a Moroccan privateer who governed the city of Tétouan from 1515 or 1519 to 1542.  She is considered to be "one of the most important female figures of the Islamic West in the modern age."

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

She lumbers to the bus stop weighed down by straw baskets, hats, and mats, her long, beaded earrings swinging with each step. (page 8)

...a farm scene from the 1930s: hatted laborers kneel between furrows, picking lettuce, while in the background an overseer in blue dungarees leans against a rusty white truck. (page 9)

...retirees in matching baseball hats, sullen teenagers in checkered pajama pants, toddlers trailing behind disheveled parents.  (page 15)

The strangest thing is that Finney is in a yellow tuxedo, and the other guy is in a cowboy hat and fringed waistcoat. (page 162)

At least she has the kids' wide-brimmed hats...(page 263)

"Let me put these hats on you." (page 263)

...gets his hat on him. (page 263)

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Would you allow your dreams to be collected if it meant better sleep? Do you worry about the encroachment of technology in our lives?