Books I Read This Month (August 2024)

Virtual Heaven – Taylor Kole
Dopesick – Beth Macy

In my creative writing class, the facilitator mentioned that he wrote and self-published several novels. He complained that he couldn’t get an agent to read the manuscript.

I’m thinking, yeah, right, it probably sucks. I was skeptical any self-published novel could be good.

But as I got to know the author more and more, I finally relented and told him I’d read it. I didn’t have high expectations when he gave me the book, and I procrastinated on actually reading it.

Since my word was on the line, I had to finally dive in, reading chunks at a time. I was immediately impressed with his ability to compose strong sentences and tell a story. Clearly, he was an adept writer. But I wasn’t sure how good the whole story was…at first. 

Alex Cutler is a rock star in the computer world, relatively speaking. A coding prodigy, he’s recruited by the mysterious Broumgard Group. He relocates to their campus in the mountains of Montana, where they have conceived of a revolutionary advancement in virtual reality.

With the aid of nanotechnology and drugs, a person straps into a chair and is uploaded to the Lobby. The Lobby is a totally immersive world in which users appear as idealized versions of themselves with the ability to visit hundreds of different world, from past, present, and future, without the fear of extreme pain or death. San Francisco 1968 is one such locale.

Soon, someone discovers that if you die while plugged into the Lobby, your consciousness stays alive within it. As word spreads, mass suicides crop up across the globe and threaten the world order. Christian and Muslims view the machine as some diabolical soul-thief. They call for its destruction while others believe it’s a higher plane of existence. Alex is forced to cooperate with US intelligence agencies to put an end to the madness, broker a peace, and save his marriage.

Like a dark “Ready Player One,” this well-paced thriller ends with a mindfuck of a twist. I was unsettled the whole day after reading it, coming to grips with what I had read and its subtext. There are some minor grammatical errors, like with most self-published books, but nothing too distracting.

“Dope Sick” profiles several families in central Appalachia at the heart of the opiod epidemic. Published in 2019, the book probes the origins and explosive rise of OxyContin in the 90’s and 00’s, and traces the deadly transition to heroin in the 2010’s, as it spread out from the inner-city to the suburbs. The next transition would be fentanyl, but in 2019, it wasn’t as pervasive as it is now.

Much of this book feels like reading a biography about myself. One of the people profiled was sentenced to prison after a friend overdosed from the heroin he provided. Along the way, Mace cites revelatory data about addiction and recovery. For example, the opiod-addicted relapse an average of 5 times before they manage one clean year. They are 2-3 times more likely to recover with a combination of MAT and therapy, versus therapy alone.

The most shocking statistic was one I knew in my heart for some time now. There was a study done about the time perceptions of the addicted. The typical, non-addicted person considers the future as a timespan of 4.7 years, on average. The addicted? 9 days.

For anyone struggling with addiction or knows someone who is, this is a sympathetic, humane portrayal of that struggle. You are not alone.