Fighting Google brain

Keep sharp this summer with some
off-screen reading

by JULIET WATERS

I know, summer hasn’t even started yet and you’ve already read the last Stieg Larsson book. How could you not? It was 30 degrees in mid-May! Not to worry, there are plenty more books you can read this summer. But first I’ll explain why you need to read them.

Google is making you stupid. A couple of years back, this was just an idea that went viral from an essay in the Atlantic. But now Nicholas Carr, the journalist who asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” has an answer and a book to go with it. The Shallows ostensibly has scientific evidence that proves that Google is breaking down more synapses every time you click that mouse.

No worries, though. There is a cure. You can chain yourself to a porch with a very long book you can’t click your way out of. Maybe a book you could conceivably read all summer. Like Sebastian Junger’s War, a very compelling read about battlefield life in Afghanistan, or Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay’s epic historical fantasy set in eighth-century China.

If you’re not quite up to that kind of rigorous reading diet, there are also baby-step books. You could do what I did last summer and read YA books by successful adult writers, like Hoot by Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen’s new adult book, Star Island, centres on the life of a pop star who has learned the discreet art of throwing up birdseed, vodka, painkillers and stool softener into an ice bucket.

Or you can aim even easier, like Samantha Bee’s I Know I Am, but What Are You. The Most Senior Correspondent at the Daily Show writes about her “chequered Canadian past” and what seems to be her mostly made-up career. This is a pretty good summer for memoirs by women comedians. Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler continues to dominate U.S. bestseller lists and Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter is making its way up there.

Personally, I’m going to start somewhere in between totally vacuous fun and light brain-building, like Emily Gould’s And The Heart Says Whatever. Gould is another author who got her start with a feature-length article that went viral, this one in The New York Times Magazine about why she quit her job at Gawker.com.

There’s a reason why not too many people write memoirs in their 20s, because whether they realize it or not, their lack of life experience often shows. Gould isn’t really an exception to this rule. But she writes well and effortlessly about what it’s like to be a pretty, smart, young New Yorker who is connected enough to have Jonathan Franzen blurb her book. And I’m not above living her life vicariously for a weekend.

I will, however, be working my way back to something more substantial, maybe with a few more thrillers, starting with The Faculty Club by Danny Tobey. Set at Harvard Law School, it looks like a smart book with a fun plotline: “Jeremy Davis is the rising star of his first-year class. He’s got a plum job with the best professor on campus. He’s caught the eye of a dazzling Rhodes scholar named Daphne. But something dark is stirring behind the ivy.” Or maybe a med school mystery like Nicholas Ruddock’s The Parabolist, an eclectic literary thriller set in the Toronto streets of 1975. Or there’s Almost Dead by Assaf Gavron, summed up as “An Israeli, a Palestinian. A Suicide Bomber. It’s a comedy.”

But for those looking for the next Stieg Larsson, a new mystery by Michael Genelin looks promising. Due out in July, The Magician’s Accomplice is the third in the Jana Matinova series and follows the continuing exploits of the up-and-coming Slovakian police commander as she’s transferred to the Hague on the same day her lover is murdered and an indigent student is shot and killed in sleepy Bratislava.

Yes, sleepy Bratislava, why does that sound like just the perfect place to relax my over-digitalized brain?