Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea ** 1/2

I felt an existential crisis coming on, so I decided to lean into it by reading Nausea. (Although, admittedly, my feeling was more ennui than nausée.) As befits a novel from a philosopher, Nausea is rich with ideas, but I thought it lacked the visceral impact suggested by its title.

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis ****

In advance of our recent trip to Memphis (and to Woodall Mountain the highest point in Mississippi), I reread this first book in Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick does an excellent job of presenting Elvis' "complexity and irreducibility" while also placing him in the context of his time and place. In fact, to me the most compelling parts of the book are the details about the regional nature of the 1950s music business: someone like Sam Phillips from Sun Records had to personally deliver his records to DJs and local distributors, and most concerts were revues featuring an array of mostly regional performers.

Last Train to Memphis is similar in many ways to another of my favorite biographies, Naifeh and Smith's Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Presley and Pollock are both insecure, larger-than-life artists who died young, and both biographies use their lives as an entry point for showing artistic worlds on the cusp of major changes.

Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation ***

Book 14 of the Aubrey-Maturin series is a typical entry in the back half of the sequence. The prose washes over me like a warm bath as I follow our heroes through a series of low-key adventures. The book begins and ends at basically arbitrary points in the overall story, although the end does find the Surprise headed home to England from the penal colony in Australia.

I like the title of this one.  The British envoy in the The Thirteen-Gun Salute applied the title to himself; in this book, Jack Aubrey borrows it as the name for the former Dutch ship that he sails from Batavia.

China Miéville, Embassytown ***

My China Miéville binge continues with Embassytown, a prime example of linguistic science fiction. Embassytown is a city of mostly human inhabitants situated on a planet at the edge of the trafficked universe. The indigenous population of "Hosts" are mysterious creatures who speak a language that involves two mouths speaking simultaneously. Furthermore, they only recognize sound as language when both streams of sound come from a single mind: "A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words." The only humans who can communicate with the Hosts are Ambassadors, who are pairs of twins trained to have an empathic bond.

I liked the idea of dual-track language and was willing to suspend my disbelief about the Hosts being able to detect that the sound was coming from a single intelligence. I was less able to accept that the Host's Language was non-symbolic ("Words don't signify; they are their referents") and that Hosts were therefore unable to lie. What does it even mean to say that their words don't signify? Spoiler alert the Hosts learn symbolic language by the end of the book and it's a transformative experience.

As usual, Miéville creates an intriguing and convincing world, including its social mores and politics. Ultimately, though, I just wasn't able to embrace a couple of the fundamental ideas that drove the story.