6
MAY 4�11, 2022
FROM THE SHELF
CHECKING OUT THE
WORLD OF BOOKS
An outbreak story — just a little too soon
‘The Dreamers’ by Karen
Thompson Walker
By Lisa Britton
Go! Magazine
I
belong to a book club in Baker City,
and sometimes when we brainstorm
our next book we are overwhelmed with
all the countless choices. New releases?
Classics? Fiction? Nonfi ction?
For February, I suggested we choose
an Oregon author in honor of Oregon’s
birthday on Feb. 14 (my kids think cel-
ebrating this birthday is more fun than
Valentine’s Day).
For inspiration, I did a search on
Google and found a post titled “10 books
by Oregon authors that should be on your
reading list” (fi nd the post here: www.has-
son.com/blog/2020/04/oregon-authors-
that-should-be-on-your-reading-list/).
It has older books, such as “One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey
(which I haven’t read) and newer off erings
like “Strange the Dreamer” by Laini Taylor
(I zipped through this young adult novel,
and its sequel, several years ago).
One that really caught my eye,
though, was “The Dreamers” by Karen
Thompson Walker. The premise is this:
In a small California college town, a
student goes to sleep and doesn’t wake
up. Soon others fall into the same deep
sleep — alive, but their brain waves
registering extraordinary activity.
This line in the post caught my eye:
“Written in luminous prose, ‘The Dream-
ers’ is a story about how life goes on,
even in the midst of a crisis.”
The book club didn’t choose it for the
month, but I added it to my “to read” list.
Then April brought winter back with a
vengeance, and what better way to spend
a snowy weekend than reading?
I picked up “The Dreamers” and en-
tered the world of Santa Lora, California.
I had to take a break several times.
Don’t get me wrong — the prose is
wonderful, and the story is good. But it’s
eerie — “The Dreamers” was published
in 2019, but it felt like I was reading about
the pandemic we just lived through.
Perhaps the author simply captured
how humans react to a crisis — some-
thing I’d never seen on a global scale
until 2020. But I could feel my pulse start
to race as I read about quarantines and
masks and panic in the grocery stores.
If I had read “The Dreamers” in 2019,
I would have found it an interesting story
about human nature — like how I felt
when I read “Station Eleven” by Emily St.
John Mandel (in that 2014 book, a virus
causes total destruction of the world
as we know it, and the few survivors live
in small settlements. It is very much a
survival tale).
It is so fascinating to me how we react
to books. Sometimes, we pick up a book
and it’s just the story we need at that
point in our life. Other times, a book just
doesn’t quite fi t — yet if we pick it up
years later, it reads just fi ne.
I feel like it wasn’t quite fair that I read
“The Dreamers” in 2022. I wish, instead,
that I’d read it in 2019 and then, as the
pandemic unfolded in 2020, I would have
thought back to that story and marveled
at how fi ction refl ects real life.
Instead I read this novel with the knowl-
edge of how humans react to a crisis
— how fear can cause strange reactions
that aren’t always rational. Now that I think
about it, the author did an amazing job
of capturing the human reaction — how
some people hide in fear while others go
about life as normal, and how the health
care workers work tirelessly to care for
patients with an unknown affl iction — so
overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sick
people that they barely have time to think,
let alone fi gure out a treatment or cure.
I’m always wary of giving book recom-
mendations because everyone’s tastes
are so diff erent. But I am glad I read “The
Dreamers” because it introduced me to
a new author and I’ve put her fi rst novel,
“The Age of Miracles,” on my reading list.
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Lisa Britton/Go! Magazine
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