Are we ever truly lost in the internet age? The Observable Universe is a moving, genre-defying memoir of a woman reckoning with the loss of her parents, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world. When she was a child, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died and ten when she lost her mother. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, her personal devastation was mirrored by a city that was ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she begins to research the mysterious parallels between the histories of AIDS and the internet. She questions what it means to 'go viral' in an era of explosive biological and virtual contagion and simultaneously finds her own past seeping into her investigation. While connecting her disparate strands of research – images, fragments of scientific thought, musings on Raymond Chandler and late-night Netflix binges – she makes an unexpected discovery about what happened to her family and who her parents might have been. Entwining an intensely personal search with a history of viral culture and an ode to Los Angeles, The Observable Universe is a prismatic account of loss calibrated precisely to our existence in a post-pandemic, post-internet life.
In the Still of the Night : The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds and Her Mother's Unceasing Quest for the Truth
Ann Rule
bookIn the Mountains of Madness
W. Scott Poole
audiobookChildren of the Troubles : Our Lives in the Crossfire of Northern Ireland
Laurel Holliday
bookKennedy & Nixon : The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America
Chris Matthews
bookThe Same River Twice: A Memoir
Chris Offutt
bookWild Company : The Untold Story of Banana Republic
Mel Ziegler, Patricia Ziegler
bookBy the Fire We Carry : The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
Rebecca Nagle
audiobookMy Fourth Time, We Drowned : Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route
Sally Hayden
audiobookDriven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War
A. J. Langguth
bookBoone : A Biography
Robert Morgan
audiobookManson Exposed
Ivor Davis
audiobookThe Way Of The Zen Cowboy : Fireside Stories From A Globetrotting Rhythmatist
Barrett Martin
audiobook