As a person who moves often, I’ve winnowed down my possessions to the bare essentials — so long as you count hundreds of books and more artwork than I have wall space as essential.
Perhaps that’s why I’m obsessed by mini storage units. People who have so much stuff they have to pay a monthly fee to contain it at a second location fascinate me. I’m beyond curious about what these pack rats deem so valuable they can’t part with it, even though it plays no role in their day-to-day lives. Having viewed a few episodes of “Storage Wars,” I suspect most of them are filled with junk.
An aimless, down-on-his-luck freelance journalist who specializes in covering the climate crisis discovers that firsthand in New Orleans author Nathaniel Rich’s “Cloudthief” (MCD Books, $28).
The unnamed narrator, who later uses the alias “Tim,” is lured by a friend to burgle storage units in a failed attempt to strike it rich. In the process, Tim meets and falls in love with Virginia, an enigmatic young woman who lives inside a unit of Manhattan Mini Storage.
Virginia turns out to be a thief with bigger ambitions. She convinces Tim to help her break into a different kind of storage unit — the second largest data center in the country, located in Oklahoma. Her goal is to steal black boxes of corporate data that can be used to give her an edge gambling on the prediction markets.
Never quite sure if he can trust Virginia, Tim follows her lead anyway, willing to risk his professional reputation and his ability to pay for his chronically sick sister’s medication to remain in Virginia’s orbit.
What follows is a gripping road trip heist story filled with edgy dialogue and thought-provoking social commentary on the working class’ growing fury over high-tech’s chokehold on modern life.
“Data centers … were the nerve ganglia of our society,” Tim observes. “They were the Fort Knox, Fort Meade, Langley, Area 51, the Library of Congress and IRS headquarters combined. If data was the lifeblood of modern society — our currency, our chronicle, our neural network, our godhead — its corpus was the data center.”
Other books recommended for summer reading include:
Credit: Penguin Press
Credit: Penguin Press
Lauren Collins, staff writer for The New Yorker and a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, delivers an ambitious nonfiction account of a massacre and coup d’état that occurred in her hometown in 1898. It resulted in the murder of an untold number of Black men and the takeover of the town’s multiracial government by a group of white supremacists. Collins tells the story by tracing the lives of four families — two white and two Black — as they intersected and overlapped over the course of 125 years. (Penguin Press, $32)
Credit: Simon & Schuster
Credit: Simon & Schuster
Following a whirlwind romance, 23-year-old newlywed Eileen O’Malley follows her naval officer husband to a tiny island in the Mediterranean in Rachel Beanland’s new novel. There, Eileen bonds with other Navy wives, questions the U.S. government’s international policies, develops a crush on a local journalist and ultimately finds herself. (Simon & Schuster, $30)
Credit: Regal House Publishing
Credit: Regal House Publishing
Jonah, a single dad sparring with his former partner over visitation with his son, works as an orderly at a nursing home in New Mexico in Ginger Pinholster’s new novel. Jonah’s life grows increasingly complicated when he agrees to take his new love interest, wounded veteran Jemi, to Bluebird Mountain, and Miss Rose, his favorite nursing home patient, enlists his help to uncover her stolen Native American heritage. (Regal House Publishing, Aug. 25)
Credit: FSG Originals
Credit: FSG Originals
Leonie is a travel guide writer who suspects she might be pregnant and grows concerned when her translator boyfriend Max stops returning her texts in Katy Simpson Smith’s literary exploration of human connection and the art of translation. Max has gone to Malta for three weeks to work with Ana, a poet haunted by her father’s past, to translate her poems into English. At Leonie’s request, her friend and colleague Rhoda travels to Malta looking for Max and discovers more than she bargained for. (FSG originals, Aug. 18)
Suzanne Van Atten is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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