The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Karen's pick for bookclub in April 2021 was The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. The author describes this book as "a ghost story with a Ponzi scheme and container shipping." The description is not wrong. In the book, we hear the voices of many characters who together tell the story of a woman, Vincent, who gets involved with a successful financier, and we eventually learn that this financier is orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme. The book develops a number of individual storylines, exploring relationships between different characters who later interact with other characters in different contexts, and at the end, many of these storylines are tied back together in a masterful way.

Discussion of the book was quite involved. Some had trouble getting into the story, until the characters were in fact at the glass hotel, where the characters related to the Ponzi scheme were introduced. From here, things got quite interesting. We discussed characters we liked and didn't like and why. We explored different characters' ethical stances and what drives people to make unethical decisions. We talked about the hallucinations and ghosts in the story and how our perceptions of these apparitions changed throughout the book. And we discussed how the author resolved different storylines. It just so happens that the person who inspired the character of the financier was Bernie Madoff who ran the world's largest Ponzi scheme to date until he was arrested in 2008. Madoff died in prison three days after our bookclub.

Our discussions also took us to current events including progress on the covid vaccine, Asian hate crimes, and how to instigate change as well as other topics such as our children, families and much more. We missed Liz and wish her a wonderful birthday. Like always we look forward to a time (hopefully in the near future) when we can see each other face to face again.

Having fun at bookclub: