Pickup Artist: The Pitt, The Plague, and Peter Matthiessen
How do I pick my next book? Tracing the path my brain takes through a series of seemingly-unconnected reads, starting at the origin point of a medical drama I chose to watch on a long flight.
In the last almost-15 years of running my book review blog, I’ve collected quite a few references. When apparently not in the all-consuming funnel of a book revision, my thoughts pinball all over the place to books and studies, which sounds rather obnoxious but is just the way it goes. It makes living in my head sometimes feel like this:
I’ve just started on a reading list for my latest round of book edits for my debut novel, but I’ve gotten into more conversations with readers lately that have basically circled around to: how do you decide what to pick up next?
When explaining how I read so much so quickly, a big factor for me is that I always have the hunger to pick up another book. It’s not usually hard for me to decide to read something next, although I can occasionally get bogged down with the paradox of choice. I just have so many books I want to get to.
I’m a mood reader, but not solely within genres or aesthetics. One aspect of a book will spark a dozen different interests or cravings that then follow me into another book on my extensive to-read list (TBR, for those of y’all not familiar with book jargon.) It might be the style, tone, author, footnote, or some other aspect entirely. It might be reactionary to what I’ve just finished.
For example, here’s what happened to me lately after watching The Pitt randomly on a plane and how that impacted my reading list and order.
Now, I’ll go forwards and backwards a bit in my explanation here, but I just want to show how organically the threads end up coming together, and how my book references will end up layering on each other in strange ways. (I have a better post on this coming related to orange theory, but that one spirals significantly more. This is a safer starting point pour moi.)1
An Overarching View of the Reading Path
The way I plod through these reading threads isn’t conscious in the moment, but it’s interesting to trace my fascinations/layers/reading decisions, so I’m breaking it down in hindsight here to show how you can follow one specific aspect of a book down an entire rabbit hole.
Anyway, so I start watching The Pitt on the plane from Geneva back to Honolulu. I’d just solo thru-hiked part of the Tour du Mont Blanc thanks to an expiring flight voucher, so it was a long haul home. This HBO drama was a great pick for that reason: close, intense, filmed over a 15-hour shift.
My first impression is that it’s built like 24 meets Grey’s Anatomy (or your preferred medical drama.) I’m not well-versed in film criticism, so won’t wade in, but I am a lover of having Grey’s seasons one thru six on in my home when family’s around. My WiFi network is named Shondaland.
Dr. Robby immediately reminded me of Rieux from Albert Camus’s The Plague, which I’d just read in February. (I’ll transfer over my review—or rather, my highlights, shortly!)
By such weaknesses Rieux could assess his own fatigue. His sensibility was getting out of hand. Held back most of the time, hardened and dried out, it would occasionally collapse and abandon him to feelings that he could no longer control. His only defence was to resort to hardening himself and tightening the knot which had formed in him. He knew full well that this was the correct way to proceed.
‘You have no heart,’ someone once told him. But he did have one. He used it to bear the twenty hours a day in which he saw men dying who were made for life. He used it to start again day after day. For the time being, he had just enough heart for that. How could his heart have been big enough to give life?
So that started me going backwards in my reading references within my brain. Put a pin in that for now. That belongs in the BACKWARDS category at the very bottom of this post.
What I Loved About The Pitt
I loved The Pitt’s depiction of compartmentalization, the anguish and adrenaline of life-and-death stakes. Someone’s world is ending in a shitty plastic waiting room chair under fluorescent lighting at 11 A.M.; for everyone else, it’s just Tuesday. That starkness can be so disorienting—familiar to you if you’ve ever had the sobering, dignified experience of caring for someone near death—but is undoubtedly human.
The show also doesn’t shy away from the toll it takes on those physicians administering treatment, especially when instinct surges up and patients flare up, act out, bureaucracy’s a bitch, etc. etc.
Watching The Pitt → Reading Five Days at Memorial
Immediately after watching The Pitt, I wanted a book that had a similar sense of shock and awe—not in a trauma porn way, but in a “don’t look away” sense.2 I landed on Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink next for a few reasons:
This year, I’ve loved a thorough microhistory, especially when dealing with ethical or legal dilemma. Medical complexity—sure.
I’m Floridian, and had one hell of a time dealing with the terror of Hurricane Helene in both Tampa and Asheville in fall 2024; this August (when I went down this rabbit hole), storms and natural disasters have been on my mind. Last year really freaked me out.
It was about to be the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
I might watch the show afterwards, since I enjoyed The Pitt.
Thankfully, it was available as an eBook from my local library, and I still had a long flight ahead. (Big travel weekend for me.)
Mixed thoughts on the book overall, but I appreciated how much it challenged my ideas of medical ethics. In my review, I mentioned that I might be on a medical kick specifically because I’d been reading books like Extreme Medicine and Endure about human limits, so natural disaster relief was very much an arena for those types of challenges.
I also noted that residents of New Orleans don’t love Fink’s depiction or characterization, and I could find plenty of flaws in the presentation of the material. It was a compelling story, but I did have a lot I picked apart.
The book itself reminded me of Dopesick, and reminded me that I’ve always had Columbine on my list too. Right now, I can handle a book that makes me flinch.
Five Days at Memorial gave me several directions to go in
Now, the transition from The Pitt to Five Days at Memorial was straightforward, but now I have a few directions to go in—some of which I’ve read widely in already, and some of which are unexplored. Sometimes, I might decide I like a writer’s tone or scope and pick books that might have the same feel; I didn’t love Fink’s writing itself, so that wasn’t a factor here. It was purely topical.
If I wanted to continue reading about medical ethics and responsibility, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi and The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke are both beautiful books that treat the end of life with such respect, fear, and grace—which gets to the heart of why the devastation at Memorial matters so much.
If I wanted to read about scandal, legal battles, and the issues within medical care, I could lean more towards Dopesick or follow the thread through overt bad actors like Elizabeth Holmes in Bad Blood or The Confidence Game. (The con artist / unconscious influences / reading others bookish rabbit hole is a favorite one, but that’s a whole separate map.)
Meanwhile, I had been thinking a lot about the hurricanes, which brought me also to Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (which I’ve been working my way through.) I’m very hit-or-miss on Matthiessen overall, but love that he can utilize so many different voices and styles. So let’s continue on the Shadow Country thread.
Shadow Country → Southern Gothic, short stories, desolate masculinity, backwards into explorers again
From Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country then, I might pick my next book based on a few flavors or qualities.
The overlap between hurricane interest and Shadow Country is obvious to me, and I was already familiar with Matthiessen’s work since I’ve been reading his nonfiction travel writing (plus, I’m a longtime fan of The Paris Review.) So those qualities—atmosphere, author, and topic—make it a pretty obvious next pick for me. Forgive me for my phrasing here: perfect storm.
Now here’s an example of where my reading might get reactionary; while working through Shadow Country, I picked up On the River Styx because it was much, much shorter. Short stories sounded good in comparison to a 892-page behemoth. I end up switching between books as I read because different vibes scratch different itches.
I’m actually still not done with Shadow Country, but I can keep going through it. On the River Styx had this amazing story about a bitter couple and a turtle in it that reminded me entirely of Alice Munro’s work and the emotional distance/gaps in it, which also fits with the compartmentalization questions of The Pitt. That put me on a short story kick, so now I’ve been reading a lot of those.
Or I could veer into the rugged, masculine, desolate territory of more writers like Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.
If I go more Southern, that brings me to Flannery O’Connor and Beloved and more territory that swings me into my reading list for book edits anyway—plenty of Southern Gothic.
If I go more Western, as I’ve been apt to do lately, the desperado/cowboy energy lands me at Lonesome Dove and the like. Which, bonus, the audiobook is actually narrated by the only narrator I’ll swear by, Will Patton. Not normally an audiobook person, but I’ll listen to this one.
Lonesome Dove → Lost & Lassoed
So here’s where I can explain where my “next read” kick might get a little ridiculous, because I might decide—as I have this summer—that I’m suddenly extremely into cowboy books. I know Lonesome Dove is cited as the obvious pick, whether or not the Western folk actually agree with that, but it’s at least iconic in that way.
I might swing nonfiction, like The Solace of Open Spaces: Essays by Gretel Ehrlich, which I read this summer around this time.
Or I might swing full-on BookTok and pick up one of the books in which I learned for the first time what a “buckle bunny” was. Reactions vary.
Obviously, these books have very little in common tonally. The line between Lonesome Dove and Lost & Lassoed is, well—a lasso. But the brain wants what it wants.
I did not necessarily love Done & Dusted, the first book in the Rebel Blue Ranch series, but found myself reading the rest at 2 A.M. when I couldn’t sleep. It’s that kind of book.
To set the scene here, Lost and Lassoed was a book I picked up past midnight when I couldn’t sleep. I finished it at my kitchen counter around 3 A.M. when I got really hungry, eating the final scraps of an overdue grocery haul: havarti cheese, which very well could be my Death Row meal, and hint-of-lime tortilla chips, which I am allergic to. Surprisingly delicious in combination.
You have no reason to know the details, except for that’s exactly the type of situation in which this book and series are a good idea. A sudden consumption. Not shameful at all, because I think often we use “guilty pleasure” in a super condescending and/or gendered way when it comes to romantic books, but more so that I have no real reason for picking it up late-night other than there was no friction keeping me from doing so.
From there, I can keep going down the threads that chart the course of my most recent reads, but I’ll stop myself for now. In summary, there are so many random bits of a book that might spur me (I need to stop) into picking up another and another and another.
These curiosities tend to accumulate and cross-pollinate each other, which might lead me to a kick like explorers and human limits coinciding with the horror and awe of hurricanes in a Peter Matthiessen epic. And then, of course, I’ll pull various elements from each read based on what I’m interested in, feeling, thinking about, which makes the entire experience (both of reading and choosing) enormously subjective.
Giddy up.
Wait! I forgot to work backwards real quick.
Basically, my main literary association with The Pitt is The Plague by Albert Camus, which I loved. When reading, I also jinxed myself because I got the stomach bug directly after finishing it, and was feverish alone on my bathroom floor for several days cursing the themes of the book.
Anyway, I think the Dr. Robby as Rieux parallel is spot-on. In many of the instances of the show, his act of love is in keeping an overwhelming situation controlled and in-line as best he can (and does show some wonderful moments of tenderness) while keeping the toll it takes on him mostly invisible. It’s very acts-of-service of him, and you get a feel for the fundamental grip a job like that has.
From The Plague, I could go into four or so threads of relevance that lead me to other book recs:
COVID-19, UNFORTUNATELY
Dr. Robby is very much scarred from his experiences in the ER during the worst wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the show starts out on the anniversary of his mentor’s death.
There is a lot about The Plague that will overtly hit you as a callback to 2020, wherever you landed during that time.
At the far end of this long period of separation, they could no longer imagine the intimacy that had once been theirs, nor could they imagine how they might have lived beside someone whom they could touch at any moment. In this regard, they had entered into the very rhythm of the plague, whose mediocrity made it even more effective. No one, living here, had grand feelings left. But everyone experienced monotonous ones.
OCCUPATION & ALLEGORY
The Plague itself is an allegory for Nazi occupation of Paris, so you can continue on the occupied town & metaphor books into Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down. For me, all roads lead to John Steinbeck nowadays; I’m obsessed.
If you make it to The Moon Is Down on that thread, you could enter magical realism territory via Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL
Of course, you can walk back from Camus into The Myth of Sisyphus and then into, similarly, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera which might also echo the weight of responsibility.
DETACHMENT AS AN ACT OF LOVE
Those people had, like Rieux himself, been casual about relying on time: they were separated forever. But others, like Rambert, whom the doctor had left that very morning, saying to him: “Be brave, now’s the time to be right,” had not hesitated to reunite with the person they thought they had lost. For some time, at least, they would be happy. They now knew that if there’s one thing you can always desire and sometimes attain, it’s human tenderness.
One of the conversations most evident in The Plague is that of the loneliness baked into a job like Rieux’s because he has to harden to do it right. You could go into the idea of whether greatness has to be isolated (another Steinbeck curiosity via East of Eden.)
But I think immediately of the parallel between The Plague and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and Charlie’s realizations as he balances the intellectual discoveries only he can make with the sense that he’s running out of time and pushing people away.
I talked on and on, spewing out of myself every doubt and fear that bubbled to the surface. [Alice] was my sounding board and she sat there hypnotized. I felt myself grow warm, feverish, until I thought my body was on fire. I was burning out the infection in front of someone I cared about, and that made all the difference.
I could talk about the relationship between fever as a metaphor for repression all in here too, but if I busted out individual paragraphs, y’all actually would really worry for my brain.
I’ll do more of these. They will get worse. Let me know what you think.
Once, I tried showing something like this to my psychiatrist and that appointment did not go well for me.
One of the eight experiences that can provoke the sense of awe, according to Dacher Keltner’s research, is encounters with life and death, which is why it feels strange but accurate to characterize doctors, soldiers, midwives, etc. as experiencing it frequently.