#jessablog — Public Fediverse posts

Station Eleven (by Emily St. John Mandel)

I first wrote about Station Eleven in an earlier post, and even then, I already knew it was the kind of book that doesn't leave you easily. But reading it two years into a real pandemic changed something about the experience. The dystopia Mandel imagined is far worse than what we lived through, and yet the emotional texture of it felt achingly close. Real close. Like she had somehow already been to a place we were only beginning to understand. The book follows multiple timelines—before […]

https://jessa.blog/2026/03/23/station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mandel-2/

Snow Crash (by Neal Stephenson)

I picked up Snow Crash because of an excerpt we read during a Scenario Club Meetup at the Urgent Optimists, and honestly, that one excerpt was enough to make me want the whole thing. The book is set in a near-future America where the physical world and a virtual one called the Metaverse exist side by side, and people move between them almost without thinking. Reading it, I kept pausing not because the story was slow, but because it felt uncomfortably familiar. Like Stephenson had written a […]

https://jessa.blog/2026/03/22/snow-crash-by-neal-stephenson-2/