Just finished Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer. Not sure what to make of it. I certainly enjoyed the background details and the descriptions about our decaying planet, regarding “climate change, habitat destruction, international unrest, an encroaching pandemic, a litany of disasters” as reported by Helen Philips' in her review for the NYT. Perhaps the plot was let relevant to me, as thriller-like novels are not really my cup of tea. Intellectually stimulating though.

Some quotes I enjoyed:

"We must change to see the world change"
"Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories."
"Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future.[...] So we stitched our way through what remained of life not so much in bubbles but in varying levels of unreality. Even as past, present, future lived in all of us. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher."
"Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine. It accumulated, oozed in around the cracks in our day-to-day. Always over there. Always somewhere else."
"What is the world like after the end of the world? Is there a hummingbird, a salamander? Is there a you?"