Becca

Martha Wells is an excellent world builder. This is a fun setting (a world, on a leviathan!) and some interesting cultural clashes between the different groups in their world and a very nice metaphor about what different communities need to be sustainable and thrive. The Rift plot didn't work that well for me, and I wish there were more development of many of the metaplot questions raised in the first book. Solid 3.5 stars

NK Jemisin is an epic world-builder. She crafts worlds that make so much internal sense that she can then write an entire book about what it means to live in the margins between the communities or not fit into them, and because we get the world so well it makes sense. As someone who loves interstitial spaces, I loved this book about people who are trying to figure out where they fit into the world when they don't quite fit into the previously made boxes

I read this in real time this year: a chapter for Tisha B'Av, a chapter for the rest of Av and so on, through Sukkot. R'Lew had me dead to rights: the holidays had fallen into a rut of tradition and ritual, but I needed to be shaken up and see them anew. And he got to me: I couldn't stop thinking about this book for months. Thinking about why I get angry when I want to be sad or empathetic; about the imagery of being completely unprepared, about mortality, and the books of life we write.

This book is really for all Jews: R'Lew makes clear that he has no expectations on what you believe, or if you believe anything at all. Whether you believe in G-d, whether you participate in any ritual life, whether you even acknowledge the HH, what is real is that we have on fewer day each day; our lives matter, but also will inevitably be forgotten and it is our responsibility to write the books of our lives how we wish them to be. And that we will fail at that responsibility. Those are the undeniable, intolerable facts of life. R'Lew died suddenly at a relatively young age, and that made his work more poignant to me.

(It's not aged perfectly: the passage about what an amazing and virtuous person Giuliani is made me cringe, reading it in 2019.)

In conclusion, Octavia Butler is amazing.I'm not even sure where to begin. The Xenogenesis trilogy is completely unlike anything I've ever read before. The closest I can come in comparison is to [b:The Left Hand of Darkness 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4) Ursula K. Le Guin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388229638s/18423.jpg 817527]: this is a book with rich, thorough world/species building, compelling characters, a solid plot and more theme than you can shake a stick at. Butler understands that meaningful speculative fiction asks “what if” questions to cause readers to reflect on the world as it is. And here, she does that artfully, weaving in questions about whether human nature is intrinsically violent, how different we are able to tolerate our children being from us and still perceive them as “ours,” whether it is better to die sticking with the familiar, or be irrevocably mutated and survive. In there are implications about environmentalism, gender relations, racial relations, consent, and warfare.But all of this lies under an intricate plot, and beautifully devised characters: the bitter, resigned, maternal Lillith; the optimistic, daring Akin; sweet Tino and others. The Oankali as an alien species feel so real: Butler has developed for them a physicality, a culture, a morality, subdivisions, etc. such that it is as easy to predict how an Oankali will feel as a human character, and yet they feel so alien that it's easy to feel that undercurrent of revulsion towards them that is felt by the characters.

The epitome of Klass' work – a pedantic and often obnoxious narrative voice overlying the fantasies and fears that are, in fact ubiquitous among medical trainees. After reading this I knew that I wasn't the first to secretly desire running off to practice medicine in some rural third-world country – not out of benevolence, but to be able to utilize history and physical skills, without any pesky high technology to ruin my intellectual fun and I now know that I share the mixed dread and exhilaration boarding an aircraft knowing that they may call “Is someone on board a doctor?”
Klass is maybe the most renowned medical writer and although she is far from the best, she never fails to entertain.

I read this book when I was growing up and I only remember two things:
1. It was boring
2. Opium. So much opium

As the pandemic hit, exhausted and strung out on adrenaline, I completely lost my ability to concentrate on books. And yet, Spinning Silver reached me with its deeply evocative setting, weaving together multiple American and Russian faerie tales with a modern sensibility to how to write strong female characters. This is also possibly the first high fantasy novel I've ever read to include Jewish characters.

I loved Miryem, Irina and Wanda, each strong in their own way, each determined to make her own way to bettering her life and that of her family. I liked the Staryk, with their icy alienness, yet truly a sympathetic villain. I liked the foil between the fire demon and the Staryk. Overall, it hit the sweet spot of combining a haunting setting, strong characters and a compelling plot.

David Finch has autism, a diagnosis he embraced gleefully as an explanation as to why his marriage cooled off about as soon as it began. Indeed, he brings an autistic focus to trying to understand how he deviates from what he calls marital “best practices.” In doing so, he pulls no punches in explaining his behavior. He is even unflinchingly honest about when his flaws are not well-explained by his autism, for instance in exploring his sexist assumptions about gender dynamics in a marriage.

Unflinching honesty can sometimes be discomfiting in a memoir (see Alison Bechdel's “Are You My Mother?”), but in this case, the combination of Finch's dry humor and his commitment to self-improvement together allow it to be humorous, or at the very least, viewed empathetically.

I was pretty invested in my desire to read this book - I told my husband, look she's just like me: married, recently moved to a new place, unable to make any close friends there, relying on long distance friendships and then she makes friends! I want to be like her! And her self-description was so promising: we're both young professional bibliophiles, who like yoga and are Jewish with an affinity for people who share our curly hair. I wanted [a:Rachel Bertsche 4789751 Rachel Bertsche http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1314039364p2/4789751.jpg] to be my BFF and if not her, then I wanted her to share her secrets about how to make friends like her.Unfortunately for me, the similarities between myself and Bertsche pretty much end in the one-liner. She's the sort of woman who only has female friends and uses terms like “Gay BFF” unironically and gets mani-pedis; I'm the sort of woman who uses terms like “heterosexism” and consider happy hours a sophisticated form of torture. Also, she gets a huge boost in her friend count from people she already knows in Chicago - friends of friends, coworkers, her husband's friends - and from people who read her newspaper article; not exactly strategies I can utilize. So on that hand, a disappointment. On the other hand, her research on friendship is fascinating. I particularly was interested in the search for a definition of “best friend,” the discussion of social role support and face-to-face versus side-to-side friendships.

Man, this book is controversial, perhaps because of the subject matter? Although it's kind of shocking to me to read the reviews, since I came of age in a time where no one really believed in multiple personality disorder the way that it was portrayed in the Sybil case. When we learned about it as an example of the fallibility of memory it seemed intuitively true to me that while we all have different facets of identity, no one is truly multiple people. Additionally, Nathan has clearly researched the heck out of this topic – nearly every sentence she writes directly cites the personal written records of one of the protagonists.

But why is multiple personality disorder something that speaks to so many people? I think it's because of the way that feeling fragmented into multiple parts of self is such a core part of the human experience, while the myth of the continuity of a single self still dominates the human narrative. For instance, rushing from work, I summarized my day to my husband and we both noticed at the same time that in clinic, I am calm and collected in a crisis, while only minutes later, in a different context: late to daycare, I easily become anxious and struggle to quickly make a plan. I think the story of Sybil speaks to that.

And I think the story behind the story of Sybil speaks to so much else: the way in which psychologic manifestations and the perception of self is contagious; the way in which uncertainty about gender roles can subconsciously be subverted into ways to get women back out of the work place (first post-WWII with MPD, a very neat analogy for the way women were torn between the work place and home, but also, as it hit epidemic levels, a way to get women back out of the workforce; and later, during the recession of the 80's with the satanic panic vilifying daycare); the way in which things that we take for granted, like a scientific approach to medicine and professional ethics, had to evolve and belong to a place and a time.

And honestly, that's really what this story is about: that things that seem “normal” and perpetual to us belong to a place and a time. Nathan makes the point that MPD, a disease of middle class white women during the 50's-70's belongs in the back of the DSM with the other “exotic” disorders that only occur in cultural contexts. So does the psychiatry of Dr. Wilbur's age – giving the patient excessive amounts of barbiturates, amphetamines and other psychoactive drugs, then hypnotizing them – clearly barbaric to our eyes. But Nathan treats her very sympathetically, making it clear that Dr. Wilbur pioneered a field, enjoyed all of the professional accolades of the time and did scholarly work. The point is not character assassination, but rather to cause us to question what modern precepts only exist within our cultural context. I found it very interesting reading.

I read this through the haze of sleep deprivation and baby blues that comes with the first two weeks of being a new mom. As such, I found the book both profoundly moving, and palpably, viscerally almost unbearably sad. See is very evocative – I usually do very poorly with historical fiction, especially set in an era about which I had little a priori knowledge, but I found myself very invested in the characters.

In the past, Bregman argues, the problem was people were poor, ugly, sick and stupid. In the present, the problem was that people have lost their dreams. All of the dreams that were possible in the past have been realized, and nowhere is that more true than in the US, where the per capita income and life expectancy have skyrocketed in just the last two hundred years. Per capita income is up 50-fold and life-expectancy has doubled. But instead of settling, we need new dreams of an even brighter future.

Just that message alone is a refreshing antidote to the mounting concern that society is crumbling over the past month and a half. Bregman then pitches the book on providing evidence for three utopian ideas: a universal basic income (UBI), a 15 hour work week and open borders.

Like most probable readers, I was already pretty familiar with UBI (an idea that I thought I invented several years ago before finding out about the Manitoba mincome experiment) and I thought I knew pretty much the basic primer, but I didn't know about Nixon's failed UBI proposal. Bregman also provides the most optimistic statistical analysis of UBI and how its sustainable that I've ever seen (more on that later), making it sound like an actually feasible idea. This section, prima facie, really lives up to the “for realists” segment, focusing on studies supporting the financial sustainability of UBI, and I thought that this was the strongest (and bulkiest) section.

In contrast, the Open Border section is pretty short, basically: countries that accept immigrants make more money than those that don't; immigrants, and in particular refugees are less likely to be involved in crime, and any criminal activity is predicted by socioeconomic status and that immigrants are more likely to return to their home country in open borders (and that the more we've militarized the US-Mexico border, the higher percentage of undocumented immigrants that stay here, so that clearly fits well with the plan for a Wall.) It all makes sense, but is a pretty anemic chapter.

Finally, the fifteen hour work week is more fleshed out, and there's some good thought processes there (i.e. that working longer hours decreases productivity, especially in creative jobs and that there are fewer good jobs than there are people) but there's not a lot of hard data.

Honestly, I thought the book's best ideas weren't the ostensible main ideas but were things that came up in the interstitial pages:
1. Is GDP actually a good measure and what can we use instead that would be more congruent with cultural values? Let's get rid of productivity and efficiency as goals, and concentrate on creativity and innovation, which is less metric-able
2. So many people are doing “bullshit” jobs, where they move around money, but don't do any societal or personal good. 1/3 of Americans think their job is pointless and doesn't bring them satisfaction. Let's get rid of dumb jobs and use the money to subsidize actually important work, like teachers and social workers, paid for by taxes on the financial industry.
3. Social good can be measured, just like anything else, and can be optimized by using randomized controlled trials to try out new ideas and see how much good they bring.

And finally, as a balm to my anxiety about what the best way to respond to the growing decline of political liberalism, Bregman has a strategy: use Politics as a way to move the Overton window to the left: for too long, the Global Right has been moving more and more right, while the progressive parties talk about compromises and being reasonable. But each new rightwing extremist defines deviance down, so what we perceive as moderation shifts further and further right. Bregman encourages readers to use the statistics he presents to calmly and logically argue back in the other direction, and convince politicians to run on truly progressive agenda.

So the downsides? I've hinted at a couple of them: like many books that seem to have started as a collection of essays, I found Utopia for Realists a little disorganized, and at times disjointed. I found I had to read large chunks at a time, or I would get lost because Bergman will revisit ideas that he previously explored without noting that it was discussed in a prior chapter. I thought the three sections were a little artificial – the topics relate to each other, and the information between the Big Ideas, I thought was as worthy of fleshing out, and perhaps one chapter per concept would have provided an internal structure that the book seemed to lack. Finally, and perhaps my biggest criticism is that Bergman told, rather than showed the statistics, and for a book that prides itself on being “for realists” and data-driven, I wanted to see the data. In at least three different spots, Bergman talks about data showing one thing, than being reanalyzed and showing another. That's normal for such highly charged, politicized topics, but as a reader with a strong mathematical background, I wanted more evidence about why I should believe the reanalysis over the original results: what was the statistical error? What other analyses have been done?

Overall, though, I thought Utopia for Realists was a fresh take on the topic of how to make the world a better place. I liked that Bergman focused on some concrete ideas, and looked to bring in evidence for each, within the context of a philosophical idea to dream bigger. Often with books like this, I wonder who the intended audience is, but I think with the stated goal of encouraging liberals to use data to shift the Overton window, Bergman answers that question and it's a good answer: this book isn't intended to change the minds of people who are opposed to UBI or a 15 hour workweek or open borders (or housing first, or direct cash assistance, or randomized controlled trials of social justice), but to change the minds of people who are in favor of all of those things, but afraid to look impractical. I'm still not totally convinced, but I feel better than I did before reading it.

This is probably one of the most depressing books I've ever read. Although Steinberg seems to have no particular mission for this work, it is truly an expose in the arbitrary decisions that are made by college admissions committees.

Perhaps the saddest part is the coda, wherein two students who were accepted despite mediocre grades and SAT scores were unable to handle the academic work and had to take time off from college, whereas two students who were rejected despite great SAT scores soared at their back up schools. It really highlights how unfair the process has been to both sets of students.

I'll admit that I was emotionally invested from the beginning. Like Jordan in the book, I had dream grades, SAT scores, AP classes & the works. Like Jordan, everyone assured me that I would get into Brown...and I didn't. So, like Jordan, I want to a mid-tier liberal arts college that was anxious to snap up the Ivy League's remnants (although unlike Jordan, I was savvy enough to choose one that gave me a substantial merit scholarship). Unlike Jordan, I never got over Brown, and deeply resent the four years I spent with coursework that failed to challenge me, and classmates who were not my intellectual equals. (For others in the same boat, take heart: despite going to a mid-rung college, I managed to get into a top-tier medical school, and thereafter a top-tier residency. Work hard and make the best of it; the rest of the world is not as fickle as undergrad admissions.)

I found this a very light and enjoyable review of Antonia and Jonna Mendez's experience in the CIA. There's some politics and office drama that didn't totally make sense to me, but by and large, it was a fascinating account of the crazy things our government has done. It almost makes conspiracy theorists look sane.

The most notable thing about this book is that it clearly is built from a series of articles strung together into a central hypothesis. There isn't terrific flow between the chapters – the voice, style, and the goal of each chapter is highly variable and it really undermines the idea that the book is supposed to be an expose of a central social thesis.

That being said, the book is enjoyable – there are many funny parts (although non quite as funny as Brooks seem to think) and many insightful parts. I particularly enjoyed the introduction about education, and the sections on vacations and spirituality. In contrast, the parts on business and academia were dull, repetitive and highly exaggerated.

It all depends on why you read Neal Stephenson. If you read Neal Stephenson because you can't handle going to work at your software engineering film and hearing “did you read the newest Stephenson novel?” all day without breaking (or because you have a completionist attitude towards top ten lists or a bevy of related reasons) this is going to be the most painful novel you've ever attempted to read.

If you read Neal Stephenson because you love his Neal Stephenson-ness and the fact that there is no detail too small to be explained in depth and no side plot too irrelevant to devote 50+ pages to, this is Neal Stephenson at his Neal Stephenson-iest.

I, however, am in the middle. I love the idea of reading cyber-cultural tomes and I have a weakness for info-dumps. So there were things I loved about the book: the central importance of an MMORPG and the exploration of the sheer diversity of a player base. I loved the exploration of startup culture and the info dumps on Chinese ethnic minorities and the intricacies of flight planning. I took the seven plus main plotlines with complaint - at least they were largely presented in serial, rather than parallel.

However, I took exception to the fact that this book is fat. Not just large, and not just Neal Stephenson-y crammed with details, but seriously in need of editing. When an entire paragraph is dedicated to whether or not a character pulled the shower curtain closed, you have to seriously consider what sort of editing failed to happen. And when I say that there was nothing too trivial to write about, it's like in order to explain what I ate for dinner, I first had to explain my cooking process (with a twenty page aside into the biochemistry thereof), then my shopping trip, the motivations of my grocery store clerk, but also the entire pedigree of the cow that provided my milk and the intrafamilial fighting of the farming clan that raised said cow. And now pretend that such 100 page long diversions are occurring when you last left the characters that you cared about in a boat stranded in the Philippine Sea, out of fuel.

Still, I knew what I was getting into, and it must be said that Neal Stephenson is definitely one of the Authors of Our Time - the advantage of the glut is that he hit on almost every major trope in current culture, making this probably one of the most relevant books today.

This felt like bog-standard fantasy with the exception of the protagonist's magic umbilicus. Yes, see, her navel is a gem that turns hot and cold (and more, but...spoilers, I guess.) Did her umbilical artery run through it? Did it grow once her cord fell off? Is the belly button just decorative in this world? Inquiring minds got too distracted by umbilical anatomy to pay too much attention to the plot, which is good, because again, cliche fantasy + Stockholm syndrome.

OK, to add one more comment: I liked having a heroine who was larger, and the body positivity that went with it. Of course, she lost a ton of weight while being kidnapped and was thrilled with her smaller body...Rae Carson is not exactly svelte herself and this all felt like a very unhealthy weight fantasy situation.

Hmm. Less satisfying than the first book. Also, the objectification of women is definitely not abating - possibly amplifying, in fact. The other problems from Rivers of London also seem recurrent – for example the two mostly separate plot lines.

Part of the problem might be that I simply don't care about music, so the long passages about jazz made my eyes glaze over. Also, I read it back-to-back with Rivers of London, which may have exacerbated my frustration about the repeated problematic portions. 2 1/2 stars and I'm going to take a break before continuing on.

Yeah. So, I feel bad not liking this, because I borrowed it from a friend who really likes it, but I spent most of my time wanting to slowly walk away.

People are mad about the character assassination of Dr. John Watson – and don't get me wrong, me too – but the fatal flaw is the character assassination of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps all the more pernicious because King actually does get Holmes' voice pretty dead-on. But his actions... The very idea that it's OK for any 50-something year old man to carry on flirtatious conversations with a 15 year old is already pretty obnoxious; the idea that a 19 year old referring to her 58 year old “surrogate father” as her “near-lover” in literally the same sentence is egregious. But at the idea of this middle-aged Romeo being Sherlock Holmes causes words to fail me. Yes, I realize that the author herself married a man 30 years her senior when she was in her early 20's and therefore might mistake grooming for romance, but there's no excuse for it to have been published that way.

One star for a semi-decent mystery when I ignored that drivel, but the pacing was poor and there were multiple details lacking (especially the Hebrew: Mary “translates” Armageddon as “Ar Megido” as...I don't know, evidence of her Hebraic superiority. It's “Har Megido.” “Har” means mountain.) But it's not worth nitpicking something that has a glaring flaw. Wikipedia tells me Mary grows up and marries Holmes: I'm out.

Yeah, after the first couple of strikes, I kept trying (and failing) to love this series. What can I say? I really wanted a guilty pleasure