Angela Ambroz
Wow, REALLY resonated with so much in this. Sure, it's got some padding and fluff. I didn't read every single staff eng interview in the appendix (though I may revisit - especially the Tech Leads). But I got a LOT out of this book. It kinda met me exactly where I was at.
In brief: this is one of those capitalism self-help books, but aimed at a very specific audience - folks working in (large-ish) tech companies, who are (1) engineers or eng adjacent (CRAFTSPEOPLE, I like to say), and (2) at or near a “Staff” level title. I'm a Staff Data Scientist, which was a title I yearned for for many years (!), mostly because I want to keep advancing along the “IC” (individual contributor - aka, CRAFTSPERSON) path, and tech is an industry that allows me that (as opposed to eventually switching into managing people). But now, indeed, I face the question: does Staff DS mean... my stats is more fancy? Or I tell people to do fancy stats? Or... what, exactly?
Hence this book. I especially enjoyed (1) the highlighting of many many women (yaaaa boiiii), and (2) the very practical discussions of career, life spans, and archetypes, and (3) the occasional cheek. I've now been also recommending this book to everyone who'll listen, and have also felt WAY more empowered (and inspired) at work - honestly, just removing that confusion and anxiety around “but what am I supposed to be doing?!” really helped.
Fine. Nice. I realize I need to probably stop reading middle grade/YA graphic novels, because I'm always like “ugh so simplistic” and then I'm like “oh, it's supposed to be for younger people”. Anyway, this was fine.
Agh, so good. Soooooo good. Short story collections have two things NOT going for them: (1) the story ends as soon as you get into it, and it's hard to switch contexts, and (2) stories can be uneven. The (1) problem wasn't that bad - mostly since each story immediately pulled you in. They were similar to Adichie's Americanah concerns: Nigerian (specifically, Igbo) intellectuals in Lagos, Philadelphia, and Princeton. The (2) problem also wasn't that bad; of course, some stories were especially good, but none were duds. All of them were basically great.
Agh. Agghhhh. I love Adichie's portrayal of Nigeria. I love her portrayal of America. She's so precise and incisive in her writing. I loved the meta qualities, when you wonder how much is about Adichie's life herself - the titular story, for example, about a group of African writers at a retreat in South Africa led by a bloviating, patronizing, white British author. I mean, like, that must have happened to her, right? It's hard to travel around Africa without tripping over one of these bloviating white old English dudes saying vaguely racist things.
The real piece de resistance of the collection, though, is the final story: a glorious, GLORIOUS!!, fanfic about Things Fall Apart. Of course, Achebe also centralized his stories on the Igbo experience, and - when I read Things Fall Apart - I did indeed get an itch of, “But how would Chimamanda respond to this?” The final story, The Headstrong Historian (available here), is that glorious response. I loved it. Oh man. So good. I loved that it started, and you realize, sneakily, that it's set in a pre-colonial Nigeria, and you're like, “Oh, cool, not modern anymore, interesting.” And then someone mentions “Obierika”, and you're like, “Why is that name familiar.” Oh, cause it's that one side character from Things Fall Apart. And then someone mentions Okonkwo, and you're like, OMG FANFIC YUSSSSS.
But beyond it being high-falutin' fanfic (and thus a direct line to my heart), it was also so wonderfully A RESPONSE to Achebe (and to bloviating male descriptions of Africa). It tells the entire story from Obierika's wife's perspective, a “headstrong”, opinionated lady named Nwamgba. It covers the same overall theme of a traditional Igbo village being violently transformed by the arrival of Christian missionaries, but - MWAH - it's done so much better than Achebe. Nwamgba's son, who she sends to the missionary school so he can learn English and get better at settling legal disputes in this new colonial world, grows up into the biggest asshole ever - rejecting his mom's “savage” traditions, going on and on about Jesus stuff, refusing to call himself by his “tribal” name. Nwamgba's not too cut up about this. And there's this great/amazing/moving moment when Nwamgba, now an old woman, refuses to call her baby granddaughter by her Christian name (“Grace”), calling her instead Afamefuma (“My name will not be lost”), and then hopes/prays that Afamefuma will maintain her resilience and strength and pride in the face of these undermining colonial transformations:
She feared that, at boarding school, the new ways would dissolve her granddaughter's fighting spirit and replace it with either an incurious rigidity, like her son's, or a limp helplessness, like Mgbeke's.
Kiiind of like “Flowers for Algernon”, only way more hardcore. Great little nugget of harsh, literary, INSANE spec fic.
A movingly inclusive portrayal of humanity, in all its forms. Very oddly touching. Probably - actually most definitely? - a disproportionate amount of hairy female armpits and legs. And also definitely a US view? I guess. But who cares, it's great.
A fun, freaky sci-fi horror novel which was - gasp! - self-published by some guy. Well, I am here to say: that guy had some cool ideas! Bravo! Very inventive, in the vein of David Cronenberg (oh man, that body horror was gross-out wonderful), HP Lovecraft (cosmic uber-entities who are cruel and intent on fucking your shit up), and that one Dr. Who episode that was sooooo good.
The premise: there is a secret organization called the Foundation. It's their job to protect humanity from other-worldly, supernatural threats. So far so standard. The inventiveness of author Sam Hughes is in the quality of the threat: the Foundation is up against both “memetic” and “antimemetic” entities - that is, ideas that are either dangerously viral (and thus insidious and infiltrating into humanity's consciousness), or aggressively un-seeable/forgettable. The antimemetics are - mwah - chef's kiss. Since the Foundation characters often begin to realize - and the writing does a decent job of capturing - that they are having some severe short term memory loss, often on the fly and while running away from a scary antimeme manifesting as a creepy corporate man. This was like if Alzheimer's had a will of its own and that will was pure evil. These memetic and antimemetic supernatural thingies mostly exist in the inscrutable, Lovecraftian “aether” - the MIND SPACE, if you will - but sometimes they also take physical form as, amusingly, super disgusting body horror monsters.
There is quite a bit of gore - almost a bit too much for me - and the plot is circuitous, with many false starts and false ends and forgotten bits and re-done bits. I didn't really try to follow it too closely. I was mostly along for the ride. Oh yes, and it did remind me of another wonderful, fun body horror geeky sci-fi book, which was Greg Bear's Blood Music. This was a similarly pulpy - PUN SORT OF INTENDED - story that was both an enjoyable thought experiment (how to defeat an enemy that keeps rewriting your history?) and a fast-paced thriller.
This might be one of my favorite books of any genre. Shocked laughter at the last page.
This book didn't land for me, alas, it didn't give me what I wanted.
What I wanted: A social history of “laziness” - where it comes from (Puritans? Calvinists?), maybe the underlying social and economic forces of why it came up and why it has persisted, and alternative philosophies of living.
What I got instead: A narrow-viewed self-help book about how to avoid burnout, written from a very specific perspective (American, modern, ableist (according to another v interesting review) etc), that sometimes overstated its thesis and called everything and anything bad the “laziness lie”.
A bite-sized snack of math history, this is an unsatisfying, 30-minute lecture on the origins of mathematical thinking. Despite the title (which made me think this would be a super-panoramic view from Pythagoras to Liebniz), this is essentially 25 minutes about what the ancient Egyptians knew about math (mostly practical arithmetic stuff) with a brief 5 minutes on ancient Chinese math (not much). Bottom line: apparently the ancient Greeks were the ones who started treating math like a science, thinking in terms of deductive reasoning, proofs, theorems, etc. Meh.
Hm. A decent overview of authoritarianism - using a handful of case studies. Ultimately, it felt a little disorganized, and I was disappointed with the glaring exclusions of Stalin and Kagame.
As a colleague said, now that an overtly authoritarian administration begins in the US: “congrats, we're like every other country.” Yep. Really puts the lie to the US propaganda of American exceptionalism. Yeah. Not so exceptional.
Hmmm. There was something about this that I really didn't like.
This is a collection of slice-of-life one-panel comics, mostly gag jokes around domesticity and - eventually - parenting. The art itself is VERY good; Yehuda Devir has incredible draftsmanship. And the themes are right up my alley: I am 100% in the householder phase as well right now. BUT, a lot of this kinda rubbed me the wrong way. It felt... conservative? Like, it's a celebration of red-blooded, hetero-normative, patriarchal stuff; and the hyped-up Adonis figures that the author puts himself and his wife in just felt odd. Like, there's lots of perfect bodies being perfect, and jokes about just wanting to eat Nutella. I'd love to have Slavoj Zizek read this and comment.
Horny, crazy, grotesque. This was pretty weird. Not necessarily un-enjoyable, but its vision felt a little unfocused and all over the place. Grotesque scenarios of human cruelty - which, in Tezuka's Buddha series, felt powerful and philosophically important - here felt gratuitous and just gross.
Fine. I mean, I didn't get any of this. Who is William Blake? Yeah yeah, I'm a philistine. But srs, this book is charming and weird, and is probably catnip for Blake fans. Whoever that guy is. I'm having vague high school English class memories...
Really adorable, charming YA book. I stumbled on it via an Interstellar hangover helper, of all things, because it features mind-bending time travel and messages sent back in time and tesseracts and stuff. And wow, what a lovely little book.
Taking place in a gritty, humanistic New York City of 1979, the story follows 12-year-old Miranda as she navigates her usual 12-year-old things. The book is pretty genius at capturing adolescence; the sci-fi elements are very, very light-touch, almost magic(al) realist, while being central to the story. The main narrative centers around Miranda starting to receive mysterious notes from “you” - and the notes can tell the future.
Very sweet, fun. Yeah, you can probably call the mystery fairly early in the book. But the whole thing is just so damn graceful: with lots of good, subtly-done life lessons, about compassion, forgiveness, imperfection and embracing the quotidian. Very spare, and yet full of gems. Wish it had existed when I was 12!
OCTAVIAAAAA BUTLEEEEEERRRRRRRRR!!!!!
This book was WILD. I saw a couple Goodreads' friend reviews that said as much, and I didn't really understand why. But this book's plot was like a runaway freight train - and, man, you are climbing aboard from page 1. What's funny is that the description of the plot really doesn't capture the urgency of it? But I read this voraciously and spent a lot of time wanting to put it down and just SCREAM. I mean, there is sex and violence and craziness - abounding! - on page after page. But it's also - smart???
OK, briefly, the plot: Doro is a guy, well, more like a spirit. He can't die. Instead, he can jump into other people's bodies and, ahem, WEAR THEM. He is very old (like, thousands of years) and has 1 hobby: breeding more people with supernatural abilities. We start the book in west Africa - sounds like Nigeria? - where he is annoyed that one of “his” villages (of descendants/”breeding stock”) has been pillaged.
While wandering in search of his villagers, he feels something - think Yoda and the Force. He follows the feeling and lands on Anyanwu. Immediately, he understands that she too is special and has supernatural abilities. She's 300+ years old and can mold and shape her body. He's like, dude, great, WILD SEED (TITLE OF THIS BOOK), awesome, you'll make a great addition to my breeding experiment. Anyanwu is like, wow, another super special guy, yes, let's hang. She has a few compunctions, as she realizes how powerful he is... and what a dick he is! And this obsession with BREEDING, mamma mia!
Anyway. They hike back to the coast (Ghana?), where the slave trade is in full force. And - you can just read on. BUT IT'S ALL NUTS, OKAY.
This felt very similar - and similarly delightful - to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Both are historical fiction + fantasies that are VERY rich and tactile, that are as invested in the fantasy elements as the historical context, and that illuminate the historical context THROUGH the fantasy elements. Both are also SO compelling, and had me reading voraciously/hungrily/crazily. Can't recommend this enough!!
I don't know how I feel about this. It's so seductive. But - hmmm. Before I became a parent, I didn't - obviously? - traffic in any of the Parenting Industrial Complex and various parenting subcultures. I had zero knowledge of “attachment parenting”, zero opinion on “parenting philosophies”, and basically zero experience in any of this stuff. Family- and child-centric entertainment and culture had mostly eluded me for the ~20 years between me being a teenager (and rejecting “kid stuff”) and me actually having a kid. Now that I am swimming in kid culture all day, every day, I have been slowly forming opinions - as and when my limited remaining cognitive energy allows. One of these slowly-forming opinions is on children's books. I've noticed something. There are several “types” of children's books:- Problematic classics: All that mostly Medieval, pre-20th century stuff where children are eaten by witches or ogres if they disobey their parents, or otherwise mutilated (fingers cut off, turned into mince pies, etc), or terribly sexist stuff where women are almost always damsels in distress/princesses in towers waiting on some plastic Ken doll. Colorful, fun, something we choose to basically never expose to our kid except via movie time (i.e. old Disney).- Non-problematic classics that stand the test of time: Dr. Seuss. Maurice Sendak. - Modern hits from the recent, post-my-own-childhood past: Strega Nona. The Day the Crayons Quit. Press Here. Stuff like that - stuff that's enjoyable to both the parents and the kids.- Gooey spiritual books with a hipster aesthetic: THIS ONE!- Gag baby registry books: Rocket Science for Babies - a waste of resources!- Agenda books: Anti-Racist Baby, Feminist Baby. I gave my kids Buddhist baby books and I already feel embarrassed/silly about it. Like I'm taking advantage of their age and impressionability to start a brainwashing campaign. Anyway, these are the books that have Important Values that the parents are anxious to impart on their kids, but that are probably just waaay over the kids' heads and I almost feel bad dragging them into the shitty parts of society (prejudice, etc), especially when it's clumsily written. Don't get me started on the anti-racist baby book: “point to policies, not people” - right. I'll tell that to my toddler. : ANYWAY. So this book is a gooey spiritual feel-good-about-parenting book that is gorgeous - GWAGEOUS - and my kid found almost entirely boring. I guess, in my head, I thought we'd read this and my kid would go, “oh wow the magic of childhood is truly magical” but... yeah, I don't know if any kid thinks that.
A real page-turner; a slightly punchier, shallower version of Haldeman's The Forever War. In this case, Elderly Protagonist is given a young, new superbody (smelling very much of Avatar) and military training. He then fights random alien species, while characters we meet and fall in love with die. Doesn't really cover any new ground vis-a-vis Haldeman; the alienation (no pun intended) and brutality of (space) war is well-conveyed and poignant. Also carries some Ender's Game-style moments of “Ah ha! Military genius!”; which is always a satisfying scene.
Overall, nothing new here, but still fun enough.
Slice of life memoir about growing up in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Really sweet. Would be great for middle schoolers, but I - a grown-ass adult - loved it too.
Marginally better than most Star Wars tie-in novels (which are generally abysmal), because at least this one features Wedge Antilles.
Pretty basic, a little too long, but obviously an important book. Really interesting to learn about some of the history of statistics - I had no idea that stats themselves, as an idea and a discipline, are rooted in social science. That is, people started collecting stats in order to talk about social/policy issues! Seems very “duh” to me now, but it was an eye-opener.
A timely survey of the global economic and political landscape by two of the three 2019 Nobel Prize economists.
Like their previous book, Poor Economics, they aim to present things beyond “ignorance, ideology, and intuition” (aka the way decisions are usually made, the way a lot of classical economic research was conducted) and instead take an open-minded, strictly empirical approach. Underpinning this is their preference for empirical evidence coming from randomized control trials, when available - a preference that their fans (such as me) would say, “NOBEL!” to, and their critics (like Lant Pritchett) would say is myopic. But, as Tony Soprano says of Columbus, in this house, Esther Duflo is a hero!!
So, with that out of the way, this book is like a great undergraduate course for anyone interested in how economics would interpret the current world. There are chapters on international trade, migration, climate change, universal basic income, and the robot revolution. They offer plenty of examples and insight on America, India, and France (the three places the authors are most tied to). They offer a take full of intellectual clarity, moral generosity, and - importantly - optimism. Which made this book very refreshing to read! They offered some catty remarks and snark about social media (UGH, THANK YOU), and discussed - at length - the difficulties of empirical macro. They called UBI the “midcentury modern of welfare”, which made me looool and lol.
This book made me want to read the Deaton and Case book. It made me happy and pleased and nostalgic about my own history of economics. It made me admire Esther Duflo even more! And it made me wish they would keep writing pop books like this...!
Eek. Rarely in my life has a book fired me up so completely. I spent the last few weeks OBSESSED with this book, and have already made changes to my lifestyle. My family is pretty sick of it, HA.
I need a book club about this, but - even more desperately - I need an undergrad semester-long course with full syllabus and citations PLEASE about everything in this book. This + Charles C. Mann and I just want to shout from the rooftops. I will shout from Goodreads instead!!
The book
OK, so this is a beefy, near future sci-fi book about climate change. It basically outlines the rest of the 21st century, ultimately landing on an “optopian” (optimal realistic outcome - as distinct from “utopian”/idealized outcome) 2100. The book is a novel in the most old-man-KSR way (more on KSR below): namely, chapters vary a LOT in style. Exposition is very light. There is a LOT of talk of geological things - as well as technocratic things like economics and government and political action. Characters are fairly thinly-drawn; we spend the most time with Mary Murphy, a diplomat and head of the new UN agency nicknamed “Ministry for the Future”, and Frank May, an American aid worker who almost died in a heat wave. There is occasional eco-terrorism, lots of meetings with central bankers, and ultimately, airships and solar-sailed sailboats.
On the book's effects on me
And OH MY GOD, THOSE SOLAR-SAILED BOATS!!!!
OK, so this book got me - as I said - SUPER fired up. I was about ready to throw my plane tickets in the incinerator, and put solar panels on my entire house and family, and start composting the cat. I was (and am) OBSESSED. [My family did not appreciate.] It helps that my area is undergoing an enormous heat wave at the moment, with heat indexes at 110+ and the local government texting me every day to warn me not to die. It also helps that my gas guzzling, Earth-killing, non-EV vehicle is at the repair shop, so I have been e-biking like a utopian everywhere.
But, srsly, here is my list of behavioral changes (thanks, KSR):
- Downloaded various apps to calculate my carbon footprint (I like Earth Hero right now). Eye-popping numbers.
- Shrieked at the plastic in my home. Bought laundry powder in a cardboard box, for the love of God.
- Threw out my cursed compost bin from 2022 (plz don't ask), picked up a new one. RE-STARTED COMPOSTING.
- Signed up to my local climate action group. ✊
- Re-started my CSA.
- Went to the farmer's market.
- DID NOT buy a bunch of crap I was planning to buy. Oh my LORD, the consumption addiction!
- Made long lists of plans about divesting my personal retirement funds from fossil fuels, investing in green funds, and how to avoid online shopping ALWAYS.
- Researched and had lots of emotional drama about community solar and green bonds and buying carbon offsets. Hand-wringing here. Plz let me know your thoughts.
- Discovered some really great readings at Yale Climate Connections, Grist, and MIT Climate.
On KSR
I do so love KSR. Ever since Ursula Le Guin died (RIP, bless), he is my top living sf author. I have now read 6 of his books, and 2 as did-not-finished, and I enjoyed seeing many of his usual habits and tactics and intelligence in this one. He also has, thankfully, minimized two of his bad habits - the cranky/unlikable/”if you're not angry you're not paying attention” strong female protagonist, and his cranky infodumps. I mean, they're still THERE. Some of those short “I am an electron!” chapters were cringey (not the electron one, actually, I liked that one, but some of the others). But Mary Murphy is blessedly pleasant.
I enjoyed seeing the similarities to The Years of Rice and Salt (ugh, one of my top faves
A generous, big-hearted celebration of humanity and this planet. Lovely and perfect for inquisitive little ones who just want to inhale facts.