Angela Ambroz

Bah, still off the rails, and I am bummed. I feel like they've lost the plot! Man. :( Like:
- What's up with the pervy homunculi? And the homunculus master? This is a HUGE plot thread and it seems to be (a) going nowhere and (b) not very interesting to begin with?
- Why did we meet Alix the asexual and her kinda creepy monster-man friend? Apart from them having the “magical power”, why are they in the story?
- Why did monster-man get intro'ed as a sorta villain, but now he hangs out with Alix?
- Why, exactly, ARE the sex police villains? Why did “Kegelface” break into the psych's office and steal Jon's papers? What's the point?

This series started with a very simple, and fun, premise: people who stop time when they orgasm, and use that magical power to rob banks, cuz they're mad about the financial crisis and income inequality. THAT MAKES SENSE. And that is hilarious. I also loved Vol. 2's sensitive and funny portrayal of mental health stuff and sexual diversity.

But now... Now the meta/fourth-wall-breaking feels indulgent and not very funny (e.g. most panels have puns, which kinda ruins the worldbuilding and makes everything feel fake). The characters' motivations feel contrived and spread thin. The plot feels like spaghetti. And the “good values” of writing a sex positive story about diverse sexual experiences have been frittered away in a loooot of kinda crass juvenile jokes. Like, the fact that Jon called his “stopped time” place “Cumworld” was funny in Vol. 1, because it was the name of his favorite “adult” shop when he was a teenage horndog. It made sense. It was believable, and funny.

Sigh. It's a bummer. The one (and only) thing I did like was the sweet portrayals of the psych-prof/porn star first date (the therapist is a pretty lovable character overall), and the relationship between the OB/GYN and the roommate.

I REALLY hope this gets better, because it started so strong. Mannn.

DNF @ ~30%. More like: threw across room at 30%, after great restraint.

This was tedious, tiresome and totally lame. It's basically a Great Men history of the tech industry, narrow-minded and completely ignorant of a bunch of contexts (social, economic, historical). The Great Men that I got through were: the Whole Earth Catalog's Stewart Brand, Alan Turing, Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg - and I stopped there. There are also some detours into Great Men of History like Descartes and Leibniz. There is a Great Man of Reporting Tech (which I have particular beef about - the best tech reporter these days is Kara Swisher!).

In between these hagiographies - the only concrete-ish parts of the book - Foer uses vague, hyperbolic language to talk about “algorithms” and “AI” and “monopolies” in a way that feels superficial and like, well, he doesn't have a background in tech or economics. Example: he attributes the tech giants' accumulation of monopolistic power as being guided by their “theocratic”, near-spiritual belief in their own, uh, futury-ness (as prescribed by the Whole Earth Catalog). I guess he's never heard of economies of scale? Or natural monopolies? I'm not saying Google is a natural monopoly, but he kept... NOT acknowledging this basic idea of econ that I begun to wonder, “Wait... maybe he doesn't know about it.”

In other things he doesn't know about: algorithms! According to Foer, they were invented by Leibniz (?!). They're also, apparently, mystical and indecipherable and certainly not just patterns of deterministic steps following logic (not invented by Leibniz), fed into a machine (also not invented by Leibniz). According to Foer, Turing - as he lay in a field after a good run - had the “visionary genius” vision of putting algorithms into machines. Not... Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, you know, uh, 100 years before. I mean, this is mind boggling. There's even a bit where Foer recasts Mario Savio's “throw yourself onto the gears of the machine” speech as a reaction against the oncoming onslaught of computers', uh, computeriness.

Descriptions of AI - or, I should say, “AI” - were similarly obfuscated, convoluted, and vague. It seems like whenever Foer didn't know how to explain a technical concept (which was every time he raised a technical concept!), he would just say “ALGORITHMS” and cue some dramatic music. He conflated neural networks with AI based on cognitive models. He didn't mention, er, HOW algorithms may be problematic.

ALLLLL THIS would have been vaguely more tolerable if the tone of the book hadn't been so damn ego-heavy and high-falutin'. If he hadn't used so many $1 words and philosophical ramblings instead of, well, research evidence and data (of which there is ample to support many of his arguments!).

Awful. I'd recommend Jaron Lanier or Cathy O'Neil or Sherry Turkle instead.

Breaks the fourth wall, which is always amusing. Maybe rehabilitates the image of monsters?? I hope.

Oh man. That was fun. Gory, messy, ridiculous fun.

The story is that usual sub-sub-genre of the “mad scientist” trope, where the mad scientist's mad experiment goes terribly wrong (or right? depends on your perspective, I guess) and takes down most of everything else with him. It combines that rarest of emotional harmonies: horrifying/disgusting, with hilarious. The zany grotesque, if you will. Think David Cronenberg, or that wonderful, underrated jewel, Slither. It's gross-out, and it's funny, and it's mostly beautiful pulp (pun intended?!). I also think it's a bit anti-science/anti-tech, cuz, you know, all hell breaks loose in Silicon Valley, and what sort of message is Mr. Bear trying to send the kids? Eh?

Much of the book is a post-apocalyptic disaster movie, which is also fun, but - honestly - the premise promises more than it delivers. One day, Silicon Valley-type Vergil Ullam (who I picture as Danny Huston - also underrated!) is confronted by his genetic engineering firm employers over the creepy “smart” viruses he's creating down in the corporate lab. He promises to flush them down the toilet, but first saves a few... IN HIS VEINS, MWA HA. And ttthhhence begins the glorious orchestrations of the, ahem, BLOOD MUSIC. i.e. The smart viruses start to take shit over, and much fun is had by all (sort of - well, mostly by the virus). The rest is a post-apocalyptic disaster movie.

All that said, I was surprised by how sloppy much of the book is, with weird typos (blame Amazon/publisher?), weird dangling plot threads (whatever happened to the twins and Ullam's mom in LA?), lazy and jarring scene changes/POV shifts, and - that most deadly of spec fic failings - a complete inability to see beyond a white male perspective.

YO, IMMA LET THIS REVIEW FINISH, but first I just gotta vent: the characterizations in this book were so godawful sexist that sometimes I wanted the book itself to get infected with smart viruses which could turn it into blood music-humming mush. Because, COME ON. This was approaching Alfred Bester levels of retrograde gender stereotypes. Except that Greg Bear was writing this 20-30 years later, in the 1980s. Thus this was ostensibly Cyberpunk/Biopunk period, not Golden Age of Sci-fi (Sexism)/Good Ol' Boy Period period. Bechdel test = FAIL. Survivor girl who is meek, pouty and (self-described) dumb: FAIL. Survivor man who is Upstanding White Elder Statesman who is, in contrast, fully intelligent, informed, and all about his big thoughts blah. And who muses on his past ladytroubles. Fail, fail. So much fail. Color me disappointed, Greg Bear!

So things pretty much peter out by the end, which is a shame. But it did whet (pun intended) my appetite for Rudy Rucker's post-human stuff, a la Postsingular or the wetware stuff.

Ayyy ayyy. Why didn't anyone warn me.

This was basically pulpy Catholic schoolgirl hurt/comfort fanfiction. In spaaace. Look, if I want to read about sexy Latino space priests being made to suffer... and suffer.... and suffer... then I already have one, and that is Dan Simmons's Father Federico de Soya who, iirc, is literally turned into a meat smoothie and then magically reconstituted using his magical space crucifix every time he makes a jump into hyperspace.

I say this also as a former Catholic schoolgirl who read and wrote her fair share of ridiculously over-the-top, angsty, hurt/comfort fanfic about various priestly studs. I feel like I've grown out of that though (I mean, I do hope I have), and so I spent much of this book just groaning and rolling my eyes and going, “oh GAWD stahpppp about Emilio Sandoz's hair [SO MUCH ABOUT HIS HAIR FALLING INTO HIS EYES], his eyes, his sexy chest” blah blah blah. But I feel like I can recognize a fellow traveler when I see one. And this book was just waaaaay too invested in Sandoz's (a) sexiness and (b) suffering. It was also EXTREMELY Catholic - to the point of it should be advertised as Christian fiction? - and also, oh, so dated, so 1990s. Like, come on: people in 2019 are not still quoting commercial jingles from the 1980s.

So many things that were just absurd.
- First, I kinda got into the characterizations at first - I did like Anne Edwards (Ann? I listened to this on audiobook, so forgive my spellings). But then I noticed that they all... sounded the same? And while I did enjoy some of the dad joke bantering, I did eventually tire of it. Like, maybe this is the Platonic ideal of salt o' the Earth humanity in Russell's mind, but I just found everyone kinda provincial and similar and nerdy? Some of the jokes were real groan-inducing. And to have the aliens ENJOY THESE JOKES TOO? I was like, Gawd, please.
- Second, the Big Reveal. I will not spoil it, but it seemed so terribly unrealistic. Like, when they find an emaciated, clearly-tortured Sandoz in some space prison whorehouse, their first instinct is to think... that he willingly became a space prostitute??!! Uh, what? So when Sandoz has his big Good Will Hunting-esque therapy breakthrough that he was instead repeatedly raped, and all the other Jesuit priests are Pikachu face shocked and sobbing, I was like, AND THIS IS A SURPRISE?!
- Third, they plant a garden? On a random alien planet? Has Russell traveled internationally, cuz like even most airport Customs + Immigrations will tackle you if you try to walk in with an apple!? Also, they just eat random space vegetables (AND MEAT)? Apparently none of these characters have heard of the Columbian exchange? Honestly, the book jumped the shark for me when the Jesuit mission was put together, because it just strained belief that this group of mediocre-seeming pals would actually ALSO be the ones who (a) hear the SETI signal, and (b) get to go?!

I spent most of the book comparing it unfavorably to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, because those authors have tackled many similar themes - first contact, other cultures, space anthropology - but, like, with way more believability and intelligence? This just seemed so hokey in comparison! AND PLEASE, NOT ONE MORE SENTENCE ABOUT EMILIO'S EYES OR HAIR.

Meh, OK, fine. Another alternative US spec fic book, in the style of this: i.e. another book tackling America's original sin (here, slavery) through a flashy gimmick (here, slavery never ended, the Civil War never happened) that doesn't have as much substance as its promised style implies.

I mean, it was OK - but I feel like I could have LOVED it. The plot: In modern day America, a man named Victor is tracking a runaway slave. Victor himself escaped from the plantations in the South, only to be captured by the US Marshalls a few years later and turned into a double-agent. He now tries to ferret out “Underground Airlines” operatives; i.e. the hidden cross-country network of people trying to get free, and people trying to help them. With false identities and a handler back in Gaithersburg, MD, Victor acts as a bounty hunter for runaways - finding them and sending them back. He is also, unsurprisingly, a super grim dude. It was only very late in the story that I realized how much the book is modeled on a private eye/detective story. Yeah, yeah, I know. DUH. Anyway, there's the “foxy damsel in distress” archetype via the character of Martha, the white mom with an African-American kid; there's the “cynical mobster” archetype via a ruthless abolitionist priest; and so on. Yadda yadda.I dunno. Ben Winters, the author (who is a white guy btw - it shouldn't matter, of course, but it kinda does?), drops a lot of giant, not-nuanced ALTERNATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY things that are normally the best part of alt universe spec fic, but here felt heavy-handed and hum-drum. I could never really buy Victor, the main character, though I did LOVE all his “assuming false identities” stuff - and BIG kudos to the reader (since I did the audiobook of this), William DeMeritt, who was PHENOMENAL and should win an Audie Award. a friend recently told me that people try to stay away from calling people “slaves” and instead refer to them as “enslaved people”; is that a thing? i agree that it definitely sounds better, more humanizing. Or is this the euphemism treadmill?

Meh, it's fine. I read this in one sitting. We'll give it a try and see how it goes! I've lately been a bit annoyed with parenting books/podcasts promoted by non-expert laypeople with dubious claims to authority - I'd really prefer a pediatrician. Or Emily Oster! The author is a former nanny who is now a potty training consultant. Shrug. Take that as you will. Also features another one of my parenting book pet peeves: the appeal to the parenting noble savage (i.e. “this is how they do it in [insert developing country]!” - which, yes, is mentioned in the book).

tldr (though it really is quite short):
- Take a 3-day weekend.
- You're the boss (duh...).
- Watch your child like a HAWK.
- Grab them mid-pee to go on the potty.
- Don't use the tiny potties, use the one that goes on the real toilet.
- Showily “throw away” all diapers (except for pull-ups, which can be used for nap/bedtime).
- Don't get angry if they have accidents (who gets angry about this?!)
- My favorite: Reward them with a treat, LIKE CANDY! HAHAHA. I love it. It's basically puppy training.
- No TV, unless you watch it with them.
- No going outside on Day 1. (Why? Isn't it easier to let them frolic pantsless in the yard?)
- Make everyone else who watches your child do these steps too (co-parents, daycare/childcare providers, etc).

Bah. We'll see. This is my favorite potty training tutorial ever, fwiw.

A lively, charming look into Buddhist philosophy and its benefits to a Western practitioner. I was surprised to see that Robert Wright hasn't written a bunch of other Buddhist books, since this was a dense-yet-approachable look into the deepest pits of what makes Buddhism Buddhism, and he just sounded like a long-time practitioner and Buddhist scholar. But dude's just a smart journalist! And, yes, okay, he has been meditating some pretty hardcore Vipassana for the last ~20 years. Fair.

So this book is going to appeal to the mostly-secular American Buddhist - it's an intellectual and well-researched look at how meditation, coupled with certain Buddhist “truths” about the nature of identity, of reality, and of individuality, can be “proven” by, well, a lot of evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics research. Wright uses humor - even CHEEK - and anticipates the skepticism of a secular Western reader. I'm already in the choir, so no need to convince me of the not-self or of how sitting quietly on your butt for N minutes per day is valuable. If anything, I felt inspired to restart my own practice. I also really enjoyed - and was relieved by! - the reiteration of how HARD Buddhism is, since it goes contrary to our evolutionary drives. This actually aligns with ANOTHER book I'm reading about anxiety disorder as NOT maladaptations, but just outdated good-adaptations, that were evolutionarily beneficial and are now, in this post-industrial age, a bit of a liability.

I would juxtapose this (and well, the New Yorker review juxtaposed these two books) against Stephen Batchelor's After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for the Secular Age. Both books dive deep into Buddhism with the clear hope of making it palatable to a post-Judeo-Christian Western skeptic. Batchelor does this by, IMHO, cherry-picking canon and assuming the best of any ambiguous phrase - but, hey, at least he TRIES to tackle the gnarlier stuff like reincarnation (waaaaht) and how women will doom the dharma (womp womp). Wright avoids the gnarlier stuff with a basic thesis of deep pragmatism: yo, just throw out the stuff that doesn't make sense! Meditation makes sense and is helpful! Here's science to prove it! I'm fine with either/both. In style, Batchelor's writing was - hoo boy - a ponderous slog, whereas Wright was fun and easy to read (without sacrificing depth).

Would I recommend this to a non-dharma friend? I'm not sure. I guess if someone was pretty keen on learning about Buddhism already, then, yes, this is a great intro. Take ye this and the Headspace app and go ye unto the mountain and, lo! I would probably not recommend the Batchelor book, since it's - well - kinda boring. If I wanted to slyly plant the seeds of Buddhism, I would do it the old-fashioned way: watching Keanu Reeves's oddly passable Indian accent (????) in Little Buddha.

A solid and entertaining look at one of my favorite intersections: economics and animal behavior, as demonstrated by class hierarchies and irrational consumption.

The main thesis of the book is that, in this crazy post-modern, post-industrial, declining West, we're experiencing increasing class stratification via new (zany!) forms of conspicuous consumption (the finest breastfeeding accessories!) coupled with inequality-exacerbating “inconspicuous” consumption (the finest tutors, the finest healthcare). Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, and the book is a fairly solid combo of quantitative research (though it is awash, I say, AWASH in frustratingly weakly-identified correlations), as well as a general lit review of interesting economists and sociologists: Thomas Picketty, William Easterly, Tyler Cowan, Ed Glaeser, a bunch of other notables.

It spoke my language, and it spoke right to me: especially since I am, by Currid-Halkett's definition, a member of the “aspirational class” (basically the new bourgeoisie). As such, a lot of the behaviors and “lifestyle choices” she described were cringe-inducingly on-point.

But let's back up! Imagine, if you will, the Past, when the wealthy sought to differentiate themselves by buying relatively scarce, expensive goods. Silverware, fine china, rugs, etc. Thanks to globalization and industrial development, most consumer goods have become very cheap and spending yourself into debt has become normalized - and so the wealthy have, since the 90s or so, needed to find fresh new ways to differentiate themselves. Currid-Halkett describes a lot of these new forms of conspicuous consumption, especially as mediated by America's myth of a classless society. She makes some interesting points about a new “aspirational” class, which has blurred income boundaries (e.g. the hipster earning $30k vs. the tech C-level executive earning $200k) but shared values and similar signaling. She talks a lot about how “value-driven” consumption and production has risen in a post-modern world, and how these behaviors - for example, to buy organic food, to breastfeed, to buy “fair trade” coffee - are all imbued with moral weight, even if they pretend to be completely detached from basic economic realities and privilege.

The book's sections were super in my wheelhouse as well: childbirth and childrearing, food, and urban living as giant (secret) signals of class wrapped up and presented as signals of knowledge and good (liberal) values. Also, the worship of productivity, and the values of “aspirational” class people to “buy time” and to make their leisure time “productive”. Shit, man, I was listening to this as an audiobook on 1.8x speed while exercising - i.e. I was LITERALLY DOING WHAT SHE WAS DESCRIBING - all so I could “perform” my class: performing my well-read-ness (thanks, Goodreads platform), performing my health savviness (thanks, disposal income for gym membership), performing my productivity (multitasking! no second left unturned!), and so on.

The section on food was in the same vein - basically, Whole Foods/Paycheck is a ruse of marketing - but here, I had to dig in my heels, because Big Food in America is a big issue in my heart, and I do think Whole Foods offers (AT LEAST ON THE CHEESE FRONT) some light. And yes, you pay through the nose for it. Good food should not only be for the rich!!! But, as the Italian chefs said at a cooking class I took a while ago (allow me to perform my rich, cultural knowledge), the best place to get Italian ingredients is... Whole Foods.

Speaking of cheese, two things kinda grated on me about the book.

First, Currid-Halkett's supplies ample, ample quantitative research. Unfortunately, all of this is marred by (a) the inherent, philosophical problems of measuring consumption (I was reminded of Angus Deaton's meticulous agonies over how to define a consumption bundle) and (b) AAALLLLL of this was correlated with AAAALLL the rest of it. There's nothing we can really do about (b) - you can't really randomize class... - but it was dizzying and frustrating how incredibly entangled all these data points were. Example: one of C-H's BIG points is that the aspirational/upper classes are spending increasingly more on “inconspicuous” consumption goods: that is, goods that offer huge advantages but aren't on display. Namely, education - health - childcare. But... all those “inconspicuous” goods have just gotten WAY MORE EXPENSIVE in the last 30 years -

See this chart by the American Enterprise Institute

- and this is something C-H only vaguely acknowledges. But this confuses everything! If these goods are getting more pricey, then everyone should be spending more, in absolute terms, on them. And the poor should be spending more, as a % of income. If they're NOT, then that needs explaining. Is there a binary “drop-off” point at which the poor just STOP spending on this stuff (e.g. you can't buy part of a college education)? This wasn't explored/discussed/disentangled enough.

My second critique - and this is more of a wish - is that C-H never acknowledges the very interesting animal behavior/hairless ape hierarchy stuff that, well, drives the whole business of class and preening consumption anyway. Okay, okay, she's not an animal behaviorist or biologist, but this is such a missed opportunity! Econ in general is not the smartest about this (the myth of homo economicus - i.e. a rational agent - is still the core of things, and behavioral economics - i .e. the acknowledgement that we're systematically irrational, i.e. that we're human beings - is a recent, late 20th century development; when will we take the next step and realize that we're not just human, we're, ahem, animal). But I think it's SO INTERESTING that (a) we're apes and thus (b) we have weird social hierarchies built-in that (c) manifest via economic systems like money, “work” and spending. Man. MAAAN. Someone should write THAT book - and they can call it Animal Spirits!

3.75 stars. Starts wonderfully strong. Ends okay. One big, disbelief-straining infodump loses a star.

I'd been meaning to read Lovecraft for a while, since I love all the Lovecraft fanart I see on the internet (e.g. this!), and I was in the mood for something weird and about monsters.

This short novel is reminiscent of 19th century horror stuff like Dracula and Frankenstein. The pacing feels a little slow at times, the infodumps are very infodumpy, and the general voice is just super 19th century dude.

Which is fine. I enjoyed the slow build-up to the eventual reveal, and I enjoyed how the TRUE HORRORS (!!)!!)!) which the protagonist keeps alluding to but never actually, totally materialize (I guess it's “read the sequel for more”).

Brief plot: Protagonist Man (didn't get his name), a professor of geology from some New England college, goes on a science expedition with his scientist bro friends (and some grad students and interns, heh) to the Antarctic. They drill some holes. They find some weird striations. When they investigate stuff more, they find, well, CTHULHU. Well, sort of. Cool stuff. Then bad things happen. Then, AFTER the bad stuff, the Professor and his friend decide to go explore those “mountains of madness” and see what's on the other side. I will admit that I did LOL a little at WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE: I don't think it's spoilery to say they do, at one point, find penguins and marvel at domestic stuff like window hinges. I'm sorry, but it was kinda funny to have them be like, “the horror! the horror! but what good window hinges”. Also, “what good art, that is good, wow”. Hahahaha. Also, okay, how did they literally deduce the entire history of the planet from some (apparently quite good but still just) murals? I know the late 19th century was when folks were pumped about archaeology, but I thought it took them more than a minute to understand the hieroglyphs and the pyramids?! RIGHT?

THE HORROR

Oof, this was a slog - I realized that I was enjoying the last chapter quite a bit more than all the previous ones, and then I was like, wait - is that just cuz I know we're close to the end?

Which is a shame! Cuz I'm all about modern/recent Indian political history etc, and this book has that in spades. It follows two main threads (or, like, two dozen) but all the character-lives wrap up together in a Love Actually/two degrees of separation deal. First main thread is about Anjum, an intersex woman living as a hijra in Old Delhi. Much MUCH is made of the glories of Old Delhi, and this was maybe my favorite part of the book: oh SNAP, I almost forgot, here's some mood music for ya.

Anyway, indeed, Anjum lives in a raucous hijra community somewhere near the Jama Masjid, and we have a rich, loving portrayal of Old Delhi's heritage in a modern, fast-changing India. There are such wonderful hits as how great Mirza Ghalib is (so great!), how great Mughal-e-Azam is (I personally prefer Umrao Jaan), and generally these scenes feel like a 1980s Naseeruddin Shah movie. I say that with much affection. This is about ~30% of the book.

The second thread centers around a group of university students, a love quadrangle with a moody lady named Tilo at the center. The quadrangle folks end up getting wrapped up in the bloody fighting in 1990s Kashmir, and much horrors are observed. This takes up ~70% of the book.

Sooo. Yeah. I found this a mighty, mighty slog. I found the writing really self-indulgent and a little too self-aware/self-enamored. Never did I forget the presence of ARUNDHATI ROY, or her views or the Important Points she was making. This was similar to the feeling I got when reading Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 - another accomplished, much-lauded author whose latest book is full of indulgent, gimmicky schticks like alphabetical lists of words (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ARUNDHATI, I GOT THE POINT AT C, WHY MUST YOU CONTINUE). Main difference here is (1) Arundhati Roy is clearly on a mission to tell an important story about What's Up With India, and (2) I love KSR, he so great (I never read Roy before).

Another weird gimmick - one that really bothered me - was that Roy refers to several important Indian politicians and public figures: namely, Narendra Modi (the current PM), Anna Hazare (who led a wave of Bernie-style “political revolution”/anti-corruption movements in 2012), Manmohan Singh (former PM), and so on. Yet she doesn't name any of them - Narendra Modi is “Gujarat ka Lalla” (Gujarat's beloved? I forget), Hazare is the “baby” (cuz of his looks, not behavior), etc etc. And I was like, wait, why? Who is the audience of this book? It's written in English (and, notably, it's mentioned how most of the characters DON'T speak it), so it's pitched more towards upper class Indian readers - and, of course, international readers. But how many international readers know Anna Hazare? And can recognize him by roundabout descriptions of his movement?

And this annoyed me. Like, clearly Arundhati Roy is waving the flag of social justice and left-wing outrage at the ascendency of far-right Hindu nationalism since the last election, and I think it would be nice and educational and important to, for example, publicize the Gujarat riots of 2002 (and Narendra Modi's role in them) to an American audience. But... she doesn't? She's weirdly coy about it, weirdly smirking/wink wink about it. And I'm just like: WHY? Just tell the story! Or better yet (since, damn, she does do a lot of telling), SHOW us the story!

And now, my beloved Shashi Kapoor, playing a Kashmiri goatherd type, noting how foreigners are nothing but trouble and one must stay away from them.

Ugh. This book bothered me. BOTHERED ME.

There's been a swath of edgy, insightful, “cutting too close to the bone” near-future dystopian books about America lately. Namely: The Underground Railroad (where said railroad is literally true), Underground Airlines (alt history where slavery never ended), Exit West (magical portals facilitate Syrian refugee crisis), and this.

The concept of this is great, and I was super pumped to read it. It's a near-future book about a second American civil war, this one driven by climate change. My spirits were a little dampened by the less-than-great reviews it was getting, but NO MATTER. I love alt history dystopias. I LOVE THEM. I will read them.

But I was really bothered by this book. It seemed so dark as to be almost mean-spirited, and so cynical in its portrayal of America's problems as to be, ahem, reminiscent of provincial Euro-snobs who reduce America to “guns and religion” clingers. There was no nuance, only pessimism. Every character was a vile caricature; there was no kindness, not even method to the madness!

It's rare that a book upsets me like this, but I found myself deeply disturbed by the values portrayed in this book. Yes, America has done some shitty things (if countries can “do” things) - slavery, Guantanamo, Bush, the Dulles brothers, police brutality, Trump. The list can go on. But (A) are there morally good countries? If so, please let me know, let's all move there. And (2) if we accept the premise of there being “shitty countries”, then what of all the people that live there?

Cuz this book is about a shitty America which has made its bed and GODDAMN IT, WILL LIE IN IT. It's the end of the 21st century. Climate change has decimated the coasts; the Federal government has moved in-land to Columbus, Ohio, and most of the South is underwater. Texas and California are back in Mexico's hands, and a civil war is raging between the Blues (northerners/Democrats/liberals/what have you) and Reds (southerners/Republicans). The war ostensibly began when the government passed a clean energy bill. “YOU WILL NEVER TAKE AWAY MY FOSSIL FUELS!” the South cried, as it seceded. Thus beganeth the war.

Our protagonist, Sarat, is a tough “tomboy” (SCARE QUOTES) who grows up in the Louisiana bayou with her two siblings and parents. Shit is hard in this near future South, and the family escapes the civil war's front lines, ending up in a refugee camp. There, horrible shit happens, Sarat is radicalized, and then she does lots and lots of horrible shit. There is a prolonged stretch in a Guantanamo Bay-style prison. The book ends on a feeble note of hope - oh wait, no, never mind, it ends with just pure misanthropy.

Ugghghhh. I feel like the reason this book didn't click for me, and I found the dystopian darkness stupid and repellant, rather than edgy and smart, was that it presented - at its core - an unbelievable and stereotyped vision of the US. Another Goodreads reviewer noted, accurately, that the politics don't feel real. Future South is completely post-race and post-religion, but it still hates the “Blues” - and hates them over fossil fuel usage? I'm sorry, but I cannot buy that 90 years from now, racism will magically disappear and be supplanted by fossil fuel outrage. Also, this is a nitpick, but the family's last name - Chestnut - also felt weird. Who is named Chestnut? It felt like the author randomly picked an English word; it felt like the way I used to write shitty Orientalist sci-fi and randomly google Urdu or Hindi words and name my characters after them because AUTHENTICITY (“Sanjeev Biryani”, I am sorry).

I felt like the book is marketed as a nuanced, dystopian look at America's problems, but instead it's about Syria, Iraq, and - more generally - the horrors of war, radicalization, and terror. Which would be fine. COULD BE FINE. But the hollowed-out presentation of American society, denuded of its history and painted in stark, misanthropic ways, was just - ugh.

Meh. This was fine. Snack-size cosmology. Didn't touch me like Sette breve lezioni di fisica, or The Accidental Universe.

Charming and fascinating. A brief but vivid window into a dozen or so families' lives in very different circumstances - a refugee camp in Chad, the mountains of Bhutan, an apartment in Mongolia, and so on. We get a portrait of each family with one week's worth of food, followed by an itemized “receipt” of the food (including how much was paid) and a few pages describing their daily life. Every so often, there are interjections of data visualizations and stats - as a data person, I found these sometimes left me wanting more. But that's fine! As a piece of qualitative research, this was wonderful. I felt myself transported, reminded again that there's a whole wide world out there beyond my narrow perspective of American politics, covid, and my specific daily life. Really great.

Oh yeah, and the authors really despair over McDonald's.

Where's the review? HERE IT IS.
Is this book good? YES IT IS.
Are the flaps interactive, soft, and in charming, bright colors? YES THEY ARE.
Is this book - like all baby books - skewed towards charismatic megafauna, and neglecting ecologically important niche species and common-but-vital species like the underrated superorganism, the ant? YES IT IS.
Is it this book's fault? NO IT'S NOT.
Did we read this a lot? YES WE DID.
And indeed am I recommending it to you? THERE YOU ARE.

The best. When Peter comes home, puts the snowball in his pocket, tells his mom about his adventures, and then sits in the bath and “thinks and thinks and thinks”, I fell in love.

Gritty, grimy, cynical, human and oddly cinematic. This wasn't really what I expected. It was far more self-aware, far calmer, and far more “modern” than I anticipated.

This is an anonymous (though she was eventually de-anonymized, you can google it for yourself) account by a 30something journalist in Berlin at the end of WW2. The Soviet Army is rolling in, and this diary is tightly focused on the two months when the Nazi Reich fell, the Soviets arrived, and Berlin began to be carved up by Allied Forces. I expected it to be brutal and “foreign” feeling - both in cultural temperament (a defeated Nazi Germany) and history (1940s culture). Instead, it felt very, very immediate - and not at all foreign (which was disconcerting).

A lot of this book is about rape. The author is repeatedly raped, as is (almost) every other woman she knows. The way she talks about it, the way they all talk about it, is also blunt, shell-shocked, even with some gallows humor. It's hard to take it (including, for example, for the returning men - who insist the women not speak like that). It's confusing: many of the Soviet Army men speak of “love” and “marriage” and make romantic gestures, even as they rape. The German women likewise have a range of resistance: trading sex for protection or food; one woman, a lesbian, wears men's clothing and escapes it all by passing as a man; others hide for weeks in crawlspaces or welcome Soviet officers to their salons. The author herself takes a pragmatic approach: always seeking a high-level officer.

Indeed, this blunt treatment of one of life's “primal horrors” led the book to be published twice: first in the 1950s in Germany, when it was “ignored or reviled” (wiki) by a German public unable to digest it and then again, after the author's death, in the early 2000s.

Beyond its steely portrayal of rape and near-starvation (since Berlin, as a starved sieged city, is in a state of near total anarchy during these two months), the author also repeatedly and strongly condemns men - especially German men. They're repeatedly described as “pathetic”, pathetically limping home, starving and defeated, unable and unwilling (and seemingly no longer caring) to defend their women from the Soviets.

Meanwhile, the Nazi leadership - Hitler, Goebbels, etc. - is also portrayed as universally reviled by the Berliners hiding in their basement bomb shelters, except by a few die-hards (portrayed as naive).

That said, the author is not necessarily a heart-warming “lifelong anti-fascist” - she's shocked and horrified by the newspaper's recounts of the Holocaust, but doesn't dwell on it - and doesn't seem to feel a sense of personal guilt. The personalization of the war is in the sense of loss, the humiliation, the defeat of Germany. Not, in other words, the crimes or the guilt of Germany. That came later, I guess, with the truth and reconciliation (and generational inculcation of German war guilt) in the 1960s and 1970s. This lady doesn't feel bad about what Germany has done, she seems to be as much a victim as anyone. As an American - and especially someone who had a lot of ties with the Jewish community in high school - I felt uncomfortable here: I kept thinking, “THIS IS NOTHING COMPARED TO ELIE WIESEL” and things like that. But I don't think that's a helpful response - in fact, I was a little appalled with myself, with my brain, for even going there. It's not the Suffering Olympics here. This woman didn't personally deserve what happened to her. Indeed, it's interesting that my American reaction - inculcated with endless Hollywood representations of a cartoon evil, and now the revival of “Nazi” as a catch-all for “evil monster” in modern American politics - would lead me to have difficulty accepting German non-Jewish suffering during WW2 (when, obviously, it did also happen), and lead me to feel sometimes tense in letting myself feel bad for her.

Anyway, I recommend this (especially if read in conjunction with Tony Judt's Postwar).

Ah well. I don't feel great giving 1 star to a dharma book, since obviously (a) its heart is in the right(est) place and (b) I'm a Buddhist! But, well, Buddhism is all about non-attachment, and I musn't be attached to dharma merch just for the sake of it, and so I consider it my duty to honestly point out when stuff is a slog, boring, a chore, and/or doesn't resonate. While this book had some good points - e.g. the value of silence, of waiting, of time, of contextual compassion gravitating outwards from the self to loved ones to community to everyone, etc - I felt like most of it didn't really land with me. By the near-5 star rating by ~2k folks on GR, it looks like it landed with a lot of others - so your mileage may vary!

So basically this is a short-ish book of “soft style” Buddhist-ish platitudes. The author, Zen monk and college prof Haenim Sunim, apparently got big on social media, and, indeed, a lot of this book just feels like one very long Twitter Moment/Storify/etc. They're organized into short chapters around stuff like Love, Work, and Spirituality. Here's some examples:

“Life isn't a hundred-meter race against your friends, but a lifelong marathon against yourself.”

“If you have led an honorable and honest life, there is no need to be afraid of speaking the truth.”

“The more grateful we feel, the happier we become. This is because gratitude helps us realize we are all connected. Nobody feels like an island when feeling grateful. Gratitude awakens us to the truth of our interdependent nature.”

An affecting sorta-magic(al) realist novel about the refugee crisis.

It uses a brilliant gimmick - magical doors that teleport people instantly around the world - to explore the tragedy and humanity of modern migration. That said, similar to Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, another book with an evocative magical-political gimmick (in that one, Oppenheimer and other nuclear bomb scientists are magically ported from 1940s Manhattan Project to 2003 New Mexico), Exit West starts strong - VERY STRONG - and then takes a plot twist that feels cheap and like a too-early highway exit. That is, it's such a great idea and it has so much potential, but it doesn't feel fully explored - in fact, it feels like the central refugee crisis gets wrapped up halfway through the book.

The story starts in an unnamed city in an unnamed Arab country that feels very much like Syria. Saeed and Nadia are twenty-somethings courting each other while the chaos of civil war encroaches. As things become increasingly dire, rumors spread of these magical doors. The doors - Narnia-like - open up to other parts of the planet: from a kitchen closet in Aleppo, you can step into a public bathroom in Mykonos. Doors are fiercely fought over, hunted for; they appear randomly; any door can become a magical one.

This is such a clever gimmick. First of all, it eliminates - crazily, but geniusly - one of the defining characteristics of the story of the refugee: the long journey. What if you didn't need to walk for miles, or struggle onto flimsy, unsafe boats, or huddle in the backs of trucks? What if you could just step through a magical portal? Mohsin Hamid incisively shows how this would only accelerate the crisis rather than fix it: the logistical nightmares of refugee camps and endless, perilous uncertainty would still be there. The reactionary nativist forces would still be there. The cross-planet informal networks of migrant rumor mills on Whatsapp and Facebook would still be there. Things would just move faster, much faster. Genius point 1.

Genius point 2 is, of course, how the doors represent the reality of this globalized, inter-connected in-everyone's-face world.

Anyway, I crushed this book in a couple marathon listens; it's very, very readable. But it does leave you feeling unsatisfied; so much more could have been done with this. Also, Mohsin Hamid's writing is intentionally detached, remote, even aloof. I think this is meant to make it feel like a fable or morality play (which, of course, it is). Mostly, this works well - but sometimes, it felt like the prose was both purple AND aloof; not a good look.

And now, for another affecting gimmick about the Syrian refugee crisis, this old Save the Children ad. GENIUS.

Oh yes, and for ANOTHER political spec fic gimmicky book: The Mirage, about an alternative history/parallel universe where the UAS (United Arab States) are besieged by “Crusader” terrorists on Nov. 9 (11/9). Exit West bends more towards literary fiction, whereas The Mirage is more airport spec fic.

Like all good history books, it was a TOME and took forever to read.

However, it is indeed a VERY good history book, up there with The Hindus, or American Prometheus (about Oppenheimer, so relevant here), or A History of Contemporary Italy.

Oral histories are also particularly affecting: shit gets really emotional, and it's hard not to shed a tear or two. It's also often AMAZING. God, the lives some people have had. It's just amazing. Highly recommended. I'm looking forward to reading more of Studs Terkel's work now, too.

I can't believe my (systematically irrational) mind, but I finish this book with maximum choked-up-ness. Like, I was fighting tears on my commute in. Oh, Amos. Oh, Danny. Oh, choice architecture.

This could be put on the shelf next to Nina Munk's The Idealist (about Jeff Sachs), and Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Paul Farmer): that is, a brilliantly written account (by a journalist) of a genius theory in economics/public health, and the genius-personalities behind it. In this case, we explore the foundation of behavioral economics, from the odd couple buddy movie that was the Kahneman & Tversky collaboration.

What Michael Lewis does brilliantly (as Nina Munk and Tracy Kidder also did for their subjects) is create a strong, coherent, emotional narrative: it's a biography of an incredible intellectual romance. The excitement of finding each other, the pain of their “divorce” late in the life, the tragedy of Amos's early death. Their odd couple-ness: Danny as the pessimistic, dark, sensitive one; Amos as the brilliant, funny, fiery one. It's a history of the foundation of Israel, of the end of WW2, and there are detours into the vast influence of their work: in Nate Silver-style sports analytics/moneyball, in government “nudge” units, in the movement for evidence-based medicine and acknowledging doctor fallibility.

And, of course, it's a crash course in my favorite part of grad school: subjective probability! Behavioral economics! We hear from a lot of great “2nd generation” voices: George Loewenstein, Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein (Dan Ariely is notably absent, WHY?). It's all super inspiring and - unexpectedly - super touching. I loved hearing all the human details: Amos's incredible, eviscerating wit (the Amos-isms, omg); Danny's relatable insecurities; the hilarious cultural comparisons of economics departments versus psychology departments; that “hold your breath” moment when the Nobel Prize committee calls. Lewis also tries (and mostly succeeds) in weaving in each behavioral economics topic with how it was applying to the men themselves: when Danny starts working on “the undoing project” (exploring how people think about counterfactuals; i.e. “simulation heuristics”), it's at the same time as the relationship between him and Amos is starting to degrade. Gah, so sad!

Super recommended.

One of the few Star Wars tie-in books that is palatable. Takes place shortly after the Battle of Endor, so everything is still vaguely familiar and everyone is still in relatively top form.

Someone should really do an anthropological survey of the pregnancy and childbirth folkways of the aspirational class in the US/Anglo world. I mean, I guess people have. Anyway, this book would be a very helpful primary document!

So, I honestly only wanted to give this 4 stars - that was how my heart and brain felt about it - but, ahem, my uterus took over and decided to get ~PoLiTiCaL~ and demanded 5. Because, as Knisley kinda insinuates in the book, this is a relatively rare story: a very realistic look at an averagely-hard pregnancy and childbirth. I didn't “relate” to this book; I had direct, first- or second-hand experience of basically every panel. Knisley makes a very good point of the baby boom (ho ho) of baby movies in the late 80s/early 90s (Baby Boom being a fave!) - and how now all us 1980s/1990s kids are grown up and having babies and WOW NO ONE MENTIONED TEARING, DIANE KEATON YOU WERE FULL OF LIES. Knisley's experience, on the other hand, is kind of “peak” this era, this socioeconomic class - she's in her 30s, her OB/GYN kinda just clocks her in and out (and misses that she gets frickin' preeclampsia, sheesh), there's the siren call of the natural birth movement (and I appreciated her digression into its dodgy history), there's the mountain of advice capitalism merch, and so on. Her story is truthfully told, with heart and clarity. And it's a story that we should honestly be shoving in the hands of teen girls and 20somethings!Now, a couple QUIBBLES, and why I wanted to dump a star: First quibble is large: in general, the graphic novel memoir sub-genre is just waaaaaay oversaturated, and - given that a lot of these successful cartoonists come from similar backgrounds and similar socio-economic statuses - it just feels kinda boring, repetitive, and indulgent. Like, I don't need another navel-gazing Millennial (BLAM, take that, generation!) lamenting their relatively okay life. This critique is sooooort of attenuated by the fact that, again, there just ain't that many realistic pregnancy memoirs, and so this is valuable in and of itself. But, I do wish graphic novels would pursue other forms of storytelling too... the medium has so much potential!Second quibble is small: there's a bit where Knisley explains how her husband came around to wanting kids (he was hesitant before). He's quoted as saying that he realized the difference between “making myself happy and becoming fulfilled”. Fair. Strong fair indeed. By definition/biological imperative, a lot of parenting - especially baby stuff - is about how your needs come last, and your kid's come first. And that can be a scary loss of freedom/control. But then, in the very next page, Knisley is gesturing towards the okay-ness (and increasing popularity) of staying child-free, and she notes the “stigma” still attached to it, and how a study found that child-free people are perceived as being “less fulfilled”. And I was like *double take wait, didn't we just say that that's what you believe? I was confused. That is a small quibble, I know.

* jk jk, she does not give birth to the baby in Baby Boom, but I digress

Alright, calling it. 2.5 stars, and DNF @ 37%.

I was really excited to read this, since Cory Doctorow is one of my lifestyle gurus (I do what he says!) and I really loved Little Brother (his (best?) YA novel covering similar themes) and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (his breakout novel). At best, when I read his books, I feel super inspired: I love the tech, I love the cyberpunk maker vision, I love the civil liberty righteousness. At worst, it feels pedantic and preachy. Unfortunately, this book is mostly the latter.

This book - his first adult novel in a long while - is kind of a prequel to Down and Out: it's a zero-days story of the birth of Cory's Burning Man-style utopian vision. It's divided into parts, and I made it through three:

1. the near future corporate dystopia featuring privileged, idealistic crusty-punks hosting “Communist parties” at abandoned Muji (!) factories
2. our heroes becoming “Walkaways”, who wander away from mainstream (“default”) society and go off-the-grid, well, sorta off-the-grid - they go onto the anarcho-commune maker grid.
3. the birth of a post-human future, where mad Walkaway scientists finally figure out how to upload consciousnesses into the cloud (specifically, as torrent files! HAHA), therefore obliterating death. Also, the birth of “adhocracy”, as featured in Down and Out.

And I stopped there.

So I stopped because this suffered from what a lot (most? all?) truly utopian novels suffer from: they're JUST a stream of explanations of how the utopia works. No real investment in the plot or characters. Dialogue doesn't happen, Socratic soap-boxing does. Characters are caricatures; the Skeptic, the True Believer, blah blah. The plot is just watching the utopia click into place.

Honestly, I haaaated the first part, because the three heroes - Hubert, Etcetera (he has lots of middle names; this joke gets old fast...), Natalie, and Seth - were nails-on-the-chalkboard unlikable. I also hated the narrative voice: completely unchallenged in its self-righteous more-radical-than-thou tone. I hated the Straw Man 1%-er introduced (Natalie's dad), and how completely unambiguous and boring it all was. I even found myself siding with billionaire dad, cuz, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, he JUST invited them to his house and they (metaphorically) took a giant dump in it cuz he's an “evil rich dude”! Talk about self-righteous brats, oof.

I liked the second and third parts more, just cuz the ideas were pretty fun: I loved the second part's idea of “open source” civil engineering; where anyone and everyone can just fork the repos of open source UNHCR housing projects, and people have big commit-revert wars. This was VERY funny, though I suspect it may not strike the same chord if you don't use GitHub/GitLab at work.

But, as things progressed, and I started hoping the original heroes would just die, I was like, maybe I should just DNF this. Like, these characters literally have no other driving interest other than explaining radical politics to each other (which is the only thing they talk about) and sex (which is the only thing they do, apart from making). It started to feel like this, only in earnest.

SOOO. I read the Bruce Sterling review of this and was annoyed by it: he calls it the “best Cory Doctorow book ever”, but then notes that it's written mechanically, has way too many sex scenes, has lectures instead of dialogues, and has “all kinds of basic plot and structural problems”. SO HOW IS IT THE BEST!? Also, this quote REALLY turned me off:

A political agita­tor needs to watch it with the self-congratulatory too-cleverness, because that gets all Mensa and it intimidates the normals. Doctorow's got that problem in spades, because he's got an IQ high enough to boil water.

A pretty pedestrian puff piece. About ten years ago, I went through a fervent Hindi film phase - and Shashi Kapoor was one of the brightest stars in that firmament. I just loved him, and - according to my movie review blog statistics - I've seen ~50 of his movies (gee!). He's always held a very special place in my affections, but also a kinda fraught place too. There was something about him and his celebrity that I felt - weirdly guilty about? Like, and I say this unironically, but I always felt like he was super objectified (dude was suuuper handsome), and there was a troubling darkness under that charm?

In January of this year (2018), he passed away. It was very sad, and it reminded me of his peak days during the 1970s: beautiful and snaggle-toothed. I was a bit leery about reading a celeb bio of him, figuring it'd be indulgent, vapid or both, but decided to give it a shot anyway. Unfortunately, this bio is not great.

I was, naturally, very curious about the stuff I knew about: how his older brother, Raj (ultra-famous in his own right), once called Shashi a “taxi” who would take any film offered (and, boy, did that lead to some stinkers!); how he married an Englishwoman, Jennifer Kendal, who died tragically young at 51; how he essentially disappeared from films after her death, gaining weight and fading from view while his extensive family (the Kapoors) went on to keep dominating Bollywood up to this day (his grand-nephew, Ranbir Kapoor, is the current generation's star). All of this is really interesting.

It would have even been really charming to just read a biography that richly contextualized Hindi films from the 1950s to 1980s - that period must have been magical, and a history of Bollywood - passionately researched and written - would be great!

INSTEAD. This book. Unfortunately, this book is just a puff piece; it intersperses bland flattery taken from interviews with his co-stars and collaborators (“Shashi was so generous”, “he treated the crew with so much respect!”) combined with brief, uninspired synopses of his best-known films (Junoon is about blah blah, etc.) Not much investigative journalism went into this, since most of the content summarizes existing (magazine) interviews, etc. I was also irked by the tone in some moments: for example, Neetu Singh - one of the interviewees - is mentioned as someone who, oh yeah, also acted a bit. DUDE, Neetu was HUGE in the 70s! And her disappearing after she married Rishi Kapoor (Shashi's nephew) was a tragedy and one of the things I hate about Bollywood (married actresses were/are rare...). Jennifer Kendall's death is also mentioned in a weirdly off-hand way, which felt terrible. The whole book just felt superficial, at times sycophantic. Which is a shame!