Angela Ambroz
Holy shit. A short children's book to teach them the Triestin dialect (aka the dialect from Trieste, Italy - a dialect that has like 250k speakers?). A way for me to face my angst and grief that the dialect will almost certainly die with me? But at least I can show my kids the words?!?! And, like, a picture of Miramare and some iota?! This is the barest drop of Triestine culture and life.
Finally read this (since it's quite wordy, probably good for older toddlers and up). The art is gorgeous. I want to transfer + embroider every page of it onto my pants and bedsheets. The story is fun and very relatable (who doesn't love sweets?).
SUPER up my alley. Like, if you read James Scott and if you were thrilled - THRILLED, I say! - at how last names evolved such that the state could more easily tax its citizens, well, this is a book like that. Also! If you like David Macauley and like to nerd out about infrastructure and underlying systems, yes, this is more of that. (And David Macauley gives a blurb for this book.)
I loved the internet section. I was reminded of a friend who noted that the size of the NASA space shuttle is a function of the size of horse carriages cuz of the underlying infrastructural grooves of horse butt -> width of horse carriage -> width of road -> width of truck to haul space gear. Which is amusing.
I loved the electricity section too. I am ALL about electricity markets and electrification right now. Boy. I have learned a lot about my local utility, ha.
I actually didn't care for the water section. That one left me with more questions than answers. It felt too skimmy (heh).
Still, there are not enough books like this in the world! Just like, as I shouted in 2017, wtaf is wifi!?!?!? (And I now have a decent grasp of radiowaves and such, hooray.) So too am I still like, BUT what is electricity??!?!?! And so on.
I think Charles Mann said something recently about how we need to be educating the youth about these practical systems - that, right now, in this (post-)modern life, we live so abstracted away from the actual tools for survival and modernity (light, energy, water, internet).
Gasp. A masterpiece. A “choose your own adventure” book aimed at the preschool set, featuring a mundane day of a little boy and his younger brother. The usual annoyances and irritations of childhood ensue (wrong plate; wanting to play with the same toy; falling over your feet and destroying the lemonade stand). The reader is then asked to choose. TO CHOOSE, do you hear me. Do you react with the more typical RAGE AND AGGRESSION AND DESPAIR?! Or do you channel your tiny inner Buddha and say “ahimsa ahimsa no prob mom”.
FWIW my kid chose attack/despair every time - which ends with Danny having a terrible day indeed - and then was like, “but i wanna see what happens everywhere else in the book?” AH HAAAAA, the great lesson is upon us! Same choices = same story, my child!! It was revelatory (and very difficult) for them to choose the Buddha route. I could see the brain gears turning. WONDERFUL. Thank you, book.
DNF at about halfway, and won't review, since - meh - it was fine. I used it during my first Georgia Tech OMSCS course, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence, and that's over now, so... :shrug:
I mean, I love Winston's MIT AI lectures. They are MIND BLOWINGLY good. Here they are. This book is less about “optimal” AI (in the style of neural nets and machine learning) and more about “human-like” AI (in the style of mimicking cognitive systems and encoding semantic relationships). Which I find inherently confusing and kind of gratingly dull. ML is more exciting! And seems to make more “sense” (even if it's less interpretable, often). As such, this book feels like a textbook from history - from a field that has changed quite a lot since it was published.
Terribly sad, wide-scope memoir about growing up black in America of the 80s, 90, post-9/11, Obama, Trump, etc. I want to read this guy's newspaper comics now, they looked excellent.
Celebrated acquiring my fourth - FOURTH (!) - library card by checking this out. I'm also, like many people, still waiting for an English-language publisher to publish vols 5 and 6 of Sattouf's masterful Arab of the Future series. WHERE IS IT?!
Anyway, this book centers on a young Parisian middle schooler, Esther. We follow her when she's 10, 11 and 12 years old, from 2015-2018 (I think). These are comic strips that have appeared (weekly?) in a French newspaper, and that Sattouf creates after regularly interviewing his friend's daughter, the titular Esther.
I love Sattouf's work. It's brutal but also... humane? Esther is kind of awful and wonderful. She's imaginative, materialistic, already pre-addicted to an iPhone (she LONGS for one in almost every page), feminist, chauvinist, a bully, homophobic, caring, conscientious, and everything. I definitely saw myself in her. She's innocent, trying to fit into a world - including all its broken parts (the homophobia, eeesh, can these kids chill out about gay people) - and trying to figure out herself in it. As she grows, we see her confidence grow. I LOVED her moments of courage and imagination, when she's like “sorry but fuck that” lol. Sattouf sometimes centralizes the casual cruelty of children (Arab of the Future had a LOT of that), and tbh middle school cruelty is the last thing I want to revisit, but I also appreciated how steady-eyed and non-judgmental and... resilient? He also portrays things? Like, life is definitely suffering - but it's also very funny and there are moments of sweetness.
Phenomenal book. Good values (“stop grabbing my face so hard”) packaged in a thrilling crescendo of Huggy - an affectionate python snake - squeezing and destroying various loved objects in his pursuit to “BE GENTLE”. Will Huggy “BE GENTLE” with his beloved little dog, who has committed no crimes and is clearly not strong enough to withstand the python's powerful grip? We end on a cliffhanger. Recommended.
Really fun, biting satire. Postmodern stuff is an immediate turn-off for me, so I slogged through the postmodern smirks. But whatever. I also kinda enjoyed them?
Briefly: A novel about an African-American writer and professor who writes highly cerebral Italo Calvino-style postmodern stuff that no one reads or enjoys. He then needs some money, due to relatable family drama (a mother being diagnosed with Alzheimer's). So he writes a trash book that fetishizes the ghetto and panders to white audiences. The book is a smash hit. Our hero is crushed.
Tbh I loved it. I watched the movie immediately after finishing the book (hey, it was a sick day), and they did a decent job - I'll leave that review for Letterboxd.
Super excited to read James next.
Does your little kid have big feelings? Of course they do. This is a good book about managing that.
The library had a big Holi spread in the children's section, and who among us doesn't love Holi? WHO??? Some mood music.
Anyway. What I took to be an introduction to Holi as a day and concept turned out to be a VERY relatable story about a girl getting mad about a perceived slight (she got the wrong color), and learning - through the power of a Holi story - how to let go of her anger and accept love and softness back into her heart. BOY OH BOY do we sometimes need that lesson over here.
Art was gorgeous. Appreciated the suburban backyard.
DNF at ~29%. It's... fine. It's not my jam: I feel bored and alienated by these sorts of faux myth “now I'm going to tell you what I'll tell you, there once was an evil king” blah blah stuff. Some other review mentioned Tolkien's Silmarillion. Yeah, it's that kinda writing. Also, the constant restarting of every chapter - as they exist as semi-independent short stories, all centered around this mythical empire - is another hard sell for me. (I have loved the style - nay, ADORED it - once: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.)
So. I'm sad I didn't really connect with this book. I actually think I could quite like it in another, less busy, less tired, less Darwinian season of my life. But right now, I was like, “hmmmmmm NOPE cutting u off!!” The DNF trigger fires easily these days.
As with the other books in this series, most of this book is a bang-on take of what your N year old is going through - how they're behaving, why they're behaving like that, and what you can do about it. The advice in Your Two-Year Old, it was mostly: TV and babysitters. NO PROBLEMO. I am over the screentime moral panic, sign me up.
As with the previous book, it's super dated and so - amidst all the gems of timeless wisdom - there are, err, real hilarious clunkers. My favorite being the advice that, okay, some kids might need a good spanking - nothing excessive - but especially if they're mesomorphic boys. Ectomorphic? Something about body shape. I was just like, okay, this is Yale, but this is the 1970s, moving right along.
The final outcome of this book - just for me and my parenting - was the best one: I felt more compassionate and more patient. Onto the next years!
I like all the food kids books (e.g. Dim Sum for Everyone) and I love kids books that feature Italy, so this was an easy win. Bilingual Italian/English rhyming couplets about food. I forgot that some Italian kids call their dad “Babbo” - so cuuuute.
I didn't “read” this so much as blearily stare at it in a fog of fatigue at 3am. Ho ho ho.
Actually, I kid. I read some of it. I read the chapters that were most relevant to my life right now - and truly, I exist only in the HERE and NOW right now - and I read the “exhausted parent summaries” at the end of the other chapters, when I could find them (sometimes I was too tired to find them).
Generally, I am very much on Team Weissbluth, infamously known as Team Cry It Out. Allow me to vent: I mean, we let our kids cry - sometimes for quite a while - when we're doing other things to them that they don't like but we know is good for them: taking a bath, getting their diaper changed, changing out of their soiled clothes, going in the car, etc. So why should sleep be something that gets sacrificed just cuz the little one doth protest too much? The “attachment parenting” narrative posits that letting your baby cry for more than I-don't-know-how-many minutes could cause permanent, long-lasting psychological harm; so does attachment parenting say we should avoid baths, diaper changes, car rides, anything else they hate, etc? I guess it's because all these other crying-producing events have definite ends, and so the parent (at least) can grin and bear it. But howling at night, with no end in sight, feels unbearable.
Anyway, Weissbluth's writing is catty, opinionated, stern and compassionate: that is, he is the classic angry, jaded doctor. He's like Hawkeye Pierce. Except instead of the Korean War, he's trudging back from the Parenting War on “mama” message boards, and he's super pissed off. He's like that meme of George Clooney walking away from a burning car, with the headline “Paul Krugman has had it up to here with you people”. That is, he has been trying to fight the good fight - getting kids to sleep, creating healthy sleep patterns - since 1973 (when he started practicing pediatrics). He is a prof at Northwestern (fancy!) and has marshaled tons of rigorous research evidence (randomized-control trials!) that “sleep training”/”extinction”/”cry it out” does NOT break your baby, but rather makes everyone - baby, mom, other parents, family - better rested and happier and healthier, etc. And yet, he must still fight this fight. I think the best line in the book (and this appears also in Emily Oster's Cribsheet, in the chapter on sleep training) is that popular opinion on sleep training is very divided, but expert opinion (pediatricians, child dev psychologists) is not: sleep training works.
This leads to writing that, okay, I found highly amusing. His multi-page screed against Dr. Sears (the father of attachment parenting) is chef's kiss. There are italics and exclamation points. He has a wonderful line about us parents letting go of some “hypothetical dream baby” and accepting the baby we have here, now! For the love of God! I imagine him saying this while shaking us by the arms, maybe giving a slap or two across the face. He has a wonderfully indignant rant about how all that research that shows how maternal mental illness can negatively impact baby sleep patterns is probably just masking a bunch of deadbeat dads. Ohhh, don't get him started on deadbeat dads. I love it.
Anyway, the book is organized into sections:
- Why is sleep important (imagine him shaking you and giving you a hard slap while shouting EVERYONE NEEDS TO RESPECT EVERYONE'S SLEEP MORE)
- Sleep problems and solutions (early bedtimes, get dad involved, teach self-soothing as much as possible (i.e. put them down drowsy but awake), do the French “le Pause” thing - i.e. wait before consoling at night to see if they settle)
- Baby's first month (a compassionate section; it's chaos + all babies are super-noisy sleepers (snorting, snoring, grunting, squeaking, etc) + colic is a thing + colic is hell)
- Baby's second month (the peak of madness! and the ebb of madness; a light at the end of the tunnel; maybe try self-soothing more if you're baby is not super colicky?! where is deadbeat dad?!!)
- EVERY SINGLE MONTH AFTER THAT: teach self-soothing because bad sleep is worse than crying for even a few hours for a few nights (!)
So it's great. It's a reference book I basically sleep with, hugging it to my chest. He was bang on right about a lot of stuff I experienced: e.g. early bedtimes are key, respecting your kid's sleep schedule is socially limiting but emotionally liberating. The first two weeks of newborn life are often a total honeymoon/bait-and-switch - those babies are just exhausted from having been born. Wait until they wake up! Aaagh.
Good God. What an awful historical anecdote I knew nothing about. Radiation poisoning is one of those horrible things. This was horrible.
Amusingly super factual. Be careful sending screenshots of this one, you'll get banned from your platform. lolol
Basically: a picture book outlining how a baby gets made, for real. Includes my favorite drawing: a penis saying “Hallo!” to a vagina saying “Komm rein!” (Come in!). Includes some REAL TALK about morning sickness and c-sections. Made me cry in the end??? Everyone was a baby. Everyone loves their baby!!! sob
So basically, true, unvarnished but simply told sex ed for your preschooler. Highly recommend.
Really lovely, non-board book for little ones about Zaha Hadid - an Iraqi architect I didn't know anything about. I loved learning about her; I was inspired (her favorite classes in school were art + math!); the heavy lines and psychedelic geometric patterns of the cover's interiors - all the art was great.
A fusty, benign look at a very, VERY specific part of the world, which misses ONE IMPORTANT POINT (more below).
I read this because my “native place” is a small town just outside of Trieste. It's where both my parents are from, and their parents, and their parents, and their... you get the idea. I honestly cannot believe this book would be of interest to people who don't have a personal connection to this place, since (a) Trieste is basically boring and (b) this book is just OK.
But for me, it was thrilling - THRILLING - to have an English-language book about this very specific posto, and I'll admit, firstly, that the book faithfully captures the narrative that Triestines tell themselves about themselves. That is, a narrative that (1) pities itself for being, old, aging, forgotten by time and the world, and dull, (2) prides itself on its Hapsburgian past (in a super reactionary/monarchist way - glorious Kaiserlich und Königlich blah blah), and (3) recognizes the inherent lies of 19th century European nationalism/patriotism. That Morris accurately captured what I had previously believed were specific attributes of how my FAMILY sees the world, and that these attributes are, instead, specifically cultural, was eye-opening. And interesting in a meta way.
On (1), Trieste is one of the oldest cities (demographically) of an already (urgently) aging country (Italy). I think the birthrate is, like, -0.7. JK. But it is bad. I landed at the Trieste airport recently and was the youngest person at the Arrivals gate by about 30 years. I am 34 years old.
On (2), many in my fam considers themselves proudly Austro-Hungarian, though they hold Italian passports, speak Italian (and no German), and Franz Ferdinand died 104 years ago. Reminder: the year is 2018. Nonetheless, every person in my fam has a picture of our great great uncle when he met Franz Josef in the 1910s. SO KAISERLICH!
On (3), ah yes, this is the most interesting bit. Trieste has changed nationality so many times in living memory (Austro-Hungarian until WW1, Italian until WW2, debated “Free City” under the US in the 50s, Italian from 1953, split by the Iron Curtain) and it's been such a perennial mix of cultures (Friulan, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Austrian, etc) and mix of ideologies (monarchists, Italian irredentists, Tito Communists, Fascists), that “official nationality” has come to mean very little in the local mindset. National fervor is seen with an arched eyebrow. What nation? DO YOU KNOW HOW EASILY NATIONS CAN CHANGE? Morris makes good points on this, and juxtaposes it interestingly with her background as Welsh-English, brought up during GLORIOUS BRITISH EMPIRE days, and then traveling the world.
But! BUT! And this is the big failing of the book (and, of course, of Trieste itself): Morris JUST BARELY acknowledges the very modern, very not-Hapsburg, very NOT-WHITE reality of modern Trieste: that is, the enormous late 20th century and Refugee Crisis migrations that have rocked this region.
Morris was writing in 2000 or so. But even then (and always!), Trieste - as a port city on the edge of the Balkans and western Europe - has seen many, many, MANY immigrants and refugees. I found it appalling, in a way, that Morris (who clearly romanticized the K u K/old Europe multi-culturalism) was so willfully blind to Trieste's modern (and problematic) history with people of color. Her one acknowledgement that you see a lot of black dudes selling baubles in Piazza Unita is to say that those dudes are from Italy's Ethiopian/Abyssinian colonies?!?!!? My head exploded here. Wwwwhaaaat? Lady, those dudes are not long-ago immigrants from (romantic?!) 1930s Italian/Fascist would-be colonies, they're almost certainly fresh off the frickin' literal boat - the one that almost sunk in the Mediterranean! Similarly, she notes the growing Chinese presence - but doesn't investigate their history in the city - and she completely ignores the enormous Bangladeshi presence in Trieste's ship-building industry (ostensibly it's main thing).
To be fair, Morris doesn't write about this stuff because Triestine culture also doesn't acknowledge this stuff as an integral part of its history. Indeed, Morris does a great job of writing a book that panders to Triestine's self-image - but not their ACTUAL image. Don't even get me started. It's absurd to me that Triestines (and Morris... and my fam...) pompously celebrate the vibrant ethnic stew that this city has always been by noting the Italians! Slovenians! Austrians! But then everyone's panties get bunched up when they see a, gasp, non-white Triestine community. And there is ZERO curiosity. I mean, it's stupid. STUPIDLY RACIST.
Note: The current mayor was supported by Lega Nord (now just “Lega”), the far-right, xenophobic, Euro-skeptic Italian party that hates refugees, hates the Euro, and wants to “make Italy great again”. The pressures of the refugee crisis on local politics, local culture, are HUGE here. I would have LOVED to see Morris - or any author, really, Italian or English-language - contextualize Trieste's narrowly-focused romanticization of its (only white) history with its ACTUAL history as a port along numerous international migration routes. HMM. PERHAPS I SHALL ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGE.
Made me think a LOT about science communication, and how challenging it is to convey the scientific method and scientific norms and just epistemological uncertainty, man, to the - ahem - unwashed masses.
Also, it's the same bloviating Cold War physicist assholes working for Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Pollution. It's the same like 5 guys! Over and over and over!! Just screwing things up, seeding these evil memes into the collective consciousness about “climate change debate”. Maddening!
Also also, I love history of science and have just discovered Naomi Oreskes so I am PUMPED.
Disappointing. Ostensibly a sf story about a 1990s kid being transported to the 2100s. Except the 2100s are... just like any progressive city in the 2020s. I read science fiction to stimulate my imagination, to imagine how things could be. I especially enjoy, indeed, utopian and progressive visions. But this was just - not imaginative at all? And kinda self-congratulatory? That said, many stars for the excellent art.
Really good, but also infuriating, graphic memoir about growing up with an eating disorder. I guess the thing I found infuriating was the parenting - EDs can, indeed, often be passed down from mothers to daughters. Watching this unfold was just.... aarrrghhhhh.
Very magical. I was wavering between a 4 and a 5, but “Giacomo di cristallo” (Crystal Giacomo) pushed this over into a 5.
Basically, this is a collection of very short “phone phables” (hee) for kids. I tested this on my 3 year old, and - for a book that had zero illustrations - my kid was pretty enchanted, and kept asking for more stories, and for clarifications on the stories which I read. For example: the story of the very distractible Giovanni, who loses his hand, his arm, his leg, his nose as he goes for a leisurely walk around the neighborhood. (My kid: “And his head? WHAT ABOUT HIS HEAD?”) Sure, this story SOUNDS horrifying to adult ears - reminiscent of the most unsettling scene in Looper (oh glob that scene) - but my kid was instead sternly fascinated.
Similarly: the girl who shrinks as she gets tired and ends up sleeping on her now-enormous pillow. That's the whole story. That's it. I really enjoyed, actually, how both absurd and sudden the endings would be. The cosmic chicken story was pretty good (and oddly moving). This is definitely a time capsule of 1960s sensibilities: WW2 and the horrors of fascism are still fresh, but, at the same time, there's a sense of Space Age wonder.
Giacomo di cristallo is the story of a little boy who was born transparent, and his thoughts could be seen like multi-colored fish swimming around his head. So he can't lie or keep secrets very well, heh, but shit really hits the fan with a fascist dictator takes over, and Giacomo can't pretend to be okay with it, so ends up getting pretty immediately imprisoned!
Hmm, other lovely images were the castle of gelato in the middle of Milan's Piazza Maggiore, and the little old lady asking for someone to find her a gelato couch with armrests, please. Also enjoyed the story of the boys eating their way down a road made of chocolate. I mean, yo, Italian food is good and is NOT to be trifled with.
There was a definite aspect of Grimm Bros-esque fantasticalness to all of the stories - distinct from the now-stodgy-seeming Anglo/American stories of going to school, enjoying school, doing circle time. PLEASE, kids in Italy are eating their way down chocolate avenues to gelato palaces, let's get with the program here.
The moralizing was mostly light, except for the occasional note on how fascism was a terrible idea and some “colonizing space”/brotherhood of man stuff. Honestly, I was very excited to read this to my kid, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly enchanting it was for them. This is like 71 stories! Good value for money too, haha.
Really phenomenal. This is what I wanted The Theory That Would Not Die to be - that is, a book that explores why Bayesian statistics/Bayesian rationalism is meaningful and powerful. I guess that one was a pop stats history book, whereas this is aimed more towards practitioners.
That said, this book is written with such a lively, passionate tone, such joie de vivre and humor and brio and so on, that I often cackled with glee. He also made me get pumped again about being Bayesian. Someone at work recently asked me, “Are you frequentist or Bayesian?” My response: “Bayesian. But we all are, in our hearts.” I definitely believe that. Bayesian stats aligns with what people THINK many frequentist concepts (confidence intervals being a big one, p-values being another big one) are conveying.
But this book also tied things together in an unexpected way. Namely, I had never thought that the replication crisis which created such drama in so many fields (psychology, economics, medicine) was almost a deterministic result of using frequentist statistics. My take had always been a pragmatic/economic one: that is, that the incentive structures of academia and “closed science” (aka paywalled journals) had created a perverse system of p-hacking, etc. Clayton (who taught a course at Harvard's Extension School that became this book - I WISH I had taken that course!!!) argues that frequentism is just rotten to the core, and it's now pulling the rest of empirical science with it.
Very eye-opening, Pikachu shocked gawping, was that the American Statistical Association had been sounding this alarm as well - for years! I had no idea.
Anyway, I'm going to go tell everyone at work that we need to be Bayesian from now on!
This was an interesting read. I was surprised to see that it was published by Shambhala Publications - aka the Buddhist people - and I was annoyed when the author began by saying we could put the structural problems of parenting-while-capitalist aside (e.g. no government subsidies for childcare, no government mandated parental leave, oh my blood is boiling again), and focus on changing our mindset. My initial reaction was, “lady, whut”. But she did make some very good points - and I can see how indeed very Buddhist these points were. Namely: Life is suffering (First Noble Truth) - aka, there are seasons of life and experiences that are just difficult. Deal with it!
Indeed, the main thesis of the book is that, if we stop RESISTING the difficulties in our chaotic, parenting-small-children-while-trying-to-work, upside-down-house lives, we will save ourselves a lot of extra pain. And that is certainly true and sensible. Emily Oster - who recommended this book on her substack - often talks about “there is no option C”. Sometimes we are just faced with two unpleasant choices, and waffling between them will not make a better, third option appear. It's another way of saying: acknowledge your constraints. It is physically not possible to work 80 hour weeks and parent small children - accept that! I found that helpful. It's always a good reminder. You are going to drop balls. Oh well!
There were some worksheets and self-helpy activities, but I listened to this on audiobook, so can't really evaluate them.