Angela Ambroz

Krugman may be the prophet of thinking Democrats, but this book - I guess his manifesto? - didn't really get my blood going. Not like “What's the Matter with Kansas?”, a book Krugman cites - and corrects (in his view) by incorporating the US's fraught racial history into current political lines. But even the racism thing, certainly not a thesis original to Krugman, didn't really get me going. I felt like he wasn't adding much. There are other books about these same topics that are better-written, more mind-blowing and intellectually exciting: “A History of White People”, for example, which really picks apart the whole white supremacy thing, and Randall Kennedy's book titled with the n-word, which looks at contemporary racism from a sociologist's perspective. Even “The Hidden Cost of Being African-American”, a relative chore to get through, stirred me more.

The best bits of Krugman's book, indeed, come not when he sings the praises of FDR's equality-generating social policies (and the relative moderation of 1960s Congresses), nor when he laments the rise of “movement conservatives” (the GOP's crazies infestation/the Tea Party), but when he discusses - with urgency, clarity and eye-opening figures - the necessity of universal health care in the US. I really zipped through that chapter (towards the end), since it was the first time I had really read an overview of the US's healthcare woes. So I appreciated that. But otherwise this book may sit on my shelf as a middle-of-the-road, kinda dull, somewhat useful book. Maybe more anger, or just more fancy wordsmithing, would have earned my affections. As it stands, Krugman was a bit too economisty (i.e. dry) and not enough pundity (i.e. fist-shaking). I know, I know. We should all be level-headed and data-driven like Spock, blah blah blah...

Mother of God, was this depressing. I still feel sad when I think about it, and it's been almost a week since I finished it!

Short, brutal YA novelette about a teen romance souring amidst, basically, the collapse of civilization. The authorial voice is spot-on teen, and it lends a wonderful spin on the “unreliable narrator” conceit: such as when we discover, via our unreliably-narrating teen hero, that they're all covered in lesions... and this is probably because Earth's environment is f*ked... well, damn.

There's not much in the way of plot, really. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl get their brain/internet connections hacked. One gets better, one gets a lot worse. It's mostly an exploration of a place (imagine the worst dystopia you can, and then populate it by completely brainless teenagers) and feelings (which, oh man, did they ring true). And it basically makes you want to (a) NEVER BUY/CONSUME ANYTHING AGAIN, and (b) NEVER USE THE INTERNET AGAIN.

I might have to read some techno-utopianism now, like Doctorow, to feel like I'm not contributing to the slide into horrible decay by just writing this review on Goodreads. Instead of, you know, being outside planting trees and reading Thoreau.

Edited, almost 1.5 years later: Upping the stars to full five, because I've been thinking about this book - and admiring its prescient genius - a lot since reading it.

Meh. Fine. This won both the Hugo and Nebula (wooo). I like, but don't love, George Alec Effinger's schtick: that is, I get embarrassed by gimmicky Orientalist spec fic written by white people since I used to ply that trade myself and am still in recovery. Like, I have a half-written short story on my machine about a Delhi doctor lady going to be a frontier doctor on a literal planet of slums. I mean, it's fine - white people can write POC protagonists, that's fine. It just feels like Effinger's stories (both this, and When Gravity Fails) are fairly run of the mill once you remove the diversity thing - making the latter feel a bit gimmicky.

I'm being too hard on this. It's fine. It's enjoyable. I got choked up, even. It's about the multiple worlds theory (recommended reading on this topic), as told via a young Arab girl facing her spaghetti world-lines: does she kill or not kill the evil rapey boy? Does the Imam punish her or forgive her? Does she work with Herr Doctor Heisenberg or Herr Doctor Schrodinger? It feels super elliptical, with repeated fragments, with initial confusion that all comes together, with evocative “troubles in the souk” scenes, and there are some pretty glorious set piece scenes. I also, like all SF fans, worship at the altar of early 20th century physics, so seeing the big hits from that era - Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein, Bohr - is always fun.

Buttt mehh. I look for ~scintillating~ SF, stuff that makes me get goosebumps or makes me question my existence. OR, failing that, has much drama and adventure in space (pew! pew!). This short story is like a 4/10 on the mind-blown scale, and maybe a 5/10 on the adventure scale.

It also is another entry into my Personal Law Of Science Fiction: that is, for every sci-fi idea you have, they already made a (better) version of it on Star Trek.

Really brutal and upsetting portrayal of the child welfare system. I honestly can't rate this - I don't want to - because some of the content was too distressing: what happened to those six kids is such an enormous failure of society. This is an investigative journalist's look into the 2018 Hart murder-suicide, with a special emphasis on the adopted childrens' biological families and histories.

I was actually reminded of the Kim Philby biography - about a British good ol' boy who turned out to be a Cold War double agent, working for the Russians for 30+ years. That book - and this book - stressed how “looking the part”, whether that be two “normal seeming” white women in South Dakota or a normal-seeming Eton/Cambridge guy, can hide real monstrosities. Except these two women did something so appalling to read: a lesbian couple who rush-adopted six Black children and then trapped them in a nightmare of abuse, all while posting self-serving social media “performance parenting”, before murdering them in a suicide-murder. It's just so terribly sad, and the author makes it a point to centralize the systemic failures which led to this - it is, indeed, nuts that a couple could adopt so quickly, with so little oversight, and with so many red flags accumulating. It just makes you want to scream.

Anyway. I spent much of the book asking myself why I was reading this. It felt voyeuristic and was so upsetting. If you have an interest in the foster care system, it's definitely of interest - but just be careful about the contents. Lots of interesting points about transracial adoption.

No! No, no, no, nooooooo nonononooooo.

Okay, I'm only ~10% into this thing, but, you know what? I don't have to deal with this shit. DID-NOT-FINISH. Take that.

This book has got a lady problem. Yes, big surprise, right? 1960s good ol' boy sci-fi. Why do I always forget that the good stuff (where by “good stuff” I mean “stuff that doesn't make me spork my eyes out with Greco-Roman tragedy-style femrage”) didn't start until the literary/New Wave sci-fi era of the 70s. SEVENTIES. Cuz this book has, in the first 10%, only had ladies in one of three options:
1. Infantilized (“girlish in sleep”; or the 15-year-old young mother who joins a group marriage and is spoken of in reverent tones)
2. Momified
3. Sexualized

But the thing that broke this femnsist was the character of Wyoming Knott, AKA “Why Not”, AKA “Pussy Galore” AKA NOT PERSON BUT OBJECT. I was listening to the audiobook of this (and the reader, Lloyd James, is masterful in his accents), and I was squirming around in my seat on the commute, because all Why Not and Mannie (the protagonist, who has a Russian accent, a Latino/Irish name, and lots of Opinions) would discuss would be (1) how sexy Why is, and (2) how she “failed as a woman” because of a bunch of marriage/childbirth stuff, AND (3) THAT'S IT!

Sorryyyyy but we have a saying in feminsmm club that there ain't no free lunch AKA we're all mortal and gonna die AKA I do not have time for this basic bitch-style econ 101 crap wrapped up in a heaping hot lardy layer of misogyny. Nooo no no. If I want to hear a libertarian politico-morality play, I'd rather to listen to Rand Paul plagiarize Wikipedia summaries of sci-fi movies (at least I get to enjoy his icy cold blue eyes of a husky - ho ho objectification ho ho) AND/OR just listen to Russ Roberts try to shoe-horn every single academic economist's work into Something About Libertarianism.

...

I'm just kidding, Russ, I love EconTalk. But Heinlein? NO.

Phew, yuck - the double-headed irradiated tomato woman. I mean, damn.

Pretty good. A fun, freaky far future sci-fi about how “history doesn't repeat itself - but it rhymes”.

This book skips along the centuries, but we start in a post-nuclear apocalypse wasteland somewhere in the southwestern US, sometime 100-200 years from now. A Christian monastic order has grown up around a supposed “Saint Liebowitz” (who sounds like he was a young engineer minion on some Manhattan Project equivalent). In a clear parallel to the Medieval period, the monks spend most of their time lamenting the “demon Fallout” and the great hellfire that destroyed the world, and illuminating manuscripts that are recovered from that wasteland - preserving knowledge while not understanding it. There is a funny bit where it seems that one monk labors 14 years illuminating the copy of a page of Liebowitz's doodles from a meeting.

Anyway, generations pass, and we have an interesting dawn of the Enlightenment/Renaissance period, with an arrogant Isaac Newton duplicate, and the (inevitable?) scientific progress towards the inevitable second nuclear age.

OK, some thoughts:

The Christian stuff
Just like the Hyperion series (which also features far future speculation where Christian monastic orders miraculously survive and much Latin spokeneth est), I had trouble willingly suspending my disbelief for this. Maybe I discredit Christianity's persistence. But I was like, RLY? So much Latin. SO MUCH. And while the Hyperion series's weird far future Christianity is sort of gloriously Gothic and pulpy, this stuff felt like much more like Walter Miller's specific affection for bumbling Medieval monks.

The book actually ends on some interesting, horrible tensions surrounding Christianity's dedication to being super pro-life, even at the cost of seemingly pragmatic mercy. I couldn't parse out where the author fell on this stuff; it felt authentic - neither glorifying the monks' unwavering commitment to their principles, nor condemning how horrible that commitment can be. So that was interesting.

The Fermi paradox stuff
The Fermi paradox asks why, amidst all these billions of stars, we've never seen any evidence of alien life. One answer is that technological development is necessarily self-destroying - i.e. the capability of total self-destruction always comes before the capability of robust space colonization. This book has a sort of interesting answer/twist on that, which I liked.

The moments of magic(al) realism/fantasy
For a book that's more sci-fi than fantasy, there was a thread of Something Magical - or something weird, anyway - which I wasn't too big of a fan of. But I shall speak no more, lest I spoilerize.

An intriguing, brutal indie graphic novel. This is not an enjoyable read, necessarily: how could reading about sociopaths murdering people be? But it is certainly original: I appreciated the dry, crackling, Schultzian art; it called to mind the whole “mind numbing post-modern suburbia” vibe, as well as (I guess?) the emotionless vacuum of the protagonists.

Edited, in Jan 2018: This is being turned into a Netflix series!??!! BOLD. I am intrigued.

Starts strong, ends strong, but I found my mind often wandering during the middle bits. This is a non-fiction account of 1980s Ebola outbreaks in the Congo and US (!), written in the style of a Michael Crichton techno-thriller.

The first chapter opens with an expat Frenchman living in the Congo who is Ebola Zaire's patient zero. His horrible, tragic death is described in gory, dare-I-say-loving-?! detail, and is not at all something you want to read or listen to around a meal time. The rest of the book varies between pop science explanations of filoviruses (such as Ebola and Marburg), and non-fic Crichton techno-thriller stuff about a group of CDC and military officials in Reston, VA, where - in the late 80s, apparently - a bunch of monkeys were accidentally imported “hot” with Ebola and (a small group of) people realized that, hoo shit, the world might end if we don't hose this place down with some serious bleach.

The book is at its best when it describes, with enormous passion, the cold, almost alien intelligence of viruses, and the way we human hosts are mere meat packages for these ruthless... beings? It's such a fresh, disconcerting way to think about viruses, and it forces you to think so deeply about viruses, that - for that - I give the book its 3 stars. But the whole process of how they dealt with the outbreak in Reston, which is described in very meticulous detail and features a wide, rotating cast of (forgettable? not dissimilar enough?) characters, oddly bored me.

Another anti-star was for the reader; I listened to this on audiobook, and the reader, Richard Davidson, had a very old-timey humorless journalist quality (think Leslie Nielsen) which sort of ruined the tone. Sometimes I realized that, had I read the sentence rather than heard the Leslie Nielsen version of it, I would have laughed or been struck or otherwise enjoyed it more. Instead, it all sounded so... ughh 1990s cheesy? Monotone? I dunno.

Very charming!

A character piece about Rosemary Cooke, a lady born in the 70s, colleged in the 90s, and narrating her story in 2012. There is a BIG SPOILER in the first half of the book. Okay, I thought there was a BIG SPOILER, but it is more like a medium-size spoiler. But I daren't spoil it.

So I can't really describe the story. Suffice to say, it's about Rosemary and her family and her upbringing. And they are very interesting people. UC-Davis and Indiana are described in rich, loving detail. The 90s are described in rich, loving detail. Very heartwarming, for those who nostalgize that period. There is also a very important philosophical thread which was very affecting, but which I daren't describe (again).

The voice was great.

I should also mention that I find it very difficult to read non-genre fiction, but I was charmed by this. So that should be saying something! Hmm, only criticism: a bit overlong, given that it's essentially a character piece with an awesome moral point.

A solid sci-fi romp. I read this upon Cory Doctorow's BoingBoing recommendation, and, overall, I'm glad I picked it up. I breezed through, and generally felt that it sucked my attention and entertained me in the same way Harry Potter or The Time Traveller's Wife have. That is, this isn't necessarily a deep book, but it is a fun one.

Some bones to pick, though:

First, this book exhibits a VERY Neil Gaimany vibe. Which might be good, if you like Neil Gaiman. I don't. (At least, I didn't like American Gods.) Nothing to do with the story, it was just the... smugness? The hipness? I don't know. There's something about Gaiman - and this authorial voice has some of that too - which smacks of overconfidence. Like, yes, your ideas are good, but they're not THAT amazing.

Second: in fact, although the General Semantics-inspired “language can be so powerful that it's like magic!” idea is pretty interesting (but not mind-blowingly interesting; see above point), the section when our interesting anti-hero Emily visits the Academy felt SO. TEDIOUSLY. CLICHE. It was basically an American Harry Potter. Or Lev Grossman's The Magicians (aka a “sex and drugs and magic” high school). I liked the Boyfriend Drama plot (hey, I'll always go for that), but I didn't see anything new here. Here's an idea: why not do the magic high school in a John Hughes Pretty in Pink way? You know, James Spader as a Draco Malfoy-type bully. Or what about Ferris Bueller? Come on, people, I'm throwing out ideas here.

Third, and this is my biggest beef, is how incredibly culturally narrow this book is. The entire premise of the book rests on the assumption that English is the medium of communication. Which, yes, is true for most of the world, because English is our current lingua franca. But, OK - SPOILER HERE - the big revelation that the secret language-wizardry organization makes: “OMG, our magic is less effective when people are multilingual!” was VERY eye-rolly for me, as that basically excludes... hm... I estimate billions of people here: 1 billion for India, where the official languages are English and Hindi, even in states like Andhra Pradesh, where the local language is completely different and etymologically unrelated (Telugu). Several millions for basically all of Europe, especially places like Benelux. Or anywhere anyone speaks a dialect. Like Italy. (Yeah - WHAT ABOUT DIALECTS?) And then there's all of Africa, where people will speak their local language... plus English... plus another local language...

It was just so silly that multilinguism should have been portrayed as a revelation and magical antidote to the entire premise of their wizardry. I mean, this story takes place firmly in white America and white Australia: these two communities are pretty well-known as being stubbornly monolinguistic (all those jokes about “ugly Americans” getting angry when the local doesn't speak English well...). Move the story OUT of these two places, and into the wider world (heck, even just New Zealand - where they've got everything written in both English and Maori, for crying out loud!), and suddenly the whole plot seems to just deflate. At least, for me, because it made the “poets'” organization seem hopelessly naive. It's also surprising. Given that the “magical” words were all non-English gibberish, and based on the idea that different personalities responded - in a deep, brainy, chemical way - to different sounds in special ways, shouldn't they have been effective against everyone, regardless of language spoken? I guess not, given the whole discussion of words triggering special meanings in brains, etc.

ANYWAY. Just my $0.02.

I had been meaning to read this for forever, and I'm glad I finally did! I knew of Emily Oster from my J-PAL days, where I helped draft a policy brief about her menstruation in Nepal study (which gets a mention in the book!). Woo! That was 2011 or so, and I remember, when this book came out, being like, “Oh, she wrote a pop econ book? Oh wait, it's about pregnancy?!”

While I tend to think that high-flying economists (which Oster definitely is one!) have a TOO HIGH tendency to assume that, since they're high-flying in economics, they must be good at everything, I do - at the same time - agree with her basic assumption that having a background in academic economics gives you a useful decision making paradigm and some general literacy for reading academic articles and parsing quantitative research. Oster turns those skills to the Pregnancy Industrial Complex (PIC), and it's great - doctors do, after all, have a strong incentive towards being conservative, for fear of malpractice and generally things going tragically wrong. Patients, likewise, have a tendency towards imperfect compliance. And thus we have blanket, all-or-nothing statements about alcohol, caffeine, and so on.

This book is basically a giant lit review of pregnancy-related medical research, written in a fun, warm, pop tone. I found it mostly heartening and reassuring since, well, the PIC is scary and there is SO MUCH social judgment around pregnancy and parenting. Everyone seems to have found Jesus on this topic, and it's hard to separate fact from passionate belief. To epidural or not to epidural, etc. To that end, I liked that Oster offers (mostly) non-judgmental information and advice, with the overall message being, “You have your own risk tolerance, here are the facts.”

One giant MMMMEH from me. I could barely finish this. It sounds interesting on paper: a post-eco-disaster world, where some shady eco-warriors (like, with guns) cruise around the ocean on their giant, repurposed research vessel, looking for their missing sister ship and trying to save whales. Ya know.

Anyway, nice bits include all the water stuff: the art feels like a Zen haiku at times. I appreciate (intellectually) how the global disaster is portrayed on the periphery of things - i.e. when they dock into Hong Kong, and find it basically underwater (cool!). I also like the basic design of each issue, especially with the fake primary docs following each mini-story.

But... it's just, well, boring. And I found the characterizations basically ridiculous. A former black ops guy turns into a rough, handsome, righteous Robert Redfordy captain of a bunch of eco-warriors? It just seems absurd. Like, why have the black ops stuff in there at all? Also, while I appreciated all the globe-trotting and flashbacks (“Once, in 2001, in Slovenia...”), I also found them a bit tediously exoticizing, almost hipster in its “Yeah, you probably haven't heard of Mogadishu/Ljubljana/whatever”. LE SIGH.

Picked this up after hearing the author, Alex Pang, on a very intriguing episode of Buddhist Geeks. Maybe it just hit me in the right moment - my life had paused in a little eddy of Dharma Lite (“Hmm, maybe I should meditate again or something?”), and the ever-gushing torrent of INTERNETTTT OMGGGG (i.e. my techlove). Anyway, it really hit the spot in that sense.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with some of the other reviews I've seen here: it's a bit rambley, a bit meandering, and could have been edited down to something a lot shorter and snappier. In particular, I'd often end up confused (and a little impatient!) after I'd find myself deep into a long, seemingly irrelevant digression into:
- Psychedelic drugs in ancient civilizations
- The path around Darwin's house in England
- These cool VR researchers, doing cool psychology experiments (including that famous one about people behaving different when they get sexier-looking avatars)...
- ...this digressed even further into a note about stereotype threat! Yo, I love stereotype threat, I be droppin' it at aaaalll the parties, but - what!? why?!
- Some unexamined, uncritical press release copypasta about the (IMHO, controversial and not so great) One Laptop Per Child program (talk about development bloat!).

How does all this relate to our eroding attention spans amid myriad tech distractions, and the ways we can claim our brains back? I DON'T KNOW. I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and often found myself plowing through these bits, waiting for the point to emerge. Pang does do an OK-ish job of tying it all up in the very end, but it still felt like many of those pages could have been paragraphs.

That said, there are some nuggets of very interesting issues in here; particularly his adapting Abraham Heschel's ideas on the Jewish sabbath to our digital age. Indeed, that's what he talked about in the Buddhist Geeks podcast, that's basically why I bought the book, and that's what I ended up liking most about it (I know, I know). Other very interesting bits included the (slightly fanboy-ish and unfortunately outdated - some of those apps are dead or different now) overview of “Zenware” (i.e. Freedom, WriteRoom, Futureful (?)), and the Buddhist monastic responses to it. Also, when Pang is on his game, his writing can be smart and funny.

Yeah, I don't like this book. It's been in rotation recently at our house, and it annoys me for several reasons.

First, it's quite long and wordy. Not great for “let's wrap up bedtime, we're late”.

Second, the jokes are very one note: more than one crayon is just writing in to say he's tired.

Third, it feels super retrograde. The pink crayon complains that Duncan, the unseen child these letters are addressed to, isn't using her/him/it because “you think I'm a girl's color, right?” I mean, my kid is a pretty blank slate, growing up in a hippie town, so why on earth am I telling them that hey btw some people think pink is for girls. I would much rather minimize that nonsense. There's a peach crayon who is embarrassed for being naked. AKA boys like blue, girls like pink, and peach is the color of skin. :/ This is so lame and boring, ugh. I cannot wait until my kid tires of this one.

Awesome. Basically an intro, from the ground up, to d3.js - the powerful JavaScript library built by Mike Bostock for data visualization. I've been meaning to get good at d3 for a looong time. I now feel like it's somewhat possible. Great overview of the fundamentals, lots of calming encouragement, and - thanks to its links all over the place - an amazing resource.

FYI this book is an expansion and enrichment of Scott Murray's freely available d3 tutorials on his website. I'd say the tutorials form the skeleton of about 50% of the book. Still worth it, though, as (1) I need this shit offline, and (2) the final chapters are pretty mind-blowing (GeoJSON, where have you been all my life?), and (3) the walk-throughs of the existing stuff are more thorough.

On on on.

I don't know what happened to me but, pre-high school, I was a very well-rounded young person, interested in art and nature and science and sports and all sorts of things. This wonderful memoir - well-written, amazing story, tearjerker! - reconnected Present Day Angela with Sports Angela Of Yore. Yo, I used to love basketball - I had basketball playing cards, and played on my middle school team, and thought it was great. What happened!?

Pat Summitt was one of those inspiring people that I'm sorry to only become aware of after her death. Her life ran parallel to an explosion in women's athletics: from growing up as a farm girl in the 1950s to playing college basketball with, like, zero university resources, to the passage of Title IX and the sudden explosion of women's basketball - it's just amazing.

The book opens with Pat Summitt learning of her diagnosis of Early Onset Alzheimer's. (She died from this a few months ago, in June 2016.) It then intersperses the narrative of her life with first-person interviews from the people around her, as well as short chapters from the present day (2012? 2013?) with the co-author interviewing Summitt about her diagnosis. Pat was a forceful, incredibly competitive personality, and so there are numerous funny moments; Pat going into labor during a scouting visit to a high school senior's house was quite hilarious. And there are a bunch of inspiring, “let's get pumped!!!” moments of huge NCAA victories. It makes me wish I had been a University of Tennessee basketball fan since the 1990s (since, oh man, did they crush it)!

Definitely my fave memoir from the stash of memoirs I just read.

Aaah. Superbly brilliant. Maybe the best book I've read this year? SO GOOD.

This was basically like a five-hour Idea Channel episode, what with the charismatic host (Finn Brunton's writing - so clever! so fun!), the combination of technology/futurism/literary criticism/culture theory/sociology, the awesomely interesting asides and mind-blowing anecdotes. This was one of those books that my brain absorbed like a giant sea sponge dumped into crack-filled water; I was just so thrilled, so stimulated, SO INTO IT, all the time.

Briefly: it covers the parallel development of the spam and non-spam Internets. Like yin and yang, you kinda realize that one can't exist without the other: what with spam being the gummy, gray gooey, reptilian brain, capitalist slush that inevitably fills the tubes (ALL OUR TUBES, not just the Internet), pushing the edges of our global network's technical capacities and acceptable social behaviors. It runs from the earliest proto-spams of ARPANET to the really creepy blurred-lines spam of clickbaity nonsense like, well, any post-AOL-acquisition Huffington Post article(hoo boy, did they jump the shark there, eh).

The book was amazing because it charted, basically, my experience of the Internet, structuring and contextualizing that experience. Yo, I been online since 1995 (twenty long years, people), and I distinctly remember each spam phase: the proto-spams of AOL, the weird litspam of the mid-2000s, and now the Orwellian awfulness of Upworthy et al. and the linkbaitification of journalism. So, it was like, I FEEL THIS. And, I HAD NO IDEA.

Another great thing about this book is that it's a bit of an action-packed cyberpunk rollercoaster, better than the best Gibson because, well, it's real.

Highly highly recommended. Eleventy stars.

Ain't nothin' new here that Siddhartha didn't say 2,500 years ago. But it's always useful to remind ourselves. A pop philosophy/coffee table book.

Ahhh, so that's why people read novels. What else have I been missing!?!?

Long ago, maybe in 2008, I stopped reading literary and mainstream fiction. I discovered non-fiction and sci-fi, and could never suspend my disbelief very easily again. “What's the point?!” I'd rant as I paged torturously through stories of modern people doing mundane, modern things. I hated, with the passion of a thousand suns, the faddish “quirky” titles of lame mainstream pop fiction, The Adventures of the Dog In the Moonlight, A Tragedy of Small Things, The Sisterhood of Pancakes. I hated (and still hate) the high-minded but fundamentally stupid books of Fancy Entitled Older Dudes, like Martin Amis or Ian McEwan or Salman Rushdie or John Updike or that whole stupid “Fond Memories of Vagina” bullshit. NO ONE CARES. Or I don't, at least. Uggghhhh. I could sort of tolerate post-colonial stuff (which, of course, Americanah is) because I am a bleeding heart Orientalist, but even some of that just seemed like cheap, dumb shit. As Ifemelu would say, what rubbish!!

So I decided perhaps novels were no longer for me, and became a bitter shell.

But I knew - and friends told me, and research showed - that there is a special something to be found in sharply observed, well-told novels. And Americanah is a novel so sharply observed, so smartly told, that I found myself often shaking my head, smiling, at its genius. And such wide-ranging genius! I recognized hidden-in-plain-sight truths about Dar es Salaam and Accra (and Delhi) in the portrayal of Lagos. I recognized similar realities about American college life, and the life of an immigrant in the US, and culture shock going every which way, and white liberal guilt, and the insidiousness of racism in America. It feels so banal to say that this book is about race, globalization, migration, modern life, post-colonialism, and LURRRVVEEE?! And yet - IT IS! And it revealed things that have always been in front of me, and did it in a way that felt grand and big. The moment when one character, in a hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey, sends an e-mail to the old love of her life in Lagos, and he reads it on his Blackberry in the busy, buzzing traffic of the city - COULD ANYTHING BE MORE EPIC? MORE DIVINE? The answer is no.

Briefly, Americanah is a love story between two Nigerian kids: Ifemelu and Obinze. It follows them from fun teenage blush to an epic-ly adult yearning. From the 1990s to the 2010s? Ifemelu is snarky and bold and clearly she must be a stand-in for the author?! Obinze, instead, is mellow, thoughtful, a deep reservoir of empathy. In 1980s/1990s Nigeria, when the country is under military dictatorship, Ifemelu gets a scholarship to a US liberal arts college in Philly. The vague plan is that Obinze will join her. Instead, life happens; and Obinze ends up trying (and failing) to emigrate to the UK, eventually getting deported back.

While the love story is the core - and it is an epic love story, hot damn - there's SO MUCH going on in this book that you sometimes forget that's what it's basically about. America, the UK, and Nigeria are portrayed so well - aghh. I especially loved all the details about Lagos as an explosive, rapidly changing city, a white hot molten core of nakedly capitalist hustle. The observations of returnees' alienation resonated with what an Indian-American friend once told me about going back to Delhi: you return and return to an increasingly changed place, you no longer recognize it. My “native place” is a small town in Italy which, thanks to Europe's refugee crisis, has also been greatly changed. DO I SENSE A MAINSTREAM NOVEL IN ME? Gosh, I could only dream of having Adichie's eye for detail and human behavior.

A side note: I read this book's moving portrayal of Obama's 2008 victory last night (did I mention the genius of this book in its precise observations of race and class in America and OMG HOW COULD I FORGET OBAMA HAPPENED!?!), just when Obama started giving his farewell address in Chicago. The interplay of life and art - WHOA.

Another side note: I “read” this using my new favorite format for everything, the audiobook! And the Audible reader, Adjoa Andoh, did an amazing job navigating all the accents and characters. Her American accent was just OK/shaky, but her Nigerian accent was delightful, as were her different UK accents - the Cockney (?) friend of Obinze, Nigel, and the posh accents of those London people. Is the internet going to shame me if I admit that I liked practicing the accents myself?!?! WHAT, I FIND ACCENTS CHARMING AND LINGUISTICALLY INTERESTING, DON'T JUDGE ME. Don't even get me started on Indian English, especially Hinglish, or how this blog is so hilarious.

The last side note: There is apparently supposed to be a movie adaptation, starring Lupita Nyong'o as Ifemelu and David Oyelowo as Obinze. David Oyelowo has kinda already stolen my heart as a mellow, thoughtful, Good Dude in The Queen of Katwe, so PLEASE, universe/Hollywood people, make this movie happen! Also, please find a role for Chiwetel Ejiofor - he can play Blaine (okay, it'd be ironic to have the Nigerian-British actor playing the American in a movie about Nigeria, but he's meant to be hot, right?!). Just think of that Trenton-Lagos smartphone-Blackberry cross-cut?! My heart is aflutter.

On the one hand, I appreciated and admired the really classic, pulpy sci-fi goodness: this was imaginative and weird in the style of some of that really strange shit that was dropping in 1970s pulp sf. I'm thinking, in particular, of that Sean Connery movie where he's in space that I watched when I was feverish and 12 years old (BIG MISTAKE - SO FREAKY). On the other hand, this gave me the heebie jeebies. After two weeks of decompressing from its weirdness, I can now say: in a good way!

Prophet's interlinking stories have the same feverish quality as that Sean Connery movie: full of brutal, primal gore and heaps of ever-stranger. I mean, within the first few pages it's implied that John Prophet - recently awakened from cryo-sleep on a far future, unrecognizable Earth - has just had sex with what I believe the artist's sketches call a “chicken vagina monster” (or something to that effect). My reaction, similar to yours, was: UGH WHAT. See what I mean? This stuff is intense.

Indeed, things got so weird I had to put this down and sort of space out for a minute, if only because it was late and I was starting to seriously freak. But, when I picked it up again, my “annoyed at having to read quasi-horror” feelings melted away: this stuff is actually pretty amazing. I didn't want to review it immediately, but instead let it sit for a week or so, and, yeah, my liking for it has fermented and brewed. I'll definitely be following up on this weird, wild sci-fi (and I'm surprised to be saying I find it more enjoyable and more compelling than Brandon Graham's Multiple Warheads.

Hoooooooo man. Deep breath. DEEP SHAKY BREATH. Oh man. This was gonna be a 3-star book, but then I ugly sobbed - like, LOUDLY - through the last ~30 minutes of this book, paralyzed on my couch and unable to continue with my day. Which merits a 1-star auto-bump. SUCH CATHARSIS.

Hoooooooooo gee.

KIDS. DAMN KIDS!!!

Did I cry this much at Perks of Being a Wallflower? I don't think so. I still think that's one of the best YA books ever written. Also, it has the Pittsburgh auto-5-stars (I love Pittsburgh). But this was, ho gee oh man, pretty damn good. Especially the ending. It was as gloriously romantic as the ending to Shakespeare in Love, which - yes - here it is - you're welcome. God, that scene. That ending. THIS ENDING.

Anyway, if you can't tell by the Shakespeare ref, this is a story of star-cross'd lov'rs who are just a coupla damn teen kids. It's 1980s Omaha (oof) and there is much John Hughes movie-esque riff raffery on the bus and in school, and much misfit listening to Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen. The kids have good taste! Indeed, this book read a bit like John Hughes's Pretty in Pink - it's similarly about a boy who's higher on the social and economic pecking order falling in love with the poorer, fashion-forward outcast girl. The only difference, and where things veer dramatically away from John Hughes and into a land of harsher realism, is how the girl's situation reveals itself to be worse than just working class - there are some very shitty adults in this book (also a few okay ones, thank God).

So my cold dead heart was like “meh” on the teens falling in love scenes, although Rainbow Rowell accurately captures teenly voices full of ANGST and EMOTION. i.e. They felt more real, realer than the too-wisecracky too-smart teen lov'rs in John Green's The Fault In Our Stars. But I was like, meh meh. I liked very much the school dynamics - man, people can be so shitty in middle/high school, it's amazing - I meditated much on cognitive development and what the hell is up with our social brains - but I didn't get totally invested until the last ~25%. Then I was ALL IN, MAN.

Honestly, you'll probably love this. I think this is a very lovable book. It's written with lots of tender authenticity and it's sweet. Don't listen to the audiobook outside, unless you look good while crying.

Ostensibly this is a byproduct of Brian K. Vaughan's child-mind after seeing Star Wars - and, indeed, it shares with Firefly (another Star Wars descendant) that theme of cobbled-together families soaring through the stars together, pursued by quasi-mechanical beings who have family dramas of their own. It's all very warm and endearing. And it all starts in media res, which I always appreciate.

There are further Star Wars strains: hints of Han Solo or Boba Fett, for example, in the scoundrely, hunky, morally weird “Freelancer” (bounty hunter), The Will, and his sidekick, Lying Cat (I, like everyone else, love the Lying Cat). The difference, though, is that The Will - and Saga in general - takes Star Wars, blends it with craziness of the most hallucinatory Miyazaki/Moebius kind, and ramps everything up by a million watts.

I'm a little worried that I'm just reading it for TEH WEIRD, and not for the actual story or characters. Vaughan's quirky inventions (the wooden spaceship, Prince Robot IV, the ghoulish ghost babysitter), coupled with his down-to-earth Firefly-esque banter full of mundane squabbles and trivial asides, are really the two main draws. This is fine, I guess. Though eventually there should be something MORE - something in the plot (which, structurally, is VERY run-of-the-mill space opera) which resonates - something to remember this by, more than the gimmicks of one-liners and weird visual jokes (like the prostitutes on Sextillion omg!).

I get hints of a smarter, deeper core in things like, for example, Prince Robot IV's monitor showing blips of... what? His subconscious thoughts? I thought this was a great touch, and showed Vaughan had more to offer in Saga than just screwball over-the-top ideas and razzle dazzle. I hope he continues along this vein, now that he's done establishing the very weird, fun universe he's built. I hope he deepens things and explores what he's established, instead of rushing off to unveil MORE and MORE HEAPING PILES OF WEIRD.

Total aside, but the design of the covers is also beautiful.

A superlative work; definitely in my Top Ten of any medium (books, movie, etc.) And it opened me up to all the possibilities of graphic novels.

In the near future, one day all the men mysteriously hemorrhage and die. Except one: an amateur escape artist named Yorick, together with his pet monkey, Ampersand. Journey with Yorick through the post-gendercide/post-male landscape, and marvel at the authors' unbelievably well-thought-out, incredibly clever, and often very touching vision of what such a world would look like. Naturally, lots of great commentary on gender. But, in addition, it has wonderful action and some of THE BEST dialogue I have ever read. When a one-eyed lady kills another, Yorick exclaims, “But you have no depth perception!”

Highly, highly, highly recommended.

Ugh. Hgrghm. Rghh. I feel nauseous. I mean, like, duh, I know what this is about. And I did have a fried egg and cheese and fried sausage sandwich this morning that has been sitting RIGHTHERE all day, but - ugghhhhh. The bit where he gouges out his eyes. Ghgrhrg.

So I listened to a modern English translation of this, performed by Michael Sheen and “a full cast” (poor nameless cast!). Michael Sheen I like a lot, and feel like he's been lately typecast in “geeky British second banana” roles in second-rate scifi movies, whereas I think his Welsh talents are best used in big-bearded, armor-and-sword roles like Lancelot or a Roman commander on the Welsh border in the first century CE. Actually, this all started - I started listening to this today - after finishing the wonderful SPQR by Mary Beard. One of the final chapters is about Boudica, this badass rebel Celtic queen from Britain, who tried and failed to fight off the Romans in the first century CE, and obviously a big-bearded Michael Sheen would play the weary Roman commander who's never actually been to Rome and has to reluctantly destroy her forces, even while he admires them. GOOD MOVIE, RIGHT?!

HEEENYYYWAYYY. So should there be spoilers to Oedipus? What is the state of America's schools? It doesn't really matter; ancient Greek narrative arcs are apparently differently shaped because Oedipus is TOLD he's the murderer of his father and the husband-son of his mom-wife in basically the second scene. We then spend about ~50% of the story waiting for Oedipus to stop having anxious tantrums, while more people confirm the story (“no, dude, it was you, sorry, terrible news I know”), and then - UGHHH - the CLIMACTIC, CATHARTIC, THIS-IS-WHAT-I-PAID-FOR ANCIENT GREEK SCENE OF GORE AND TRAGEDY.

I liked this translation, since it retained the unfamiliar “the past is a foreign country” quality of ancient Greek stuff (the Chorus? the places? the cultural norms?) while using familiar language. I liked the performances, if only because they were affecting. Which is the point, I guess? I liked the Fisher King quality of the City of Thebes being covered in plague sores because someone (a special someone) is an incestuous murderer, and - of course, duh - I loved the ancient Greek irony of Oedipus flailing and cursing the murderer in scene 1. Ugh, and his PRIDE! And such a humbling. Very cathartic. I also enjoyed the off-stage Apollo, via the Oracle at Delphi (?), being regularly visited for consultation. Oh yes, and I liked the brother-in-law Crayon (I looked it up, it's CREON). But all I heard was, “Oh the gads, my eyes! CRAYON, what of a wretch like me?!” It cut the tragedy nicely.

Now I see that Kenneth Branagh performed a BBC Anthony and Cleopatra drama, so I guess it's gonna be ancient Greek and Rome time in Angelasville for a little longer!

OH GODS TAKE PITY ON A HUBRIS-FILLED WRETCH LIKE MEEEEEEE
AAAAAHHGHGHGHGHGHHGHHG
extreme gore
CRAYONNNNNN
the end.

Cried harder. Also, I appreciated Spiegelman's meta moments; commenting on the writing of the story as he was writing it. Can't wait to read the actual Meta Maus.