Sylvia Chi
I adore the premise (I gave a presentation on the zodiac heads in an art law seminar during 3L!), but I found the characters flat and difficult to relate to. The writing style was very much not for me; descriptions were repetitive and felt like impressionistic but meaningless sketches. There was a lot of underspecified yearning and handwaving towards memories. Personally, as an American born member of the Chinese and Taiwanese diasporas, I don't think the story of how it feels to be Chinese American or how we might feel about mainland China and Chinese culture was well or sufficiently told. I don't think the importance of repatriating cultural patrimony was well explained either. But it was still a fun story, and I have high hopes for the Netflix adaptation!
It was very interesting to read this right after Transcendent Kingdom. Both novels deal with diasporic narratives, mother-daughter relationships, and (folk) religion. Curiously, they both recounted an anecdote based on the apparent myth that a mother bird will abandon her baby bird if she smells the scent of a strange human on it.
Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of a neuroscientist who strikes me as particularly cerebral and less attuned to her heart and spirit (perhaps at the root of her conflicts) - a perspective I appreciate and resonate with, although I think that could have been drawn out more in the story. I read a couple articles and interviews with K-Ming Chang, the author of Bestiary, who talks about how her stories are “completely embodied.” This contrast between embodiment and cerebral-ness is really interesting to me.
Bestiary is unusual in its angle on magical realism; the characters take the magic that manifests in their lives and is the main propelling force in the narrative for granted, even when it's bizarre or grisly, and often disgusting. I feel like this is a way of showing how they integrate their folk religious beliefs, which for me is a refreshing change from more commonly represented perspectives and experiences of religion or spiritual beliefs. At the same time, this focus made it challenging for me (a more cerebral type) to really understand the characters in Bestiary. A lot of the embodiment - the physicality, bodily functions, and sexual desire - was off-putting, and not relatable or even very recognizable to me.
Like the author, I am Taiwanese on my mother's side and mainland Chinese on my father's, so I very much appreciate reading a Taiwanese narrative that provides an Indigenous perspective and is not centered on the mainland.
I felt like this was the opposite of a thriller. It was a total slog to get through and very little happened plot-wise. I did not pick up a Tana French book looking for paragraphs of meditations on woodworking or what the Irish countryside looks like (it does sound very lovely). On the plus side, there were some interesting themes about morality and small town life.
McAlevey definitely has a particular point of view about unions and their role in society, which was very inspiring interesting to read about at length. I really appreciated the chapter on the UTLA teachers' strikes in LA in 2018 and the nurses unionizing drive in Philadelphia — good level of detail on organizing tactics and strategy. I think McAlevey's arguments about how critical unions are to democracy were underdeveloped, though. I also think her take on union avoidance in the tech industry is slightly off base.
And fact check: the Marriott in Oakland is on the 1200 block of Broadway, not 2200.
If Goodreads allowed it, I'd rate this as like a 3.8/5 stars.
The ideas were really fascinating and quite deeply thought out, and will be stuck in my mind for a long time, like the best episodes of Black Mirror. Chiang is really good at imagining how people would interact with speculative technologies in an networked society. However, a few of the stories were much longer than necessary, and not well paced. Characters generally felt pretty flat, as if they were present just to support the story's central conceit.
A good look at various factors affected by the growth of utility scale solar energy, particularly in the context of biodiversity/ecosystem effects and lifecycle assessment, especially as applied to thin film vs. crystalline silicon technologies. Also provides a good synopsis of ARRA investments in solar and a more macro view of the global PV market in the past decade or so. Overall, very interesting and informative. I do wish there was more about distributed and rooftop solar and grid/transmission/distribution. (And at least in the edition I read, there was an unacceptable number of copy and other editing errors.)
As a collection of essays, it's somewhat uneven, but mostly worthwhile. There are some interesting ideas in here I hadn't previously been exposed to, particularly in providing details about how the Anti-Apartheid Movement played out, and perspectives on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) against Israel and the Gulf Labor efforts targeting the Guggenheim. There was one supremely bad take on free speech and “censorship” that is an embarrassment to the rest of the volume. If you're interested in boycott and divestment as tactics, or if you're a “cultural producer” interested in the artist's role in politics, it's worth checking out.
I feel really ambivalent about this book for a lot of reasons. One is that I don't think it's that useful to reinforce the notion that there even is an “empathy wall” between liberals and conservatives. I frequently read and hear about how elitist liberals are always looking down and sneering at rural conservatives, and I don't doubt that that's how they feel, but I don't see evidence that that's what's actually happening, at least not on any kind of significant scale.
I'm of the belief that facts matter and there is such thing as an objective reality, and - setting aside the separately disturbing bit about how we're in the end times and the Earth is going up in flames so who cares about this existence! - it's extremely disturbing how much of Hochschild's characterization of these Tea Party/Trump-supporters' “deep story” is based on misperceptions if not outright falsehoods. Hochschild doesn't seem to seriously address this with her interlocutors, which is maybe outside the scope of this book.
It's a fairly interesting look across the cultural and political divide, anyway, although it's probably not going to be especially revelatory to anyone who's paying attention. About 2/3 of the way through this book, I kept thinking, No surprises here. But there are some fascinating anecdotes and Hochschild's discussion near the end of the book about this conservative “deep story” seems like a useful analytical frame. I am very curious to read what folks on the right - and even people in the book - think of it.
(On one nitpicking note, the chief U.S. chemistry industry lobby is the American Chemistry Council, not the American Chemical Association, which as far as I know does not exist.)
I no longer need to write the great Chinese-American-millennial novel because Jenny Zhang would probably do it better than me. There's a lot in here that makes me suspicious that she has some kind of secret access to my mind/memory. But I knew this collection was perfectly true to me by page 13, when she writes: “I was born itchy as all hell and I would die itchy as all hell unless a crafty genius somewhere decided to invent a miracle drug that would save me from this long and itchy life.”
This is another book that's billed as a thriller but isn't really a thriller. It's a fine family drama and explores some really important and interesting issues, but not what I was expecting. To the extent that trigger warnings are useful, it should maybe come with a trigger warning for child abuse.
