Thomas

Going to cook on this a little before I write a review. It might end up getting up to 5 stars. I'll update when a review is ready!

I finished this today and have been sitting on it for a bit. It's certainly good, though I prefer Deacon King Kong to this. McBride is excellent at weaving together many characters and many plots into one cohesive picture, and I enjoyed reading this. I particularly enjoyed hearing Mr. McBride talk about the story and his experiences when he came to Sixth & I to talk about it.

That said, there were a few parts of the story where the pacing felt just a little off for me. This is a 3 instead of a 4 because I kept butting my head against the way McBridge describes female characters. Many female characters are described by their breasts or rears (“perky” was the word that threw up a red light for me). At one point, I started to go back and re-reading, wondering if this was a trait of a particular character so that it could be interpreted as that character's thoughts and views. I don't think that's the case, though. I didn't notice this so much in Deacon King Kong, and I wonder if it just flew past me because I found that story so engaging.

McBride also does a fair bit of sermonizing - particularly in the closing chapter or two. It's his book, and it's pretty good (and I agree with a lot of it), but in the same way that I complain about contemporary authors firing off tweets in their books -I'd rather be shown, not told. I'd probably have put it down if the book started this way (and it wasn't McBride). For better or worse, it is a part of how McBride wraps up this story and delivers his analysis of our times.

The book has some interesting writing. The first sentence is 52 words long. Two pages later, there is a 112-word sentence that has 13 commas and a semicolon. I kept wondering–is this bad writing, or is it intentional to reflect the thought process of the narrator?

I wondered that frequently through the book. It is split into 5 parts, but really, there are 3 distinct episodes. A flashback in the middle did not do anything for me; I didn't feel like it added anything and, in fact, sort of diminished my thoughts of the protagonist.

The “story” is sort of not. In book club this evening, I called this a “vibes book” because the story seems secondary to the author's description of nature, the cabin, and the sometimes hallucinatory experiences of the protagonist. The story meanders and doesn't really go anywhere, and has what I feel is an odd ending.

I spent this morning as I spent every Saturday morning, I went to the cafe. Instead of reading, I spent most of my time working on an article and after found that I had a lot of trouble focusing, so after the second cafe I went for a walk. I meandered around DC until I realized I was at MLK Jr. Library and I went in and started to wander the aisles and eventually saw this on a shelf. It was right next to a big graphic novel about building an atomic bomb, which a friend had sent me a picture of at some point. A lot of weird circumstances went into putting me in a place to pick the book up.

I sat there in the library and read this through. It is a nice little graphic novel written by an intersex author about the frustrations of gender and navigating them.

Something that occurred to me while reading, though not for the first time, is how gendered language for beauty is, and how constrained some words seem. Handsome for men, cute for kids and younger people or people of a certain “look” (I've no idea how to define this); pretty and beautiful for women. This has frustrated me a little because I often think people presenting as masculine look very beautiful or people presenting as feminine look quite handsome. (What even is the difference? It's all vibes.) Even writing about it begs for a stumble, because language tries to box you into man/woman, masc/femme. Like a lot of the things the author spends time processing in this book, it's a bit annoying and is much about social construction.

Several years ago I was having lunch in a Mexican restaurant in rural Illinois with a Russian psychologist. This is true. I was a (younger) person learning about mental health professions and practices. We were discussing the process of diagnosis. In a sort of bizarre turn, my social work mentor thought of this as closer to a science, and took the statistics part of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders relatively seriously (though not rigidly). The psychologist had a much different approach, perhaps because she'd been educated first in Europe (who knows?) – she viewed it as firmly an art. My experiences over the past 8 years or so align many things in the social world as much closer to art than science. I don't think these two worlds exist outside of each other, and I think that's a fallacy that gets us into trouble. Anyway, I think gender is closer to an art than a science. I have no idea the temperature of that take.

This book is split into a series of chapters, each exploring a concept or process of decisions. Things like living with someone, the words you use to refer to yourself and your significant other, attraction, body image, etc. An underlying theme is that of hypervigilance / hyperawareness. I loved this. In one chapter, the author is talking about the stress of driving, something he has not done often. The stress is in how he presents himself when driving. I was thrown back into high school reading this. My high school car was a 1997 Ford Ranger with a camper shell (I loved the camper shell). I was always so stressed driving, because I did not know what the right way to look was. I was incapable of being relaxed (ever), and so I was always at 10 and 2. One day someone said they'd seen me driving and it looked like I was white knuckling the steering wheel. Funny, how some things stick with you.

I was also too paranoid of sounding feminine to order my favorite treat at Dairy Queen, the Mocha Moolatte, because I thought it'd out me as gay. Gee whiz.

There's a chapter all about buying glasses – something I did recently. I really loved this! So much thinking into something as small but as big as a few ounces of plastic and glass.

Probably the most profound question in it, at least for me, someone that is relatively unbothered by his gender but is sometimes frustrated by the social demand to categorize people, is on page 95: “If you had been born a girl & lived your life that way–what kind of life would you have lived?” I am a social worker, a ‘female' dominated profession. A friend asked me the other day if I have many female friends, and I realized I have mostly female friends and have since I came out, more or less. How different would my life be? Would I still be a social worker? Would I be working in the policy world? Would I make the money I do? Would I still be here? I don't know. It's quite a thing to think about. I have never even considered the question until now. Not even when I was in high school, and desperately lovesick over a cute straight guy, did I ever think about this.

This morning in the cafe a few people sat at a table adjacent to mine and there were a few little toddlers in high chairs. One of them was in the phase of tiny childness that means they like picking things up and dropping them. They were playing with their shoe and dropped it and it landed a few feet away from them. The child kept leaning over their high chair and reaching for it and the adults didn't notice. The child looked at me several times. I thought about getting up and walking over to hand the shoe back, but I thought this would be an aggressive violation of space and social custom. I thought about going to the bathroom, which would have put me in the walking path and made it incidental. I thought this, too, would be bizarre in the extreme. I distinctly thought that if I were a woman, it would not have been even thought about for me to do a thing like that. Perhaps I was too far in my head. The dad eventually got up and found the shoe, after the child sent their little picture book after it.

As far as a chance read, I really liked this!

Surprised I didn't like this more. Neo-noir with corporate espionage and sci-fi elements. It ended up feeling like a shallow collection of all these elements, without a lot of depth. Apparently, it was conceived as a low-budget sci-fi film, so I guess that makes sense. Ultimately, I barely followed the plot. I suppose you could call it a vibes book since it's about 150 pages.

Pretty good! I listened to the Tantor audiobook. Scary realities with a good view of the work to intervene.

Reposted from elsewhere. I wrote this quickly and may eventually come back and do a full review; I've had a lot churning in my head around this work for the past few weeks and need to let that settle before I attempt a full review.

—

Started and finished this book this week. I read it basically in two sits. As someone who works on homelessness policy, and used to work in direct service, I just couldn't put it down. So much of what Dr. O'Connell says I could hear coming out of my mouth, and out of the mouths of folks I've worked with over the years.

There were several moments when I just put the book down and started at the coffee shop table. I kept thinking, “man, we need to do so much better.” It had an odd effect of both depressing and motivating me.

This book is a lot like a Big Red Vanilla Float soda. It's very good in small doses.

I don't know, I enjoyed big chunks of it pretty thoroughly. I really liked the Illinois of it all. I liked the cats — but there really could have been a lot more of them.

There came a point where I think I got a little tired of all the jokes. I was having a really good time for the first few chapters, and then in the middle was coasting from good joke to a lot of the same stuff over and over again. Then by the end I was really wishing it were about 50 pages shorter. I don't really have a big ask of the story here. I wish it were a little shorter and more about the cats.

Some of the dialogue is pretty bad given the context in which it's appearing. People don't talk like this. Kind of baffling. Still, overall I enjoyed the book.

Grann's new book is quite readable! I was very lucky to find a new copy, dust-jacket and all, in a little free library. It is a more straightforward story than that of Killers of the Flower Moon, and the thesis seems a little less pointed, but a quality read nonetheless.

Much of Grann's writing goes about recounting the differing perspectives of the survivors of the Wager shipwreck. The castaways, as they struggle with lack of food, shelter, and all the other needs, gradually break into factions and nearly lose their humanity. Grann explores, somewhat lightly, how quickly the bonds of brotherhood dissolve. He does not take much time to explore the things humans will do in these perilous situations. There are only a few passing references to cannibalism, for example.

I am not sure what Grann intended his thesis to be. Is it an exploration of the trials and tribulations of the crew? The personalities involved? That's accomplished quite well. However, in the final chapter, Grann writes this:

“After M___ returned to England, he published a forty-eight-page narrative, adding to the ever-growing library of accounts about the Wager affair. The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”

I struggle to find Grann's point. The narratives of the people who survived a gruesome shipwreck, mutiny, months of hunger and strife are occupied in their writing with their survival, not the political thought of Empire? Wow, no shit. I also feel that Grann is looking at these folks quite clearly removed from time and space. The officers in this setting would have an interest in propagating empire, not curtailing it. Many of the officers would go on to be active players in developing the largest empire ever to straddle the Earth. Is that “unthinking complicity” ? No. It is, if anything, thoughtful abetting.

Grann clearly feels a need to address some elements that come up in the castaways' accounts, but I don't know if it works seamlessly. Grann frequently mentions that the written accounts come from Europeans with a European view, and that is a good and proper note. However, there is a relatively shallow examination of these contexts. I think there is a little more written about the press gangs at the start of the book than there is about the Kawésqar people later on. Perhaps in the paragraph I quoted above, what Grann seeks is not writing from the survivors on these topics, but from others. I don't know, and I don't know if he knows. I would have appreciated these things be better integrated throughout the story, rather than appearing in Chapter 26 and feeling somewhat tacked on — especially the paragraph above, which I feel has no precursor anywhere in the book. Perhaps the themes best captured across the full page count are hubris, social order in times of social collapse, and the time-tested want of militaries to engage in boondoggles.

This probably sounds negative, but I really liked the book! It does feel less congealed than Killers of the Flower Moon, and less capital-I “Important.” It was an engaging and itneresting shipwreck read though!


P.S.: I accidentally deleted the last two paragraphs of my review and they were so good. Please accept this hasty substitute. Shame on me for trusting the goodreads editor.

Wow! Incredible read. I wondered a few times if this is one of the scariest books I've read. I'm left contemplating this, because it is so much more than a ghost story. Morrison's writing is beautiful and haunting. There are times when I had to re-read passages several times to track what was happening, but not in a way that was unpleasant. It felt intentional and designed.

The book also does some interesting stuff with spacing that I found enjoyable.

Having finished the book just a few minutes ago, I don't know what else I can write about it. It's still banging around in my head. I feel like it will be for a long time. This is one I'll re-read in the future, and I think it will be a rich experience. I may update this review later with more thoughts.

As a long time NPR listener (though, I confess, not consistently of All Things Considered, I do the morning shows usually), I eagerly signed up to go to Politics & Prose's event at Sixth&i where Ari spoke about his book with Audie Cornish. It was a great conversation and I was glad I picked up a copy of the book while there.

The book is pleasantly short, and filled with essays glimpsing Ari's life and work. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the Syrian Refugee Crisis and was moved by the essay around the Pulse Nightclub shooting.

I would have loved even more discussion of Sam Sanders' theory on hard and soft news. I'll have to do some of my own searching to see if Sam has talked about this on his podcasts!

This is one of the best books that I've ever bought on an impulse based on cover art. I had heard nothing about the book before picking it up and wow! What a treat. I love all the characters that we see, the locations are amazing, and the whole pirate thing is so different from what I usually read that it was a ton of fun.

I would say the last third of the book as we got into some slightly more magical stuff was not perfect for me, but it also never verged into annoying or too crazy.

I really enjoyed this and will recommend it while also eagerly awaiting the next book!

I almost rated this at 2 stars, but my complaints mostly have to do with the type of reader I am.

The book is not for me, but I think it is for someone. I'm not sure the author knows exactly who he wants that someone to be. There is a lot of interesting trivia in the book, things that can whet the beak of someone and get them interested enough to sit back and picture what the skyline of Mars might look like, for example. I imagine these would make a person look for other content around Space and our place in it. Unfortunately, the trivia is interspersed with a lot of filler material. Sometimes, these are just adverbs and unnecessary spacing. You could carve out about a quarter of this book and be left with a better product for the time saved.

There is another component - small fables told usually at the front of each chapter. These weren't for me, and I think they point to who the author thinks he's writing for - junior high or high school kids. I can see these being good hooks for that population, and the book, I think, reads as if it is aimed at that level (most of the time, anyway). I did not like the fables because they were written in the second person present tense, which I absolutely hate. Sometimes (and weirdly), these narratives pop into the regular sections of the text, and that felt discombobulating.

I think this book is trying to be 3 or 4 different products at once. I think it could be better in one of the following forms:
- A generously illustrated traveler's guide to the Universe, 80 to 100 pages.
- A first-person narrative of someone experiencing the story being told, in a more classical sci-fi way...(?)
- A much more scientifically detailed, but ultimately more refined version of the book. I know that seems counterintuitive, but I felt that much of the content in this version is filler.

The author describes himself as a “science populizer,” and that is fitting because in some sections it read like Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining things at me in a way that even I, someone who loves space, felt a little annoyed by. I think the author means well and it's possible I couldn't get past the writing because of my tastes and/or prior knowledge. I do wonder if science needs “populizers” as opposed to something else, something about that term feels a little icky to me. I don't know.

I read an Advanced Reader Copy.

It feels absolutely stupid to call a book about creativity by perhaps the most successful music producer of the last century bad, but holy shit is it not for me.

I'm not sure exactly when I began reading it. Several folks in a movie community I'm active in began reading it more or less as a devotional, and I started it in this way. I quickly found the writing exceedingly annoying, and the lessons overwritten and cliche.

This is nearly 400 pages of the same basic thing over and over again, dressed up in different decoration. Sometimes conflicting with itself (which I don't care about much). It is written in the same tone of voice as instructional tarot cards and horoscopes: incredible authority without any connection to anything. Gaping generalities and astounding assumptions.

I kept thinking, “this sounds like so much pseudoscientifical nonsense,” but of course it isn't scientific and isn't trying to be. It is really more pseudo-religious or pseudo-metaphysical. After more or less every ‘area of thought' there is a little broken out piece of text that sort of languishes on the page. The spacing is broken up to add some extra... Something. Here's one:

“Is it time for the next project
because the clock or calendar
says it's time,
or because the work itself
says it's time?”

Wow! Deep!


Much of the text of the book exists only to add length to basic thesis statements that really stand alone. The added scaffolding does nothing but subtract and annoy. I wonder how this book came to be, and I wonder how exactly Rick and Neil Strauss collaborated on this. Who is responsible for all this pretension and preaching? It seems so counter to Rubin's personality. It has a religious feel, but in the way that you hear a Recent Convert talk. It's one of the most grating things I've read in recent memory.

There are a few parts that I liked, mostly the thesis statements. If you stripped away all of the superfluous gobbledygook, I feel like there's some good stuff here. I had the thought about 250 pages in that there are probably blogposts about this book that are better than the book.

“The work reveals itself as you go.”

I like that! This is actually quite good. It is also one of the standalone things unencumbered by a bunch of scaffolding written by someone on a pay-by-word contract.

To be fair, my hackles were raised at the very start. Rubin (or Strauss, I guess) talks about “receiv[ing] direct transmissions from the universe,” and this sort of thing I am deathly allergic to. I was also really annoyed with some of the early rather privileged ‘wisdom' the book proclaims. Rubin has had a pretty exceptional life with a net worth of some $300, so some of this external/internal experience talk (around page 60) is rather easy for him to say.

There is also a passage on page 39 that simply blew me away — in the wrong direction:

“A helpful exercise might be opening a book to a random page and reading the first line your eyes find. See how what's written there somehow applies to your situation.” (A quick interruption — see how this mirrors religious writing and fortune telling nonsense??? My mom used to read the Bible like this.) “Any relevance it bears might be by chance,” (it is) “but you might allow for the possibility that chance is not all that's at play. When my appendix burst, the doctor who diagnosed it insisted that I go to the hospital immediately to have it removed. I was told there were no other options. I found myself in a nearby bookstore. Standing out on a table in front was a new book by Dr. Andrew Weil. I picked it up and let it fall open. The first passage my eyes went to said: if a doctor wants to remove a part of your body, and they tell you it has no function, don't believe this. The information I needed was made available to me in that moment. And I still have my appendix.”

Don't take medical advice from this guy. Probably not from the nutjob book he picked up, either.

Reposted from elsewhere...

I read this in anticipation of a book club coming up this week (actually finished this on February 16th). I hadn't read any of Annalee's previous work, and am not super well-read in Sci-Fi, and certainly not what I would call more environmental science fiction. It was interesting, though I thought it had a little too much going on at times. I thought the actual writing was fine - a little stiff, and some things were said in ways that just didn't need to be (as in, the author describes a character's reaction but then says point-blank the emotion they are feeling in ways that aren't necessary).

I enjoyed the book's exploration and boundary-pushing of what personhood is and how we conceive of it. Though, some characters sort of undermine this (example: the living trains essentially separating into biped or quadruped “bodies” to function in larger society). The moral message is... not subtle. The antagonists (which sort of weirdly shift midway through) are cartoonishly evil and did not really ring true for me.

I rated this 3/5 on Goodreads. I think it was a fine read, I'm curious as to how it'll be received at the book club. At least a full start of that is because I found the use of pronouns and exploration of gender, personhood, and plural/singular people (as in, dyads identifying as singular, not simply someone using they/them pronouns) very interesting in this.

Another book for the book club - another book I did not enjoy very much. I wanted to enjoy it, but I think the book is just not for me. There is way, way, WAY too much going on. If a book is going to take 500 pages, I'd like it to earn that - and unfortunately, I don't think this did. The author clearly has a lot to say and a lot churning in their mind, but putting it all in one book has robbed any of the stories from shining. One must ask - where, oh where, is an editor when they're needed most? This should have been 250 to 300 pages max and should have focused on just one part.When I read the Acknowledgements and saw that this is sort of meshed together from three or four different things, I basically slapped my head and said, “of course, it is,” out loud to the coffee shop. It's painfully apparent.Some of my gripes up front... I found the naming of characters to be really... weird. “Pivotal Moment,” “Epiphany Foreshadow,” “Allegory Paradox.” I don't think this is even explained away as translation, as so many things in this book half-are. Towards the end of the book, when certain artifacts are named after literary tropes, I started to REALLY roll my eyes. I think these are all intended to be sort of tongue-in-cheek funny, but they just annoyed me. Another gripe... Do you ever read a book and see something and think, “Oh, this author has clearly just binged a bunch of so-and-so or this-and-that.” Well, me too, and it happened big time in this book. I have no way of knowing for sure if the character of Nicholas Solitude was created after watching just a little too much Doctor Who, but WOW does it seem like it.I think I also really bumped against the author's writing style. I found the switches between first person and third person very strange. The dialogue OFTEN does not ring true - people just do not speak in the way they do in this book. Example: “For what it's worth,” CHARACTER said, “I greatly prefer that you're not dead.” “The circumstances are appealing to me as well.” The WHAT? People do not talk like this. The character repeating this isn't even a robot or something where you could sort of pretend that it's just a weird characterization. This happens over and over again. The dialogue just doesn't ring true for me and it really stopped me from getting into the story.Speaking of getting into the story. I got so irritated on page 290 that I picked up a pencil and wrote a note below my little sticker mark (how I typically mark bits in books). At page 290, the author takes several paragraphs to go into the background history of something that is almost completely irrelevant to the story and is never revisited again. This just KEPT happening all throughout the book. EDITOR - where are you? WHY are huge swaths of this book devoted to telling me about things that have no impact on the story? If it's worldbuilding - SHOW, don't TELL. The book loves to tell me things, but skips over so much of the showing. At 300 pages, this book should have been starting to wrap up.The author also seems to love firing off tweets in the text. I noticed this with [b:The Terraformers 60784471 The Terraformers Annalee Newitz https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1649899400l/60784471.SY75.jpg 64155389] by [a:Annalee Newitz 191888 Annalee Newitz https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1608627466p2/191888.jpg] as well. If you're writing speculative fiction - I kindly ask that you remember you're writing a BOOK. You don't need to contain your social commentary to 180 or 250 characters mid-stride. SHOW ME the consequences of what you're upset about, SHOW ME why things are not working right, SHOW ME how they can be better. Here are some examples of the author firing off a tweet:“At the age of fourteen, I knew the Building existed, but no-body I knew really liked to talk about it. They didn't teach us about it at school. I lived in one of those Americas where they printed textbooks with blank pages so that school boards could just decide on the fly what repressive bullshit they felt like teaching.”Any idea how much weight that string of sentences has on the story? None - absolutely none. This happens frequently, where the author will say how bad a thing is, but do nothing to show WHY or HOW it is bad, or WHAT can be done better. This isn't social commentary, it's tweeting. The author also calls Earth-floors hell worlds at one point which I think is also supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, all it does is sort of illustrate the total lack of clarity around how this world works. Everything is in a big building, that you can go outside of where there are folks and spaceships... But there are infinite floors that are world-sized (question mark??), and infinite, but not infinite... Certain modes of transportation open interdimensional rifts... but they still need to be aimed manually? I don't get it.I really hate to rag on this book so intensely. There were parts that I liked, but I had to work to like them. How I wish this book were 300 pages and that the author worked with an editor.In the spoiler below, I call attention to an opportunity to END the book radically on page 441.Finally... My hopes at a really funny ending were CRUSHED on page 441, where I saw such an amazing opportunity to end the story and shave 40 pages of pretty incomprehensible gobbledygook into what would have actually been a pretty funny meta joke. I'm going to write out what I wrote out at the back of the book as an alternate ending, picking up about midway down on page 441:"Then just put a stop to all this shit once and for all," said Carissa. Write The End in your little book and let's be done with it.""Oh, come on.""No, you come on Tabitha," Carissa snapped. "Rindasy and I are only in this mess because of you.""It doesn't work like that, even if I wanted it to!" Tabitha yanked out a clean sheet from her notebook, "here. You think everything's so easy?" Tabitha seized her pen and wrote, "The End###Just end it right after the "d" in "End" - no period, no closing quotation mark. That would have cracked me UP! I'd probably have been a little annoyed too. But you know what? If that'd been the end on page 295 or 320, and not before the closing action on page 441, I'd have been pleased as punch.

I really enjoyed this! I found it a little slow to start, and kind of disorientating for two reasons. 1) Unlike many (most?) of King's books, this isn't set in Maine, but in Illinois (my home state), so it felt pretty close to home. 2) The protagonist is a high school kid, in high school at roughly the same year that I graduated high school. This caused some odd friction when King writes about “opening up Safari” or “going to the Tube” or “everything's on the Net” which is “awesome sauce.”

Thankfully, once the story gets going, we get into stuff that is much more in the ol' wheelhouse and this turns into a lovely fairy tale of fairy tales. I had a lot of fun reading this.

I listened to the audiobook of this through my local library / Libby. I think it would work better as a workbook - I think you'd benefit from writing some notes or being able to have this open on your desk or something to reflect on. In general, I think it has a lot of useful things in it, things that I will look to incorporate or at least be mindful of.

One thing that the author says frequently is that (paraphrasing) nothing gets done in meetings. I have a bit of a bone to pick with that. It may be true in software or developmental work, where the “work” is code, but when you're working on policies or big questions and how they will impact a field of grantees, meetings ARE the work. You need to be able to bring people together, have conversations, and figure out thinking. You can pass a Word document around 5 or 10 people for weeks and weeks, trading comments and feedback, or you can set up a working meeting to nail things down. These are things that matter. So, while I get what the book is trying to say, I wouldn't have been so authoritative in saying, “nothing gets done in meetings.”

Otherwise, there is a lot of stuff in here that could be useful to folks working in bureaucratic systems.

I technically “finished” this because I skimmed the rest, but I more or less gave up after the Staten Island chapter. And ‘gave up' feels like it does me a disservice, because I should be framing it as, “died after a long struggle.” I wanted to put it down after the first chapter. I stuck with it as long as I could.

I am preconfigured to dislike it. I find anarchist theory and ideas to be woefully stupid, and I don't even know how to phrase that more respectfully. I simply do not think they are in line with reality. Not in a “you're saying no before thinking about it,” way. Part of it is that I believe a State can be a force for good, maybe in the same way that anarchists think that the Stateless can be. I'm not sure. I know there are a lot more examples in history of the State being a force for good than an anarchist “State” being a force for anything (to be fair, more examples of a State as evil, too). Anyway, I find the whole thought really dumb and bizarre, not to mention a woeful waste of time when so much could be done to improve the real world.

This is a work of fiction, so I'll review it like that. The writing is abysmal. An interview format can be interesting, though I think it is almost always an insanely lazy way to write because it lets the authors get away with such little detail and the infrastructure that makes a good story. You can do these things in an interview format, but these authors do not. They fail even to write decent interviews. No one in the world has ever or will ever speak like this. If an interviewer tried to interview like this, they the conversations would never get off the ground.

One of the authors is a professor at my alma mater. I frantically checked to ensure they DIDN'T teach in my program because I was appalled that someone professing human development would write such poor interviews. Surely, this is not how they engage when interviewing real people. I don't believe the people writing these have ever interviewed anyone. I hope not!

Struggling to put my personal beliefs about anarchy and its feasibility aside, considering the world described - there is no detail put into anything. The lack of detail drains conflict. There is no intention or opposition in the telling of this tale, and that means there is no drama. We are never held in suspense. We are never wondering what will happen next. If you set out to tell a story in an interview format, a certain amount of suspense is already lost because you are removed in time. So, you must keep us engaged somehow. They failed to engage me or try even to hold my interest.

In my book club, someone said something to the effect of, “it's in the aches, not the details.” I'm glad the book worked for them. That is not how books work for me. A good idea does not save a bad book, and let me be clear: I think this is an egregiously bad book. It lacks detail, it lacks consistency, it lacks interest in anything but the ideas the authors wanted to package up and proclaim as workable. They present no evidence for their assertions. They talk about a future 40-60 years from now in which everyone agrees with everything. They present no discussion of how the world achieved this peace, other than some passing glances at the great fun of remembering war and murder. Characters wave away any emotional conflict with “I've been to therapy.” Were it so easy.

I think these things MUST be engaged with if you're going to write a good book. If you want to write a vibes book, write a vibes book! But this isn't that - this is a work of worldly fan-fiction that tries to sell a political and economic ideology that does none of the work required to convince anyone. You can't give someone an idea and say, “figure it out!” That's a dumb thing to do!

This thing has already wasted too much of my time - safe to say I hated it!

What a good book! Thank you to my friend Hannah for lending it to me!A lot to think about with this. The Acknowledgements suggest that [a:Ray Nayler 6447152 Ray Nayler https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1642102511p2/6447152.jpg]'s main theme here was the difficulty we would experience in encountering and then communicating meaningfully with another intelligent species. Much of this in the book is very interesting, and I found myself wanting to google things to see how true they were.What really stood out to me, though, was the exploration of loneliness and connection among ourselves as people and as a people. Most of the characters in this book are lonely - some crushingly so. I can relate very deeply to the experience of heartbreak and then burying oneself in work and study to try and make that fill the hole - though (as is a little less explored in this book), that is never successful for long. I expect this will be what I explore in my substack post...The description of the point fives was fascinating to read as a social worker. I can't imagine ever prescribing something like this - I'd break out my copy of [b:The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy 21029 The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy Irvin D. Yalom https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388176092l/21029.SY75.jpg 22216] and write out a referral for a good group so folks can experience universality. The nature of the point fives in here really comes across as something that would be even more isolative for the person - it isn't teaching the patient how to interact with others, it is providing an artificial means of buffeting the world from them.Then, though, I started thinking about Evrim vs Kamran. What are the meaningful differences, here? Of course Evrim's origin is different, but they are an artificial construct. The main difference is physicality. If you put Kamran in a person-shaped oculus and gave them movement... Would I think it is as far out as I do? Something for me to think about.

I'm not 100% sure I can well encapsulate my thoughts. This is the June book for the Small Press book club I attend, and reading the back I knew it'd appeal to me. “Parasite meets The Good Son in this piercing psychological portrait of three women haunted by a brutal, unsolved crime.”

It's a brisk 147 pages and reads easily. I had a hard time putting it down. We have a vague timeline, a smattering of characters, and the interior of their minds to think about for those pages, sometimes wondering whose head we're in, other times wondering what the point of a passage is. I am not sure all the questions are answered (rather, it is clear not all questions are answered), and I am okay with that. About halfway through the book I thought, “this would be great if x didn't happen,” and I wasn't disappointed.

——

As an aside, I find that I really enjoy translated Korean works. I'm not sure why, maybe because the emotion inside of them is so tangible, and so palpable to me. PAST LIVES, Celine Song's directorial debut, was my favorite film of 2023. Flux, another work of Korean-American fiction, is another book from last year that I really enjoyed. There are some other examples in the recent past. Something about the way things translate, the resulting English feels often novel but perfect. It may not look exactly perfect on the page — you may be able to tell it's a translation — but the emotion it evokes works very well.

There's a passage in this book: “We were all seized by the same guilt, and the classroom was as still as the inside of a vacuum.” What a great utilization of a word with two images attached. The vacuum of space, and the inside of a Bissell. As my eyes read of quiet, my ears could just hear roaring. If the reader didn't get there on their own, the next page has the line, “Just like a vacuum that sucks up everything, she easily commanded all of our attention.” Once again, perfect utilization of one word, meaning two things, that works perfectly with both meanings. That is a lovely attention to detail.

Looking forward to hearing what others from the book club think!

I picked this up, brand new and in its shining jacket, from a little free library months and months ago. I read Station Eleven and thought it was pretty good (I did not love the TV series). I quite enjoyed this, probably more than I did Station Eleven, even. Despite that, I have few thoughts.

I've seen it described as “quiet” science fiction. Fitting. The story is quiet, not exactly contemplative but patient. That is not to say slow: I found it paced very well. In fact, despite a rotating setting and cast of characters, each character feels separate and well formed. That is impressive. This helps the pacing a lot, I think, because we never get bored of anyone.

I don't think it tries to hide anything or obscure itself. It is very pleasant to read and when the action comes it is not the world ending whatever of other books, it feels more personal. I like that.

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that ti's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Okay, where to begin. I have a lot of love for David Lynch, and reading this (which I did in about an hour, it's quite short and spaced out), I heard his voice, which is very pleasant. I got a kick out of some of it.

I think my notes (not all of which are below like they usually are) are divided between three categories: advice to the artist, notes on Transcendental Meditation, and Lynch Trivia. I really enjoyed two of those things.

Lynch Trivia – there is quite a bit to love. The accidental discovery of BOB in Frank Silva standing next to a dresser. The evolution of INLAND EMPIRE. The trivia about Kubrick calling Eraserhead his favorite movie (what the fuck does it feel like to have one of the best to ever do it call your film his favorite? Must have been nuts.). Lots to love.

T. Meditation – listen. I don't find a lot of this all that much different from the hokey stuff that Rick Rubin was peddling in his book (which I detested). There are some differences. One, Lynch is notably less preachy. He is trying to convince you to give it a shot, and he goes on some really wacky tangents. Talking about Unified Field Theory and modern science catching up with ancient vedic science. None of that works for me. It gives me the willies. I'm allergic to it.

I don't believe that meditation can let you tap into some great unifying force that connects everything. I do believe that taking some time to chill out and let your emotions settle can be healthy. Much of this stuff is the same as radical acceptance and mindfulness. Those are two things I like. Do I like them because they've been sanitized of Eastern influences? That would be a troubling thought. I don't think so. I think I like them because they don't try to tell me that the world works in ways that my eyes cannot see and my hands cannot feel. I don't have to accept any mysticism with them. I don't know. This is not an uncomfortability I had to confront at all with Rubin because much of his writing seemed completely batshit to me. Perhaps I am a hypocrite – probably I am.

Here's the rub: if taking 20 minutes in the morning and the evening to calm down is helpful to you, and you want to call it meditation, or mindfulness, or anything else, that is none of my business. What do I care?

I've tried meditation a bit, including a few years ago after I read Ruth Ozeki's The Face: A Timecode, which I think about a lot. Lynch says that meditation lets you tap into a wellspring of bliss and inner happiness. I am not convinced there is such a wellspring inside of me. I don't know. I don't think most people I know would say that I'm the happiest person in the world. Not that I want to be thought of as depressed or constantly sad. It's just that happiness is something I experience in the moment with people and not in quiet times by myself. I need a lot of external validation for that. Perhaps that is an insecurity that Lynch would say rests in my inner self, and that meditating on that would help me. That is probably not so far from what a therapist would say. I'm a social worker, I know. But so it goes and all that.

Lynch a few times mentions published research. I can't help but notice at no point is this cited anywhere. That doesn't impress me. I would be less annoyed at this lack of citation if other things weren't cited in the back. There are also a few names mentioned as doctors or whatever and I wondered what I'd see if I googled these names and ultimately I don't think it's worth my time to go poking around because what do I care?

Advice to the artist – there is a lot of it to be had and I like it all. All of it involves truth, which is important to me. I would say it is a core value.

[Sound] is just another tool to ensure that you're following that original idea and being true to it.

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea.

I don't necessarily love rotting bodies, but there's a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.

Selected notes/highlights:

you.

being true to it

If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really.

be

show

Keep your own voice.

Stay true to yourself.

This did not work for me and I detected that quickly. Ronin is a great short, and it's one of those things that I don't think having more of is that much of a good thing. There are many, many characters in this book. Too many, I think. I wish it had focused on the Ronin and Fox and left many of the others behind. It felt too scattered and felt very long and drawn out because of that. Every time we got to a Kouru chapter I wanted to skip it because I found that character and their story uninteresting.

I considered DNF'ing this about halfway through and looked at reviews here to see what the flavour was. I am disappointed in them. A lot of people pissy about pronouns and queer storylines in Star Wars. Dumb. The editing in this book was not good and there are too many adverbs. The pronouns are not the problem nor are the relationships. Get over it.

For such a short book, I have a lot of thoughts! I really enjoyed this. There are definitely some parts that show the time in which it was written, but putting those aside, I thought the play with god concepts really fun.

I'm not sure what my favorite line of the book is, but at first glance, it might be: “I know the gods love blood, and that is why I have offered it to you...“

The other thing that stands out: emotionally-stunted, angry, men in the 40s were a lot like emotionally-stunted, angry, men in the 2020s. Crazy, huh?