Thomas

I read this book for work. It's a pretty interesting text, though somewhat dated. Much of the theory and advice that Tufte gives here survives the more than 20 years since this edition's publication. But, not all of it.

For one, Tufte has rather lost the battle on data graphics being best serviced by artists. I would not argue that artists would be better suited to creating stunning graphics than someone doping around in Word and Excel, but I think the budgets of most of the folks producing data graphics would. The proliferation of easy-access office suites, and even slightly more advanced (but just as easy to access) chart builders, has made the standard format of many of these graphs concrete in our society.

A third edition of this book - or a technical accompaniment - would best focus on how to implement some of these changes within software that is accessible to users. Tufte's description of range frames is interesting - the use of negative space in bar charts to intuit the grid is interesting. There are a variety of things that I would like to take from this - but practically, I do not know how to accomplish them within the grammar of our data graphics life today.

There are a few parts of the book that have either aged poorly or were sour on writing. For one, I think much of Tufte's advice is not very accessible to folks with eyesight concerns, and also lives somewhat divorced from how data graphics are translated and proliferated over time. On pages 124 and 125, Tufte explores adaptation of the range bar and bar plot to consistency with his design principles. The results are illegible. The range plot works alright.

The box plot, however, is adapted by creating variance in line-weights, and then Tufte delights in his second adaptation - offsetting the box one pica above baseline. These are the sorts of design changes that look lovely in a picture book, but are not good for practical data use. For one, one pica (or one pixel on a screen), is not a sufficient offset - it could easily look like an error in printing (especially after numerous copies). This ultimately makes the chart communicate less and less fluently. I think if Tufte had combined the line-weight and offset, this would have accomplished his goal more fluently.

A very interesting reference text, but something that (for a reader today) is best taken as theory rather than practical advice. Unless the user is handcrafting charts by pencil and plane or digitally in photoshop or some such, some of the more innovative practices are perhaps lost to time.

I'm attaching some of my notes as a comment to this review for future reference.

I have so many thoughts on this book, so many notes. There's a pretty good chance I come back and update this or write something of some length elsewhere about this.This is the second Bernal I've read. I loved the first ([b:His Name was Death 56760368 His Name was Death Rafael Bernal https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1616806546l/56760368.SY75.jpg 1783878]), but hated the main character. I thought that was a bit of the point. I started questioning that relatively soon into this book because the main character here is not likable - and I went back and forth on if you're supposed to like this character or not. In the end, I don't think so. However, I think, ultimately, Bernal is interested in pointing out that there simply are not a lot of likable people. People are complex and hypocritical, and these people are being written into trope-like roles by an author writing for a late 60s audience.The book is awash with racism, sexism, homophobia (wow, the homophobia). Toxic masculinity, of course, but also a sort of glimpse at what an alternative would be (though fleeting, in the closing pages). The main character's thoughts, the obvious connections they have to senses of inferiority, shame, and fear are deeply interesting.At some point, I'm going to go through my notes and think about this a little more, and perhaps I'll update it.

This was a gift from my sister for Christmas this year. I really enjoyed it! As a (translated) novelization of the film, it has about the same little oddities that the film has. This would be a great book to gift a child who has been reading smaller things and is ready for something a little longer, but with writing that is approachable — especially if the child likes the movie!

When I finished reading through the final chapter's last pages, I wondered: what's the most important book ever written? I did a quick Google and found that all the suggested lists used the word “influential” instead, not what I wanted. I put quotes around the query and was not too pleased to find a bunch of christian websites using SEO to convince Google to serve an answer: the Bible.

I'm not going to suggest that The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the most important book ever written. I think it's up on the list, in the top quarter, at least. It is probably one of the most important books I've read. Many Americans know a vague sketch of the Manhattan Project; I expect very few could trace its history back to Leo Szilard reading Ernest Rutherford calling the idea of liberating atomic energy “moonshine.”

The book is a tome, and there's no way around it. Some readers will think the history too far-flung, too detailed, and too long. I scratched my head through passages of the book and had to read and reread a few of them. Yet, this is a literary work of high quality. The whole book is a gentle but consistently rising crescendo.

The final two chapters - Trinity and Tongues of Fire - are astounding. It may be the best non-fiction writing I have had the pleasure and discomfort of reading. In Trinity, Rhodes walks us on a nearly second-by-second countdown to the terrible culmination of centuries of scientific work. Tongues of Flame elevates numerous accounts of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deploying language to try and communicate the incommunicable.

There are so many roads one could go down following this. I found Colonel Stimson compelling. I've known the tale of his removal of Kyoto from the list of targets for a long, long time - but I always understood the reasoning as little more than his honeymooning there (a tale the movie OPPENHEIMER recounts). This book paints a much more nuanced view of Stimson as someone horrified by the bomb (and horrified by the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo) and as a statesman straddling generations and losing purchase in an evolving world.

It took me a long time to get through this book, but I'm glad I did. Astounding.

In the opening chapters of Stoner, Archer Sloane asks a young William, “Don't you know about yourself yet?” Stoner seems always to be pulled between the idea of what he wants and what he is willing to do. He thinks constantly about what would be burdensome to others. Throughout the book, his placidity verges on ambivalence — as if he is aloof to the living of his own life. Sloane tells him later that he must remember what he is, and what he has chosen to become. We follow Stoner's becoming for the rest of his life.I thought a lot about [b:The Sun Also Rises 3876 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509802323l/3876.SY75.jpg 589497] as I read. There were many times where I wanted to reach through the page, grab Stoner by his shoulders, and shake him. He is often times a passenger when his life cries out for a pilot. In Hemingway's book, Jake is often a passenger (or, maybe, valet), especially as it relates to Brett. But we don't spend a lifetime with Jake. We watch Stoner watch his life pass by.So many passages stood out to me that I transferred about 18 pages worth of A5 to my little borrowed-books notebook. What is a teacher? Where are the bounds between complacency, apathy, and acceptance? What makes a life worth living – is it success? What is success? How much are you willing to give up for your principles? How much of what you do not yet possess are you willing to stake, blind?Some of the most painful moments in the book are between Stoner and his child. They're a collection of deaths so complete that in the end nothing is there really to die. They barely know one another, and in fact Stoner barely knows anyone at all. You might call that a failure, and Stoner thinks of it in this way until he considers kindness. He's always thinking about how not to offend, to the extent that even his very few triumphs he thinks considers “amusingly contemptuous.”Another disconnected thought: there's a bit here about rural boy moves to ‘urban' center and is irrevocably changed, so that when he visits home, he is an ‘alien.' I know the feeling. There's a lot here about inheritance and legacy, to an extent. Nothing that I have words for.The writing... I loved the prose. I notice that Williams, in writing Stoner's thinking, almost never phrases anything as positive, but as not negative. The phrase, “not unpleasant” appears repeatedly throughout. We get a crystal-clear sense of Stoner's quasi-nihilistic view on life.Not sure what else to say. I finished reading this about 30 minutes ago and need to let it cook for a bit. This is definitely the sort of story that appeals to me, though. Down to the occasional odd turn of phrase that I had to sit back and admire (the best in the closing chapters may be, “chaos of potentialities” – wowza).

4/14/23 - This is one of my all-time favorite books, and I picked up my paperback copy and started reading then re-reading chapters I particularly enjoy earlier this year. Then a few weeks ago I resumed a previous re-read on the audiobook version. Early this morning while walking I finished up the last third or so of it, so I'm calling this as a 2023 book for me. I love this book!

I had not read any Agatha Christie before, and I have to say what a pleasure it was to start here. I listened to the audiobook version, performed by Dan Stevens. It was a fantastic performance, reminiscent more of radio drama than of a pure audiobook. For the last several hours I just could not pull myself away from it.

This is a pretty quirky little book. The core story is interesting. It chronicles the journey of an elephant from Lisbon to Vienna in the middle of the sixteenth century. There are numerous digressions along the way hinting at the era and location's politics, society, religion, and experience of elephants.

I found the book challenging to read. Jose Saramago has a writing style unlike any I've seen. He does not use paragraphs in the traditional sense - in one stretch of the book, a single paragraph goes on for more than 10 pages, if I recall correctly. Similarly, the period is demoted in the rank of punctuation to lieutenant to the Captain Comma. In one sentence I counted 53 commas (the sentence went on and on for perhaps three dozen lines, nearly a full page). This makes for strange reading. It also means if you get distracted or lose your place, it is a challenge to find it again. The dialogue is also written with minimal attribution, and exchanges all occur mid-sentence without quotation marks. The novel asks a lot of your attention.

The writing is so confounding that if it weren't so funny I wouldn't have finished it. Every few sentences has some quip or morsel that are all in varying degrees insightful, touching, funny, or at least odd. Here are a few of my favorites:

“A part of me learns and the other part ignores everything I've learned, and the longer I live, the more I ignore.” (period added by me.)

“As we know all too well, no one telling a story can resist adding a period, and sometimes even a comma.”

“As the poet said, the pine trees may wave at the sky, but the sky does not answer.”

“It is true that the X did not save the Y, but the fact that he had imagined it meant he could have done, and that is what counts.” (redactions to avoid spoilers.)

A friend gifted this book to me for my birthday last month. I'm glad they did, because I'd have missed it otherwise! I did not quite know what to expect going in, but it proved to be a lovely mix of memoir, history, and question-asking. Very me.

I'm going to keep this constrained to just my experience reading the book. This has been one of my most notated books in recent memory and a lot of my notes are questions. I'm going to resurrect my dusty substack to meander through some of those. I'll edit this review later with links to those posts.

I picked up the book about two months after my friend explained it to me and had for some reason an understanding that it was about AI. It is about a lot more than that. I was initially thrown off by the philosophy discussion opening the book, but found the writing so approachable and so personable that it didn't feel so divorced from the practicals of the human experience. I'm not sure what I mean by that. I tend towards a low tolerance for highly philosophic books because ultimately it ends up being a lot of stroking that doesn't lead anywhere. The deep philosophical questions of the world, like, are we in a simulation? don't mean that much to me as I'm working on homelessness or how technology is impacting people experiencing it. They would mean more if someone told me how to open the console and the codes to make the world a better place and fast.

Perhaps that's an imagination failing on my part. Anyway, the discussions often feel more about the speaker than about the mysteries of the world when they're in writing. I quite adored the weaving of self into O'Gieblyn's writing. It is refreshing to read someone struggling with these big questions and choosing not to try and separate themselves from their thinking. Context matters! Context always matters. She discusses this on pages 152-153 in passages that I've drawn giant exclamation marks adjacent to.

I think a lot about equity when it comes to AI tools and how they are deployed. Really not even deployed. Developed, trained, deployed, utilized, evaluated. I tend to be suspicious of people who claim these models will be able to balance out or be prompted in such a way as to solve for the bias within their models. I get a bit freaked out about these models making decisions in the human/social services that could impact things like people being referred for housing or who gets a voucher.

There are a couple of places in the book where O'Gieblyn describes AI of significant sophistication as to render it indistinguishable from revelation. Or, that because we cannot understand the decisions made and cannot possibly probe these models for understanding, that we must accept their say in a way analogous to the believer accepting the word of their god. It reminds me of that old thing that technology of significant sophistication is indistinguishable from magic. Magic, Majesty, Mysticism, Machines. This is the stuff of nightmares when you're trying to ensure equity and accountability. The first three of these things have been co-opted by systems to dominate populations – and it's probable that we are witnessing or have witnessed the co-opting of the fourth. Not that I am resigned to this cynicism.

Which is to say, I think these tools can be used for good. But I think it is hard to square these extremely sophisticated machines as tools when their complexity is nearer a galaxy than a hammer.

I have a ton of little notes throughout the book and even more simple tabs marking passages. But almost all of those are going to show up in some form of writing in the next few weeks, and they're all about questions in my head instead of the book itself.

So I'll try to cut this short. I really enjoyed this! The blend of memoir, science, theology, literature, and philosophy is right up my alley. I love thinking about these questions, and they are presented in such human terms that they are not clinical or obtuse. I need to chew on this for a while, and write out what I'm thinking and chew on it some more. I mean, the author talks about the story of Job several times and that is one of the stories that really sprung a leak in my faith, so it's always a real treat to accompany someone else's thoughts on it.

Probably one of the more compelling realizations I had while reading involved a quote or story from Niels Bohr around page 174. Basically, the realization or remembrance that mathematics and physics are not, in fact, the language of the universe. There is no connective tissue between those squiggly lines in textbooks and LaTeX editors on your computer to the underpinnings of the Universe. If there are underpinnings at all, we have no mechanism by which to observe or interact with them. The best we can do is create symbols and bestow upon them meaning. The best we can do are shallow metaphors. That is, for whatever reason, quite freeing and compelling to me.

Found this to be a pretty middling sci-fi pulp that didn't really meet my expectations. The expectations were tainted, I admit, by the game Star Fox and my desire to read about space ships fighting each other - which there is virtually if not literally none of in this.The start of the book had some genuinely interesting world building with a federation, aliens, political intrigue, the promise of privateering, etc. The middle of the book diverts into a long planet-based survival that felt a tad boring. The final part promised some genuine starship combat, but we never see any. We rejoin the crew months later after several successful raids, and we depart the crew as soon as they are about the face their greatest challenge in the deep of space.After, we rejoin our protagonist (who has some rather revolting approaches to women in this book, more on that later) acting out his own little George Washington fantasy on New Europe. It was fine.Re: Heim and women. At the start of the book, Heim is mourning his deceased wife, who he seems to have cheated on with a character named Jos. Later, we meet Jos, and they entertain the idea of renewing their affair - Jos even graciously says outright she wouldn't mind if he fooled around with other women (how kind). Along the story, we find that Heim's main (?) purpose in his privateering is to save/see an old flame again. When he gets to the planet, her weight is commented upon alongside that she's married. Then they meet and he is INSTANTLY more interested in the woman's daughter than he is his old love herself. To make it even better, Heim points out to the daughter that she is his daughter's age, and gets all pissy when another character (more age-appropriate, maybe ? I don't think we know) swoops in and starts flirting. Yuck.I'd have left out the middle, left out the daughter and old love story, kept Jos but left out the misogeny, and brought in more space ships and more space fighting.The next book club book is 700 pages long so I, even now, am denied reading the book I want to ([b:Warbreaker 1268479 Warbreaker (Warbreaker, #1) Brandon Sanderson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1240256182l/1268479.SY75.jpg 1257385]) because I don't think I can squeeze it in. So, I am fleeing to one of my all-time favorites [b:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 11 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1) Douglas Adams https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531891848l/11.SY75.jpg 3078186] to cleanse my palette of this before starting in on [b:Perdido Street Station 68494 Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) China Miéville https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1680461055l/68494.SY75.jpg 3221410].

What is the theoretical minimum of understanding a text necessary to log it as “read” on goodreads without lying?

I can tell you that my eyes touched every word in this book. I can't tell you how many of the typed elements penetrated the various parts of my eyeballs and how many of the equations were lost on their way through my nerves and into my brain. I was not a strong maths student, and never had a pre-Calculus class let alone Calculus. So, many of the equations in this book were essentially static to me.

I read all of the prose(?). But much of this prose broke down the equations—unfortunately not in a way that could make much sense to me. I thrived on the parts of the book that explored concepts more than the parts focusing on calculus.

As it turns out, the theoretical minimum to start doing physics is more than the practical maximum of my maths competency. The fault lies with me, not the book. I do think with a primer to Calculus, I could figure this out, but not in this form.

I read (listened to) the last few chapters of this while walking laps in the park, a very odd thing to do given the really weird concluding chapters.This is a genuine, bona fide, 1980's King book. I haven't read anything from Stephen King for quite a while, maybe not since I finished up my first read of [b:The Dark Tower 5091 The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7) Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372296329l/5091.SY75.jpg 6309701], unless I'm forgetting something. There's a lot to love in this book. We've got a ka-tet, a horrible villain, and genuine fear wrapped up in places and things that few writers get to like King.There are some really bizarre things in the book. Most of them are just fine. I think I probably would have left the orgy between the kids on the cutting room floor.That said, fantastic book and a fantastic narration by Steven Weber. It has me wanting to read [b:The Gunslinger 43615 The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554220416l/43615.SY75.jpg 46575] again!

Natalie lives in an ordinary world, but as it passes through the filter of her eyes and is processed by her brain, she interprets the world as either painfully banal or frighteningly strange. The ramblings of her imagination sputter along throughout the book, interrupting moments and pulling the reader along by a rough hand on digressions of fancy. What's the point? Who knows, certainly not Natalie.

The plot is more or less three loosely connected events or transitions, having little to do with one another but at times passingly referenced. Natalie is so internal and her thoughts so tangential that at times it isn't clear what is reality and what is not — but never so opaque that you lose a thread completely. Jackson is not writing Natalie as a narrator, rather a narrator observes Natalie and that at least keeps some ground under our feet.

Still, I found myself struggling to hang on. The first half of the book is rather boring. I felt similarly with “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” — and thought, if I just hang on, there will be some moment that changes everything. I wondered to myself, “this is a book that'd probably be better on a reread, events would take on a different meaning after the inevitable conclusion.” Yet, I'm skeptical that this is true.

What ultimately kept me reading is Jackson's prose, which is quite good even when it says nothing and communicates no plot at all. Often there are writerly jokes that will give the literary snob a good chuckle, and these were good enough to keep me reading, though it was a labor.

I kind of have no idea what I just read, but it was very readable.

Wasson puts out a pretty interesting book about Francis Ford Coppola centered on Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart as the dominating frames. There is a bit of biography on Francis, but the interest is really with his approach to filmmaking and his philosophy on artistic spaces. A lot of the text has to do with American Zoetrope, and later in the book, Electronic Cinema.

I love many of Coppola's films. I couldn't help but think that he sounds like a real headache to work or live around. I have to imagine that his charisma must be nearly on the level of someone like a Steve Jobs to command the loyalty he did/does throughout so much consternation.

I agree with other reviews here that this would have benefitted from additional editing and structure. The book is only loosely chaptered and mainly operates on sections (Dreams and The Apocalypse) that kind of have no meaning. Sometimes, it felt disorganized and tangential. I think additional scaffolding would have helped.

The first hundred and some pages resisted all effort at interest. UKLG is a dry writer. I know she is beloved by many, but this is my second fiction from her (first was Left Hand of Darkness), and I'm left with the same feeling that I am interested in the story in spite of the pacing, structure, and characters.

It is bizarre to say, but Dispossessed has a little kinship with Atlas Shrugged. Rand's tome is also a thin-to-barely veiled excuse to talk about philosophy and economics. Dispossessed is certainly better than that in most measurable ways. It's shorter, much better written, and has a lot more interest in interrogating ideas and stressing them.

I mentioned in my review of Everything for Everyone(?) that I have no interest in the anarchy idea and typically find it dumb. When it comes to fiction, part of that disinterest is the idea of a post-scarcity world. It is difficult to imagine and doesn't pass any reality testing, in a way that I find difficult to suspend disbelief. Dispossessed does not take place in a post-scarcity utopia and is interested in how an anarcho-syndicalist world would navigate things like droughts and resource shortages. That's interesting!

I think UKGL's Anarres manifests a lot of my concerns with a totally stateless world. The absence of government is an illusion, and factionalism and cults of personality still spawn as a part of human nature. We see that Anarres has no actual protections for this, only protections on paper. Sabul is able to accrue power and exert outsized influence on his world by virtue of being an expert, and this results in suffering. Shame, which is the primary enforcement tool of the Anarrean norms (think on that), does not impact Sabul at all. I don't think we ever see Shame deployed against a power-holder in Anarres, only the people struggling against the power holders.

And that's the problem with a Stateless world in which shame and fear are the enforcement mechanisms. Anarres portends to be a quasi-utopia, still navigating scarcity, where individuals can do whatever they like (with the possible exception of rape of a woman or child, I don't think there's mention of rape of a man). Deviations from this are shamed, bullied, or beaten to accept therapy. We see this break at least one character after they write a play that is poorly received. This world does have laws, but they are unwritten. My suggestion is that the unwritten law is more dangerous than the written law, because it is immutable by anything but, if optimistic, time.

An unwritten law, when questioned, can be waived away easily, “there are no laws!” One of the Odonianisms is, “to create crime, create laws.” That's something that sounds deep and moving until someone is raped or beaten near-death or run from every town because they hold an idea or an association. The power-holders in this world are creating laws, but they are calling them norms and acting as if they are mutable.

To an extent, this is a deviation from what I understand to be Odo's initial setup. I don't think Odo means “write” when she says “create,” and would thus still consider these as laws. But that's all semantics, because in the reality of Anarres in the story we find it, the society has failed to resist laws and hierarchy and operates within these structures, veiled now against critique and change.

I like all of this. It is the most realistic working on these ideas that I've read in fiction. UKGL is poking these academic ideas with sticks and seeing where they break and where they hold. One of my favorite bits around this idea is when the utopia is hit with a (I think multi-year) draught, and the scarcity of it all begins to warp people.

I think UKLG's Anarres is successful within a window of scarcity: things must be scarce enough that mutual aid and sharing is required and beneficial, but not so scarce that people's survival instincts trigger. Well enough!

There is a passage around page 312 where a character talks about having the job of counting people as numbers, and making lists of who will eat and who will starve. I thought this had tremendous potential and wish we'd have seen this instead of had a character tell us they did it at one point. I want to be in that character's head while they're navigating that crisis. Nearby this passage, another character is describing actions taken during the famine - plotting of food raids, food supply lines, etc. I loved the logistical discussion and the picture of this society's resort when scarcity begins to crunch it.

——

A big part of the book involves the main character trying to figure out his unifying theory and then figuring out what to do with it. The middle section of the book has a lot of interesting ideas on this — scientific research co-opted by States, control of ideas, scientific communities being quasi-Stateless in times of peace. I wonder how much of this is inspired by the atomic sciences and specifically the process of scientific research around the atomic bomb. Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (an incredible work of non-fiction) explores these themes in our history. There was an earnest belief that ideas, if explored, would be found unusable or as a deterrent. Scientific naivety combined with the fear of the threatened State.

——

In terms of the book itself, I pained myself to read the first half. It simply does not move with any swiftness and has ideas that are only vaguely interesting. There's a lot of world building that is written in the driest possible prose. It got a lot better in the second-half, which is where the book really does become an excuse to poke and prod at these ideas. The plot in the second half is basically nonsense but the idea exploration is quite good.

Speaking of the plot in the second half — where'd it go?? There is a deus ex machina the size of a civilization or two, and then the book sort of clatters to an abrupt end with nothing resolved. I'm not someone who needs everything to be resolved, but it'd be nice to be left with the impression that the author didn't leave half the manuscript on a park bench somewhere.

It feels unfinished. I think the problem with writing a book to poke and prod at philosophy is that once your poking and prodding is done, you have to figure out what your story is. I don't think the book has a good idea of its story. The alternating timeline chapters bemused me, but ultimately they add nothing at all to the story other than a false feeling of suspense. I wonder if it was written chronologically and then shuffled because, if read straight through, there really is very little of interest happening.

That said, I found it very thought-provoking and it made me turn some ideas around in my head that I've previously been dismissive of.

——

One last note: my copy of this book is RIDDLED with errors. One every few chapters, it seemed, to the point where I became on high-alert for them. I think these are with the publisher, not the author. They almost feel like OCR errors; for example one error on pg 148 is ‘life' instead of ‘like,' another on pg 181 is ‘them' instead of ‘then.' These errors were really distracting and annoying.

Thanks to Tor and the Goodreads Giveaways for an ARC of this book.

This new novel, from debut author L.M. Sagas, is billed as “fast, brash, and wickedly fun” by Dayton Ward. On the inside, author J.S. Dewes says it has “earned its place among my favorite found family tales, alongside Killjoys, Mass Effect, and Battlestar Galactica.”

I couldn't stop thinking about Mass Effect the whole way through. Mass Effect is one of my all-time favorite video game series. There are big chunks of this book that read a bit like ME fan fiction. I don't know whether that is good or bad. Though I love Mass Effect, my joy here is less than full. I think it's because the story is so oriented around the “found family” and writing has a style tries to emphasize the ‘fun' and ‘gritty space crew' over everything else.

I kept thinking to myself, “I think other people would find this very fun.” I wish I did, but what I find fun in a video game is distinctly different from what I enjoy in a book. I have been reflecting on my reading (especially relating to my book club books, of which this is one), and I realize that I don't enjoy fun books very much. I had to work to finish the book. The way the author writes characters and dialogue is so far removed from what I like - every single emotion and motive is spelled out, sometimes over and over. There is so much telling, so little showing. Think words repeated, words in italics, words emphasized with “fucking” and other expletives (which does not offend, just doesn't work for me).

I also don't enjoy found family stories. There is a scene where the crew has a brief reprieve from the action and so they're dancing with one another. I had to skip pages to get past all of this, I couldn't take it.

If you're a reader that enjoys really light fiction with no thought required, where everything is explained, this would be a good pickup. If you want to read the novelization of a Mass Effect DLC that never was, I think this would be a good pickup. It's not reflective, contemplative, or serious in almost any way. That means it wasn't a good fit for me.

I felt obligated to finish this because it's a debut. I won't be picking up the novel's sequel, but I will check-in in a few years to see what sort of thing the author is writing at that time. This feels like an author finding their legs and using a very firm structure to manage that.

Can't believe how long it took me to get through this! For some reason I had trouble really committing to it. There was a lot going on at different parts and I felt like it all sort of came clamoring to an end in the last 150 pages. I enjoyed the world and magic system. Some of the characters were pretty grating to me (the “funny” mercenaries in particular, I started to loathe scenes with them), others I appreciated more as time went on (Vivenna is probably one of the better characters in the book).

I'm not totally convinced that the ending makes sense, but I really enjoyed the last 150 or so pages. I think the book is about 200 pages too long, and I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if some of it were trimmed out.

(2/5)
——

When I was in high school, we lived in a little * apartment in rural Illinois. It was across the street, a short walk from the factory where my mom (and several relatives) worked. We were on the South side of the tracks - a small open field separated us from them. Trains no longer run through this track and haven't for years, as far as I know. I used to walk over to the high school, only about a mile away, but rarely with sidewalks available.

My mom was a single parent after the separation. I remember her working various jobs—mostly waitressing and factory work, often two at a time. I remember walking home from school one day and seeing a pink paper on our front door. I don't know the specifics of that one, but I've seen enough in the years since to know it was a 5-day notice or some equivalent. This would have been 2010 or so. It might seem hard to believe that someone working two (sometimes three jobs, one under the table because of what this book calls the “cliff effect”) couldn't afford the rent on an apartment. Yet, I'm here to tell you that was reality for my family then.

That's as close as I ever got to homelessness. What intervened in my life then wasn't an assistance program—it was one of my high school teachers who found out about this and paid three months of our rent anonymously. I thought about this a lot years later when I ran a rent assistance program, where people would sit across from a desk and tell me their story, and I would have to be the one to decide if we could pay 3 to 6 months of their rent, and sometimes advocate their case to my manager. That memory isn't what drew me to work with people experiencing homelessness and the policies that impact them, but it was on my mind a lot as I read Adler & Burnes's book.

I've been working in roles serving people experiencing homelessness since 2016, more or less, now working in a policy job rather than direct service. For this reason, I kept having to calibrate what I was looking for from this book. I didn't go in expecting something like “Homelessness is a Housing Problem” or “Poverty, by America” — I went in expecting a work exploring the deep moral injury(1) that occurs when we—the richest nation in the history of the world—walk by our fellows in calloused squalor, begging for subsistence. How do we function, the feelings of uncomfortability, the confusion, the knowledge that this should not be possible, with the evidence of it before our eyes and our frequent decision to do nothing but stare steely-eyed ahead?

That is not precisely what this book is. Adler and Burnes spend time discussing relational poverty—a kind of poverty in social networks and social capital—and how this weaves around the experience of being homeless and the systems that fail and struggle to serve those experiencing homelessness. Essentially, it is a primer on contemporary homelessness and graspable interventions to which the individual can contribute.

This works well as a relatively shallow introduction. It gives the lay of the land and enough information for informed conversations with their peers. That's a tremendous value.

It has a few problems. Some of these have to do with writing mechanics, and I'll save those (maybe snobbish) thoughts for last.

While reading the introduction, I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Without getting technical, I got the willies. Andrew Yang adorns the book's cover with a blurb at the top. Yang's political candidacies have been a little odd, but his thoughts on UBI are at least (as far as I know) coherent. Yet, I tend to be suspicious of venture capitalists, especially when the very rich come into communities trying to serve the very poor. I dismissed this, and then, in the introduction, we began to hear a lot about Adler's work with Miracle Messages, and I got those willies again. Adler's intro seemed to suggest some kind of white savior complex to me, or maybe a variation of, “We're venture capitalists/start-up bros, and we're here to help.” This did not ultimately seem to be accurate as I continued to read, but it made me defensive going in.

A contributor to this may be the concept of Miracle Messages, which seems to take more or less untrained volunteers and pair them with people experiencing homelessness in a buddy system for phone check-ins. I wonder about the support given to the volunteers, how these relationships form and sustain, and if they're healthy. Perhaps that is cynicism—volunteers encroaching on social work territory, and my reaction is some ingrained thing. It's a gut reaction, that's all. Perhaps it's a manifestation of my allergy to all things vaguely religious and the name “miracle.” Loneliness is an epidemic, and Adler and Burnes's case for relational poverty is sound. I think the idea of a buddy phone program is interesting. Sometimes, it felt like a commercial for the program. Maybe that's not a bad thing?

Similarly, in the last chapter, a few paragraphs detail what readers can do to invest themselves in ending homelessness. The authors dedicate a whole page to listing start-up/non-profit-ish social entrepreneurship things, some of which crowdfund money for people experiencing homelessness. I find this dystopian. This shouldn't be necessary; this should be a tax-funded initiative, and we shouldn't have to rely on crowdfunding to satisfy the basic needs of the people in this country. Well, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Various levels of government presently fail to widely program basic income, direct cash assistance, affordable medical care, affordable tuition, affordable housing, etc. So, in the meantime, I guess social entrepreneurship is where it's at.

There is a recurring theme in the book on paternalism (a whole chapter and more). Yet, the book does not well address the realities of paternalism (progressive or punitive), with concepts like involuntary psychiatric holds. The book explores (BRIEFLY) the idea of forced hospitalization and does not dwell on how to square this with its previous writing on paternalism. The ethics of involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing homelessness is topical and rich for exploration. Yet, the book gives it only one paragraph (not even in the original chapter on paternalism or mental health). This is about as far as the book goes: “Furthermore, since involuntary treatment can easily be misused, it is critical that health care professionals determine that the individual is in desperate need of hospitalization before they are committed” (p. 197). I was disappointed that the book did not think more about this difficulty.

The authors routinely put “the homeless” in quotations and frequently discuss that they feel this moniker will be as gross (in time) as people referring to LGBTQ+ people as “the homosexuals.” They make this point at least three times in the book, but only the last time did I understand what they were saying. In the first instance, “the homeless” is quickly grouped with “people experiencing homelessness” and “the unhoused” in the argument, and I thought to understand that they didn't like ANY grouping term (as they specifically note that people experiencing homelessness are frequently termed in homogenous ways). The book's final pages clarify that they are espousing support for Person-First Language (which is good!). The authors could have communicated their point more clearly. It is worth recognizing that when we talk about homogenous references vs. specific references to groups of people within a larger group, there is power in that larger grouping category. Adler and Burnes frequently bring up the LGBTQ+ community as a reference point for language (i.e., “the homosexuals” and the concept of being closeted). I hope people do not read this and seek to stop using terms like “people experiencing homelessness” in favor of something more discrete like “a person who couch surfs” or “someone who sleeps in their car.” This distinction makes these groups appear smaller and easier to hide. Being able to have an umbrella term like “the gay community” (and eventually, “the LGBTQ+ community”) helped take us from Stonewall to Obergefell in less than 50 years. We can understand, identify, and respect more specific groupings while holding onto the power that comes from big numbers.

Finally, I had some concerns about the writing. The authors have striven for so much organization that they have overorganized, and as a result, the book is repetitive. Some of the same stories and anecdotes appear several times, and this is not necessary in a book that's fewer than 250 pages. Each chapter ends with a “Key Takeaways” section, which repeats some elements of the previous 5 or 10 pages of the chapter. Then, the penultimate chapter (“Fixing Broken Systems”) goes chapter-by-chapter with suggestions, restating the same statistics or stories. These notes, which were so powerful in their first use, are drained with every subsequent recurrence because they feel like disorganization rather than being the beat of a theme. In a second edition, I would suggest doing away with Chapter 12 and integrating solution sections in each topic chapter, allowing more efficient use of the reader's time and the book's page count.

Mechanically, the writing is passable but not great. Sometimes, this is just me being fussy about a terrible abundance of adverbs (the most criminal of these is on page 145: “One of the most ubiquitous developments” — ubiquitous means everywhere or totally! Skim away all of this unneeded text. Let's get on with it!). But sometimes, the phrasing is so poor as to appear careless and misleading to the reader. The most notable is on page 96: “And many local public housing authorities make it illegal to rent to someone with a felony conviction...” The problem is that a layperson may read this and somehow think that PHA's get to tell renters who they can and can't rent to — they can't. PHAs cannot determine what is and isn't illegal; they can only set policy within the guidelines set by Congress and, to a lesser extent, HUD. To say that PHAs can “make it illegal” is misleading. PHAs can and do set rules about approving people with felony convictions for vouchers- a bad practice that should be explained clearly in this text so that people can understand who sets that policy and to whom they should advocate in their community.

——

Overall, I would recommend this book to the layperson for a good primer on homelessness broadly and the ways many different systems intersect to make it difficult to escape it. The book could benefit by offering more information to the reader, such as who sets policies where and how to engage in advocacy around them. I am concerned that many of this book's solutions revolve around social entrepreneurs benefiting from unpaid volunteer work and, to a much lesser extent, local non-profits where direct service could help, but not at all around direct advocacy to local, State, and Federal policymakers.

(1) “Moral injury is the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” https://moralinjuryproject.syr.edu/about-moral-injury/

(Edit July 2024: while talking with my mom recently, I found out that we weren't in a section 8 apartment — we were in something that was low income, but they wouldn't accept section 8. Those visits I remember to the housing authority were applying, but either not getting or getting but not finding somewhere to take it, apparently. I corrected the above paragraph.)

An incredible book which has aged at once splendidly and terribly. Some parts are flat out depressing to read as decades have passed with very little improvement (and in some parts, decline).

Some of Sagan's recommendations feel so impossible at this point that it almost sounds like someone shouting at the sky.

A lot to process.

I really enjoyed this, though am having a hard time figuring out what I'd like to say about it. I found the exploration of sex and gender pretty extraordinary for late 60s science fiction, prescient even for today (the afterword has some good additional notes on how it was perceived then and how it has aged). I was a little surprised at how many concepts and words I stumbled upon that have become more or less grammar in science fiction (notably, ansible).There are a few lines that I really like, that stood above the rest for me on this, my first read:“‘We are not a sophisticated people.'” Perhaps this doesn't stand as well outside of its context. This is one of our primary characters comparing a neighboring government (a “full-blown bureaucracy”) that has developed Orwellian methods of population control and thought-policing. A few lines before, there is a discussion of the Farms and how the neighboring government would boast about them. This lie in the truth of the thing is a theme throughout the book that I found fascinating.That line pairs well with a line about 50 pages before, also comparing these governments, with the monarchy the ‘more primitive' of the two: “It was odd that in the less primitive society, the more sinister note was struck.”It's hard not to think about [b:1984 61439040 1984 George Orwell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657781256l/61439040.SX50.jpg 153313] here, and maybe [b:Brave New World 5129 Brave New World Aldous Huxley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129.SY75.jpg 3204877] (though this one I've never given a thorough read and always sort of glazed over).Later in the book, there begins an exploration of nationalism and patriotism. “Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it.I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? ...“(Another dash of Orwell in the “un” language, to my eye.)And then:“And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?”I'll be reflecting on the book for a while, but these all stand out to me.

Reading this is like being tucked into a warm bed and feeling absolutely comfortable.

A few favorite lines from this readthrough:

* “However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

* ...“the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it.”

* “Ten million years of planning and work gone just like that. Ten million years, Earthman, can you conceive of that kind of time span? A galactic civilization could grow from a single worm five times over in that time. Gone.” He paused. “Well, that's bureaucracy for you.”

* “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.“

* “And I write novels!” chimed in the other cop. “Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!”

* “...an acute attack of no curiosity.”

One of my favorite of the Dark Tower series. I love that this is basically an Arthurian Western, what a rare (to my eye) genre. There is the romance, the suspense, even horror, that make it so enjoyable to re-read. I don't have any long or complex thoughts. I am just so pleased to be revisiting the Tower quest again. That I can come back after years and be reading it and hoping things change and knowing that ka's like a wind — it heightens these.

My second time reading this, about 10 years later. When an author as works like The Stand, and The Shining (not to mention huge worlds and explorations of them, like The Dark Tower series), it's hard to point to a magnum opus. Still, I wonder if this is it.

11/22/63 isn't a horror like many of King's works, not really. Yet, it features some horrific events, with the same can't-put-the-book-down grip. It may well be his most romantic book - and is there any kind of story that carries romance like time travel?

This capped a month of King for me, which started with On Writing (I suppose I read that in October, but I'm counting it) and included Carrie, Fairy Tale, The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, Duma Key, and ended with 11/22/63. I haven't read such a concentrated dose of King's work since High School. I had such a good time! It taught me a lot about things King does in his work, phrases he likes, and themes that recur in his work. Mostly, it made clear to me things that I do that I took from King over the years.

This is the second or third time I've read the book (first time reading the Tenth Anniversary Edition). I love King's writing, and his advice on writing here is short (maybe not always sweet) and to the point.

I'm going to reply to this review with a comment or two tomorrow so I can port over some of my highlights and tabs from the physical book to goodreads for my future reference.