Becca
Like a modern Sholem Aleichem, carrying on in the rich tradition of Yiddish novels that are deeply engrained in Jewish diaspora life without necessarily a religious point of view. Similarly to classic Yiddish novels, this one also has a strong Labor-rights and immigrant rights focus. I just found this book downright fun without much else to say about it. I really enjoyed Little Ash and the angel, although I didn't love the sideplot about the angel becoming more mortal, and I also wish that some of the restrictions and supernatural elements about the angel would have been protected throughout the novel, instead of it learning to speak all languages. I felt a little funny at the inversion of Aramaic being the one language angels don't know to it being the only language the angel spoke, but this also seems accurate, in that no one else speaks Aramaic anymore. But, anyway, overall the world needs more Yiddish literature revival, even if it's in English (but I would pay a lot of money to have a copy of this translated into Yiddish.)
This is a sweet little book that is mostly about Sasha Sagan's life and gratitude to her parents, Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan. It is clearly inspired by their work: writing clearly and spaciously about how the marvels of science and the rational world can invoke a sense of awe and spirituality and exploring a non-supernatural intention for religion and connection.
It was interesting to me that for a book about atheism, it is also a profoundly Jewish book. When Sasha talks about the atheists that found meaning in awe in the scientific world being people like her father, Einstein and Feynman, it's not a coincidence that these are all Jewish atheists. To riff on a classic Jewish joke: the G-d they don't believe in is specifically the Jewish G-d. This is important because so many atheists in America are culturally Christian and talk about atheism in a way that is specifically about rejecting Christianity. For Jews, participation in ritual life is not predicated on belief, and the blending of ritual and spirituality with atheism is simpler. This is clear when Sagan talks about her atheistic approaches to Shabbat, Passover and other Jewish traditions.
A trainee came to my office in tears a few years ago, to ask how to move forward in a world where we are constantly caring for sick and sometimes dying children. The only thing I could tell him was that religion was the technology that humanity had invented and refined over millenia to deal with hardship and that using this technology did not require any belief, just a willingness to trust that feeling part of something larger, finding rituals that take us out of the day-to-day and being in community. Sasha Sagan paints a way to do this in a world where many people have religious trauma, and/or do not hold supernatural beliefs, reverse engineering the technology to include: textures of time that relate to the seasons/days of the week/times of day, moments for rest and recuperation, moments for self-denial and empathy for those with less abundance, moments for joy and grief and awareness of being alive and this being a temporary state.
It is more of a reflective piece than a practical piece, but I enjoyed it and will come back to it.
I have been a long-time Ann Leckie fan, but in long-form I only enjoyed the Imperial Radch books, and I don't usually enjoy short stories at all, so I was hesitant approaching this, but it was mind-blowingly good. Each story had a new take, even when it felt like it was going to retread speculative fiction genre conventions. Almost all of the stories were about negotiation, persuasion and diplomacy and I liked that it felt like they were in dialogue with each other, but each story had a unique perspective to add.
I thought the first third, the stand alone stories, were shockingly the strongest: I really liked the first-contact and symbiosis set up of the titular story, which really immersed me in the setting and world very quickly.
Hesperia and Glory also packed a punch in its short pages, about how perception defines reality
Another Word for World, which is clearly a descendent of Ursula Le Guin's A Word for World is Forest cut to the quick with its exploration on how well-meaning people could still fail to connect across linguistic and cultural boundaries
The imperial Radch stories were in fact the weakest, in part because they were all quite distant from the Radch we know. If they hadn't been marked as belonging to the same universe, they could easily have stood alone. The only one I remember is She Commands Me and I Obey, another great look at negotiation and what happens when we take the status quo for granteed.
The Raven Tower stories were somehow very successful (even though I really didn't like the Raven Tower?) with the one exception that each of them recited the rules for the gods not being able to lie – it would have been better if they'd been edited to be in a collection made to be read together. Of those, the Snake's Wife was by far the strongest – a disturbing read, but captivating and really a capstone on the themes of negotiation, manipulative practices and the ways that scheming to get the upper hand can fail.
Overall, a really strong collection organized along a powerful central theme with very little redundancy or “duds”
I don't really know what to make of this one. I really liked Jahren's discussion of botany and chemistry when it was happening. Jahren is hard on people: her students, her co-workers, but also herself and she pulled no punches in describing herself, which led to challenging passages where I was cringing at her condescension towards colleagues and students. I liked how she depicted herself learning and growing, and making her way through bipolar disease. It was truly vulnerable and authentic. Nonetheless, I don't think I'd send one of my students to rotate through her lab – it's clear that she embraces the sort of work-to-death environment that academia is struggling to grow out of.
Speaking of generation gaps, I was surprised to find that Jahren has barely more than a decade on me. From the way she described being a woman in science, I would have guessed more like three decades. Indeed, many of her faculty members were women, and my own experience in overlapping years in the life sciences was that there was very little overt sexism.
I loved reading about her relationship with Bill, her lab manager, but I note his conspicuous absence from the press releases, her lab website and many of her publications. It's hard to read about how she sees him as a partner while he's underpaid and underacknowledged for the work he does. Finding grants to pay people is brutal – I know that personally – but now she's a big deal and he could have fancy titles and a nice profile on the lab website but he's not even mentioned. Perhaps that's how he wants it, but it's weird to write a book about your friendship with an employee and then not use any of your employer privileges to support said employee.
I read speculative fiction in the undying hope that something will come along and surprise and make me find a new perspective on the world. It doesn't happen often, but it's electric every time. Rosewater is that book - I loved everything about this new take on alien encounters, psychics and oppressive governments. It's clear that Dr. Thompson has a firm grounding in science (he's a psychiatrist), with decently well-thought out explanations for how alien physiology works and impacts human cognition in this world. The sociology of the aliens and their motivations are...alien – distinct from other first encounter books I've read, and I enjoyed the futuristic Nigerian setting. If I had a complaint (and I always do), I would say many of the sex scenes are gratuitous and a little uncomfortable, but that was a minor annoyance. I liked the time-skipping back and forth as each time jump revealed a little bit more of the global setting and Kaaro's backstory and motivations (the perspective shifting is also something I've encountered from a number of Nigerian writers
The central theory is interesting: that politics has become a central identity point in America that predicts everything about us down to where we live. Since 2008, that has largely become conventional wisdom, so long lists of things that political identity predicts (including ones that feel obvious because they're political, like school choice and book bannings) feel a little obvious. The conclusion that polarization of physical places resulting in people never meeting those with differing political views, and that this increases polarization and extreme opinions is important, but no solutions are suggested.
But to a modern reader, the changes of the last 16 years since the book was published make a lot of the premises feel silly and shallow. “There will never be political violence in the US” is a claim that looks pretty stupid after 2021. 2016, 2020 and 2024 have a lot to say to the “hyperpolarization of the 2004 election”. Indeed, I started reading this book in 2016, and couldn't quite stomach it and the distance between my reality and where the book was, and have struggled every time I've picked it up for the last 8 years.
This was a weird read. Foer sets off to write a book that is part autobiographical, part about the mnemonist community (competitive memorizers) and part about the science of memory. The third part is by far the weakest – if you've read any other pop science about memory, you've read everything here. The first part is also not that strong: it's mostly Foer hanging around a bunch of mnemonists. And as I quickly learned, mnemonists are not the sort of people I would want to hang out with: self-absorbed, quick to turn things into a lewd reference, under-employed and drunken. But none of that matters, I imagine people mostly come for the act of competitive memorizing.
Foer starts out the book by declaring that people like me don't exist, which was kind of a surreal book start. By people like me, I mean people with naturally strong memories. I've had an unusually strong memory my whole life: when the waiter doubles back to say an ordered dish is out of stock, I can recite the menu verbatim for my dining companions, barely having glanced at it; I work a field that requires memorizing hundreds of rare diseases (many of which I've never actually seen) and the associated features; I spent most of high school memorizing long swathes of poetry for fun (including the entirety of the Wasteland).
Foer's central argument is that everyone has the same memory and that any exceptions are synesthetes who can encode information visually. And that's where I really fell off the rails with him: I'm not a visual processor at all. I remember words. Which, of course, Foer states as impossible. He argues words have to be transformed into visual features to be memorized. For a while, I thought that maybe literally decades of chanting torah and memorizing each vowel sound and trope pattern explained the difference between how my memory works and how he claims the universal memory works, but then I remembered that my father memorizing a thousand digits of pi by remembering the aural patterns. So then I thought maybe as Jews, we've been selected for this by memorizing talmud and torah as a culture, but Foer is also Jewish (and does talk about Torah chanting for his Bar Mitzvah), so who knows.
Why does it matter that this book is aggressively not about me? Because I think it takes something that a small group of mnemonists do and makes it into a universal rule for memorizing: memories have to be visual and obscene. Memorizing a poem or a deck of cards isn't visual or obscene? First memorize an incredibly complex system of how to encode this information as lewd visuals, and then quickly transform one to the other and Bob's your uncle. This seems absurd to me, why not just memorize a poem by...memorizing it? But then I started to think about what I knew about the study of memory, and I know from the educational literature that people remember information that they've needed to transform or encode. I realized it doesn't matter if you transform the deck of cards into lewd visual images, or a rhyming scheme or a patter song, it's engaging with and transforming the content that makes it memorable. Foer considers, but dismisses this, but it's actually a fascinating central point because it's much more universalizable: most people with jobs are not going to spend hours first memorizing schemes that involve pop stars and specific sex acts just in case they need to memorize something else later, but a more flexible, lower upfront cost schema for memorizing is useful. Foer himself talks about how being a mnemonist isn't actually useful in any way – the mnemonists he encounters (and Foer himself) rudely forget people's names, miss appointments and all of the general scourges of daily memory
Two things that I will operationalize from the book: I am convinced that the idea of a spatial memory is useful. I'd read about memory palaces before but never found them useful. Foer's specific guidance to have multiple, each real life places that you have a strong spatial sense of, and to use them to order information by following a path around the space is very useful. The other is the major rule for memorizing numbers, encoding each digit into a phoneme so that a short number, like a credit card number or a phone number, (or a medical record number!) can become a distinctive word.
As someone named Rebecca, people always asked me “like the book” all the time and all I knew about the book was (a) it is old, (b) Rebecca was dead from the beginning (c) the narrator was unnamed and (d) it was gothic
For a book pushing 100, it holds up decently well. The unnamed protagonist, the looming atmosphere of Rebecca both are deeply evocative literary choices. The pacing is decent, although the protagonist's flights of fancy (social anxiety?) got a little old. I liked having a narrator who was as unfamiliar with high society at the time as the modern reader was.
The Atlantic headline of the book review for the Hunter was “Tana French has broken the murder mystery...can she put it back together?”
I didn't read their review, but the answer is no, she can't. Look, I get her point: glorification of police is causing political problems in real life and it feels dirty to keep writing police books. But then just...stop. Don't do this, it's sad and it's more sad because we all know how talented Tana French can be.
Since there is literally no plot for the first 179 pages, I spent a lot of time thinking about where Tana French went wrong with the non Dublin Murder Squad books. Yes, it's rural, which is usually not of high interest to me, but the Witch Elm was urban and not much better. I think it's that I really don't care very much about Cal Hooper and Trey Reddy and Lena Dunne and Mart. They have no real interiority except a desire for peace, a shared reticence for speaking and a loose allegiance to the truth.
The plot starts on page 179, which you'd think would improve things, but it weirdly feels the need to close the loop at all times, so first Cal tells the narrator which lie he'll tell, then he tells it, then he tells Lena he told it, then he thinks about how Trey will feel about him telling it, then we hear about how Trey feels about him telling it and then Mart comes around and summarizes how the town feels. Over, and over and over again.
One could be forgiven for not realizing that this is supposed to be a murder mystery, even a post-modern one, since no one dies until page 275. It's not very mysterious, though, the murder and the motive were obvious to me less than a third of the way in the 100 pages between then and the reveal, simply because the book is so sparse that there was literally only one choice.
I never would have picked up a book about a retiree living on the countryside and navigativing his relationship with the townsfolk if it hadn't been written by Tana French, and I think, sadly after a third dud in a row, I'm done with Tana French.
There are a few touchpoints that I can say were truly essential to the trajectory of my life. One of them was going to college with one of Reb Zalman's sons. I didn't know who he was (or R'Zalman) at the time, and I'd never heard of Renewal Judaism. I already considered myself observant, with a deeply intellectualized Judaism. And here was this other religiosity, basically sideswipping me, encouraging me to instead enter religion through emotions. It shaped how I think of myself as a Jew, how I show up to services. I was talking to a friend about it a few years ago and he suggested I actually read some of R' Zalman's writings.
This was everything I might imagined it would be – an honest, vulnerable, thoughtful approach to what we literally do when we pray and how we can make it feel real, meaningful, emotional and worthwhile. R'Zalman helps prayer feel real and living and applicable to daily life with both concrete tips on how to approach prayer with intention and stay present as well as bigger philosophical musings on the ways that spirituality can feel distant from us. This is really a must read for all Jews, but especially those who feel like religion has nothing to offer them
I wasn't sure whether Kelly Link's magic would work in long (or ultra) long form, but I found this wildly successful while being true to the genre that is unique to Link. Rather than read a Link book linearly or narratively, you have to pay attention to the puzzle of how you feel when characters talk about coins or doors or rabbits or wolves or structural racism and follow that feeling to figure out what's actually happening.
Perhaps as a necessary concession (although a move I found kind of disappointing), Link places three info-dump chapters roughly evenly throughout the book to literally catchup anyone for whom creepy vibes are insufficient explanation. Each of these follow an exposition that takes the narrative in an expansive dimension, opening up the story from the part that proceeded it. I found the first two thirds of the book wildly successful proceeding in this way, and the back third a little too conventional, while still quite good.
Overall, the book reminded me a lot of the best of Dianna Wynne Jones, where you start to believe that anyone could secretly be anyone else, while also being Loki and while you're unlikely to guess right, you're rewarded for being skeptical about fixed identity.
I also found the book thematically successful as well as tonally so. The major themes of the book: the structures that we take for granted even when they don't work for us, and the magically mundanity of love of all forms were deeply seeded throughout the book without being overpowering. A lot of the negative reviews weren't prepared for the balance between epic plot and quiet meditations on the power of relationships and identity and change, but that's what made the book so worth it for me.
This book has enjoyed a lot of hype, but it wasn't really my cup of tea. I adored some of the essays – especially the ones on parenting, and the ones that really delved into mixing botany with indigenous culture. Two things really got in the way of it being great for me, though: one was that I tend to read in chunks of time and by the end of half an hour the essays would feel very monotone and redundant. I suppose that Kimmerer would say that I wasn't reading as an honorable harvest and that what I should be doing was small moments of mindful reading over time to give the essays space to grow. Which, I guess, leads me to the second point: I found Kimmerer so disdainful - she tries to say she doesn't disdain people, just ways of life, but she also clearly looks down on her students, biologists who don't talk about love and beauty in their scientific presentations, city-dwellers, people who get bored during long speeches and so much more. She comes off as thinking that only her people have insights like “rituals that celebrate the whole community are good” (it turns out non-indigenous people also have spiritual and community rituals).
I got the strong sense reading the book that she would hate me, a biologist who thinks things are cool but not beautiful, who loves being with other people in dense urban cities, who is easily bored despite believing in gratitude. And I just didn't enjoy reading a book that made me feel bad about myself but not in a productive way.
I really enjoyed a lot of the concepts in this book. Angeline Boulley really set out to ground a story in the Native culture that was the most familiar to her – the Ojibwe people specifically of the Sault Ste Marie area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There is a very strong sense of place here. It takes about 50 pages to get into the story and not feel like a history and cultural lesson about the region and people and language, but once that happens the story has a propulsive power. I really liked Daunis as the main character, and her connection to her Ojibwe community and her elders, as well as to science and her white family, while not being able to be enrolled as a tribal member. The interplay between community, family, heritage and individual identity was a major theme and I was very drawn to it.The romance is a little unrealistic and honestly just distracting, and I think relatedly the denouement was a little too conspiracy and high drama for me - I think it would have allowed the rest of the book to shine if there was a little more nuance and realism there. Rather than a 17-year-old controls a bunch of adults and teens, including his mother who is a judge I think this really undermines that gritty reality of the majority of the book, that domestic violence and addiction are major problems in indigenous communities and this is a very low priority for law enforcement.
Naomi Klein has a very incisive view of the current world - the strengths and weaknesses of both the left and right, and why people slip between the cracks and land in the Mirror World full of its own set of truths and news and facts that reflect, but don't agree with the views and values of the consensus reality. I like her dawning compassion about the way that the left can be too rigid and not reflective enough, and that closing people out creates conditions for this mirroring. Usually books around a theme bend reality to fit the theme, but Klein found a lot of very honest ways in which doppelgangers apply to our current reality.
There are no firm conclusions, but the raw honesty, the uncertainty, the struggling with how complicated things are – I think that's the point. In particular, her handling of Israel and Zionism is beautifully nuanced
Totally blown away by this second entry in Between Earth and Sky. This may be the only epic fantasy series that I've ver truly loved. I am just so compelled by how Roanhorse does this fascinating, intricately plotted politics while keeping her characters realistic humans whose self-interests, self-doubts and relationships consistently figure into what happens. I love the world building, the nuanced and often challenging characters, and the many factions each with many subdivisions. This is fantasy at its best: creative, brilliant and absorbing.
I think after reading her fiction and her nonfiction, some people are clearly Dara Horn people and I am not those people. Not that anything she wrote was wrong. And she was very clear that her opinion is that Jewish writing doesn't need to have a moral or a narrative thread. But there was no there there. It was just a discussion of the antisemitism in the world and a conclusion that the only choice we have is to keep being Jewish. Most Jews in the world already knew both of those pieces before we even knew the ABC's and most non-Jews, unfortunately, won't read it. The essays didn't necessarily fit. Some of them were, in my opinion, uncharitably picky about just how a Holocaust museum exhibit did or didn't hit Horn's specific personal criteria for what made a thoughtful exhibit, or whether a virtuous gentile was unselfish enough while saving hundreds of Jews and at one point Jewish Shakespeare critics who didn't agree with her ten-year-old son's interpretation of Shylock's monologue. It's too bad it didn't live up to its excellent title.
I'm having trouble squaring the goodreads reviews with the book I just read, and I've concluded that speculative fiction has come a long way in the last decade. Seraphina, to me, is derivative of every high fantasy novel ever written, with a vaguely Middle Ages European setting with saints and whatnot and a Strong Female Main Character who has really no defining characteristics except her Dark Secret and her Cunning Intellect like...every other fantasy novel ever written in the 2010s. I found the novel poorly paced and all of the twists utterly predictable. It was fine overall. I think my ten year old who is young enough to have not read every fantasy novel ever written will enjoy it, but mostly for me, it helped remind me how amazing, diverse and creative the field is now, and I'm thrilled we're free of the 2010s.
How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain
This was a light and humorous read. I liked the framing device of supervillainy and the dry humor. But I think the pop science nonfiction was distributed unevenly with some chapters have a lot more interesting factoids than others. In particular, the first chapters were the best with lots of new info and the later chapters dragged more
Pitched as an exploration of whether free will exists and what to do about it if it doesn't, but really a broader neuroscience review about the genetic and environmental influences on behavior. I deeply enjoy Sapolsky, who is accessible, funny and opinionated (and uses musicals for examples!) but I think some of his conclusions were a little over-argued without truly discussing what does “free will” mean and can we have a sense of self while also having a high degree of biological determinism? He agrees that environment influences behavior extensively, but in the discussion about how we mete out justice, he doesn't really follow through with that to the obvious conclusion that we should identify environmental factors that will more positively shape behavior and then do those things, for example. Some of the digressions through chaos theory feel not very on-topic and Sapolsky admits he isn't an expert in this topic.
Still, an amazing book, especially first third with heavy incorporation of modern neuroscience research, including neuroendocrinology, where Sapolsky particularly shines.
Apparently I read this some time in 2023, and then forgot about it. Went to read my new copy, and it felt strangely familiar. Indeed, it's twin is sitting on the shelf in my bookcase. How very apt.
I love Sarah Gailey - the rawness; the way her characters transcend the rules for femininity even to the reader's discomfort. This was great, twisty, reflective and quick-paced. What does identity mean? How much are we shaped by who we are versus what happens to us?
This was fascinating— Ronson combines personally interviews with people notoriously shamed on the internet, work with psychology experts and a ton of first person journalism to explore shaming and our responses. There's no easy answers here — in the afterword he says basically “some people prioritize ideology over humans; I prefer humans” and that captures a lot of this book: there's a lot of humanity here. Which means a lot of care for human beings and thoughtful approaches to not what “feels right” but actually helps people do right. There's not shaming of shamers, either — Ronson is also honest about his own temptations to scoff at people over the internet. For such a firebrand of a topic it's calm and personalized. And very readable.
NK Jemisin is an epic world-builder. She crafts worlds that make so much internal sense that she can then write an entire book about what it means to live in the margins between the communities or not fit into them, and because we get the world so well it makes sense. As someone who loves interstitial spaces, I loved this book about people who are trying to figure out where they fit into the world when they don't quite fit into the previously made boxes