Becca
When I get stressed, I read pop-linguistics. This was fun: exploring the “verbal” quirks that happen in internet spaces, primarily social media. I particularly liked McCulloch grouping generations of early adaptors, etc. and how different generations, exposed to the internet in different ways, communicate differently. As an Old Internet Person, I've definitely kept a lot of capitalization and format my communication more for e-mails than texts, which I struggle to explain to people only a few years younger than me. I found this very light – McCulloch is an academic, but definitely not looking to have a completionist approach here – but memorable: I found myself referring to McCulloch's findings for months after.
I was really excited to read this book on why women aren't getting married any more. But I wasn't wowed. I found Traister's treatment of the subject to be very superficial – focusing on what she and her friends were experiencing, with pretty limited deeper analysis. When she did turn to statistics, she employed a lot of motivated reasoning including interpretation of statistics that I didn't believe were significantly different. It was clear sometimes that she had a pet theory that she couldn't let go of, for instance, when she talked about how urbanization made single life easier, brushing off that the woman in her exemplary anecdote had to move out of NYC to Virginia to survive as a single mother. Also, her work really focused on singleness among highly educated, affluent white women. She had a chapter on African American women, but the breezy anecdotal tone of the book really didn't translate well to this. Even more than other chapters it felt like she interviewed one black woman (Nancy Giles) and generalized from there in favor of her hypothesis. Traister herself is married and waited until she was married to have children, and she really resists acknowledging that the postponement of both marriage and children among highly educated, affluent women is a different beast socially, psychologically and from a woman's liberation perspective than the childbirth before (and instead) of marriage among less privileged women. She references [b:Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage 73305 Promises I Can Keep Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage Kathryn Edin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438872307l/73305.SY75.jpg 1500229] a few times, but keeps returning to “my life is great! I have a career and female friends and a husband and kids. Isn't single life amazing for women?!
Bayes theory is cute. Pop nonfiction math books seem incapable of being patronizing on one extreme or invoking their math theorem as an abstract magical spell on the other. I prefer the later, which is what this is. How did we find Russian submarines? We cast Bayes at them. Sometimes, even as someone very familiar with Bayes theorem I found these invocations impossible to understand what was literally happening, but overall, this is an easy and mathy read. 3.5 stars.
The best heist movies are filled with intricate planning, last minute challenges thwarted by “actually we meant to do that” reveals, and a cast with a diverse set of strange backgrounds that make them uniquely equipped to pull the whole thing off. So in that sense, Six of Crows is up among the best of the best. The generic fantasy world is SOOOOOO generic and the ethnicities are very real world, painted over with excessive apostrophes so you know it's fantasy, which at times felt a little uncomfortable (like the exotic fantasy version of Roma), but you can tell Bardugo means the diversity earnestly even if she sometimes gets it wrong. And the heist was so very heisty.
“weird” seems to be the word to describe this book. When I was a kid, there was a restaurant that set up these miniature tableaus that you could view through an eye viewer. I'm super short, so I could only stand on my tiptoes and catch glimpses of the edges of the scene. That's how this novella made me feel: Mieville created an expansive world and showed us slivers of it. There was no clear setting, the thinnest characters and definitely no plot. But there was atmosphere in spades. There will be fragments and passages that stick with me for such a long time.
In your life, you write three books. This is the one for a reader because some things can't NOT be written. But you can still have secrets.
This is the book that reminded me that reading is in and of itself a skill. This was challenging to follow and catch snippets, but so rewarding to read.
This was a lovely exploration of the immigrant narrative rewritten through the eyes of mythical creatures. The Jewish immigrants in NYC bring a golem, stalwart, stoic and short-lived. The Syrians ring a jinni, tempestuous, emotional and millenia old. The golem is masterless and wishes for a master, while the jinni is enslaved and wants to be free. They fight crime! Okay, not literally, but they do defeat an evil rabbi and exorcise an ice cream vendor. It's delightful and speculative fiction at its best: using the metaphor of the supernatural to explore the bounds of our wordl
My six-year-old has developed this very polite habit of calling things she doesn't like “not my thing.” This was “not my thing.” It's hard to say quite why: I like fantasy and strong female protagonists and good world building, but. Here's the good: the world building was amazing. I loved the idea of the four Londons, and it felt truly original – each felt real and whole. Schwab really excels at invoking a feeling of a place. But. The protagonists fell flat. There was too much violence – pretty much anyone named and not protected by plot armor died within the chapter, and when that happens it's hard to get attached. The plot felt flimsy.
Also, I know it's itself derivative to accuse a fantasy book of being a Lord of the Rings derivative, but the MacGuffin was an amazingly powerful malevolent artifact that enervated the users, but whose possession and use was addictive. Using the MacGuffin (primarily to be invisible) allowed the enemy to spy on them. The main quest was to return the MacGuffin to the place where it was made in order to destroy it.
Yeah, not my thing.
The term “scope creep” may as well have been invented for this book. The core concept is fascinating: Luke Dittrich, the grandson of Dr. William Scoville, the neurosurgeon who performed the temporal lobotomy on patient H.M., who inspired the movie Memento writes a book about all of that. The problem seems to be that Dittrich couldn't decide which book to write.
Therefore, he includes fascinating bits like the admission of his own grandmother – Scoville's wife – to the inpatient psychiatric facility were Scoville performed lobotomies. He departs into memoir at times. He explores the entire history of frontal lobotomy (at some length) and digresses into this history of psychiatry. These subjects come with no form of organization and many of them don't really reach a satisfying conclusion as they get discarded for something else. I found myself anxious to finish but disinterested in actually picking up the book. Frustratingly, Dittrich concludes the book with a brief synopsis of the ways that H.M.'s brain was anatomically different than expected – a fascinating topic that he left basically untouched.
Also, usually an author's closeness to a subject makes it an ideal topic, but in this case I felt very uncomfortable with Dittrich's relationships to the scientists in this story. He is profoundly unhappy with his grandfather's work, calling his surgery on H.M. unforgivable and rash despite quoting experts who disagree. I think that there's a lot more nuance to performing a surgery on a patient with intractable epilepsy before the invention of modern antiepileptics. Similarly, Dittrich's mother's best friend, the psychiatrist who had scientific custody of H.M. in his later life, is painted as a territorial and vindictive villain.
The parts that are there, that are reflective and that are relevant are fascinating. So, three stars for content and concept.
There seem to be two main camps on Meddling Kids: Those who find this satirical Scooby Doo/Cthulu mash-up deeply profound and those who found it twee, slow paced and with annoying characters.
I was neither – I thought the characters were likable enough and the action was well-paced. I didn't mind the portmanteaus or the spontaneous shifts into stage directions. If anything, I thought that these really highlighted the surrealist mix that Meddling Kids was trying to be and wished that this was a more frequent choice, rather than an occasional slip. Which kind of sums up how I felt about this book overall: I wanted it turned up to eleven. I really wanted Cantero to be fully satirical, referential and really stretch what these extreme genres could do and instead I mostly got Lovecraft, especially by the end of the book. There was a lot of Cthuluoid monsters and survival horror and not much of the Teen Sleuth conceits.
I think that there is something really cool there: as kids, we're scared of everything that goes bump in the night. Teenage skepticism shows that it is all just a Man in a Mask, but maturity shows that there are deeper, more existential horrors than what we'd even previously conceived. But those ideas aren't really explored.
Tara Westover's account of growing up essentially uneducated in a rural survivalist Mormon family in Idaho has been already much analyzed. Despite this, I found it very much lived up to my expectations. Tara is thoughtful and her portrayal of the different stages of her life, from naive acceptance, to teenage rebellion, insecure undergraduate and finally Cambridge doctorage student are each nuanced and well-written. She clearly has strived for an unbiased but personal account of her childhood, buttressing her memoir in several places on her brother's memories as well.
I also found this book terrifying to read – there are two major car accidents, two serious burns, more traumatic head injuries than you can shake a stick at and a handful of broken bones, all essentially untended. It's a miracle no one got tetanus
This is honestly my platonic ideal of comfort reading. The mystery is tricky enough to not be predictable, but also not so obscure that the plot twists were frustrating. The main characters were fun and witty with snappy dialogue. I liked the exploration of Haden syndrome and the meaning of disability and virtual communities. I should read more Scalzi
I found this a shallow but enjoyable exploration of the trendy foods of the last few decades and who the major movers and shakers in those food fields were. Sax doesn't particularly get into the whys of particular trends, so I think there's more depth that could have been there, but it was fun enough.
Spy Dust: Two Masters of Disguise Reveal the Tools & Operations That Helped Win the Cold War
I found this a very light and enjoyable review of Antonia and Jonna Mendez's experience in the CIA. There's some politics and office drama that didn't totally make sense to me, but by and large, it was a fascinating account of the crazy things our government has done. It almost makes conspiracy theorists look sane.
I found the story of Hedy Lamarr, which I didn't really know prior to this novel, completely fascinating. Not just a film starlet, Hedy was an Austrian Jew, married to a fascist warlord prior to escaping to the US where she invited frequency hopping. It's a story of transformation from resignation and despair to claiming agency. But I think I would have rather read an actual biography than a fictionalized pseudo-biography. I don't really enjoy real-person fictionalizations and I found Benedict's dialogue quite twee.
I made a bad choice and decided that I'd start 2019 with a reading unit! I'd read books on real life stories of female spies! It'd be all of my favorite things: underappreciated historic women, cryptography and espionage. The downside is that even the coolest topics get repetitive after awhile, especially if you include a compendium like Code Girls.Look, there's nothing wrong with Code Girls, but similar to other historic compedia (e.g. Radium Girls), it struggles for want of a focus, jumping among characters that it doesn't do enough to differentiate. Juxtaposed with the overlapping [b:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies 32025298 The Woman Who Smashed Codes A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies Jason Fagone https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479580153s/32025298.jpg 52666460], the shallowness of its approach became readily apparent. This was also very true in its treatment of cryptography – mathy readers be forewarned.I think it's a great intro to the topic, but it didn't hold my interest as someone who already had a strong background in WWII cryptanalysis.
Quinn has clearly done her research: nearly every single beat of her story about female spies in WWI is hold up by primary sources. Usually I feel uncomfortable about fictionalizations of real people, but this is such an untouched area of history, that I loved seeing these characters come to life. The stories about how women managed to sneak in and out of occupied European countries, and pass messages on hat pins, hidden by the misconceptions that women would never participate in war efforts were fascinating.
Like other reviewers, I thought the book as a whole was less than a sum of its parts – I liked Charlie, and I was interested in her search following WWII, but it was much thinner. I was hoping for more about the war effort in WWII. It was vaguely alluded to at various points that Eve worked WWII, but never really explored.
This is a crazy romp of a story: Elizebeth Smith, bored of women's work and afraid she'll never be taken seriously as a scholar first gets taken in by a larger than life self-made millionaire and self-declared colonel, where she joins his intentional community as one of several women looking for secret messages in the Shakespeare folios, to prove that they were indeed written by Sir Francis Bacon. However, once the Great War starts, she finds herself the only person in the country with any serious expertise in codes. So she, and her future husband forge the field of cryptanalysis. Following the war, mostly discarded by the military, she continues to work for the coast guard to decrypt coded messages by the mob as they traffic moonshine. So she is well-poised to lead the American effort when WWII truly becomes the war of codes.
Despite my obsession with the British female codebreakers of Bletchley Park, I knew less about the American side: we decrypted Engima! And defeated a bizarre secret South American-takeover plot!
If I had one complaint it's that the book to some extent sidelined her husband, William Friedman. This bothers me not just because “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies And Her Husband, the Brilliant Jewish Geneticist, Who Also Smashed Codes” is EVEN more likely to be mistaken for a Markov Chain generated specifically from Becca's Interests, but also, Elizebeth and William made clear that they saw themselves as equals and I think they would have preferred it that way.
Nonetheless, this is a fascinating piece of history, well told by Fagone.
I initially only read Sagittarius, which was published online, and I found it haunting: a beautiful parable about the tension of having children that are atypical and the joy that they can bring. It was a perfect short story in pacing, in spare but beautiful prose and in rapidly drawn, immediately sympathetic characters.
I liked Sagittarius so much that I bought the collection. Sagittarius is certainly the best, closely followed by the ending story, Bereavement. Both use speculative elements sparingly to highlight unspeakable but universal human experiences.
Otherwise, I thought the stories were pretty good, and since I'm not a short story reader, that's honestly pretty high praise. I think Hbrek really understands the form: short stories are literary playground to pull out the weird stuff that you can't support for a full novel. Some of them are stuffed full of the sort of luxurious prose that would be too obfuscating to use for more than a dozen pages. Others employ literary hijinks, like non-chronologic storytelling that add a twist and a punch to a 40 page chapter. Hbrek also links his stories – not just characters, but also themes, to good effect. As a result, there's something very satisfying about finishing the work. It felt like the emotional payoff for finishing a novel – like I'd really gone through the normal emotional sequence of reading a book, despite the disparate themes, tones and genres. Overall, I'll keep an eye out for Hbrek in the future.
Jeffrey Toobin is rapidly becoming one of my favorite nonfiction authors: his narrative flows clearly, he has swathes of original research and his analysis is understated but clear. Relatedly, I really liked American Heiress. I'm too young to have a personal memory of the Patty Hearst saga, so like many my age all I knew Patty Hearst was kidnapped, got Stocklholm syndrome, something, something, guest starred in Veronica Mars that one time. The tale as Toobin tells it is more complex.
This is a wide-ranging tale (over 18 months long) that includes the birth and death of the San Francisco counter-culture, the terrorist-style activism unique to the 1970's, tension with the evolving face of feminism, turf wars between the FBI and other branches of government and widespread distrust in the government due to the scandalous actions of the president. Reading through the “best books of the year” in 2018 so many of them are about These Dark Times in America. Toobin reminds us that other Dark Times have come before – in a lot of ways the 70's were worse because Nixon was without precedent. Anyway, the scene and context are set well by the time Toobin introduces us to Patricia Hearst (who hated being called “Patty.”)
Toobin then attempts to recreate all of the events from the formation of the Symbionese Liberation Army – which he paints as alternatingly bumbling and terrifying – the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her involvement in the bank robbery...and then, instead of the story ending there, like I always thought it did, there are months of generally hiding out, followed by all of her SLA captors being killed by the police, Hearst hanging out with the remainder of the SLA who futilely try to send her back to whence she came, a cross country trek, more bank robbing and finally an arrest. Toobin then outlines Hearst's legal strategy and her ultimate conviction and sentencing. All of this, the footnotes make clear, is done on the basis of reams of contemporary notes and interviews. Toobin is meticulous about making clear when any events are at all in doubt.
The story is fascinating in and of itself. Does it speak to something bigger? Well, it ends with a a certain FBI Director Robert Mueller, III sending a pointed letter to then President Clinton arguing that Hearst should not be pardoned because people should be treated the same regardless of their personal wealth or family background.
Lisa Genova invented the genre of “neurofiction,” which seems to be a mash-up of pedantry about neurologic diseases and kind of banal fiction. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't know anything about Huntington. Since I almost certainly know more about Genova does about HD (in that I'm a board certified clinical geneticist and she's...not.) I just got a kind of run-of-the-mill family tension novel.
As part of my job, I get referral e-mails from our international medicine team, bulky with attachments of clinical charts from all around the world. Often this results in me reading them while pacing my office and swearing as the diagnosis dawns on me and I can't tell if the referring team has figured it out. That's how I felt for the first 90 pages of this book: a laundry list of textbook symptoms of HD that seemed to happen absent plot or character development. To the point where I could see it in my own e-mail shorthand in my head: “40s yo m w new onset invol mvmts and labile emotions, ?subacute duration up to 10y. Fhx notable for mother w poss same. High concern for HD, rec urgent appt w genetics for counseling & HTT repeat expansion analysis.” Needless to say, I found those 90 pages stressful rather than enjoyable.
Once the HD cat was out of the bag, the novel swung to focus on Katie, the youngest daughter, stopping along the way to rack up treacly family scenes. Katie was supposed to be the audience self-insert character, but I found her paralysis and self-absorbed self-pity infuriating rather than sympathetic. After the HD textbook checklist had been marked off, it kind of felt like HD could be replaced with basically any family tension McGuffin and the book just felt really generic.
My other complaint was the portrayal of the genetic counselor. As the only authority figure appearing in the book, it really annoyed me that he was a man, while most GCs are female. It seemed to be done on purpose for sexual tension between the GC and Katie, which is just so inappropriate and gross.
Reviewing it, I think it sounds like I hated the book; I didn't, I just found it really bland. I also think this genre is important for encouraging more awareness of HD and genetic disease in general, but I didn't need it.
David Finch has autism, a diagnosis he embraced gleefully as an explanation as to why his marriage cooled off about as soon as it began. Indeed, he brings an autistic focus to trying to understand how he deviates from what he calls marital “best practices.” In doing so, he pulls no punches in explaining his behavior. He is even unflinchingly honest about when his flaws are not well-explained by his autism, for instance in exploring his sexist assumptions about gender dynamics in a marriage.
Unflinching honesty can sometimes be discomfiting in a memoir (see Alison Bechdel's “Are You My Mother?”), but in this case, the combination of Finch's dry humor and his commitment to self-improvement together allow it to be humorous, or at the very least, viewed empathetically.