Calum
After my unsuccessful murder I wasn't unhappy for an entire year.
A couple of diamonds in here but an awful lot of rough. “Reprieve” I enjoyed immensely and brought up repeatedly. I was constantly thinking about his near death experience and subsequent elation as a pretty revealing anecdote about the nature of happiness and sadness, and how relative they are. “An Insult to the Brain” I found really quite funny as a discussion on stories, and how we construct them and find escape and meaning in them. The rest was dated at best, and psychopathic at worst.
I was hit a lot harder by this than the first. In hindsight, The Blade Itself is setup. This book lets the characters breathe a lot more, and gets to have them interact, both directly and in allusion and parallel. It makes me think a great deal about anger, since so many of the characters seem at its mercy. But it's the softer moments, especially “Scars” and the last chapter “Back to the Mud”, which elicited sobs. I don't know if I'd say there is a nihilistic thread to this so far, almost the opposite. Somehow, despite tragedy, it feels hopeful - not explicitly, but nevertheless.
Anybody could be invisible. The real miracle was to be known, to be loved as you were.
I think I tend to have a preference for invisibility. It's probably not my preferred superpower (that would be flight, also a revealing choice) but it's all too often I feel like being able to vanish would be the best option. I wonder what would have happened if I'd had a high school year like Maya's, or even a book like this. Perhaps I'd be a little less avoidant, or perhaps I'd just have more practice at it. The vexing thing with visibility is that I want to be seen, I want the validation just like anyone else. And yet it's agonising; every piece reminds of you of the lack, of your own awareness of your own flaws. It's particularly intolerable when it's coming from a parent, when you're their “whole hearts”. There's no other time when I want more to disappear. And yet the nature of joy is apparently wrapped up in the intolerable - the distinction from pleasure is supposed to be accepting this kind of discomfort, the pressure of becoming known. That's the miracle, if I can let it happen.
City of Illusions feels like it has two main sections, one much cleverer than the other. The majority of the novel is Falk's journey west, which reprises a lot of such journeys west and doesn't feel particularly engaging. Many of the events along the way don't seem to add a ton to the narrative besides giving us more time with Falk himself. The payoff comes at the culmination of the novel, where upon reaching the City Es Toch, we find that Falk is an alien from another world that sent an expedition to Earth. He has had his prior memory erased, and upon recovering it must navigate the hostile city while combining the two experiences. This is a compelling conceit, touching on questions of the sense of self and the nature of truth. I'm also intrigued by the barebones skeleton of how the League of All Worlds fell to the Shing, an enemy whose ability to lie appears to be their sole advantage. I haven't read much in the way of space war, so thinking about how an ansible-connected galactic civilisation could crumble is fascinating. I love that the Hainish universe is able to provide a setting for all sorts of different stories, including this one.
Binyamin Appelbaum produces a stunning overview of the changes in the role and prestige of economists from the 1960s to the present. I majored in economics and think myself fairly conversant, but I was not fully aware of the extent to which economic language and methods are relatively new to society; a shift amounting to nothing less than a revolution. Appelbaum describes how in the 1950s, there were no economists working in the Federal Reserve's leadership, instead being treated there and elsewhere as primarily data analysts. Over the course of the book, he looks at how in fields from taxation and currency valuation, to antitrust and corporate regulation, economists propounded a particular laissez-faire approach to policymaking with often devastating consequences.
What particularly struck me is the naked ideology described in the narrative. Milton Friedman shows up repeatedly, bringing a libertarian approach to topics from the draft to tax cuts but his motivation is not evidence, but belief in “freedom”. Alan Greenspan is the chief proponent of zero regulation in the financial sector, despite mounting abuses and failures. The narrative highlights the extent to which economists were declaring truths that they did not have evidence for; an unearned confidence that remains today. I don't think Appelbaum believes, nor do I, that the pre-economic ways of thinking were ideal. Tools such as cost-benefit analysis or principles of quantifying problems are clearly beneficial. But for all the economic discussion of positive vs. normative analysis, the ideology clearly shaped (and shapes) the kinds of analyses being proposed, and excludes factors that a society might wish to include. It's particularly shocking when confronted with the human costs of this thinking; in the gutted Rust Belt, in Pinochet's Chile. Even more so when you recognize how deep this neoliberal ideology rooted itself, since most of the relevant actors knew these costs and forged ahead anyway.
I strongly recommend this book; it's an invaluable reminder of the relative newness of certain “facts” that neoliberalism has tended to portray as such. For economists, lauded by society, it's a suggestion to preserve some humility. In an era of rising populism and criticisms of capitalism it remains to be seen whether we can build something better, but I hope this book will give us some of the context to get us there.
This novel is masterful. Roy's prose is poetry, or near as. With coinages, imagery, and heartbreaking emotion, she transports you to rural Kerala and places you among the cast of the novel across the generations they span. I've just put the book down, and am attempting to extinguish the lingering feeling of oppressive, impending doom that has sat with me throughout the book. More incredibly to me, I enjoyed it, as someone who tends to avoid doom and its impending arrival at as many opportunities as possible. Roy boldly tells you what is going to happen in the very first pages, and unfolds the path to get there beautifully, keeping you entranced not by suspense but with the weight of inevitability. I didn't think it would work until I read it.
Inevitability is not just the feeling of the book, it's also a theme. There is history, and there is History. We might take the former as a set of facts, and the latter as facts personified, empowered to affect the ways in which we live. The titular God of Small Things is a the personal tragedies that fall victim to History, when the things we want and need are unreachable because of History's designs and strictures. How free are we, when we live amidst ideology, tradition, family, society? Are we free to live, to love? I won't say this novel gives me hope that we are. I don't even think it makes it clear that we will be; this is a tragedy and History can be ruthless with those that rebel against it. What it does do, is remind me that we should be, because the cost of living constrained thus is far too high a price to pay.
When a novel has the premise that everyone on Earth is going to die in two years, it's strange to feel that it's somehow timely. Yet I certainly thought it was apt for current affairs when reading the rapid reaction, or sometimes failure to react well, of the characters in this book when confronted with an all consuming crisis. At least for someone who loves detailed descriptions of propellant use, the most exciting and heartening parts of the novel are the technical challenges in keeping people alive. The most disconcerting are the political dynamics that threaten to upend the entire project. At a time when I'd love to think that we can exert some collective, coordinated action to address pressing problems, it's a reminder that there's a lot of potential and a lot of challenges remaining.
As a story, Seveneves benefits from tremendous imagination and beautiful description of the unfamiliar environments and the ways that characters navigate them. The characters themselves are sometimes hard to follow (there are many!) but it's compelling enough to keep you page-turning. I think if there was one weakness, it'd be that the neatness is just a bit overdone. By the end, it feels like everything tied together in a way that could be amazing, but feels a little bit forced. I take it as a reminder that while plotlines can resolve themselves in an elegant way in fiction, it rarely will in reality.
The second volume of this omnibus knocks it out of the park. In the first volume, I had wondered why the story focused so much on Yaichi. Here, it becomes clear that the strategy of focusing on the thoughts that people have as they begin to learn about and encounter LGBT people works. Yaichi's continuing arc is relatable and understandable as he explores both the source of his tensions around Mike and reevaluates they way that he treated Ryoji. The culmination of this maturation is Yaichi's willingness to stand up for Mike and Kana, and his final ability to learn about Ryoji's life in Canada. I still wonder what Mike must be feeling inside, but what he displays is an incredibly admirable unflappability that will bear him in good stead. Kana and Natsuki round out the story and make it apparent that this is not just about Mike and Yaichi, but about the family they are building together. I was really hoping for a cute epilogue where they visit Canada, but I guess there's always something to keep waiting for. Read this for a touching, happy, beautiful conclusion to the story.
This was a daunting read, but proved to be an absolute blast. I started and got stuck pretty early, but on coming back I was able to pick up the vocabulary and names a lot more easily and blasted through the rest in a few days. To be sure, this seems to happen for me a with a lot of books, so it's hard to say if this is Anathem-specific, but the ride that Stephenson takes you on is absolutely worth it.
I tried describing this book to people and struggled to get it into words, so here's my best shot. Anathem takes place on a planet similar to Earth in a lot of ways, but most notably there are orders of monastic scholars called avout that segregate themselves off from the rest of the world. We spend a good chunk of the book just figuring out how this life works and dealing with relatively petty drama, and then the plot kicks into high gear.
The first thing that distinguishes Anathem for me is the reworking of vocabulary for many common things. While obviously presenting some barrier to entry, I found this impressive because not only did the words seem like they could easily have existed in English, they reflected something interesting about how we privilege the words we happen to use. For example, “theorics” is a catch-all term that distinguishes academic/theoretical study from “praxic” or practical/actionable affairs. I found this to uniquely emphasise the thought-action distinction as central to scholarship, as opposed to the more discipline-based division we tend to talk about with phrases such as physics vs applied physics.
The other big difference is that Anathem is a book that follows nerdy scholars, and so if you happen to like literally having characters describe thought experiments to each other this book will definitely appeal. In particular, the book discusses a great deal topics on the philosophy of consciousness and thought. I have no idea what the analogues or bases are for these discussions in real philosophy, but the effect (combined with the vocabulary thing) is to make you strongly question the foundations of why you think the things you think, or what you consider to be true and real. As the book develops, this quickly becomes a feature of not just the style but the plot, but I won't spoil any more.
So we are left with a beautifully put together, rich world with good characters, infused with a heavy dose of philosophy and science. Anathem is a trip, truly, that will keep you thinking.
P.S. If I'd make one nitpick, it's that there didn't need to be a romantic subplot...
2024-02-22: (more spoilery) Relistened on Audible and this is still such a banger. I think the main point I want to touch on is how the Cartasian Discipline relates to longtermism. In particular things like the 10000 year clock being built by the Long Now Foundation is very similar to the mathic clocks in conception and purpose, and the characterisation of the mathic world as uniquely capable of thinking in the long term and its contrast with the Saecular mostly throws into relief just how Saecular our world is. The description of waxing and waning of cities, of settlements and nations, is undoubtedly factual, in that that has happened in different regions of the world, and yet I think I still maintain a possibly-counter-zeitgeist progressivist opinion that the future holds good things, and despite thinking about doom and gloom we will have ways to address said gloom. The other part of the longtermist thinking is that the isolation of the mathic orders is critical to their ability to think long term, both because it is impossible to do so when immersed in the Saecular with its distractions but also because of the forcing function of having nothing else to do. I question the end of the book in the context, actually, which presents the formation of the Magisteria and the integration of the avout as a victory, a waxing of the status of the avout that is to be desired, but I also see that as an erosion that shakes the Discipline foundationally. The whole rest of the book is still a riot but I've become more attracted to the concept of a longtermist foundation, and maybe the monastic vibe of theorics, avocation and simple living. #monkcore2024
For once, I'm recording my impression immediately after finishing a book. The reason is that basically the end of the book left me with a surprising amount of energy and desire for action. I'm sitting here questioning how much I should believe that, but it's hard not get caught up in Conroy's characters' feelings. Leo's triumph and nice, novelistic ending is not one that I necessarily think I can achieve, but it still manages to leave me feeling good. I'd say this is typical of the book as a whole, where an entire cast of characters appears and moves around in a way that - while not predictable exactly - lends itself to feeling like it's on rails, with just a hint too much deus ex. I don't feel that seriously harms the novel though for me; I take it with an understanding of suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment is conscious rather than consuming.
What a change of pace from East of Eden and the Grapes of Wrath! Cannery Row is a small distillation of what I'm beginning to recognise as Steinbeck's trademark style, the heartfelt descriptions, the humourous yet poignant characterisations, the matter-of-fact narrative. It feels different here though, when the stakes are so much lower. I think I can only feel like the characters of Cannery Row are cute, rather than emotionally taxing in the same way that the other two books are. I particularly liked the briefer anecdotes rather than some of the more extended ones, since I felt like they had just enough flavour without wanting to do more and not having the words for doing so. The Malloys moving into the boiler, Henri and his boat, the soldiers and Dora's girls, Mary Talbot and her parties, the bachelor gopher. I get that I wouldn't enjoy a novella with solely 3 page vignettes, but I think without them Cannery Row would suffer a great deal. The more “philosophical” moments fall a little flatter, like Doc opining about capitalism and how Mack and the boys have actually figured it out. The quips get me more; I loved describing boring parties as “not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product” (p168). Good, tight read.
This was a really interesting experience. As I'm realizing is Kim Stanley Robinson's style, Aurora has two main thrusts: the imagining of what it would physically look like to put a settler colony on a starship and the inevitable politics and fracturing that the group goes through. I get a certain amount of joy just from reading about how the biomes work, the problem of deceleration, the challenges faced on reaching a new planet. True, at points it gets a little over the top with the vocab, and you're reminded that you're reading fiction and not a paper written by scientists who know what they're talking about. But it's still amazing to think about the balances needed to arrive on a new world.
The interpersonal conflicts here feel a little more forced than in the Mars Trilogy, where the motivations and reasoning for different factions had more time to develop. Here, it kinda just happens, and we don't actually have the ability to really get to know any of the people. Partly, this is because so much of the novel is dedicated to the narration by the ship's computer, which has it's own mental development and associated doses of feels. As an idea, I'm glad to see it explored, even if we lose some of the actual human character development.
The last thought the book leaves you with is the analogy between the starship and Earth. After all, our planet is really the same, just bigger; hurtling through space with finite resources and a crew that can't agree on how best to proceed. It's an interesting filter to look at Earth through; I realised I had a tendency to yell at the starcrew to just get along, when I don't think anything is remotely that easy on Earth. Ultimately, this was a mishmash of fun ideas and a good read, if not as coherent as the Mars Trilogy or 2312.
Decent conclusion to the trilogy. I think the additional viewpoints started to become unwieldy by the end, since we're now looking at a lot more people and the story can no longer be as tightly woven as in the first two. I felt the pacing also suffered a bit, having to climax multiple times as the succession of villains was taken down. Koll and Raith were highlights here for me, with some genuine internal turmoil that was painfully precise.
Incredible. Believe the goddamn hype. Sometimes, I really dislike the Goodreads star system, where a five-star is “amazing”. What about when a book pushes all the boundaries of fantasy in ways you were never expecting? N.K. Jemisin has written a heartbreaking tragedy, a masterfully built world, a beautiful romance, and a pointed political critique. They're all called [b:The Fifth Season 19161852 The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1) N.K. Jemisin https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386803701s/19161852.jpg 26115977].The tragedy is painful. Unlike some other fantasy where you think the feelings are so much larger than life they become intellectualised, more explorations of emotion than experiences of it, the pain of the characters is incredibly relatable and deeply felt. I love the world of the Stillness, the feelings when orogeny is described, the histories of conquest, the neat mappings of culture - comms, stonelore - to the pecularities of the Stillness' tectonics. The characters' loves are unexpected, gripping, and thankfully inclusive. It's not merely refreshing to see nonwhite, nonstraight relationships, but a genuine load lifted; it's a moment of gratitude that this can be written and can exist in the world of fantasy. I love my classic fantasy as much as anyone, and I have always been ready to defend it; I identified with Kvothe and Kaladin and Rand al'Thor. But until I read Alabaster, I hadn't realised how much of a difference it can make to have those commonalities of identity with characters. ‘Baster's identities not only helped me understand him, but also (ironically, since this is a fantasy novel) made me feel remarkably normalised and accepted.Of course, not all of the characters' identities are so easily borne. The dedication is, after all, made out to all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question. Hatred for orogenes in the Stillness is incredibly virulent; this despite the physical power that they can display. The parallels are extremely obvious - after all, the primary slur for orogenes is “rogga”. I don't know how best to interpret the parallels though. Is the power, refined by control, an statement of what black people and our other oppressed have, latent? Is it meant to indicate the futility of respectability politics, when extreme focus on that control doesn't lead to any kind of better life? Is it a mirror to the horrors that mainstream society is willing to stomach? To be clear, this is not just allegory, it's also beautiful prose, but certainly part of that beauty comes through the allegorical lens. When the Big Bad is really just us, just everybody, what exactly can you do about it? Apparently, nothing except the end of the world, for the last time.
Nice to get some background on the actual start of this trilogy! The book is focused on Yarvi, which fills in a lot of information about his character that we missed from the second book, where he is much more of a secondary character. Compared to the second, I didn't find the rest of the cast as compelling, and the plot felt a little more contrived, but there's still fun to be had.
I read Heaney for the first time more than 12 years ago now (thanks Mr. Masterman!) Death of a Naturalist was probably the second poem I can really remember thinking hard about. I wouldn't say I'm a poetry guy, but Heaney's command of sound and imagery gets me. Take Blackberry Picking, or The Gravel Walks; he can pull out feeling from the simplest of scenes. I'll add some thoughts here as I am reminded of particular pieces.
Digging
Mid-Term Break
Requiem for the Croppies
A Call
What a weekend, getting to storm through this. I think the blurb doesn't really do it justice. Yes, this is a book about a planet where people are ambisexual, becoming male or female during each mating cycle. But I think, perhaps primed by Ursula's introduction, that it's much more an exploration about how we view each other and how we interact, not just on a gendered or sexed basis but in our whole beings. I'll pick out a few moments that grabbed me:p75 - “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty”. Gethen is home to a cult/non-religion of the Handdara, who prize ignorance, to “ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing” (p 228). This is shocking in part because of anxieties of the unknown (both my own and our societal); I think we trade on certainty a lot and the Handdarata are pushing a view that says uncertainty is actually the root of all our thought and action. Focus on uncertainty isn't new, but I'd kinda felt that it was mostly limited to recognising that some amount of it must be dealt with healthily, not actually fundamental or desired. The second line, which is referring to Estraven's desire not to accept the concept of nationhood, I take as a commitment to the real, whatever that might be, but also a focus on feeling over ideology, a . Not a philosopher, don't know who's already trodden this path, but it feels scary and also reassuring to consider what it would mean to take your actions, like Estraven, almost entirely from what you feel rather than what you think.p101 - “One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.” It's interesting reading this 1969 text in a day where nonbinary genders are frequently discussed and gender confirmation is an increasingly recognised treatment. Yet despite our critiques of the gender construct, it still resonates to think about how difficult life can be when you don't have your gendered social personae to fall back on. Genly and the Investigators speculate about the effects that ending the binary has had on Gethenian society, from the level of aggression (no war), the greater focus on matters of import (Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex”), the elimination of rape, the reduction in binary views about anything at all. But Therem notes that the I-you dualism is the older binary by far, and still very much present on Gethen. Instead, I think that the exploratory discussions of nonbinary gender and sexuality (homosexuality is noticeably missing on Gethen, unfortunately) in present society actually make the same metaphorical point that [b:The Left Hand of Darkness 118028 The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) Ursula K. Le Guin https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1519082793s/118028.jpg 817527] is making. For one, they prove that the binary is illusive; in many significant ways and places we were already somewhat androgynous. Taking the next step; it does feel appalling, terrifying, to abandon our gendered crutches. Most can't or don't want to, I certainly can't, at least not completely. But the striking thing about the Gethenians is just how normal they are, how particularly non-alien. They live and love and cry and die, and they show us that humanity is not gender, that being judged only as a human being is something we can actually do.
I did not know this was second in a trilogy, which says something about how well contained this book is. There are of course plenty of tropes, the selected hero, the love interest, the training montage, the victory from the jaws of defeat. I think that Abercrombie executes well though, with excruciatingly relatable coming of age, with engaging characters, and a fast pacing that left me wanting to know more. Fun quick read.
I was wondering what I'd get when I noticed what appeared to be fantasy from [a:Kazuo Ishiguro 4280 Kazuo Ishiguro https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424906625p2/4280.jpg] on the library shelf. [b:The Buried Giant 22522805 The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451444392s/22522805.jpg 41115424] proves to be remarkably Kazuo. In this fictional Albion with ongoing Anglo-Saxon conflict, he threads an underlying question of what it means to be British, that to me feels like the kind of interrogation you can only really have when you grow up a non-native Brit. It's startling, at least to me, to see the landscapes of England shifted to fantasy and yet described so accurately (or what I imagine to be accurately). He gets the spirit of the place.Setting aside, the novel is an odd, timeskipping piece. We're kept in the dark about most of the plot, since the characters don't really know what's going on half the time anyway. It's interesting to meet characters who don't remember their own lives, but I wouldn't say the experience is particularly fun. The jumps in perspective and time, even mid paragraph, are disorienting. Again, that's sort of the point, I suppose, but it's not easy to read. Ishiguro gets an amazing sense of tone and atmosphere here; it's certainly “literary” or at least feels that way. Yet impressive prose doesn't make it entirely enjoyable, so come into this with appropriate expectations...