Angela Ambroz
Fun, middlebrow, pretty feminist post-apocalyptic novel. I found this via a recommendation by Claude (AI), after I had asked him for “The Last Of Us minus (guns, Carhartt, machismo) and plus social science feelings”. He was bang on the money!
The plot: A plague devastates the Earth, disproportionately killing women and children. Infant and maternal mortalities are basically 100%. Men die off as well, at about 98%. We follow the titular unnamed midwife as she works hectically in San Francisco (!), catches the plague, survives the plague and - like Cillian Murphy - wakes up about 28 days later to an empty, desolate world. The rest of the book follows her on-foot odyssey across the wasteland of the American continent (in the style of The Last Of Us, indeed!), navigating the varieties of Mad Max that have sprung forth.
So there's a lot of similar books to this - the post-apocalypse is an, ahem, very PREGNANT genre, ho ho - and many of them are cleverer. Y: The Last Man came immediately to mind: how would humanity cope if our gender ratio suddenly got very lopsided? So, in a way, this felt very basic post-apocalypse. There's a lot of scavenging, breaking into McMansions looking for guns, shoes and tinned food. There are roaming bands of monstrous men. There are small pockets of communities trying to recreate the civilized life. Honestly, it felt like a video game - like The Last of Us indeed! Also, like The Handmaid's Tale, there are glimpses of a far future that are wonderfully tantalizing.
Despite being very basic in setting, there are some quirks which made me bump this from a 3-star apocalypse to a 4-star one. First of all, the book has a strong progressive sensibility that I deeply, DEEPLY appreciated in this authoritarian 2025. Elison (the author) is quick to set up a progressive perspective on the (white female) character's privileges, etc. The book also has a quirky writing style: we have a primary document (the protagonist's journal entries) interspersed with tight, third person narration of her journey, as well as occasional detours into faraway places. This is all handled well (which is hard tbh!) and it's very satisfying. It reminded me of World War Z's cosmopolitan apocalypse. If anything, I tired of the diary entries and found the Mormon interlude a little high-handed/mean-spirited, even if it was probably, well, accurate.
Another big, BIG pro was the underlying, very basic feminism: reproductive rights were, well, VERY VERY IMPORTANT and kinda the whole point of the journey. The protagonist is no-nonsense, highly practical, and understands that women's power and women's vulnerabilities will be directly tied to their reproductive capacity. Shit is crazy out there, man. And so she immediately hoards all the birth control she can find and sets out on a glorious mission to help the surviving women not become literal chattel for monstrous men. I also found the "hives" - where some of the surviving women kept harems of men - really interesting. The protagonist noted that all of these women were basically incapable of getting pregnant (due to hoarded birth control, infertility, tied tubes, etc). And they're the ones with the most power!
Huzzah. Really good. SO timely, I felt a FRISSON of timeliness. I used to be all into postmodernism and philosophy and 3rd wave feminism in the mid-00s. I forgot about that VIBE, man. Judith Butler IS that vibe, they EMBODY it. So... okay, I'll be honest, I zoned out at the thousandth time they called “gender ideology” a “phantasm”, overloaded with the anxieties of our climate change-crumbling, authoritarian age. But when I was locked in, mwah, chef's kiss.
I actually think one of the most powerful - and relatively brief - sections of this book was when they discussed climate change anxiety. I've never heard anyone write about that anxiety with such powerful lyricism (!).
OCTAVIAAAAA BUTLEEEEEERRRRRRRRR!!!!!
This book was WILD. I saw a couple Goodreads' friend reviews that said as much, and I didn't really understand why. But this book's plot was like a runaway freight train - and, man, you are climbing aboard from page 1. What's funny is that the description of the plot really doesn't capture the urgency of it? But I read this voraciously and spent a lot of time wanting to put it down and just SCREAM. I mean, there is sex and violence and craziness - abounding! - on page after page. But it's also - smart???
OK, briefly, the plot: Doro is a guy, well, more like a spirit. He can't die. Instead, he can jump into other people's bodies and, ahem, WEAR THEM. He is very old (like, thousands of years) and has 1 hobby: breeding more people with supernatural abilities. We start the book in west Africa - sounds like Nigeria? - where he is annoyed that one of “his” villages (of descendants/”breeding stock”) has been pillaged.
While wandering in search of his villagers, he feels something - think Yoda and the Force. He follows the feeling and lands on Anyanwu. Immediately, he understands that she too is special and has supernatural abilities. She's 300+ years old and can mold and shape her body. He's like, dude, great, WILD SEED (TITLE OF THIS BOOK), awesome, you'll make a great addition to my breeding experiment. Anyanwu is like, wow, another super special guy, yes, let's hang. She has a few compunctions, as she realizes how powerful he is... and what a dick he is! And this obsession with BREEDING, mamma mia!
Anyway. They hike back to the coast (Ghana?), where the slave trade is in full force. And - you can just read on. BUT IT'S ALL NUTS, OKAY.
This felt very similar - and similarly delightful - to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Both are historical fiction + fantasies that are VERY rich and tactile, that are as invested in the fantasy elements as the historical context, and that illuminate the historical context THROUGH the fantasy elements. Both are also SO compelling, and had me reading voraciously/hungrily/crazily. Can't recommend this enough!!
A cri de ceour in favor of the scientific method, and completing the Enlightenment's haphazard hold on our culture!! I CAST THEE OUT, DARK SHADOWS OF AUTHORITARIANISM AND WOO!
In a way, this book is a spiritual ancestor of Conspirituality, another book that covers similar themes of anti-scientific social ape nonsense and its ramifications throughout society and politics - though in the post-Covid age.
THIS book, by the very lauded Carl Sagan, is, in many ways, a very 90s book. So I actually struggled through the first half of it. I would rate the first half 2 stars (!). But I just cannot tolerate chapter upon chapter of garbage - and Sagan spends MANY chapters debunking UFOs, crop circles, the X-Files (!), and other super outdated 90s woo. He then spends a fiery chapter on Medieval witch hunts, and his clear-eyed assessment of them as expressions of patriarchal power and control, chef's kiss. But then it's back to alien abduction stories. Mannnn...
I mean. I guess his argument is that humans' capacity to engage in woo is (a) directly tied to our social ape ancestry, and thus (b) TIMELESS. Oh, how I wish he had lived miraculously until now - so he could lock arms with Tony Fauci and fight the forces of anti-vax fear-mongering. Because, indeed, 1995 Sagan predicts 2025 America dismally well. And his tight linking of Enlightenment ideals - the scientific method AND “liberte, egalite, fraternite” (aka social justice) - was just, mwah, so heartening. Thank you!! We must bang this drum again and again and again!!!
Indeed, the second half of the book was much more exciting - and got me very amped up. He circles back to witch hunts (damn the patriarchy!), laments education and the cultural caricatures of scientists (mad scientists, nerds, etc), ponders the link between literacy/education and civic empowerment and democracy, and - single tear - envisions various utopian scenarios of e.g. our political leaders being intelligent and informed and comfortable with uncertainty. SOB.
By the end, I was:
- Ready to re-read Ted Miguel's research on modern witch hunts (and how they occur more often during periods of food insecurity...): http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/poverty-and-witch-killing/
- PUMPED to dust off all my pop quantum mechanics books so I could go “whoooooa”
- PUMPED to read about “scientism” as well (sorry, Carl!!!)
Hmm, okay, I thought this would be a slightly different book. What I got was much more about the Before Covid Times and the pandemic's start. (I was hunting for a book to explain and help me digest the pandemic, comprehensively, start to finish.)
Anyway, Michael Lewis, as always, writes with an eye for warm-hearted, human details. There's something also very red blooded American guy about his writing. Which is fine. He's like the non-fiction Tom Clancy. He's very readable.
Basically, this book follows a handful of Highly Competent People, all working at various levels of government, and all basically stifled by the creaky machinations of our fraying, decaying, crappy government institutions. Each of these competent people struggle to (a) make every leader/authority understand the seriousness of the oncoming pandemic, and (b) do what they can - in their haphazard, not-centrally-planned, not-technically-in-charge way - to limit the damage. Meanwhile, American leadership is asleep at the wheel.
I had mixed feelings, honestly, because it initially felt as if red-blooded non-fic Clancy was making an argument FOR competent individualism OVER functioning collective action and institutions. Color me biased. Now that I finished the book, I actually think Lewis's argument is the opposite: even the MOST competent, well-meaning individuals will get drowned out by broken systems. And these individuals certainly did. Lewis opens his book by noting that while pre-Covid “war game” simulations (by the WHO? I forget) of a worldwide pandemic always modeled that America would fare the “best”, we actually did a pretty shitty job at managing Covid - with more excess deaths and suffering. It was like the country embodied, yet again, that infamous chart showing how much of an outlier America is re: healthcare spending vs. outcomes: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/mt/business/assets_c/2011/04/us%20health%20care%20costs-thumb-600x326-47611.png
This is (again) individualized in one of the competent individuals - who is seen by many as a “guru” and with the most humble yet clear-eyed approach on how to manage a pandemic - loses his own mother to Covid. It's a bitterly ironic tragedy, and, I guess, Lewis uses this as his point: again, even the most competent, informed individual will suffer if our systems are broken.
Literary, social justice sci-fi, examining the understandable rage at America's white supremacist systems. I didn't love this, though, since the sci-fi elements felt unearned and kinda hand-wavey - like, the sister can basically do anything (teleport, telepathy, telekinesis... I guess all the tele's). The ultimate vision is also quite apocalyptic and violent revolution, which was, well, also a bummer.
Well, I'm glad I read this AFTER my major surgery, yuk yuk yuk.
V good. V early 2000s non-fiction. About the human fallibility of doctors, and how we turn a blind eye to that when we think of medicine. Everyone wants expertise, no one wants a doctor still learning the ropes.
Favorite chapter was maybe on gastric bypass surgery? Also that flesh-eating bacteria, wow. I felt unsatisfied by the chapter on “bad” doctors - aka, when doctors just... get burnt out? Tired? Overwhelmed? It felt too mushy. Maybe that was the point.
Anyway, def fun. What is Atul Gawande up to these days?????
Super short novelette - short story, even - from the same near future, cli-fi, solarpunk universe as The Lost Cause. This story dives into a brief expedition by some Blue Helmets (presumably climate emergency first responders deployed by the UN? Or maybe it's just Canada? ELBOWS UP, EH) as they try to help Oxford, Mississippi, recover from some (unnamed) climate disaster. As with the longer book, this is densely packed with political ideas, technological ideas (I liked the drones using computer vision/AI to find lost pets - since the training data had so many dog and cat images), and food (Cory is SO into writing food, lately!). It was fine, very short.
A really great, satisfying novel about the patriarchy, gender roles, and conformity - written in the 1920s, but still just as fresh and relevant in the 2020s.
Super brief summary: There is a family. It's made of:
- A dreamy, poetry-obsessed, kind-hearted dad
- A super efficient, super productive, super practical mom
- 3 kids
An accident happens and the roles are reversed. The rest of the story is just - chef's kiss! Woven into this are these amazingly empathetic and sweet meditations on the mind of an ornery 3 year old. I'm not even joking, these were almost spiritual - they brought a tear to my eye.
Loved the ending. Highly recommend! Read this, coupled with Richard Reeves's Of Boys and Men (about how gender roles constrain men, women, all genders!), and/or E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (just incredibly prescient novels from 100+ years ago).
Really enjoyed the second novella in this series. Am excited for the third!
In this novella, Mohamed delves deeper into the main theses she's been setting up. (And the worldbuilding + values are top notch.) This is a near future (2100?) climate justice spec fic, about a pro-social girl from a grungy post-apocalyptic village coming to study at a university which is preserved in a biodome of individualistic, elitist modernity. The people in this dome are basically the people in EM Forster's The Machine Stops - aka, they are us, right now, pecking away at our screens and co-watching YouTube together rather than dropping into each other's houses (shriek).
I love the voice. I love the characters, especially the salt o' the earth grungy punks. I love the protagonist's anarchist disobedience in the service of pro-social values. Bravissima! Kinda like Cory Doctorow, sans tech nerdery. Also, as I said in my review of the first one, kind of like Last of Us, sans macho libertarian ammosexuality hee hee.
Hm. A decent overview of authoritarianism - using a handful of case studies. Ultimately, it felt a little disorganized, and I was disappointed with the glaring exclusions of Stalin and Kagame.
As a colleague said, now that an overtly authoritarian administration begins in the US: “congrats, we're like every other country.” Yep. Really puts the lie to the US propaganda of American exceptionalism. Yeah. Not so exceptional.
Poop, or pulp? Feces, or gore? WHICH, dear reader, is the most abundant material in this book?! I think I vote poop. Rotting flesh is a close third.
So this is a madcap (!) romp (!!) through a doomed whaling expedition to the north-ish pole. Aboard our steam/sail/whatever-ship are various disgusting, fecal-smelling, blood-covered ogres and gargoyles - just imagine the very worst of humanity, and then dial it like way down? Up? Anyway, everyone is quite terrible. The novel KIND OF has a hero - Patrick Sumner, a traumatized, opium-addicted veteran of the Siege of Delhi, and (my favorite trope) a frontier doctor. The novel DEFINITELY has a villain, or, like, 3? 4? But the most eye-wateringly evil is Henry Drax, an absolute sociopath and moral vacuum.
Is it weird to say this novel is charming? Because it is?! There's a kind of black (frostbitten...) comedy to it all. They are really awful people. And terrible things happen to them. Even the good things that happen to them are... well, terrible. Like when they find that floating corpse of a half-eaten, rotting whale. Yay, more blubber??!! Ooh, it's all gooey and smells bad. (This author LOVES describing the awful smells and textures of putrefying tissue.)
Economics - and money-making - are important motivators in this. From Sumner's (brief) Delhi flashbacks, to Drax's machinations. Insurance fraud makes a cameo. It's like... a whole thing. Nasty, brutish, and short - and capitalist!
Also also: GREAT book for beefing up your SAT word count. Thank God I read this on my Kobo and thus could long press on words like “gallimaufry”. Also, clearly the author has a mixtape of 19th century sea shanties in mind, because the characters - when they're not shitting themselves, impaling each other, vomiting, drinking, or swearing - are often charmingly whistling some obscure 19th century pop tune.
Oooh, fun. So I have inadvertently just consumed TWO - count them, TWO(!!!) - pieces of media that cover almost identical themes: The Last of Us (TV, oh beautiful Pedrito nom nom nom) and this. Both are:
- Post-apocalyptic stories,
- featuring a teenage girl protagonist,
- and a fungal parasite,
- that was caused by climate change, and now,
- infects humans, slowly taking over their human host's brains/behaviors in unhelpful, unsettling ways.
Fine. Fine.
What I liked about this inadvertent comparison was how VERY differently this story can be told - depending on whether you are, ahem, interested in individualistic, militaristic stories featuring lots of violence (Last of Us), or if you're interested in knowledge, community, and survival (this). I also want to shout out that this novella at least acknowledges social justice and climate justice realities, as opposed to completely ignoring them (ahem, Last of Us) - which is another way of reinforcing the status quo, aka patriarchal white supremacy. Plz don't come at me yet, yes yes (1) I know that TV “Joel Miller” is vaguely coded Latino-ish in the show (“adios!”), and (2) that Wyoming commune exists. But, well, come on... Last of Us is kind of a libertarian circle jerk, where those who survive the end of the world are those rugged men who wear Carhartt and carry big guns. I say this with love for the show!!! I did like the show. I love almost all zombie media!
I just... hmm, ALSO like post-apocalyptic stories that don't follow that status quo trope. Cory Doctorow already delighted me splendidly in Radicalized, when he followed a libertarian prepper's actual outcomes after the end of the world... if you took everything to a logical conclusion. I feel like those stories - about an end of the world that isn't all about guns and ammo - are basically what has evolved into solarpunk. Hopepunk? I saw someone use that phrase.
ANYWAY. This book was fun. It's the near future - maybe like 2100 or so. The protagonist, Reid, is a teenage girl living in the decrepit science department building of some Canadian university. Electricity is gone, people, as is most of modern life. The Before Times are called “Back Then” and people mostly scavenge from the ruins to survive, or hunt pigs and rabbits, or grow basic veggies. Two interesting things: The story opens with Reid receiving an invitation to one of the “Domes”, a supposed oasis of pre-collapse life (modernity?!). This whole novella is basically about tearing herself away from her mom, her friends, her community. Second interesting thing: a fungus (“those mushrooms mean business”) has appeared among the human species. This fungus may have come out of the melting permafrost (gawd, I have this fear). The fungus is symbiotic, decorating you with little blue-green tendrils. It sometimes kills you from the inside out (come on!!!). Often it just lightly nudges you towards self-preservation. Reid has lots of arguments in her head with her (silent) parasite, and struggles mightily with understanding her own free will vs. the parasite's. This was fun!
But what was especially fun was - I just really enjoyed the writing. It was fresh. SO CRISPY FRESH. This is how I'd like to write. If I had time to write again. This is how I think I COULD write! (watch out, Premee Mohamed!) Anyway, this is now basically like slice of life solarpunk with a touch of fungus and a touch of Harry Potter, I am very excited to read the next one in the series.
Wow. This blew me away. This is a novel set in 1930s Berlin, following a large German Jewish family in their daily lives. Given the rise of anti-democratic forces in the US and many other countries (including Germany's AfD) now, in the 2020s, it felt apropos.
I was worried that the 90-year-old writing would feel alienating and stilted. Also, a translation! Double trouble. But - amazingly (and I credit the 2022 English translation) - it was, instead, relatable and absorbing. I read the last third in a daily-responsibility-ignoring tear during a weekday morning. It was SO GOOD.
Briefly: We follow the 5 middle-aged Oppermann siblings - but especially the intellectual Gustav, the businessman Martin, their brother-in-law Jaques Lavendel (be still, my heart, Jaques Lavendel!!!), and Martin's son, Berthold, as well as Jaques's son, Heinrich. The scenes of Gustav and Martin's everyday lives prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor - their expectations about their world, politics, etc - well, it was VERY relatable. Gustav, in particular, is a dreamy intellectual who dismisses barbaric politics because, well, SURELY no one takes these thugs seriously?
This novel is also remarkable as a historical artifact. As I was reading, I started wondering, “oh, I wonder what will happen to these characters”. Then I realized... this was written in 1933. So, before the Holocaust. The author, Lion Feuchtwanger, didn't actually know what would happen - though he did understand what was happening in that year (which many many people did not, or at least underestimated). This meta-awareness informed a lot of my reading: here was a clairvoyant voice speaking brave, absolute truth - across time and space. Remarkable!! This book, indeed, was burned by the Nazis - Feuchtwanger was stripped of his citizenship, property, and career: wiki. He eventually emigrated to the US.
Really incredible.
A striking and moving YA novel about a historical event I knew nothing about: the Holodomor, aka the Ukraine Famine of 1932-1933. The novel takes three perspectives - all of 13 year olds: a boy stuck at home during the 2020 Covid quarantines; a middle-class Ukrainian girl growing up in Brooklyn; and a well-to-do Ukrainian girl in Kyiv, the daughter of a Soviet official.
I appreciate very much Katherine Marsh's work: she weaves together highly personal, relatable stories - told from a young person's perspective - about difficult and nuanced historical events. I thought she did a fantastic job in Nowhere Boy, about the 2015 refugee crisis. This book is likewise expertly done: all three kids are relatable (though 2020 Matthew feels SO CODDLED compared to the girls - mamma mia, it really was uphill both ways in the olden times).
Really fun, biting satire. Postmodern stuff is an immediate turn-off for me, so I slogged through the postmodern smirks. But whatever. I also kinda enjoyed them?
Briefly: A novel about an African-American writer and professor who writes highly cerebral Italo Calvino-style postmodern stuff that no one reads or enjoys. He then needs some money, due to relatable family drama (a mother being diagnosed with Alzheimer's). So he writes a trash book that fetishizes the ghetto and panders to white audiences. The book is a smash hit. Our hero is crushed.
Tbh I loved it. I watched the movie immediately after finishing the book (hey, it was a sick day), and they did a decent job - I'll leave that review for Letterboxd.
Super excited to read James next.
Amusingly super factual. Be careful sending screenshots of this one, you'll get banned from your platform. lolol
Basically: a picture book outlining how a baby gets made, for real. Includes my favorite drawing: a penis saying “Hallo!” to a vagina saying “Komm rein!” (Come in!). Includes some REAL TALK about morning sickness and c-sections. Made me cry in the end??? Everyone was a baby. Everyone loves their baby!!! sob
So basically, true, unvarnished but simply told sex ed for your preschooler. Highly recommend.
Read this on a long drive from Essen to Berlin, and was really struck by how powerful and insidious the Stasi was. It basically blasted away any Ostalgie I could have been susceptible to - I just kept thinking of those lives destroyed in such covert ways. Ugh. 4 stars just cuz I found the author's presence often intrusive (this was written with a bit of gonzo first-person asides).
Ha, I kinda agree with the 1-star reviews... AND the 5-star reviews.
This is a self-indulgent Doctorow romp that I kept telling myself I'd DNF and ended up... finishing it, lol. It's kinda utopian/dystopian: this is the world a specific set of progressive, Democratic Socialists of America would want. It's not a bad world. But it did strain credulity (e.g. the protagonist's housemates praising the ability to move into his affordable home and pay low rent... and then a few months later, happily and readily agreeing to tear that house down and find a new place to live). The “Magas” were all basically caricatures - your worst white male tribalist nightmare.
I'm deep in Learning from the Germans now (which is great btw) and (1) it has made me appreciate that those people-caricatures DO actually exist as living, breathing Nazis/Lost Cause Confederates, but (2) the Hannah Arendtian “banality of evil” masses, the “thoughtlessly” evil, bystander effect people, aka the vast majority of us!, are, well, the VAST majority. That second category simply does not exist in this book - everyone is VERY driven by ideals. And, yeah, the groups are all compelling and I kept wanting to read about them - Brooks (the hero) and his fun world music-listening hacker DSA friends; the Magas; the (VERY DISAPPOINTINGLY BELIEVABLE) Libertarian plutocrat-wannabes on their anarcho-capitalist “Flotilla” of yachts.
Hmm. I guess Cory shines when he, indeed, writes about ideals - the clash of them (this), the passionate having of them (any of his other books lol), the internal struggle of them vs. pragmatism (Attack Surface). So his world makes sense when we're in the head of the idealist, looking out at all those bystander sheeple and trying to shepherd them to the glory land. But when the ENTIRE WORLD is made up of ONLY righteous idealists - for good causes or “Lost”/evil causes - then it starts to feel unreal.
Oh yeah, and is Cory gunning for a cooking show/podcast? He clearly loves to write about food. (Another reason I kept reading, lol! The loving portrayals of hedonistic gourmandy delight!)
This basically shifted my entire worldview. HA!
I've been deep in economics world for a long time. I do love it. I've said (for 15+ years now) that I “married economics, but have regular affairs with other topics”. I am/was so, so, SO deeply ingrained in the typical economist worldview that, e.g., Kim Stanley Robinson's critiques of economics in Ministry for the Future - that it's basically politics in disguise - made me roll my eyes and chortle and go, “Oh, silly KSR, no it's not, it's objective. It's as scientific as a social science can get!!”
Well, now those foundations have cracked. Because... “YEAH WTF!!!?!” to everything Marilyn Waring pointed out (in the 1980s!!!). And everything that Kuznets (and other enlightened economists have always implicitly KNOWN/complained about) said!!! Basically, yes, economics is a simplified model of the world... but what it chooses to abstract and not abstract are socio-political choices that have had and ARE HAVING enormous policy implications. The big/gigantic one being that anything typically counted as women's work - childcare, elder care, housework, etc - is... just not counted. And it's not about it being “hard to measure”, or “not traded on the market” - two flimsy excuses indeed, given that (a) there IS a market for care work (and you can certainly argue that its prices are still biased downwards since the market under values it)... but anyway, there's your numbers! And (b) the (predominantly male) economics profession has definitely worked pretty hard to e.g. count “underground”/”not formal” market activities like... organized crime. Also, Waring's historical analysis of how GDP (and thus our entire policy frameworks) is directly tied to the military-industrial complex. Tldr: War is good for the economy (all those tanks are pricey to make! $$$ for our GDP) while care work is NOT (since it counts for nothing).
Anyway, this book gave me the vocabulary to name a LOT of the stressors in my own life, as a working mom in America. Now, whenever the kids or husband ask me for anything, I simply exclaim, WELL ARE YOU PAYING? Wonderful.
I am now absolutely HUNGERING for more analysis in this direction: especially, e.g. how the Covid quarantines exposed the care economy's absolutely fundamental role in holding up the market economy.
Oh yeah, and Waring wrote with a ton of spicy fire - I loved her being like “this stupid statistician/economist told me XYZ and so I said no you're stupid” (I paraphrase).
Wow. WOWW.
OK, so this is a historical romance set in 1857 India. It was recommended to me by Claude (AI) after a long discussion where I shared (a) my youthful, torrid fanfic habits, and (b) my love and knowledge of India. Claude assured me I would love this and that, no, it was not colonialist claptrap and my sensitive liberal heart would be unscathed. And oh, how right Claude was!
Briefly, the story: Laura Hewitt is a “spinster” - aka, an unmarried 20something - accompanying her super bitchy (sorry but not sorry, totally true) cousin, Emily, to India on the latter's fairly ambitious honeymoon with her new husband, Charles. The story is fairly straightforward. It begins on the boat from England. They land in Calcutta (Kolkota). They travel inland to Lucknow. They meet Charles's half-brother, Oliver Erskine, who is a “zemindar” (landlord) of a big plot of land in a remote part of the country (outside of Lucknow). It's 1857, so a war explodes. Laura and Oliver fall in love.
OK, but... THIS BOOK, MAN. THIS BOOK.
First of all, this book was a brick - 800 pages! - and each page was alive with OH THE HUMANITY. I will be shelving this book right next to the nonfic version of a tempestuous love story amid troubled historical times: Indian Summer. This book was also kinda like a very specific type of hip-hop track where the lyrics are super basic, but the production and samples are eye-poppingly WOW. That was this book.
The bars, aka the romance plot
This part was, tbh, fairly pedestrian. All the usual beats are here. Oliver is a basic Byronic bro. I appreciated him... a bit. I mostly appreciated Laura, who was also a basic protagonist - smart, sensible, aka completely relatable to me, the reader. Their love story - the way they meet, the way they are torn apart, blah blah - was all very predictable. Gratifying as well, but literally nothing here was new or energizing. It was completely meh.
But the production!!!! aka, the background, the context, the everything else
THIS. THIS!!!!! THIS was CHEF'S KISS. The portrayal of daily life for a British woman in 1857 India - from the banal British bubble during peacetime, to the devastation and deprivations of the Siege of Lucknow - this was written with SUCH a rich, tactile feel. GAHHHH. I LIVED and BREATHED this woman's life. I also adored the rich characterizations of her milieu - each person felt so vivid and understandable (even that b, Emily). For much of the book, I realized, our protagonist, Laura, just kinda... observes. It's written in the first person. And her meditations on daily life, both in peacetime and war, were so, so, SO on-point. I really was struck by a lot of what she said. And even though her life was 150 years ago, in a totally different context, I couldn't help thinking: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
But let us dwell now on colonialism. Because that was really at the forefront of my mind (and, uh, at the forefront of a lot of people's minds in 1857).
Laura is basically a Hilary Clinton-style liberal Democrat, living in her British bubble. She is extremely curious about India - she starts to learn Urdu, she wonders about the people she sees, etc - but she has, well, no Indian friends. Indeed, her life is VERY ensconced in this British life. Oliver, instead, is an Englishman born in India, to an English father also born in India. He's a bit like Kim , in that he can straddle the two cultures with relative comfort. And he is, like Kim, loyal to both.
Given these two characters, it was VERY strange to read a book about India - and about this time period - that features near-zero Indian voices. There are a few characters who emerge from the otherwise undistinguished crowds (as another review said): Wajid Khan, Moti, Ungud. And there were some great moments with each of them. But they are NOWHERE NEAR as fleshed out as the British characters.
In a way, this constricted, purely-British perspective felt suffocating. I kept wanting Laura to talk to someone - ANYONE - outside of her bubble. And, again, she kinda does. But she's a Hilary Clinton type: she's not a radical anti-colonialist. She's a liberal/pragmatist. But then I realized - by giving us this view of Basic British Colonist, we get a view into the daily machinery of colonialism. It was incredibly fascinating (and tragic) to see how the narrative about their own struggle was developed (e.g. the horrors of the Bibighar massacre). I actually spent a LOT of time wondering about how these traumatized British survivors returned home, and what they carried with them - how that indignant trauma informed the colonial narrative in the UK. (Side note, but the Siege of Lucknow section was very reminiscent of JG Ballard's memoir of being interned in a prisoner of war camp during WW2.)
The author does a great job here of showing the moments when Laura glimpses outside her British bubble's narrative: for example, I won't spoil it, but when she encounters a young wounded soldier towards the end of the book. Another moment when she marvels at the fetishized paranoia around rape by an Indian soldier... vs. the normalizing of being raped by a British soldier. It's all nuts! NUTS!! At one moment, Laura despairs at humanity and how stupid and brutal humans are. It's really true!!! So I guess the book is great in its ultimate moral: choose love!
Addendum: The cast
Oh, and because obviously I cast this in my head, here they are:
Laura - me, obviously
Oliver - Lee Pace
Kate Barry - Kathy Bates
Mr. Rogers - Richard Briers, he was in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as the father of Hero, remember??
Wajid Khan - Jammubhai from Mississippi Masala (aka Aanjjan Srivastav)
Even though the plot kinda went off the rails in the final 25%, I simply had to rate this a FULL 5 STARS. Also, thank you, Claude.ai, for this recommendation. You know me too well.
So this is a speculative fic/scifi novel set in near future China, as it struggles with the (inevitable...) demographic madness of its One Child Policy + sexist self-selection (when you could only have 1 kid, most people chose a boy). This has long been known to be a big problem - see this legendary Amartya Sen article from 1990, this wiki page, and this WaPo article from 2018. There is a GLUT of men right now in China.
So this book speculates on how that could play out in a couple generations. Without giving too much away (since I do think the book is masterful at revealing the layers to its story), in this near future China, polyandry is legally and socially encouraged. We begin with a young, handsome himbo named Lee Wei-Guo and his two dads - Big Dad and Dad - meeting with a matchmaker and a potential match: an existing marriage of two men and a younger woman. Lee Wei-Guo is proposing to join their marriage, since the government has recently upped the “max” that marriages can accommodate: now THREE men can marry one woman!
I won't spoil anymore of the story, but... from this delightful social scifi setup, I was stunned by how humane and touching it was. It really is an open-hearted and wise portrayal of what marriage is, what family is, and... what neurodiversity is?!!
Anyway, if you loved Y: The Last Man and that one fantastic Ursula LeGuin novelette, then you will love this one too.
A fluffy, rambling riff on food - how great it is!! - and economics - also great! I would NOT recommend this as someone's first Ha-Joon Chang book, or first economics book. But, if you've already thought “wait, mainstream neoclassical econ is bullshit” and “where the hell did the other economicses go” and “mmm kimchee nom nom nom” then... well, this is your book.
A lively, provocative university lecture on international migration - freedom of movement/labor - told in comic book form.
So Bryan Caplan is an economist at George Mason, which already got my hackles up: I worried about the libertarian, faux-apoliticism of (white guy...) economists wrapping up their traditionalist arguments in contrarian, faux-objective speculation. I was surprised, then, that Caplan makes a forceful argument - using the empirical research of Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett (two economists I LOVE) - that borders are bullshit.
He then spends the rest of the book dismantling, one by one, each counter-argument - from the more reasonable (low-skill workers overwhelming social safety nets) to the more xenophobic (but my culture!!!?!!!). He THEN proposes - bless his technocratic heart - some policy solutions to address each of the potential downfalls.
So I went into this as a politically progressive economist-by-training/technocrat-by-heart who has never spent more than a few minutes thinking about immigration. Now that Trump won again - and largely on an anti-immigration platform - and the AfD is similarly making gains in Germany via anti-immigration platforms - I decided to learn a bit more. And I'm so glad I did! I went into this relatively immigration-cautious, not even immigration-curious, and I came out of this saying... borders are bullshit!!! And a relatively modern invention, part of the nationalism wave of the 19th century, but not even really enforced until WW1 and WW2! And they are 100% suppressing global economic output and human welfare!! The Michael Clemens paper! But even beyond the economists cited in this book - the Mariel boatlift paper!!! Which I know for its methodology (shift-share instrumental variables, aka Bartik instruments), but never really absorbed the content that - oh, another paper showing BIG GAINS for immigration!
I was also provoked - specifically, apart from changing my mind on immigration, I also argued with Caplan in my head a lot re: his policy proposals to assuage anti-immigrant/xenophobic fears: e.g. make immigrants pay higher taxes and literally hand that money to low-skill native workers. EVEN if that was logistically possible (and I doubt it would be? like, “Here's your check from Mr. Immigrant, Mr. Trump Voter! See how nice he is!?”), I'm 100% not convinced that this would assuage the political pressures on using immigrants as scapegoats for general economic anxiety.
Anyway. Ha-Joon Chang (another economist I am loving at the moment) had a great “thing” in 23 Things about how borders are just wage protectionism and I was like, gasp.