Eva
I had a hard time with this book, which features 4 women throughout the centuries, all stories around emancipation and motherhood. Every time the narration focused in on these actual women and told their stories, i was engaged. Yet this is a book about reincarnation and fate, and the stylistic feature is to swings back and forth between the charactres in a swoosh, and in addition there is narration from inanimate objects (I really don't understand what this added to the story besides a level of quirkiness), and even God, and it all seems to be about reuniting one travelling-soul with a bracelet. Just not for me.
Written in 1991 in anticipation of a second independence referendum, this counts as part of Quebec's complicated history of separatist movements and contentious languages laws. This is without a doubt a slightly dated and biased account of the issue, but the antagonism between francophones and anglo/allophones is something Quebec probably will never fully shake, and is still present, now 30 years later. Same as its nationalistic and currently slightly more dormant desires to separate from Canada.
Richler finishes the book with a rebuttal to multiple rebuttals of his original The New Yorker article, and a lot of the book feels like that, written in fighting spirit by someone who's clearly too immersed to be unbiased. But, he's good and quite entertaining at throwing punches.
This one wasn't as fun as [b:Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Daisy Jones & The Six Taylor Jenkins Reid https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580255154l/40597810.SY75.jpg 61127102], it rather felt like the equivalent of a Darren Star show from the 90ies. And still, obviously there's something seductive in reading about the young and beautiful.
The world of the near future, fighting climate change over the next couple decades, as told through the eyes of several protagonists. Among them Mary, who leads the Swiss-based Ministry for the Future, and Frank, one of the few survivors of a devastating heat wave that killed 20 million. The solutions and problems they encounter while attempting to save the planet are very grounded in our socioeconomic reality, and sometimes feel like a nonfiction blueprint of ideas. There's a cryptocurrency tied to carbon sequestering - carbonCoin. There's climate-motivated bombing of planes, causing a widespread and convenient fear of flying. There are initiatives to return half the planet to wildlife - Half Earth.
I think I appreciated the idea behind the book more than I enjoyed the flow of it. But, I did have a big smile on my face when I realized that this is a hopeful book, presenting us with a happy ending, telling us that it'll be hard and difficult, but that ultimately we'll get there.
A dangerous downward spiral from innocence to random acts of senseless violence. A diary of a 12-year old girl, living in a world that's slowly falling apart amist growing poverty and civil unrest. While her country, her city, her family sinks lower and lower, her life is uprooted yet she stands strong and adapts. Her transformation is in her circle of friends, her exterior, her street-toughness, and most clearly noticable in her language, as she takes us on her journey in her diary.
Heartbreaking and jaw-dropping.
Un petit arabe garcon timide recoit une bourse d'internat dans une ecole prestigiouse francaise de Casablanca. On vive avec lui cette premiere annee d'ecole, ou il rencontre un monde tres different du sien. Il rencontre un series de personnages amusantes et particuliers. Au debut, il lui semble que ses professeurs and les surveillants d'internat se moquent du petit arab muet, mais il les gagne a lui avec sa naivite refraichissante, son amour des livres et son volonte d'apprendre.
La narration est tres drol, ironique et contien de petits points de critique sur la colonisation et le choc culturel entre le Marocains et les Francais.
Weir should probably only write isolation stories. It worked for [b:The Martian 18007564 The Martian Andy Weir https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413706054l/18007564.SY75.jpg 21825181] and it worked here. While something just didn't really click with his second novel, [b:Artemis 34928122 Artemis Andy Weir https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1494273579l/34928122.SY75.jpg 56402016]. My suspicion, it's the isolation plot (and possibly the male protagonist). This was just lots of fun to read, the equivalent of a popcorn-blockbuster (which it no doubt will be turned into). There are a bunch of narrative and science/engineering details that felt fabricated for maximum plot effect, but that's easy to excuse while you're enteratined and emotionally invested. I would have preferred though, if the protagonist wouldn't have been *forced* to join the mission. It's clear that Weird felt it's necessary to include that reveal to make up for the early amnesia, and the general fish-out-of-water clumsiness. But that gave the whole story a weird sidetone, that clearly could have been avoided.
I feel i've had quite the share of near-future climate-dystopias recently. First [b:A Children's Bible 55298364 A Children's Bible Lydia Millet https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1608832142l/55298364.SX50.jpg 73351391], then [b:The New Wilderness 48836769 The New Wilderness Diane Cook https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597017220l/48836769.SY75.jpg 67686772] and now Road Out of Winter. Road adventures in a cold world, where everyone travels south, violence, misogny and religion flourish, and new communities are formed in order to fight for survival. Decent, and easy to fall into the narrative, to travel along. But it missed an edge.
Regulation of free speech is very tricky. Especially online, where not governments but big American corporations are in charge. Who gets to decide what online content is acceptable? Do the same rules apply everywhere?
Kaye was the “UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression”. While the general attention is on all the harm unregulated social media posts have caused in the last decade (hate speech, radicalization, misinformation) Kaye rightfully reminds us that too much regulation can be a slippery slope. Especially if executed by governments that are currently in the grey-zone between authoritarian and democratic governments.
He argues that human rights law should be the basis for content moderation norms, he wants more transparency from the social media companies on their algorithms and decisions, and advocates the need for independent local public oversight institutions that are neither part of the social companies nor the governments.
My engagement level with the plot waxed and waned. There was something in the logisticial setup of this near-future world that just didn't click. Why this game-like wilderness experiment? Why keep them in the dark? Why keep us in the dark? Also, it felt the author really wanted to pack in all these messages about motherhood, home, nature, becoming feral, etc, but she was trying slightly too hard in my opionion. Nevertheless, I enjoyed some of this, especially my days with Agnes.
Man on the brink of the abyss, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Yet instead of being overwhelmed and awestruck by the beauty and cruel vastness of nature, our protagonist is overwhelmed, immobilized and slowly rendered mad by the terror and darkness that seems to be invading the world around him. It's a feeling we all have been experiencing to same capacity during the last couple of years.
This was a wild ride, starting out on a writers retreat with musings about writing and creation, then slowly transforming into a dream-like paranoia about surveillance and 18th century German romanticism, and finally ending on very topical issues of media-manipulation and radicalization.
‘Anton' was a regular Mephisto is this tale, and I'd be very curious if he (and his TV show) was based on anyone in particular.
This reminded me of Trady Kidder's [b:The Soul of a New Machine 7090 The Soul of a New Machine Tracy Kidder https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441207522l/7090.SY75.jpg 882196]. A high stakes environment, the stress and the excitement of technical innovation, a bunch of (mostly) guys who need to figure out how to work together, someone who needs to figure out how to keep everyone motivated. When you are system-engineering, you are really engineering not only the engineering system, but also the human system that creates it.This is a book about the EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) development for the Mars Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the many hurdles and technical challenges they had to overcome (heat shields melting, parachutes exploding) until those famous 7-minutes when their labor of years would autonomously descend onto Mars. It's also a biography of the guy who let the EDL mission (who sounds about as chummy and cocky as you imagine a guy in his job to be). And what I probably liked most, it's also a book about the creative process and it's dark sides. His analogy is the ‘dark room' - when you're stuck in your development and don't have any viable path out of it. How then to make curiosity-based decisions instead of fear-based ones. And how to transform ‘unknown unknowns' into ‘known unknowns' just a little bit. It's pretty comforting to read about billion-dollar government-supported endeavours, and realize they run into all the same complications little projects run into as well. They also have organizational issues, they also run out of time and need to compromise with option B or C.
I want Mariana Mazzucato to take over all governments.
Here she builds further upon on her vision that governments should take on more risk, and steer markets and the private sector into directions that serve the common good, and NOT simply exist to fix market mistakes.
She lists the many ways our economies are broken today, and advocates that we need to restructure governments around more mission-oriented thinking. The prime example of a big mission-oriented government-led success is the decade-long quest to reach the moon. Despite being expensive, the quest united the people and fed many technological innovative offspring projects that brought back the original investments and more.
What differentiates the race to the moon with today's very long list of goals (fighting climate change, fighting inequality, end poverty...) is that the moon was an easy problem only requiring a technological solution. Today's goals (see UN Sustainable Development Goals) are ‘wicked', they involve everyone on earth, are controlled by a complex network of organizations, and potentially even have parties and forces directly opposing those goals. Which scares me. But apparently not Mariana Mazzucato. Hence the beginning of my review.
‘Never get high on your own supply' - drug dealers go by that rule, and so do today's tech executives.
Substance addictions (alcohol, drugs, sugar..) have been around forever. Behavioral addictions (shopping, gambling, exercise..) took a while longer to be officially integrated into the psychology books. And now that technologies have become faster and more ubiquitous, tech-enhanced behavioral addictions are becoming more and more widespread. Constant connectivity, likes, retweets, rewards and badges have transformed most of us into addicts of our devices. App and game designers have perfected the timing and reward systems that hook and keep users perpetually glued to their screens.
As always, technology itself is not inherently bad. The same gamification mechanisms can lead to mindless hours of gaming or binge-watching, or can also help people achieve their fitness goals. And not all creators of addictive experiences are out for the money. Alter mentions a few game designers who were so horrified by the addictive effects of their creations that they pulled them off the market. We need more of that. And more designers sensitive to the psychological effects their design decisions have upon the users.
This was everything I expected and more. It's an erotic tale of a woman and a bear, it won a big Canadian literary award in the 70ies and since then has been a forgotten controversy or maybe a well-kept secret. It's resurfacing again now, hopefully reaching proper cult novel status. Just googling the cover art for this book is worthwhile. It's not just about a sexual encounter between woman and bear, it's about solitude, romanticism (the poets), wilderness, colonization, feminism, sexual freedom, and the reinvigoration of one's spirit.
Vie dans un pensionnat pour des eleves feminines au source de Nil au Rwanda. C'est dans les années 70 et le conflit entre les hutus et les tutsis a inonde le pays et a atteint l'ecole. Les filles qui sont les filles de personnalites militaires ou gouvernementales importantes, meprisent les 2 filles tutsies que le quota du gouvernment exige peuvent frequenter l'ecole.
Tandis que la tension monte, le livre decrit une serie de vignettes a l'ecole, avec des jeunes professeurs francaises, un blanc obsede qui croit avoir trouve la tombe d'une reine egyptienne, des voyantes, la dame qui vit avec les gorilles, et une statue d'une vierge marie noire.
Pas l'histoire typique de l'internat pour des filles. C'est formidable et triste.
A satirical and critical look at the EU, centered around a range of European characters crossing paths in Brussels, each participating in the bureaucratic melting pot that is the European commission. Menasse's writing is very cheeky at times, has deadpan humor (there's a pig on the loose in the streets of Brussels!) but also digs deep into Europe's history and the reasons for the EC's original foundation (no! more! nationalism!).
I enjoyed some of the narrative strands more than others, and was actually quite surprised when at the end they weren't neatly tied up, and rather were just left hanging. But there definitely was a lot of ‘schmunzeln' at the clever picking-apart and mocking of politicians, lobbyists, academics and all the other bureaucrats.
Systems built on systems consisting of systems, all tied together, each with their own agenda, and incredibly hard to knock off their path. The world of politics and economics and national debt is complex. I don't claim that I understand it after reading this book, but I feel I now have more empathy for politicians that go into politics with ideals and simply get ground down by bureaucracy, unflexible minds and the inertia of systems in motion.
Not gonna deny that this is a very one-side view on the events surrounding the Greek government-debt crisis, and that the author definitely comes off a bit too convinced of being the only smart person in every room. He had the freedom of going into this world with an ultimatum and escape plan in mind. Most career politicians don't have luxury.
Sometimes dense, often hard to keep track of numbers and debts, near impossible to understand the bureaucratic and legalistic web tying together the main players (ECB, EC, IMF, the Troika, the ‘institutions', the ‘politicians'...) but always a fascinating portrait of what must have been a very complicated and very frustrating time for all the players involved.
Listening to the Slate Money The Greece Edition episode (2015) after reading the book, was very helpful.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This story is great allegory of dreamers and those who want to improve the world, and how every action has consequences. Wonderfully littered with smart lines about how our brains create our worlds. And besides all that, also just a good story.
Now I wonder though, why all the three scifi novels I've read of Le Guin's have male protagonists.
A century of Japan with hardships and public and personal tragedies, told through the eyes of a laborer. The protagonist is used to support his family by earning money far away, so at the end of his life he chooses homelessness (in Tokyo's Ueno Park) over becoming a burden to a family he barely knows.
I quite liked this, as it's giving a perspective that isn't so common.
I was a bit apprehensive about the first person plural, as I found it really limiting and exhausting in [b:The Buddha in the Attic 10464963 The Buddha in the Attic Julie Otsuka https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327878988l/10464963.SX50.jpg 15369956], but I warmed up to it. And, contrary to the other book, the “we” mostly dissolved into actual names and faces. In the end, it felt very fitting. As there was a clear “us” versus “them”. The generation that was born into a world that's slowly escalating , and the generation that let it come to this. Added to this all is the narrative's reinterpretation of biblical events. Which definitely doesn't sound like my sort of thing. But somehow this turned into a very compelling, sad, witty, occasional bonkers, not-too-serious, and fast-paced read.
The big revelation of this book is that nations with absolutist governments that are ruled by greed and exploit their populations won't prosper. Who would have thought? That's not necessarily how the authors phrase it, but that's my takeaway. They would phrase it as: Nations with inclusive economic and political institutions fare better than nations with extractive economic and political institutions.
They are very dismissive of the claim that geography, biogeography and climate are fundamental reasons for why some societies fare better than other. Yet they don't really explain what causes inclusive healthy societies to originate in the first place. The bottom line could be, that economic and political systems are complex, and once they are established, they are hard to course-correct.
Nevertheless this is an interesting read. I don't have an issue with the content, rather with how they frame it as a novel take. It has some structural issues, as the second half with the case studies feels way too long.
Once extractive exploitative power structures are in place, it's hard to escape them. In a vicious cycle, tyrants are expelled only for a new power elite to emerge. That's why so many ex-colonial nations are failing. The colonial powers left behind a system built on the exploitation of nature and people, that simply falls into the hands of the next power-hungry rulers.
Despite exploitation enabling some growth, extractive institutions ultimately will stagnate, as they are blocking any attempts at bottom-up innovations. Innovations are drivers of creative destruction. Old industries must fall for new to emerge, and the current elite and their friends have all their money invested in the old industries. Similarly innovation won't happen, if no one is given the incentive to invent.
Si je n'avais pas regarde l'adaptation cinematographique, j'aurais ete tres perdu dans la narration poetique de cette nouvelle. J'aimait beaucoup le film, et maintenant je me demande comment elles avaient developpe l'histoire de film a partir de les vignettes courtes et disjointes du livre.
Neanmoins le livre and l'ecriture est tres beau, mais trop poetique et incoherent pour mon gout.
A girl freeing herself from years of sexual abuse and violence, while dealing with all the psychological twists long years of abuse can bring. This is a companion to [b:My Absolute Darling 33572350 My Absolute Darling Gabriel Tallent https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498911183l/33572350.SY75.jpg 54375969], and while it shares the same dark trigger warnings, Dark Horses feels more geared towards a YA audience.