Eva
This one was a lot wilder than [b:Convenience Store Woman 38357895 Convenience Store Woman Sayaka Murata https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1523623053l/38357895.SY75.jpg 51852264] but moves along similar lines, of what it means to be an outsider in a society where everyone should act and think the same. There's a heartbreaking element that depicts how children (or adults) can escape into fantasy worlds in order to suppress traumatising experiences. Occasionally our protagonist has to endure so much injustice at the hand of family and friends, that the misery almost becomes unbearable. But then the story takes a turn towards the weird, and just stays on course!
A wonderful and unique book. It tells the life story of Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani in the form of a dialogue between him and his son, on the eve of his life while he's awaiting death. The dialogue is part biographical retelling, a portrait of the generation that grew up after WWII, part Asian history, part philosophical musing on the nature of humanity and part spiritual preparation for death.
Terzani spent most of his career reporting from Asian countries and experienced first hand many of the violent conflicts and revolutions that occurred there in the second half of the 20th century (Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Japan, ...). Hearing him talk about these decades makes it so apparent how no country ever escapes its history.
He loves those regions of Asia that are/were still unspoiled by capitalism, globalism, tourism. And he questions if it is worth it to pay the prize of a forceful-cutoff from the world and its many beneficial medical discoveries in order to stay pure. And interesting dilemma to ponder.
His advice for us is to go off the beaten track. Do not take the path of least resistance. To not repeat ourselves. To not fear death. To seek solitude. To enjoy nature.
Even though the spiritual parts at the end turned a bit preachy, and there's a certain old-school mindset regarding feminism, Terzani, his adventures and his philosophy of life are very inspiring.
Samra Habib, the creator of queermuslimproject.tumblr.com, shares her life story. From escaping the war in Pakistan, to experiencing Islamophobia and the toils of immigration in Canada, to escaping her arranged marriage and to strengthening and reconciling her queerness with her identity as a Muslim. As with her photography project, her goal with the book is to encourage and help a younger generation that's facing similar struggles.
A wonderfully immersive story, that pulls you into the WWI trenches with two Canadian Cree Indians and constructs a tale of ancestry and destiny, the horrors of war and the healing it requires. Xavier Bird, Elijah Whiskeyjack and their ‘auntie', medicine woman Niska, are memorable characters. The book definitely deserves all the accolades it received.
Mon second livre de la grande dame de science fiction de Quebec - Elisabeth Vonarburg. Cette fois je l'ai lu en francais.
J'ai aime beaucoup a explorer les changements culturels et societaux de cet futur qui prend place environ six-cent ans apres une forme d'apocalypse appellee “le declin”. Le lecteur et les protagonists ne savent pas grand-chose de de qui s'est passe a cette epoque, mais il a produit beaucoup des zones pollues et interdites, une maladie qui tue de nombreaux enfants, et un desequilibre biologique dans la reproduction qui produit beaucoup plus de femmes que d'hommes.
Nous suivons notre protagoniste Lisbei de l'enfance a la vieillesse, et comme son interet pour le passe grandit, nous decouvrons avec elle de plus en plus sur l'origine et les raisons des coutumes et le des croyances dans cet futur.
Il y avait plusieurs revoltes et hierarchies de pouvoir different dans leur histoire. Just apres le declin, les hommes ont pris le pouvoir et organise une societe de ‘harems'. Apres, les femmes les ont renversees et se sont organisees en une societe de ‘ruche' encore tres violente. Finalement un mouvement plus paisible a succede et ‘le pays de mere' s'est forme.
En particulier le petit nombre d'hommes a eu des effets interessants sur la restructuration de la societe et change egalement de langue a cours des annes.
J'aime beacoup cette livre, et cette genre de livre de science fiction sociale. J'ai lu The Silent City l'annee dernier, et a l'occasion j'essayai a faire des connections, mais je pense je n'ai pas reussi.
Le fin de livre fait quelques revelations qui te donne envie de relire le livre.
Candid memoir of a Métis-Cree whose early turbulent childhood with a drug-addicted father and stints at foster-care, sent him down a path of drug addiction, crime and homelessness. A good reminder of how one is never free of the traumas of one's past and the traumas done to one's people. And how hard the struggle is to climb back up.
That image of the 3 small brothers desperately trying to feed themselves and locking arms to take on the world that seems all set against them, will stay with me.
Rutger Bregman - of the equally excellent [b:Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World 40876575 Utopia for Realists How We Can Build the Ideal World Rutger Bregman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532031994l/40876575.SX50.jpg 49847901] - shows how we're locked in a self-fulfilling prophecy if we believe that humanity is inherently egoistic. An inverse to placebo, “nocebo” brings about negative effect through simple believes. History and literature wants to make us believe that war and egoism are part of our culture. Same as William Golding's Lord of the Flies was celebrated as a realistic depiction of human nature, we also believed the tale of the warring cannibalistic tribes of the Easter Island. Yet Gregman contrasts these with a real-life Lord of the Flies adventure of 6 boys who survived peacefully as castaways on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean. And he demonstrates how the Easter Island myths were constructed on one explorer's wild imagination for bloody stories. Like the Siberian experiment in domesticating silver foxes shows, our branch of humans seem to have domesticated itself. We're slimmer, more playful, and cuter than the others. We're the “homo puppy” who survived other more powerful species (like the neanderthals) because of our smarter wits and our social/collaborative skills. Despite there being violence in prehistoric times, there rarely were wars. Humans lived in small to medium sized groups that simply moved on when falling into conflict with other groups. Multiple signs seem to indicate that the end of humanity's nomadic existence, the onset of agriculture and “property”, is what introduce war and violence into man's history. The patriarchy overtook as women became a good that had to join foreign families, as men stayed put to protect their animals. Germs and virus arose from humanity's now close proximity to animals. We all know famous psychological studies that apparently demonstrate humanity's rotten core: The Milgram experiment, the Standford Prison experiment, the Robber's Cave experiment, the Kitty Genovese case, ... They show how we are able to hurt others when conforming to authority, how our prime instinct is to stirr up fights, or how lack the empathy to help people in need. Yet when you dig into all those experiments, you see how they all fall apart because of researchers with an intent, deliberate priming of subjects, the omission of facts that contradict the thesis (or the sensational headline). Believing those studies can have huge cruel consequences, especially when applied in structures of power. That's how the police restructured to become quota-obsessed by misinterpreting the broken-windows study. Some more notes from my huge list of notes:- too much empathy is not good as it strips one of one's power to forgive, or see the other's side- corruption through power turns to loss of empathy and triggers a survival of the shameless (politics)- Solnit talks about how leaders assume their constituents would act selfishly just because they wouldIn today's world the cynic is called a realist. We should reverse that. Bregman ends on the hopeful fact that the simple act of witnessing altruism makes us more altruistic ourselves. Super informative book with a wonderful intention, that hopefully causes some cynics to turn into optimistic altruists.
First I thought this would turn into a companion piece to [b:Uncanny Valley: A Memoir 45186565 Uncanny Valley A Memoir Anna Wiener https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559568004l/45186565.SY75.jpg 69908892] with the San Francisco tech angle, but then it became a study of interracial relationships. There were interesting moments and thoughts in here, but it somehow started to fizzle out midway. I thought it was actually quite funny that the protagonist was curating news articles for social media feeds, because the writing had this snippet thread quality (a mix of opinions, mundane life details, and interesting historical facts), where there weren't clear starts and stops and I kinda just kept reading like you keep scrolling, despite it not being super engaging.
Set in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, The Break is a heartbreaking and gritty multi-generational story of a Metis family, told through different perspectives that originate in and around the sexual assault of young teenage girl. The voices we hear are mostly women, because it's the women that hold the family structures together, they are the ones that stay. There's crime, drug addiction, lost loved ones, gang violence, and a lot of trauma and hurt handed down from generation to generation.
This book succeeded on so many levels for me. It has the literary fiction appeal, the feminist angle, and all the while also kept me hooked with the plot. Some of the scenes really shook me. Little broken Emily sneaking home without telling anyone, Rain transforming Stella's bedtime fairy-tales so that the princess wouldn't need a prince, Jake fighting tears without being able to open up to his mom.
Rounded up.
There was entirely too much personal history in this for me. Even though it was fun to hear how nerdy he was as a kid, a lot of the stories and the narrative voice made me partially dislike the guy. All the factual content is great though. His realization about what the NSA was up to, his meticulous and borderline-paranoid planing on how to report on it (is it still paranoia if you for a fact know all the paranoia is warranted?) and then his escape to HongKong to go public and subsequent forced exile. I also found it very interesting when he talked about whistle-blowers vs leakers, and what fundamentally differentiates democracies from dictatorships, how in the former people concede power to the government, while in the latter the government concedes power to the people. His story also makes you think how complex it gets with national laws in an international arena like the internet. Similar as Snowden got land-locked in Moscow while trying to get to South America, our internet traffic travels through servers and routers hosted all over the world, more often in countries like China with very different privacy laws.
Oh the Hong Kong expat life, taking up the mid-level escalators, going on trips to Lamma island, drinking in LKF or TST. Where all locals you meet have studied abroad, all expats work in finance, and everyone generally earns way too much money and is obsessed with fashion brands. Our Irish heroine Ava is young and new in town, as she falls into a relationship with banker Julian with whom she moves in, despite him never committing to her. The two bond over acerbic humor, their level of detachment, and give off a very vapid posh vibe. It took me half the book to start to like them a little. And then Edith enters the picture, a trendy young lawyer, who's constantly responding to work emails on her phone, and Ava starts to slowly analyse and compare the feelings she has for the two people in her life. What Dolan tries to do with explorations of linguistics through Ava's language classes, feels very similar to how Sally Rooney used digital communicaiton in [b:Conversations with Friends 32187419 Conversations with Friends Sally Rooney https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500031338l/32187419.SY75.jpg 52827120] and Elif Batuman used translation in [b:The Idiot 30962053 The Idiot Elif Batuman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474782288l/30962053.SY75.jpg 51577226]. I don't think Dolan succeeds as well as the other two though. There's a faint thread of class, politics and economy woven into this that I really enjoyed. What the 2008 financial crisis has done to Ireland, the soul-lessness of the financial sector (Julian's only interest seems to be in making money), HK's council election, arrest of student protestors, Ireland's upcoming abortion vote ... I would have liked her to dig a bit deeper into those. Though this probably would have become a different book then. I enjoyed this as a nostalgia trip.
Munro is a big Canadian writer, mostly known for her short stories. This is the only novel she wrote, so naturally this is the book of hers I chose.
The book is a series of snapshots of a girl's coming-of-age in a town in rural Ontario during the 1940s. Her father breeds white foxes at the end of a dirt road, her mother sells encyclopedias to farmers while mourning her own ambitions, her family's boarder is gossiped about for being an unmarried woman. There's humor and wisdom yet also darkness in the way Munro portrays the mundanity of these small town characters. And threading through all the stories is the subtle story of girls and women, enduring or trying to overcome the sexist conventions of that time.
This is great writing. I enjoyed the quirkiness of the earlier stories (uncle Benny and his mail-in-bride) and the harsh reality of the later stories (the ending of Del's love story, what an education). Just the middle had maybe too much exploration of different religions.
A researcher in isolation in the dark North of Norway, observing the influence of the climate on the local bird population. While she finds comfort in the tools and measurements of science, she slowly unwinds to deal with the relationships she fled from, and is fascinated then haunted by the history of the place.
I really liked parts of this: the isolation, the nature, the tale from the past, the theme of men vs women. And I felt indifferent about other parts: her old and her new relationship, the occasional explicit sexual descriptions. But the main problem is, that all these parts never fully clicked together, in my opinion.
The shocking and suspenseful behind-the-scenes on the investigative journalism that helped bring Harvey Weinstein down. Seen through the bigger lens of catch&kill campaigns where the wealthy and powerful have the means and the support network to squash and scare- and pay-off any sexual assault accusers. The book reads like a thriller (this will become a movie eventually, right?) and Farrow's writing is engaging, sometimes even candidly personal.
Who knew spy pens are still a thing in our modern day spy era!!!
Doing the audiobook version was a good choice. Farrow doing a whole lot of accents (to more or less success) was entertaining, but they also included the actual audio of the Weinstein NYPD tape. Which felt like a very novel audiobook thing to do.
This is a cult story, and it's a story of mothers and daughters. Of loving and trusting and wanting to believe, despite running up against people and ideas that don't deserve your love and trust. All the description of the drought, the heat, the lack of water, the thirst, the stickiness of soda .. was very visceral. Similar the crippling sensation of being locked into a place, an upbringing, a culture - that seems impossible to escape. There's a punk vibe to this, with the cheap glam and glitter of it all, the level of sexual explicitness, and its cool attitude towards that (despite the protagonist being rather young), which I enjoyed but feel could have pushed a bit further. Because of the plot I'd compare it to [b:The Girls 26893819 The Girls Emma Cline https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492065338l/26893819.SY75.jpg 42856015], and it has a similar US writing-program vibe to it, but I definitely enjoyed this one more.
All you could ever want to know about human behavior from a scientific perspective.
Looking at behavior through different lenses, Sapolsky slowly zooms out in time, going from neurons firing (milliseconds) to sensory inputs (seconds) to hormones (hours) to neural-plasticity (days, months) to epigenetics and genetics (your lifetime) to cultural programming (many many lifetimes) to evolution itself (humanity's lifetime). And the path is highlighted with summaries and anecdotes from the most famous scientific studies. The second half of the book talks about topics like Us-Them, hierarchy/obedience/resistance, morality, pain and empathy, what leads us to kill and the free will discourse.
Things I've learned:
- The prefrontal-cortex is the last part of our brain that matures (in the early twenties), therefore it's more prone to be influenced by nurture than nature. This is where our culture takes root, overrules our genes and influences our decision making.
- Ecology shapes culture. Asia, a continent build on rice, has a holistic world-view, as rice-agriculture requires the collaboration of the many. The west has a individualistic world-view in contrast.
- The brains of conservatives and progressives are indeed different!
- As soon as societies evolved into forming bigger groups, the need for a moralizing god emerged.
The writing is a lot more engaging as one might expect from a 700-page psychology book. Sapolsky is quite witty, which keeps it entertaining. Still took a while to get through though.
Our guts (and the guts of the capitalist elite) might tell us that ideas like Universal Basic Income, shorter work weeks and open borders might never help us achieve utopian visions of a world without poverty, a world of equality. But why trusts our pessimistic guts, when we can just test these ideas in scientific studies? We can and we have, and they show that people are much more likely to lift themselves out of poverty when they receive unconditional money. They show that governments that provide free universal health care end up spending less in total on hospital and social worker bills. They show that we are healthier and more productive if we work less.
Then why is it still so hard to believe the evidence and execute these ideas?
The story of how close Nixon came to implementing UBI is fascinating. Incredibly, how in the end he chose to trust a supposedly failed 19th century trial (without proper control measurements, and which turned out to be successful after all) over multiple successful 20th century trials. Similarly, how that one stat about UBI raising divorce numbers (which later also turned out to be wrong) turned people against it.
It's a fight against our guts. And a good reminder that randomized control trials are powerful, but that it's so important to verify all the numbers, and to control against all bias.
GiveDirectly has proven that handing out money directly to people in need, has a more positive effect then spending the same amount of money on the salary of a support network (people we send in to ‘help').
Great to have this book come out of the Netherlands, which with the rest of northern Europe is a frontrunner in all these movements.
A woman is cut off from the world, and forced to create a new life for herself in the forest by a mountain. Her only companions are a dog, a cow and a cat. She learns to grow food and how to survive in this new environment. Slowly she falls into a rhythm, and finds a sort of harmony in the companionship of her animals. But nature is also cruel...A wonderful story, of an abstract limited world (similar to [b:The Woman in the Dunes 9998 The Woman in the Dunes Kōbō Abe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361254930l/9998.SY75.jpg 58336]) yet the story is less interested in investigating the mystery of her confinement, but rather in the tasks of the simple life (like [b:Ein ganzes Leben 22550484 Ein ganzes Leben Robert Seethaler https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1406198884l/22550484.SY75.jpg 42007512]) and in humanity's bond with animals. Luchs and Bella and Perle will stay in mind. And I have now realized that the audiobook I listened to has been an abridged version, so I will have to fix that mistake eventually by finding the full version.
Naomi Klein is very good at revealing the connections between the climate crisis and the world's other escalating problems like income equality, systemic racism, increase of migration... We've established a world order that runs on capitalism, and the players that earn the most from the status quo, are the ones keeping us from changing the system equations towards a more holistic, people- and planet-friendly outcome.
It gave me a new perspective on why the climate crisis seems to find the hardest opponents in places like North America and Australia: Societies that were built on colonialism, are used to endless resources. When resources got scarce, they'd simply move the frontier, invade new territories. Capitalism and the culture of endless taking!
This book is a long introduction, and a couple of essays of Klein from the last couple of years. It does a good job at prodding the subject matter from different angles (one being the pope), and has surprisingly little overlap, despite the fact that the essays were stand-alone texts.
Life for Connie has been a series of unlucky events that successively knocked her lower and lower into poverty, violence and depression, now leaving her afraid and on the edge of sanity. While at a mental hospital she's connected through time to the 22nd century. In this future people still mend the harm humanity has caused the earth, but live happily in small hippy-like communities organised around principles of self realization, sexual freedom and sustainability. Connie has a hard time comparing her present and this utopia, but by spending time with the friends she makes there, she slowly grows more resilient.
Brilliant for its time (written in 1976), and still so resonant today. The types of oppression (sexism, racism, prejudice towards mental illness, the capitalism-driven carelessness of pharmacy/technology) the protagonist Connie experiences in the 70ies are still very much part of our present. I liked how Piercy doesn't spoon-feed you all the connections you can make (while she definitely does spoon-feed you some). The book leaves you with lots of thoughts about injustices generated by systems and also inspiration for a future we could and should want to build.
4.5