Matt E
How quickly style can turn to crutch, spicy phrases turn into tics, and a streetwise narrator turns into your cranky coworker that keeps coming around to complain to you! I really liked Altered Carbon, but it seems like maybe one was enough. This time around, I can't unhear the way that wildly different characters rely on the same cliches, and the way that a post-biology post-human world opens up space for Morgan to describe human racial/ethnic characteristics in a really creepy colonial pseudo-scientific way. Also, unforgivable for a pulpy novel, really really boring. Boo! I was really expecting to like this one.
Continuing my cyberpunk kick! I thought JG was so much fun from start to finish. Corporate dystopia straight from SNOW CRASH, a bit of perverse wacky fun with the upside down incentives of the world from SIDEWAYS STORIES FROM WAYSIDE SCHOOL, and the big guy vs. pathetic little guy dynamics from George Saunders' short stories. Highly recommend.
I thought this was such a beautiful book on a sentence-by-sentence level. Greenwell is a poet, and you can feel that in his language.
There's a petty reason why this is not going straight into my soul, and that's because Greenwell's protagonist is well observed and well written and has a plausible internal subjectivity, but his life experience is so different from mine and with such a different toy box of issues, repressions, and contradictions that it's hard for me to see myself in him. It's like an incredibly well aimed bullet striking the person just to your left.
Of course, that's not the only purpose of fiction, and I enjoyed the journey anyway.
I read this as a little palate cleanser after a string of nonfiction/biography. I often find myself frustrated by Neil Gaiman. I love the ideas he plays with and returns to, but his execution and endings usually leave me wanting more.
I was so blown away by how good this little book is.
It shares DNA with David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and even a little more with Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series. The protagonist of the book is seven years old, and I was shocked and moved by his ability to draw me back into that time when I was so small and had so little power and so little control and anything and anyone could become dangerous. I highly recommend.
I did not make it all of the way through Pleasure Activism. This is a collection of writing in various forms, primarily selected blog posts, transcriptions of conversations, and essays. The strengths of this approach and the collection as a whole is that there are a lot of voices and perspectives included, and plenty of breadcrumbs leading to other books, writers and teachers.
The weakness of the collection is that many of the selections are loosely or not at all edited, which leads to a lot of banal repetition across selections, and no individual selection has the depth or length to really address the topic or idea it is included to cover. Ultimately I got frustrated and bored with the low yield of ideas verses the time I was investing to read.
adrienne maree brown is a Black woman and an activist. If your experience of the world hews closer to hers than mine does, I have no doubt that reading this book would be a totally different experience. Clearly this collection has struck a chord with many readers. My recommendation to all readers is to take a look at the table of contents and dive right into the topic that you have the most interest in. If you're vibing with the material, this book may be right for you. If not, be aware that that level of depth and care in the writing is fairly consistent across the collection.
Cover Her Face is a bit of a mess. It seems to belong to a different generation of mystery novels than P.D. James' later novels. It's set in an English country estate with lots of judgmental villagers, not that different than Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple novels, just without the...uh... charming ethnic stereotypes? (That's sarcasm.)
Adam Dalgleish is a bit of a non-entity, there's none of the depth that comes in into her later novels featuring the character. There's a lot of judgey slut and victim shaming and maybe that's an accurate depiction of village morés, but it's still not that fun to read. And, frankly, the puzzle box plot was not that interesting and I found it extremely tedious to finish.
For completists only, if you are looking to get into P.D. James' novels, I would pick a different starting place.
This is, like, a very important and beautiful book to me. Tara Brach takes clear aim at the voices in our heads that tell us that we don't deserve happiness, that keep us stuck in our wounds, and try and keep us disconnected from our true feelings because we worry that if we open ourselves up to them they might drown us, like one more passenger on a lifeboat that's barely above water.
Writing about self-help is vulnerable to me because it's like shouting Hi! I have all these problems. And they are also easy to make fun of, and not even in a mean-spirited way. There is something a little goofy about looking to Buddhism for answers (as an American, given the cultural history of “looking to the East” for enlightenment) or taking in meditations with exercises like saying hello to your pain. There's a real and sad truth to texts like these: I turn to them when I need to hear them. I allow them in when trying to muddle through endless grey days without compassion for myself is worse than trying to do something about it.
Self-help/growth books are one of those things where some work for some folks and others work for other folks, so I wouldn't just blanket recommend it to everyone. The most I can say is that if it seems like it might contain something you're trying to find, you owe it to yourself to open it up and see if it is.
Here's what I knew coming into the book: it was an Oprah's Book Club pick, and it was about the consequences and effects on a marriage of a black man's interaction with a racist and unjust legal system. I wanted to remain open to what the book, and Tayari Jones had to say, but my expectations were tempered a little bit by the cynical baggage I brought to it. I did not think I needed a book to teach me that the legal system in this country is racist, I did not need a book to teach me that the personal consequences were devastating (do you hear the cliché of that word? Our cliches fail us: devastating, heart breaking, immense, incomprehensible. They all relate to a quantity so vast as to challenge human scale, but they're equally so vague as to be almost bloodless).
This wasn't that book, it's better than that.
This book asks difficult, almost despairing questions. What happens when injustice is as commonplace, as unbounded, as inhuman in scale as the weather? What's the point of shaking your fist at the weather? Roy is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and once he has successfully appealed, the system may expunge his record and release him but it can never give him the the time lost, the life that he could have lived, back. Who pays him back for that time? It's not the state, and if it's not the state, then the only other people can pay are the people around him, but they've changed too.
It's the irreconcilable paradox of our prisons, the math that never penciled out in the first place. It's become so encumbered by history and politics and violence and profit that we delude ourselves into thinking that our reforms and incremental changes and civic religion of equality can fix it, but when you take it all away, the same conflict remains: if prisons are places of rehabilitation, at some point the prisoner becomes a different person than committed the crime. If prisons are places of retribution, who believes anymore that wasting years of human life does anything to mend what cannot be broken?
I loved the characters in this book. Not loved them in the sense of being good or likable people, I don't feel the need to judge them but nobody in the book is perfect. But Tayari Jones makes you believe in their dreams, believe that they are real, and that means that the painful realization that all of these dreams together did not add up was real too. Nobody was going to get exactly what they want, and even those that got most of what they want will have to live with the knowledge that some of it came from some pretty selfish choices.
The justice system, the whole legal system, is based on the ideas that everything is owned by someone, and when something is stolen, somebody has to pay. Except for the system itself. It never has to pay.
Tommy Pico is incredible, and if you haven't read him you should run not walk to one of his poetry collections. He writes directly to my sensibility–insecure, introspective, and horny–and the beautiful experience of reading something written for you is like drinking deeply of spring water or breathing in the air after a rain.
“There's no evangelism like the zeal of a recent convert” is a cliché with a lot of truth in it. The convert is the rare person that knows what it is like to believe A and to be persuaded to believe B. It's lonely, because they feel an affinity, a one-sided kinship with the A's, and however much they also feel connected to B's they are outsiders. Therefore they must find new converts because only they will understand the journey they have completed.
Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley is a memoir in which she looks back at her journey from being a founder of a startup at 19 to being a Marxist critic in her late 20's.
While she has some clearly expressed ideas and insights—I particularly loved the way that she drew a parallel between the structure of gig worker pay and the Amazon Web Services server credits that basically every developer uses—easily half of the book is skin-deep summaries of news events and startup culture ideas. The other half is a dull tick-tock of the saga of founding a startup and riding it into failure. It's just not that interesting, think: Abolish My Two Years Working at Kinko's.
If you misread the title, as I did, and inserted an unwritten How To at the beginning, please be aware that the sum total of the imagining a post-capitalism tech sector would fit in a not-very-long Medium post. It has one great idea about the possibilities of legislating code to be open-sourced after a certain period, the rest is banality.
I feel a little bad trashing this book because the sense of anger that Liu has at being hoodwinked and bribed into thinking that startup culture really was disrupting corporate evil and doing good doing well is alive. But kind of like the convert, in a world this upside down, if you have decided to maintain your belief that Silicon Valley is a force for good in 2020 (pub year), this book is not going to reach you, and if you have been there already, the naiveté of Liu's pre-conversion self is simply going to inflame your sense of injustice.
What a sweet little book! I picked it up because I follow Richard Lawson on Twitter, but I guess I wasn't following him when it was released. Although the novel starts with a dramatic bridge collapse, most of what unfolds are the quotidian dramas of being alive: insights into the self that you try and shove down into the unconscious, trying to be brave enough to make a leap into what you know you have to do, the loneliness and despair of trying to stay connected to someone who is trying like hell to run away.
Now, maybe you watch a lot of Netflix crime shows and the only thing that seems dramatic now is a race to decode cryptic clues before a baby rapist detonates explosives underneath the final match of the world cup. Compared to that, this book may very well seem plotless and boring to you. I cannot help you there.
I give it a few extra points for incorporating some teen characters that are neither the bland upper-middle class that usually peoples YA nor are they only in the book to edify the white characters. A few points knocked off for still centering bland upper-middle class teens.
The reason I didn't think it added up to a five star book to me is that it didn't really ever answer why we were looking at these characters. They were all fascinating, but they never quite cohered together because the present-day narrative is packed into a single day. Second, although it has a beautiful message about dealing with uncertainty and taking each day as it comes, it doesn't quite present that in a way that allows the reader to take it away in their own life (unless there has been a bridge collapse in your community).
But please give it a read! I'd love for Lawson to get the chance to write another one.