December 2021 update

Complete with hard-to-see honest progress bookmark

Well - it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? In the second half of 2021 a few things happened personally, professionally, and in the world at large. My postdoc contract ended in June and I took a new job in rover operations at ASU. While I was pretty excited about the opportunity, it also meant that I was working full time on campus for basically the first time ever. I also was joining a Mars mission early on enough that operations were still happening seven days a week and at craaaaazy early start times. In the meantime everyone seems to have decided that the pandemic is over and we can all go about our business (despite Delta, and now, Omicron). While I’m still being cautious I have definitely had more pressure to meet with people in person, entertain out of town guests, etc. that has been radically different from the way we lived for over a year.

The result of all this was I didn’t have a lot of time/energy to read in the latter half of 2021, much less blog about it. I feel a bit guilty about that, given how much I enjoyed reading in 2020 and early 2021, but it is what it is. Given that operations schedules have mostly calmed down, I hope to get back to it more in 2022. But who knows.

Here’s a short tour of the rest of the books I read in 2021:

The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu (2016), short stories/science fiction

Oof. I was really hoping to like this one. A few of the stories are quite good! The title one especially. But on the whole, no, this did not do it for me at all. You 100% lost me at “fragments that had broken off the [asteroid headed for Earth] were headed for Mars and the moon”. No. Just no. I can suspend disbelief to a point but if you’re going to write science fiction at least pretend to understand orbital dynamics. Also, ending the collection with ‘The Man Who Ended History’? I mean I guess where else could you plausibly put it, but also, yikes? Going out on a torture note made me enjoy this book even less.

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927), literary/historical fiction

This is some goddamned good writing. It’s difficult, for sure - the sudden shifts in point of view, the asides, the period references. I didn’t originally intend to order the annotated version and yet I ended up glad that I did - the introduction gave a lot of context that was actually important, and the references were insightful. Truly, not much really happens in this book except some of the characters (spoiler alert) die off stage and yet.. and yet. It’s a lovely set of meditations on families, femininity, humanity, etc, and I’m better for having encountered it. The dinner scene is wonderful. That said, it was a read that required some dedicated time set aside to process. I read the bulk of it on my birthday vacation/retreat in July and the rest not until Thanksgiving gave me a few days off.

(close) Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson (1996), science fiction

Meh. To be completely fair, I am still ~150 pages from completing this, so I can’t rule out the possibility that it suddenly gets amazing. After Red Mars I have really struggled with Green Mars and this. I’ve had a really hard time accepting that the original characters are a bajillion years old, and somehow the later generations are just not as interesting. This book in particular gets so far from first book’s premise of settling on Mars and lets its artificially ancient characters flit about the solar system. I literally have been abandoning and returning to this book for a year and hope to finally finish it soon. (See sad progress book mark above). But I spent enough time with it this year that I feel justified in including it.

The Liar’s Dictionary - Eley Williams (2020), contemporary/historical fiction

This was fun, but to be honest, not as fun as I’d hoped. It suffers mainly from a lack of side characters and plot. There are two alternating protagonists, but all that’s going on is their existential crises. Neither one has any friends?! Mallory has a girlfriend and her boss but seemingly no parents or friends. Peter only has only his random crush and his co-workers. I liked the two poor insecure protagonists but they live in such a constrained world. Also, there’s a bit about factory explosion that’s really unclear that it’s not a train crash and doesn’t do anything for the plot?! Maybe I just missed the mark on this one. The invented words are fun! I just wish it had gone somewhere.

Wow, No Thank You

Oddly enough, not the only book cover on here with that standout shade of green

Author: Samantha Irby

Publication: 2020

Genre: Essays

Oops - I meant to post this back in June and accidentally left it as a draft. Update as to why I haven’t updated in the next post.

This book seemed to be on everyone’s list last year, so I had to pick it up. It was fun even if I wasn’t quite the target audience. Irby and I do not appear to have much in common other than a female identity and some time living in the Midwest. I still enjoyed her insight and humor. It was witty and real and a quick easy read.

I totally related to ‘Are you familiar with my work?’ because damn, it is hard to make friends as an adult outside of work. ‘Country crock’ hit close to home with its clear-eyed perception of race and rural reality. ‘Hello, 911’, was pretty damn funny with its “GET ME OUT OF THIS SITUATION” one-offs. (“Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.”)

I admit I was not a fan of the gross bits, funny as some of them were. (I also realized I had read ‘Hysterical!’ somewhere before.) Anyway, bit of a mixed bag overall. Enjoyed it fine, but might not seek out more of the same.

I’m not original and I’m sure someone has already made the following bookshelf juxtaposition, but I refuse to Google it to find out for sure.

Amy Poehler’s Yes Please beside Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You

Gilead

Guess what the background is

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Publication: 2004

Genre: Historical fiction

Oof. Nope. Nope nope nope. This has been on my periphery for years and it’s difficult to tell if I would have disliked it at any time or it just hit wrong in early 2021. A disorganized collection of ramblings from an old-timey minister waiting to die was not, not, NOT good pandemic reading.

This was such a slim book I was initially convinced I was going to barrel through it in short order, but….nope. I really struggled to make any progress with it. Eventually I accepted that I was going to read it in 10-20 page increments and just let it take however long I needed.

John Ames, the aforementioned minister and pastor of a church in Gilead, Iowa, is writing a letter to his son to read after his death. Ames is dying of an unspecified heart ailment, and as the unnamed son was born late in his life, he won’t have many memories of his father. The narrative then proceeds to traipse about through contemporary happenings, Ames’s own adult life, his father and grandfather’s life, and a whole bunch of drama with his friend and fellow minister’s family. He talks about God a lot and it’s sweet but ultimately rather boring. (If you are Christian you might enjoy this more, perhaps.) Abolition and interracial marriage are in there too, but in a rather unsatisfying white-perspective-focused manner. A lot of the rest of it was awfully melancholy, which was one hundred percent not what I needed in a reading experience right now.

It was also really unclear at times who was doing what, because Ames refuses to name half his characters when he writes about them. His father and grandfather get no names, his son doesn’t get a name, and his wife only gets a name through a different character’s dialogue towards the end of the book. His wife comes nowhere near being fully realized as a character, presenting as something of a shy lost soul that he rescued from sin. ‘Kay. I have to wonder how much of this is intentional – Robinson deliberately showing the weaknesses of one elderly person’s perspective. I’m not sure. I do know that I would have rather heard more from the other characters in the mix – but not so much that I’m going to pick up Robinson’s other novels to look for them.

One bit of text I did appreciate and set aside (paraphrased here): The inadequacy of your concepts has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. May we all remember that.

Oak Flat

Art!

Author: Lauren Redniss

Publication: 2020

Genre: Nonfiction, History, Graphic Media

This was super well done, and I think an important read for me as an Arizona transplant. Oak Flat is an area sacred to the Apache tribes that were displaced to a reservation east of Phoenix. The area is rich in copper and has periodically been mined, which both and stimulates the local economy temporarily and destroys the landscape basically forever. A huge mining conglomerate is working to obtain the rights to mine Oak Flat despite substantial opposition from the local community. Redness follows two families in the town of Superior, Arizona, an Apache-Navajo family advocating against the mine and an Anglo family who are less opposed. (A few other viewpoints briefly feature as well.) 

I was 0% aware of the history of mining in Arizona, or even its prevalence, until I accidentally drove through some of the areas mentioned in the text. (I was doing a no-destination long drive as a way of getting out of the house on my birthday in summer 2020.) So this was really eye-opening.

I didn’t care for the mixed media format at first, but it grew on me. I would have loved to see more photographs of the people and places featured alongside the artwork.

Pretty typical page example

I also would have appreciated family trees for the two families that are central to the story. The reader is expected to keep track of a lot of people who go in and out and how they’re related, which is sometimes a lot.

Lastly, I got the chance to attend a webinar given by the author about the book shortly after I finished it. That was super fun, and something I would love to do with more authors of nonfiction work especially. She had some great thoughts about her role as a journalist versus an activist on this project.

One Year! (and change)

I’m still here and that’s the most important thing honestly

It’s been a year since I started this little book documenting experience. (Ok, more like 13 months. Deal with it.) It’s been fun! I don’t know how much longer I will keep it up – until I get bored or run out of time to read again, probably. I started with Green Mars, which I will someday finish off when I finally get through Blue Mars, I swear. In any case here are some statistics on what I read this year. Some of them surprised me!

(Note: This list includes three books that I finished by April 2021 but haven’t reviewed yet. Twenty-one books with twenty-two authors are represented.)

First shocker: Only 8 of the 22 authors I read were female! That’s 36% percent, which 1) isn’t great, and 2) is very different from my perception of whose books I was reading. I may have fallen victim to the “enough women in the room and you get the false perception of parity” issue, not sure. My reading of non-white authors was also not great, 6/22 or 27%. (Note that I have assumed gender and race in a few of these cases, so it may not be perfect. Apologies for any errors.) What I know is that I should try to expand my horizons in the rest of 2021.

One of my favorite things about my reading this is how much I learned about indigenous and Native American issues this year. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, The Broken Heart of America, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Oak Flat were all really good takes on American Indian history and life, and 1493 provided a lot of “New World” historical perspective. Definitely topics that I want to read more about going forward. I was admittedly pretty ignorant on these subjects until recently, and I definitely feel that moving to Arizona has given me more impetus to learn about these parts of American history. 

Sci fi and just plain weird fiction were also a highlight. Lincoln in the Bardo, Enter the Aardvark, and This is How You Lose the Time War all got high marks from me despite (or because of?) each being completely bonkers in some way. If I plugged those three into an algorithm, what kind of recs would I get?

As little as can be said about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Gilead (review forthcoming), the better. Let me allow the last book I finished to address them: Wow, No Thank You. 

On to year two. We’ll see where it takes me.

Old Man's War

I refuse to go back and try to figure out which alien race the flying things are supposed to be

Author: John Scalzi

Publication: 2005

Genre: Science Fiction

Once again, something recommended to me by a friend some time ago. What a romp. Old Man’s War is a good old-fashioned space adventure slash worldbuilding exercise obviously setting up for a series. It borrows heavily from (and dutifully acknowledges) Heinlein with appropriate modern twists.

The narrator, also named John, has reached age 75, at which point he’s contracted to join the interplanetary army. Nobody on Earth really knows what that entails, they just assume it’s better than dying of old age. John’s wife has already died, so he overly calmly severs the remainder of his earthly connections and launches to space. Without getting overly spoiler-y, the space army equips him to be a good soldier and then flings him around the galaxy for the rest of the book.

Even at 15 years old, the text rings mildly sexist. Even when some of the troops are women, they’re all “men”. The leadership skews male. The narrator’s male gaze is obvious. Race or nationality doesn’t enter in any meaningful fashion, other than some backhanded swipes at overpopulation consequences in Asian countries (yikes). It’s implied that the soldiers are mainly white and American.

The narrator is a relatable everyman (at least if you’re a white dude). He has no real personality other than 1) infallible natural aptitude for war games and 2) being the only old person still in love with his spouse. My copy had a few noticeable typos. It’s a first novel, and I understand that it was serially self-published at first, but it could have used stronger editing in places. Scalzi tends to repeat words in close proximity to one another, which is jarring in otherwise pleasantly well-written verbiage.

All these caveats aside, it’s a fun read. It goes down easy with a heathy dose of snark. The story has just enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. I enjoyed it; probably even enough to pick up some of the sequels.

Enter the Aardvark

Well hello there

Author: Jessica Anthony

Publication: 2020

Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Satire

Where to begin. In parallel storylines, a British naturalist in 1875 “discovers” the aardvark in Namibia and ships a specimen to his secret gay lover back in England to be taxidermied. Meanwhile, in 2019 (?) Washington D.C., someone clandestinely FedExs aforementioned taxidermied aardvark to a closeted Republican congressman. Hijinks ensue.

I am officially giving up numerical ratings for these reviews, and this book is the reason. I struggled mightily with the rating for this one. I really did. My instinct was honestly 9/10. But did I want to rate Aardvark the same as a beautifully constructed novel like Rules of Civility or a the last hurrah for a beloved Terry Pratchett character? This is 180 pages about repressed gay love and taxidermy that, more than flirting with the absurd, wholeheartedly embraces it.

Forget the rating and the comparisons, I loved it. It’s short enough that something’s constantly happening. The second-person narration of the modern story line works. So did the semi-stream-of-consciousness writing and seamless introduction of details unknown to either narrator. It’s over the top. It leans in to the craziness and the excessively paralleled narratives and the caricature of the Republican congressman’s character. There is a major plot point involving transplanted eyeballs.

I can think of 99 reasons why Aardvark isn’t going to work for everyone. Fair enough. But damn, it reeled me in and held me and I don’t remember the last time I read a short book this fast. I’ll fault it a little on the ending, which doesn’t quite hold up, but after the wild ride that was the previous three parts I’ll allow it. Probably a good time to acknowledge that these reviews aren’t really about the literary quality of anything I read. It’s about how much I enjoyed reading whatever it was. And to that end, begone stars.

Killers of the Flower Moon (7/10)

Ominous.

Author: David Grann

Publication: 2017

Genre: Nonfiction, History

This account of the Osage murders was recommended to me by a colleague a few years ago. In the first eighty pages of this book I was convinced I was going to love it. The drama, the intrigue, the violence, the suspense! Unfortunately, the big reveal halfway through rather ruins the rest of the tale. After the primary perpetrator is revealed and his motives shown to be all too banal – do I care about precisely which horse thieves and ruffians were his accomplices? (No.) I’m also not that interested in the backstory of the FBI guy sent to clean up the mess, former Texas Ranger or no.

On one hand, Grann’s prose makes for a quick and easy read, and he does a compelling job of linking modern families to their not-so-distant history. On the other, he introduces and discards way too many characters. Fifty pages later I do not remember which now-jailed horse thief lied about what (see above). Grann likes to draw on related but not-strictly-pertinent anecdotes to make a point. I also couldn’t figure out the choice of images throughout the book – why so many similar portraits of Mollie Burkhart?

This book struck me as the result of someone with a lot of material who wasn’t sure how to best put it all together. That was a disappointment after the enthralling introductory chapters. The Osage murders are a fascinating (and shameful) story to bring into the present day. I wish the aftermath had been covered as adeptly.

Rising from the Plains (6/10)

Westward Ho (which I have just learned is a building in downtown Phoenix)

Author: John McPhee

Publication: 1986

Genre: Nonfiction, History, Science

I feel guilty about the relatively low score on this one. It’s not a bad book. If written in 2021 it might even be a really good book! But both its history and its geology are dated in really glaring ways, and there’s just not enough else there to elevate it.

Rising from the Plains is the third volume that eventually comprises Annals of the Former World, a series of four wanderings across American geology and history. I was recommended the series by a fellow geologist a few years back, and I’ve been working my way through them (slowly, as I am wont to do with series). The two previous volumes are Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain.

Plains focuses on Wyoming; a landscape with punishing climate and fascinating geologic complexity. McPhee brings to light his travels old-school field geologist and Wyoming native Dr. David Love. McPhee skillfully entwines human and geologic history into a single tale. There are cowboys and snowstorms and grumpy old-school geologists. The historical anecdotes are fun and help set the scene, but the perspective cannot help but feel dated.

It’s unfortunate that the geologic picture, too, remains stuck forty years in the past. The section that fascinated me the most concerned the volcanic islands of the world formed by hotspots under moving plates (not just the famous Hawaii!). I would love to know more about what we’ve discovered since then. As a geologist I long for an annotated version that tells me when the details are not quite right. And while they’re at it, I would kill for some glossy color images of all the glossily described formations. I don’t regret my foray into Annnals of a Former World, and I’ll likely finish it, but I’m less likely to recommend it to a general audience.

Bad Feminist (7/10)

This is, believe it or not, the first of these images I’ve used a filter on. Sorry for the reflection; I can never remember to take these in the daylight.

Author: Roxane Gay

Publication: 2014

Genre: Essays

I was SO close to getting through reviews for all the books I finished in 2020. And then I went and plowed through two more short books and now I have a backlog of four again. Where does the time go?!

Anyway, next up I tried out Roxane Gay’s much-toted essay collection to see what all the fuss is about. Bad Feminist, unfortunately, felt a bit dated in The Year of All Things Terrible 2020. Gay, writing in 2014, had not yet suffered through the last disaster of four plus years. (There’s at least one casual reference to Donald Trump as a useless rich person and not a menace to humanity.) A lot of essay’s subject matter has been brought to the forefront by movements like BLM and #MeToo in the intervening years. That’s undoubtably a good thing, it just makes the book read differently than it would have in 2015.

That subject matter sometimes worked for me and sometimes didn’t. I enjoyed Gay’s personal reflections and a lot of her cultural commentary. I was much less interested in her dissection of other media, particularly the few chapters early on where she writes about novels. Gay spends a lot of time describing the plots of other people’s books. I get it, I get it, there are links between each work she describes and they all make a point about how women operate in society. At the same time, if I wanted to know the plot of someone else’s book, I would read someone else’s book. There’s a whole essay rehashing the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey series, for goodness sake. Gay’s writings about her own experiences (including her experiences consuming media) were much more compelling to me. YMMV.

At the same time, Gay gets high marks for pulling me across the page with her prose. She knows how to craft a beautiful paragraph with a sharp punchline of a concluding sentence.  And I can certainly relate to the concept of not doing feminism “right”, of not being a perfect woman or a perfect feminist. Bad Feminist is a hard look at some tough subjects, but it’s also an honest reflection on what it means to be a complex, normal, human.

Homegoing (8/10)

A slim comfortable paperback; not much to say.

Author: Yaa Gyasi

Publication: 2016

Genre: Historical Fiction

I’m getting to the end of my pile of books that I read in 2020 - just two more will take us to the new year. This was a good one (unsurprisingly, given the hype I’d heard about it).

Homegoing tells the story of two families, related through a pair of half-sisters permanently unknown to one another. It begins in late eighteenth century Ghana. Effia is married off to a white slave trader and her descendants become involved in trafficking other humans. Esi is captured in one of their raids and shipped to America to live out her life enslaved. Each sister’s story gets an initial chapter, and then each subsequent chapter alternates between the perspective of one of the sisters’ descendants. The narrative structure of one moment in time gives the novel a quality of being a collection of short stories, all nearly identical in length.

Gyasi writes beautifully and constructs authentic characters. Her prose make sit easier to stay with the characters when their stories are difficult. On both sides of the Atlantic, the stories are heavy on pain, longing, unfulfilled desire, and failed relationships. Everyone in the book is sad. They’re enslaved or they’re incarcerated. They’ve lost their parents or been left by their spouses. They have unfulfilled dreams or unrequited loves. The stories are poignant and sometimes heartbreaking.

 In the final few chapters I found myself fatigued with the “short story” setup – I knew every time a romantic interest was introduced that they were going to break the protagonist’s heart in the next fifteen pages. In tracing the lineage of each character, the narrative sometimes gets very hung up on their sexual pursuits and familial dissatisfactions at the expense of other aspects of their character.

It seemed that each chapter had a historical “subject”, which I have mixed feelings about. In this one we’re doing northern slave catching before the US Civil War, in that one we’re doing Christian missionaries in Ghana, in this other one we’re doing the Great Migration and colorism, and so on. While early on Gyasi makes sure to drop references to the year to anchor the reader, later on she neglects to do so. Meanwhile, she makes some of the characters so old that they begin cropping up in the stories narrated by their much younger descendants. Without some more careful re-reading and math, I’m quite unsure when the last two sections of the book, which ostensibly would bring the story into the late twentieth century, actually occur. The last few chapters feel like a sprint to the finish line, and IMHO there is a missed opportunity to bring the story into the present day.

Still, on the whole, Homegoing is a very interesting premise that was mostly well executed. Definitely recommended.

Immigrant, Montana (7/10)

Bonus background: shawl my friend brought me back from his trip home to India.

Author: Amitava Kumar

Publication: 2018

Genre: Historical Fiction

This book is all over the place, but in a way that for whatever reason I rather enjoyed. I picked up Immigrant on a whim, expecting from the plot description that it would be a straightforward novel of the Indian immigrant experience in America. Instead it weaves the experience of immigrating to America in the 90s to attend grad school with the author’s literary studies and sexual exploits. There is a lot of sex.

AK (who is not necessarily the author although his nickname is the author’s initials) immigrates from India to the USA in the early 90’s. Though it’s never made explicitly clear, he’s attending graduate school at Columbia. He proceeds to try to write a thesis and screw several of his classmates. The protagonist/author clearly has no idea how to deal with women other than as sexual objects, but his ineptitude makes this somewhat sympathetic rather than threatening.

The title, for what it’s worth, is a corruption of the town of Emigrant, MT, a location the narrator visits with one of his love interests.

The book reads as part memoir, part novel. It remains unclear how much of each part is present, or which, at any given moment, is driving the train. Kumar juxtaposes history, scholarly musings, and the protagonists own life and throws in a smattering of uncaptioned images. Footnotes and asides abound. But despite the sometimes haphazard consctruction, Immigrant is a slim volume that’s an easy and diverting read.

My Brilliant Friend (6/10)

It is really unclear for most of the book who is getting married here. There were more representative choices for this artwork for sure.

Author: Elena Farrante

Publication: 2012

Genre: Historical Fiction

Let me start off by saying I don’t understand the hype around this novel. It was alright. I enjoyed some parts of it. I admit I’m not that into bildungsroman or adult novels with child narrators. But except for the last third or so, I thought there wasn’t much in the way of plot or interest to this book. That last third somewhat rescued it because there were finally stakes involved, but before that it was a bit of a slog.

I struggled with the Italian names in a way that I haven’t done since my last early Russian novel. Thank goodness for the character list at the beginning. Ferrante switches back and forth between referring to characters by the first names, family names, pet names, pet names that only the narrator uses, etc. It is all fairly confusing.

The plot follows the narrator, Elena (Lenu? Greco?) and her friend Lila (Lina? Rafaella?) who are growing up poor in 1950s Naples. Both girls are smart, although Lila supposedly is more so. When the girls complete their woefully inadequate primary schooling, Elena’s family allows her to continue at middle and high school while Lila’s family sends her to work. Elena proceeds to get her entire identity wrapped up in academic success and being “different” from the rest of her impoverished community. She constantly compares herself to a vision of what Lila would have been like if she had gone on a different path. Lila meanwhile does her own thing.

It’s exhausting to be in Elena’s head. She hates her family, doesn’t really have any friends, and treats boys as useful objects. Her perspective is extremely narrow. Meanwhile, she is consumed with her relationship with Lila throughout, despite how they don’t even seem to like each other half the time.

I don’t know if I’ll continue with the other three books in this cycle. I probably will eventually, as I’m a a bit of a completionist. I’m also genuinely curious whether adult Elena is less annoying than adolescent Elena. But I’m in no rush.

The Broken Heart of America (8/10)

What an image.

Author: Walter Johnson

Publication: 2020

Genre: History

You ever find a book that makes you want to rage-quit America approximately twice per chapter?

Broken Heart is subtitled St Louis and the Violent History of the United States. The text more than delivers on the promise of violence. Johnson uses the history of St. Louis as a series of examples of the worst conduct in American history, from Indian wars to race riots to police shootings. It highlights some instances in which St. Louis was uniquely terrible in its treatment of black and brown and poor people, and others in which it was merely a uniquely good example of same.

I lived in St. Louis for five years during grad school. This book both confirmed a lot of things I had noticed and taught me about other horrors that escaped my eye.

A shortlist:

-The much-touted St. Louis World’s Fair featured a human zoo, possibly the world’s largest. It was in Forest Park, which I lived adjacent to and often visited. The park is now home to museums and an actual animal zoo. (Coincidentally, Broken Heart and my previous post, 1493, both include the sad story of Ota Benga.)

-St. Louis’ 4th of July celebration, often held downtown by the Arch but during my tenure mostly held in Forest Park, was begun by the Veiled Prophet association. The Veiled Prophet is a masked KKK-esque figure who heads a debutante ball every year to this day. Look that one up.

-St. Louis is the only U.S. city with four interstate highways. Several of them were put down by aggressively relocating Black communities.

-While many of the dead end streets in St. Louis are the product of recent changes, there are exceptions. Namely, the wealthy residences off of Lindell and Kingshighway are creations of the 1880s. The gates, the private security, all of it – is 140 years of the same BS. Remember the summer of 2020 and the angry white lawyer couple waving guns at protestors? Guess where they live.

Broken Heart is a good read. I’ll knock a few points off my review simply because Johnson’s agenda is a little too clear. As a reader I can make connections for myself, thanks. I do not need to be reminded every two pages that capitalism and racism are tied up in the same agenda. You mentioned.

Johnson also plays a little fast and loose with the details – like when he claims an area of the city is barren after highway construction. Well, no. Certainly the former housing no longer exists and the area is dramatically changed. But I’ve stayed in a hotel, visited a pub, and picked up packages from a UPS shipping center all in that area, so claims like that don’t ring true for me.

I’m not sure I can say I “enjoyed” this book due to its dark content. I do feel better informed after having read it. It may have a narrow audience, as it might hold less interest for someone not familiar with St. Louis, but I’ll argue that it’s an important read for that audience.

1493 (8/10)

The cover image appears in a fascinating section about racial mixing in the Americas.

Author: Charles C. Mann

Publication: 2011

Genre: History

1493 is a reflection on the Columbian exchange. That phenomenon, initiated with Hispaniola’s first contact with Columbus the preceding year, encompassed not only agriculture and animals but disease, ideas, practices, and most critically, people. 

Mann’s narrative pans back and forth across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas as well as up and down the historical timeline. We learn about diseases that contributed to the rise of chattel slavery, how Spain’s desire for silver upended hemispheres, and how the exchange of new crops enabled population booms around the world. We often get a look at how these historical happenings are still affecting the present day (and the future).

Mann delights in calling out the European conquistadors, profiteers, etc. on their atrocities. (The book opens with a subsection on Columbus, which is, shall we say, not flattering.) Mann attempts to pull in non-European experiences despite their lack of voices in a lot of the recorded history. E.g., one of my favorite passages, pp.443 of the paperback: 

“Labor was to be provided by enslaving local Indians, some of whom would also be sold in Hispaniola. The Indians saw no reason to participate in this scheme and expressed their lack of enthusiasm by riddling the invaders with poisoned arrows.” 

I had read 1491, Mann’s book on pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas, over the previous summer while in Mauritius. I found 1493 a bit less interesting, perhaps because the society building focus of the previous book appeals more than economics and virology. In 1493 I could have had less about potatoes and malaria, and shorter chapters on the whole. However, the chapters on human movements during the Colombian exchange were fascinating. They should teach us more of that history in school!

A few worldview-shifting fun facts I learned:

-Potatoes really are superfoods that provide almost all the nutrients humans need.

-The Jamestown settlers struggled with bad water in part because they were setting up shop in the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. Geology affects everything.

-There are a lot of escaped slave and native communities in the Americas that haven’t gotten much historical recognition.

While 1493 drags occasionally, on the whole I recommend it as a sweeping history of a critical shift in the course of human existence.

Lincoln in the Bardo (9/10)

The book’s cover gives away absolutely nothing, which adds to the shock value of actually opening it.

Author: George Saunders

Publication: 2017

Genre: Historical Fiction, Fantasy

I was not aware upon ordering this that it was an experimental novel. I was therefore highly confused when I flipped through it for the first time. Lincoln alternates between historical (and pseudo-historical) accounts of Abraham Lincoln around the death of his son Willie, and the narrative of ghosts that Willie finds himself with in a kind of in-between place after death. If that sounds weird, you don’t know the half of it.

The historical fiction parts are shaped around Lincoln’s struggles to effectively lead the country during the Civil War. He’s receiving harsh criticism for his management of the war and the deaths of so many of the nation’s children. At the beginning of the novel, in an obvious metaphor, the Lincolns throw a lavish party at the White House while Willie lies deathly ill upstairs. After he succumbs and is buried, (mild spoiler) Lincoln visits his tomb and holds his body. (The author has said in interviews that this is based on real historical accounts, which, yikes.)

The fantasy parts find spirit Willie in the bardo. The wild and weird residents are in denial about being dead and stubbornly refuse to pass on, despite insistent encouragement from the powers that be. Willie, as a child, faces harsh consequences for lingering, but is held back by the presence of his father.

The residents of the bardo and their backstories are often bawdy and gross. They do, however, effectively immerse the reader in the messiness of life and death. And the moments in between are sweet and sad and ultimately have a beautiful message about living with grief. I was impressed by both by the book’s construction and by its the execution.

In the ‘miscellaneous complaints’ category - I was put off by the author’s failure to distinguish between real and invented historical sources. Some of the “quoted” works sound authentic. Others are clearly fabricated - we don’t have the letters of a woman who happened to spot Lincoln entering the cemetery at 2 am because she lived across the street.

On the whole though this was a moving read. I thoroughly recommend it to adults, in no small part because I’ve never read anything quite like it.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (4/10)

Pretty standard paperback with cover image that suggests way more intrigue than is actually present between the covers.

Author: John Berendt

Publication: 1994

Genre: It’s a little unclear, honestly?

Two in a row as I try to catch up on the backlog! This one’s a doozy.

I cannot understand for the life of my why people love this book. The plot meanders around and goes absolutely nowhere. The characters might have been ~interesting~ when the book was published in 1994 but certainly not in 2020. Why do I need an entire chapter of Emma Kelly galavanting around rural Georgia? Why does Chablis keep getting reintroduced for shock value? (And oof, the 1980s lack of distinction between drag queen and transgender person is cringy.) Why bother with Joe Odom, who is the most boring and possibly least successful conman in literature? Also, please could we have less of Minerva.

The book does its job as a window into Savannah in a particular time and place. I’m unsure whether I would have liked it more if it had stuck with that or dialed back the travelogue content and attempted to construct a compelling narrative in its place. It can’t do both.

I’m particularly offended by the novel’s attempt to frame itself as a “true crime” story. The author has obviously messed with the timeline and characters for dramatic effect, going so far as to act as if he casually wandered down to Savannah out of his own interest rather than explicitly to cover the murder trials.

I’m giving Midnight one or two more stars than it probably deserves on the grounds that I really did enjoy the middle section of it. The early chapters of Part Two are engaging and fooled me in to thinking the plot was finally going somewhere. (Spoiler, no, it was merely going to more sidebar character portraits.) Jim Williams is a character it is awfully difficult to care about, the narrator is an unacknowledged character it is awfully difficult to relate to, and honestly by the end of the whole thing I was just tired.

This Is How You Lose the Time War (9/10)

I don’t have anything witty to say about this one - can you tell I’m running out of new backgrounds?

Author: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Publication: 2019

Genre: Science fiction

Again it’s been awhile! since I finished this one. I’m going to try to catch up on the backlog a bit. There have been some good ones lately, but this might be the best of the bunch. Time War deserves all of the praise that has been heaped upon it (including, most recently, a Hugo award).

In summary: two time-traveling agents of futuristic powers are locked in battle with each other. Each belong to their own kind of hive mind. Red is the agent of a hive-mind robot (AI?) entity. Blue is the agent of an edenic garden world. They travel through time and possibility, wrecking havoc on the strands of history that will lead to the other side’s future dominance.

In the aftermath of a battle, Blue leaves an encoded “letter” for Red and they begin a correspondence. Throughout the first 2/3 of the text letters fly back and forth between disparate locales in time and space. The format evokes Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the (derivative, imho) Sum by David Eagleman (and probably others) in its short, descriptive hops between settings. Unlike its predecessors, though, in Time War there is a love story brewing. Most of the short sections alternate between letters written by the two protagonists, and scenes in which they place the “letters” in various forms in their surroundings, while being chased by an unexplained figure known only as “the seeker”.

In my reading, at least, the twist became clear somewhat before it was actually put in to play, but it was still brilliant executed.

My only criticism, perhaps, is that the authors spend too much space hinting and describing rather than telling the reader what the hell is going on, necessitating in a very closing (re-) reading of certain passages. Or maybe I’m just slow. On the whole, though, Time War is a delight, and one that I won’t hesitate to revisit.

The Art of Statistics (8/10)

The boringest of backgrounds for the trippiest of cover designs.

Author: David Spiegelhalter

Publication: 2019

Genre: Nonfiction

I finished this one back in July but I’m just getting around to finishing this post. I’ll be honest, when I purchased this book I was hoping it would help me with my own work. It didn’t do that, exactly, but it has helped me become a more informed citizen. One could always use the reminder to consume media critically. I hadn’t thought much about statistics since my high school AP course, but there were a lot of important concepts that I plan to keep in mind in the future. (Failing to disprove the null hypothesis is not proving the null hypothesis!)

The author comes across as a bit of a grandad, in an endearing way. I enjoyed his choice of examples from the whimsical to the deadly serious. I do wish the author had included an equation or two, explained, in the appropriate place. As a mathematically literate person, on occasion I found myself having to refer to the end matter to have any idea what the author really meant.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and I recommend it as a casual dip in to the math that attempts to explain our daily lives.

The Great Gatsby (?/10)

I have my dad’s old copy from 1980 (cover price $4.95!) that I unashamedly totally stole from his collection sometime in high school.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Publication: 1925

Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction

I should not love this book as much as I do. Nothing good happens within its pages, and quite a lot of bad things do. Virtually all of the characters are awful human beings. And yet it’s sad and beautiful and full of lovely language, and I can’t stop returning to it.

I’ve read Gatsby at least three, if not four or five times. I think I read it the first time in high school after stealing my dad’s copy on a whim, but fifteen years later I’m not 100% sure it wasn’t assigned in my junior year English class first. This time I read into it a few things I hadn’t noticed before; I think the fact that this I’m quite close to the age of most of the characters gives me a different perspective than younger me.

Anyway, Gatsby is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway, a wealthy midwesterner in his late twenties who moves to Long Island and promptly finds himself enmeshed in a debacle involving his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Adultery, debauchery, and general mayhem follow, with Nick as the somewhat unwilling observer. I’ve always identified with Nick more than a reader is probably supposed to, given that he’s a fairly passive observer for most of the events of the novel. Yet something about his general attitude of “What are you crazy people DOING and why are you dragging me along with you?” has always resonated with me.

I love how sparse it is. Gatsby doesn’t waste any space - each of the nine chapters has a particular purpose in advancing the story. You can imagine a contemporary author making the same plot last three times as long, but it wouldn’t add anything of substance. Every bit is necessary.

I know it’s cliche to like this book. I also know it contains racist language and attitudes about Black and Jewish people that aren’t acceptable in any era, and it can only be read as a product of its time. I recognize that I’m reading a book by a white guy, written largely for white people. It also has spoken to me across fifteen years of growth in a way no other book has. It’s a brief, bittersweet reminder that we can’t live in the past. I’m not going to rate it, and I’m not going to say it’s a great book that everybody should check out. But I did read it again during this quarantine period, and it’s no good to pretend I didn’t.