Solutions and Other Problems is a pretty amazing book and I think you should read it.

Today I want to talk about Solutions and Other Problems, the newest book by Allie Brosh. She is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book Hyperbole and a Half.  I first pre-ordered the book sometime in 2016 and  I didn't even know it was coming back out because Amazon did something to my listing on the pre-order and they created another listing so that I know it was released until too late.

 There are a couple of things to know about the book. The first is that it is printed on a thick stock and there's a lot of paper that is heavy. The other thing to note is that a lot of the stories are very very funny. I would be reading them, and I would be laughing and my wife, who goes to sleep earlier I do would be next to me in bed and she'll be mad because I was laughing out loud at the stories. She actually told me I wasn’t  allowed to read in bed because of that.  But it is not just funny stories that are intermingled with all sorts of personal tragedy from the author, they really kind of go together with the funny parts and highlight both the tragedy and comedy of life it's a pretty amazing book and I think you should read it.

 

Recent Reads : 1/10/2021

 War Fever

What Roberts and Smith are trying to do here is tie together three separate strands – Baseball, WWI, and suppression of dissent.

The book itself is very well written, I sped through it in a day when I normally take a bit longer to read.

The thing that ties the book together is a common character around Boston in 1918. All three strands work on their own, with full arcs, but I don’t think it was fully successful showing how these are coherent pieces of an overlapping story.

The other thing is that since it takes place in 1918, I was expecting the so called “Spanish” flu epidemic to be more prominent. It does get mention but not as much as I was expecting.

 

Feminist International

 

Gago blends together both an internationalist theory with praxis that she and her comrades are doing on the ground in Argentina. It was actually a really appropriate time for me to be reading it, as legal abortion was passed in the country as I was reading it. One thing that really hit home was thinking about the strike or any action as a process, and not a one-time event. Not sure if I have seen anything, I was reading really have such immediate real-world impact as I  was in the process of reading. It’s a little hard to read since it is theory heavy and was written in translation but interesting, nonetheless.

 

Automation and the Future of Work

 

I have written myself on the importance of UBI even though it doesn’t change the social relationships of capitalism. Benanav comes in and tells me that the reason I personally am an advocate of UBI, that technology will make a bunch of people redundant is a wrong way to look at the evolution of the economy (which has been slowing down). For him, the focus should be on the utopian possibilities of the people – not a world where we solidify market exchange. A short book, but an important read.

 

The Leopard

 

I have been consciously trying to expand my reading to more global literatures and came across this book which is one of the best sellers of Italian literature of the 20^th century. In it we read of the decline of the nobles in Sicily as the birth of the Italian nation as a coherent whole comes into being. There’s not much action in terms of the plot, but it is a lovely psychological text, one that reads like a long elegy for a lost world. Maybe a world that is not too far away, lamented by the author but not entirely regretted in its absence? It is interesting that it was written looking back after the fascist turn in Italy – I would expect that someone with a better grasp on the history of the era would be able to see deeper than I can now.

 

Long Live the Post Horn

 

This is a book that is basically about a PR rep and her team working on passing language in a parliamentary party’s platform committee speaking against an EU directive to privatize the postal service. I kept kind of waiting for it to be about something else and the who main plot to become a subplot, but that didn’t happen. And it was actually good in spite of that esoteric subject matter.

 

Libra

 

This book is DeLillo’s take on the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo is the exemplar of what I think of as peak 80s male fiction. It took Hemingway and Fitzgerald and distilled that through the chaos of the sixties and Thompson and Mailer etc. and created their own brand. It is good but is kind of cold and antiseptic – I’m old enough that it was the hallmark of “serious” literature when I was young but feels dated and stilted like some sort of baby MFA student is trying to be too serious about things. You get that here.

The thing is that you know how this book is pretty much going to go if you have a sense of the details around the assignation and Oswald’s life. DeLillo does manage to make it interesting, as it becomes a psychological portrait not only of Oswalt but of his relationships with his mother and his wife. Weirdly, I feel a real kinship and sympathy for the person that DeLillo creates as Lee Harvey. He’s a bit of a patsy and he wants to make the world better but more than anything he is just a smart kid lost in his own world.  

 

The Fated Sky

 

I had really enjoyed the first book of this series, so I turned around and bought and read the next one fairly quickly. Where the first book is about the ramping up of the space program and the journey to the moon, this one is focused on the trip to Mars.

Now, I’m still kind of doubting that if the events of the first book happened, where a meteor hits and the worry is a runaway greenhouse effect, the proper thing to do would be to invent a space program and off world colonies. It just doesn’t seem like it would scale, and the use of resources would be better focused on earth. I think I’m not the only person with that kind of criticism, as Kowal puts a group of people with just such a critique in the book. The other off thing is that the first book was all about the alternate history of the 50s and the rise of feminism in that world, that there are both a gay subplot and a trans subplot (one that I totally missed until the author explicitly pointed out in the afterward) that would be a bit ahead of their time in our timeline.

That out of the way, Kowal is a good storyteller and is able to create tension and drama around the trip to Mars, and I can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

 

Dog Soldiers

About 20 years ago, I was a student at a state university, majoring in creative writing. Since me and my peers were not really experiencing in life, much of what we wrote if it was not from life it was aping the pop culture at the time. There were a lot of bad stories about getting high and killing people. It was so bad I once drafted a poem I called “Workshop” with the lines “I have read /  enough poems / about kittens / and drug use”. I couldn’t help but think of that period in my life as I was reading this book.

The basic plot of the book is a journalist in Vietnam buys some drugs and tries to ship them back to the United States. Things do not go as he planned, and chaos ensues. People get high and people get shot; some people die. It was like reading all those workshop stories but with one difference – Stone is a heck of a writer. This is like Tarantino before he ever thought of Reservoir dogs.

The only thing that really got to me was that the amount of drugs, and the dollar amount (even with inflation) seemed crazy low to me as I was reading the book. People go through a lot of effort to get the guy’s drugs from him and it feels like there’s a relatively low payoff for the whole thing. There were a lot of people involved and it just feels like overkill.

 

Japan Sinks

 

I feel like this should be a more well-known book. Komatsu works through the implications of what would happen to Japan if they knew that the islands are sinking, and how the people would react to it. It is a beautiful speculation of mass psychology and the disparate reactions of individuals in the face of crisis. The blurbs talk about its importance in the face of the earthquake and tsunami a decade ago, but the better analogy for me is how we deal with a more slow – moving crisis, that of climate change. It was this growing tsunami of change that was hovering over me as I read the text, and it shook me to the bones. I don’t think we’re going to do well with that as Miami sinks and New Orleans disappears.

 

One Day I Will Write about this Place

 

As part of my project to read more global literatures, I reached out to one of my African connections about what to read on Africa. Now, of course I know that there is no one African literature as there are fifty plus countries with a complicated history of colonization, but I am glad that my friend pointed out Wainaina’s text. What this memoir allows is the reader to see the post-colonial continent on a broad scope through the eyes of one young man – he grew up in Kenya and lived for a time in South Africa and we get to see a visit to west Africa and then we see America though his eyes as he moves here to teach writing. What the reader sees is a set of vibrant and distinct cultures, plural – a helpful reminder not to essentialize a whole continent to the savannah in Tanzania. I think Wainaina’s story is a tragedy of a small scale though, as he never really finds a place that seems like home to him. Kenya is home, Uganda is the homeland of his mother, America is some sort of promised land with a failed promise, but he’s never at a place where he can be himself. Not sure how much of this is him or how much of it is the fake borders the colonialists drew (or does that give the dead too much agency over the living).

Recent Books Read

 

Bleak House

 

I had been thinking to myself I need to brush up on some nineteenth century British literature to fill a hole in my own reading history.

I reached out to a friend and asked what the best Dickens was to him, and he said Bleak House.

So, I bought the book, and it is a big brick of a book, almost a thousand pages.

I learned some things. Like I have joked in the past that Dickens got paid by the word and you can tell. I do not think that it is really a joke. I just think the expectations about what a book looks like are different. I still remember in high school keeping a reading journal for myself reading a Tale of Two Cities because there was so much going on. I think that instead of thinking of something like Bleak House as a novel it’s more like a TV show now, where it is episodic and driven by that kind of arc even if now we talk about them as novels. Like the Soprano’s or something.

I also joked that the thing was very character driven, but not in a good way. The writer of the afterward notes that there is 48 characters, and you feel it. The first half of the book is basically a character introduction and twenty pages of focus on them and then a new character. There is not a lot of narrative momentum, and if I were editing this for adaptation to film, there’s dozens of characters who could go out the door.

Because there is really nothing that happens. People die and get married and have disfiguring illness, but it is not until page 483 that something of note really happen. And then it feels incidental to the plot. The whole overarching thing holding the book together kinds of resolves weirdly and unsatisfactorily.

The weird thing is that overall, it is not bad. It just does not cohere in a big picture, so it took me forever to read. But I did read it, so it was good enough I wanted to keep carrying through with it.

 

 

The Calculating Stars     

My library does this yearly one book celebration where the community reads a book in parallel and invites the author to talk about the book. I missed participating in it this year because I was reading something else, but I am sad I missed out on speaking to the author because I really liked the book.

The Calculating Stars is an alternate history where the space race still happens but for a slightly different reason. There was a big meteor that hit the Atlantic Ocean and it went from going to ice age to runaway global warming. The goal in the book is to build up the space program for off world habitation as fast as possible. It is a fun pro-feminist text that parallels real life examples in the female astronauts that did not get their moments of glory because the best of the best forgot half of the people.

The only real plot point that really doesn’t feel organic is the idea that people would use resources to build up for space colonization, especially at the scale that would be needed in the case of a planet killing impact. It does feel right in how people are able to go about their lives as the world around them is changing – nicely done but not too heavy handed. I would recommend this book and I am excited to read the next book in the series.

 

Runaway Horses

About eight years ago one of my friends told me I needed to read this book; it was one of the best books he had ever read. So, I bought it and put it on my shelf until recently.

 

With all the craziness that has been going on in the world, I have been turning to fiction to try to escape it all. So, I picked this off my shelf without really knowing what the plot would be. Let me tell you, if I had known it was about the fanaticism of a group of young men in the runup to the second world war in Japan, I might have not picked it up. It hit a little close to home as we are in the aftermath of the 2020 election and have nationalists in the streets.

 

I must give credit to both Mishima and his translator, since even with too timely subject matter, it is a beautiful book and amazing psychological portrait of both the leader of the young men and those in his orbit. There’s a weird structural bit where there’s a book that is important for the formation of the young men’s ideology that Mishima includes as full text in the novel that kind of interrupts the flow, but it is important for the plot.

 

One thing that I did not know at all was that this book is the second in a four-part series. It works pretty well as a stand-alone book, but there are some references to the previous text that stick out and it would work better and thought I was able to piece together context clues I think it would make more sense if I had read it first. I have ordered the book and plan on reading it as much to fill in the gap as I enjoyed this book and like’s Mishima’s style.

 

A Little History of Religion

I received this as a birthday gift this year. Though it would not be something I normally would buy for myself, as a definite atheist, it is not bad to have a look back and see what you are missing out on.

 

This book is a good survey. It hits on a lot of world religions and takes them on their own terms for the most part. The only real problem is structural in its purpose of being a survey, right there in the title is that it does not go into enough depth. I would say that it is also a little Eurocentric and too focused on Christianity as being at the center of the story. This is a quick read, and it is something I would recommend for a precocious preteen who wants to learn about the world’s religions.

 

Solaris 

I had not read it and the only real association I had in my mind was that it was a Gorge Clooney movie from a while back and the movie was not sold as one of those science fiction movies that make you think. Which is weird because it was not that long after the Matrix blew up the multiplexes and our minds.

 

Solaris is a planet that is being studied by scientist because it is a weird planet. It orbits a twin star system, and it can maintain a steady orbit somehow and there is an ocean of goo and it seems like this goo itself might be sentient. The readers get to see the arc of one visitor, Kris Kelvin, as he has his own encounter with the planet. The whole thing is a mind trip and Lem builds out this whole edifice, not just of the planet and the setting, but what amounts to several generations of what the various scientists have done in trying to understand what Solaris is and what its existence means to humankind. The book is a monumental act of worldbuilding. But as a book it leaves something missing in terms of plot. Because you read all this and you are waiting for something to happen as a reader in the 21^st century, but it is more psychological. No wonder the people who made it into the George Clooney movie focused on him in the marketing material. Well, him and the attractive woman.  

 

The Great Believers

 

I cannot remember who recommended this to me, but I should find out who it was and thank them.

The Great Believers is an amazing and heartbreaking story of a group of men coming of age in the 80s in gay Chicago. I must admit that a part of the enjoyment was recognizing areas and bars mentioned in the text, but the pull of the book is much more than that. Makkai really puts you there, living in a different sort off plague that hits close to home here in 2020. It broke my heart, several times, even though with the subject matter you know it is going to find your gut and just punch you in there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lathe of Heaven

I have been working on an academic project about science fiction and this book kept coming up as one of these foundational books in terms of science fiction that makes you really think – science fiction but also philosophy. It is in the same ballpark as Solaris or the Foundation Books.

 

In the book, the main character is in trouble because he has been taking drugs. But the reason he has been taking drugs is that the dreams he has sometimes reshape reality, he does not know what to do with that. So, he goes to a doctor and instead of trying to cure him, the doctor tries to plant suggestions in the main character’s mind so that his dreams will improve the world. The result is that each thing he tries to do ends up with some sort of ironic side effect. For example, to create peace on earth, an alien threat is created.

 

Ultimately, it is a quick and fin read but it falls in the same sort of trap that Asimov and Lem fall into – once you create this world, just what do you do with the people you have living in it. This is so much so that references to the book hit at the idea created in the text and not the plot of the text itself.