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 20th 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).
