Tag: English

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

One of strongest pieces of evidence that, contrary to Leibniz’s assertion, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds is that somehow Richard Dawkins is still tottering around while we lost Stephen Jay Gould to cancer in 2002.

Or maybe there’s a parallel universe version of me lamenting a Gould who lived long enough to become the villain. Who knows!

While today I try to make a point of reading as many authors as possible, my default reading position up until maybe ten years ago was to focus obsessively on single authors and suck the marrow out of them—by which I mean, read every available book, article, essay, whatever. The only hard limit I drew for myself was posthumous publications, and only because I know from firsthand experience how utterly embarrassing all of my unrevised writing is. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those obsessive focal points for me, though the volume of his writing ultimately outstripped my attention span and, thus, much of his work remains for me to read. Hooray!

I acquired Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin during the period of hyperfocus, but then somehow kept on putting off reading it. I have a vague sense that I was holding off on it to save as a reward for other, more onerous reading, until that went on so long I just moved on entirely. Then, during my trip to the US, I uncovered the book in a cache I had packed up to make ready for shipping to Sweden and decided now was the time to read it and evaluate if I wanted to ship it across the ocean.

The argument Gould makes in Full House is basically one against the teleological framework of evolution: that things evolve for some higher purpose, or more specifically deliberately towards complexity; that complexity is somehow the best, most special, or most desirable form of life. Rather, Gould argues, we should look at it in terms of variety. Really what’s fantastic is that we have such a range of complexity! The basis of the book is his article “The Median is Not The Message,” originally published sometime in the early 90s, in which he points out how misleading (or not) the various statistical averages (that is, mean, median, and mode) can be.  In Full House he expands his focus from cancer prognoses to batting averages and bacteria.

In a way it would probably be interesting to read this alongside Taleb’s Black Swan, which focuses on the extreme tails of the bell curve that Gould alludes to, but I don’t particularly feel like going back to re-read Taleb (I’m hoping that If Books Could Kill will one day cover Black Swan) so that essay will have to wait another day.

Full House is an interesting read, and a relaxing one. Gould had principles and politics, and much of his fame stems from publicly taking very specific stances. Here he isn’t addressing creationism or Charles Murray; the paradigm he’s looking to shift here is much more benign and so Full House is a much less stressful book. (Yes, it’s good that someone is debunking Murray, but then it’s stressful to remember that Murray is out there needing to be debunked.) But because it’s so relatively light and uncontroversial, it’s not the most essential Gould book for a personal library. Will I need to look anything up in here in order to prove a point on the Internet? Nope. Will I want to quote anything from this in order to better express my opinion on a topic? Again, probably not. The Mismeasure of Man, Rocks of Ages and The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox are more the kinds of Gould books with a permanent residence in my shelves. Nonetheless a worthwhile read, and another book crossed off the to-read list.

The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay

I read a lot during my American vacation, enough that I hit my annual book goal early in September. This was due in part to revisiting children’s and middle grade books while staying with my parents (Emil and the Detectives, Berries Goodman) and also to reading very short volumes, of which The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay is one.

The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay was part of a care package from a friend in Texas; I’d never heard of Erik Evensen or any of his work before this. Thus I had no expectations going in and, as a result, had a fun time reading it. I’m also not as well read in The ClassicsTM as I should be, since I didn’t twig to the Beowulf structure/retelling until reading the afterword from the author. No, not even the title tipped me off.

My only criticism is a point of taste, and one that I think most of the people who enjoyed the book will disagree with. I’m as steeped in teeaboo geek pop culture as the best (or worst?) of them, but when other works start laying on the references with a trowel—specifically when the author leans extra hard in making it clear to the audience that a character is That Kind of person—it becomes a bit much. There were lots of conversations that felt, to me, like cringe-inducing pandering.

Gags like license plates or t-shirts are one thing, and actually are a great way for a visual medium to be subtle in a way that pure text can never be. (Think of all of Roy O’Dowd’s t-shirts in The IT Crowd. Now reflect on how it would be impossible to make the same off-hand reference in text without tediously describing the t-shirt in question and, in doing so, drawing extra attention to it.) Evensen includes these sorts of visual references, and if that had been his only approach I would have thought them well done. But the references to Star Trek or Red Dwarf in conversations have nothing at all to do with the story, or even the characters, and feel shoehorned in just for the sake of showing off to the audience that “I like your favorite geeky thing!”

For all the words I just spent on it, though, it’s really only a minor criticism; nothing ever took me fully out of the story. Like I said, a matter of taste.

If your favorite X-Files episodes were the monster-of-the-week stories, or if you’re really into collecting Beowulf translations and retellings, this is exactly the little one-shot for you and it’s worth throwing a couple bones at the author. As for me, I won’t be revisiting The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay, but I’ll put Gods of Asgard on my TBR.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I mentioned elsewhere on the Internet that unless you make a concerted effort to review your to-read list, it really becomes just a graveyard of aspirations. On this particular blog I used the graveyard metaphor in my review of The Jakarta Method, but originally I used it in a post elsewhere about Farewell to Manzanar, which I read over two years ago now: September 4, 2021, if Storygraph has it right. Farewell had been on my to-read list since probably around 2010 or so.

And yet I don’t have a post here about Farewell to Manzanar. I might have been too overwhelmed or too lazy or too whatever at the time, but I think another part of it was easily: what is there to say about a book like this one? There’s nothing I could say about this book that wouldn’t just be superfluous and trite, so why bother, in the end it would just come across as glib.

The same feeling prevails for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings but I want to at least push through that wall to say: here is a book I read. Not for the sake of getting anyone else to read the book, because it doesn’t exactly need more hype, but because I want as complete a record of my reading as possible. So, to that end: story time!

My sambo’s discovery of mid-century pulp magazines a couple of years ago led to him occasionally reading spooky poetry from publications like Weird Tales etc. on his Twitch stream. This, in turn, has led to occasional suggestions for other poems from viewers and regulars, which is how earlier this year he ended up asking me if I’d ever heard of Maya Angelou. I thought for a second that he was joking, since he’s usually extremely clued in to American (popular) culture, but no, the question was in earnest.

“Of course. She’s probably one of the premiere American poets of the twentieth century. National treasure.”

“Someone requested a poem by her today and it was almost impossible for me to get through it without crying.”

“Mm-hm. Like I said, national treasure.”

And yet I didn’t get around to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings until now. I’m glad that I read it but embarrassed it took this long.

Severance

Ling Ma’s Severance was the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club’s pick for August, a meeting I was lucky enough to attend in person for once!

“Here’s a question for everyone,” I announced during an early lull in the conversation. “Describe this book as a mash up of two other works.”

My own answer was Station Eleven and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Other names that came up included The Last of Us, Girls, The Road, Dawn of the Dead, and Sex and the City. A pattern emerges, but to spell it out more clearly:

Candace, our protagonist, is part of a group of zombie apocalypse survivors led run by a cult-guru-in-the-making named Bob escaping New York City to a shopping mall in Illinois. Why a shopping mall in Illinois? Through some weird happenstance, Bob happens to be part owner of the property. Don’t think about it too much.

The zombies, meanwhile, are not only slow zombies—they’re not even particularly hungry or aggressive ones. Spawned by a fungal infection that can sit dormant for ages until it’s triggered, these zombies are entirely docile and stuck in loops of activity until their bodies give out. We see a family in a dining room go through countless iterations sitting down to an imaginary dinner; another character keeps on trying clothes from her closet. Interspersed with the zombie apocalypse narrative, we get flashbacks to Candace’s life right up until the killer fungus: her family’s contentious move from China and lifelong strain it caused, her father’s unexpected death, her mother’s rapid decline into dementia, her lackluster relationships, her job in publishing  various glitzy and gimmicky editions of the Bible.

That’s pretty much it. Some people get infected, some people die, and the narrative eventually just…peters out.

Everyone at the meeting agreed that a lot of the public health responses to the fictional virus (or well, fungus) in Severance felt very Covid-y despite the 2018 publication date; my hypothesis is that Ma drew from how epidemics like bird flu and swine flu were handled in Asia when it came time to write about how an actual pandemic would unfold. We were also all in agreement that the book felt very gimmicky with a lot of vague ideas that were only half explored and that at the same time felt like pretty heavy-handed critiques and observations of Our Current Society. Candace is passive to the point of frustration, making poor decision after poor decision, and none of the other characters really have a distinct personality (except Bob the cult leader). To me it read like a novel of the Chinese Immigrant Experience but then someone suggested to Ma that she examine it through the framework of a zombie story instead and…I don’t know. I’m not mad I read it, but it never really coalesced into something coherent.

Gift From the Sea

Another random “left field” book, I stumbled across Gift From the Sea when a college friend asked me to read a selection from it at her wedding in Seattle. It’s a short book, and in the run-up to a wedding there’s a lot of “hurry up and wait,” so over the next couple days I just…read most of it. After the wedding I put it on my to-read list so I would eventually finish reading it. An excellent souvenir, then, when years later I was visiting that same friend in Seattle and came across a copy of Gift From the Sea in the bookstore!

As Becky (my friend) describes it, it’s a book that Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote to convince herself to stay in a crappy marriage. That knowledge, paired with the couple’s Nazi and Fascist sympathies, certainly takes a bit of the shine off of it—here’s an excellent example of separating art from artist and where people are comfortable drawing the line. For me, Gift From the Sea is on the “I still feel comfortable consuming this” side of the line; an example of a “nope, no thank you” would be the music of Percy Grainger.

Gift From the Sea is an installment in one of my favorite not-really-a-genres, “author retreats into isolation and writes their Deep Thinky Thoughts.” Other examples of the form include Walden and Journal of a Solitude. Lindbergh writes a great deal on the need for solitude and alone time in romantic relationships, particularly for women; as much as it’s depressing to admit in the Year of Our Lord 2023 (compared to 1955), this still rings true. All the data currently available about the burden of childcare and domestic duties in hetero partnerships, marriage or otherwise, indicates that the bulk of it still falls on women. Hence why the alone time—time “off the clock,” so to speak—is particularly important for women in this situation.

The other underlying current in Gift From the Sea is the vague sense that modern life is overwhelming and things are happening too quickly, which again: looking back on 1955 from the distance of 2023 the idea of life moving too fast is ludicrous. I suppose that overwhelm is a permanent part of life anymore, and as such sentiments like Lindbergh’s will remain relatable. You read books like this one not necessarily to learn anything new but to remind yourself of what you value and what’s important in your life. “Yes, that’s right, I need to take more time for myself,” you say, nodding along. “Yes, that’s right, I do best when I have alone time to recharge.” Sometimes we need that reminder, and that’s probably why Gift From the Sea remains such a favorite.

Braiding Sweetgrass

I was concerned about the environment from a pretty young age, though whether it’s because Captain Planet was a successful piece of propaganda or because the combination of pragmatism and anxiety (“There’s nowhere else to go if we ruin the Earth”) set in early, who can say? Either way, “environmental awareness” has always been in the back of my mind, though usually in the form of planet-wide existential crises: the hole in the ozone layer, climate change, that sort of thing.

Coming up on ten years in Sweden, however, I’ve started thinking about the environment as a means of creating place on a personal level. How do you create the feeling of at-home, of belonging? The first step is to make the new surroundings familiar, to learn the names and properties of things. Theoretically. I don’t actually know very many plant or tree names for anywhere I’ve lived, but sometimes I page through our copy of  Den Nordiska Floran with a guilty conscience.

Braiding Sweetgrass, as a collection of essays on ecology and the nature of relationships, speaks to that approach to the environment. Yes, planet-wide catastrophes are looming, but any individual disconnect from the environment is a loss on a personal level as well. Each essay in the collection explores a different facet of this disconnect, including at the academic level where the dispassionate and disconnected objective approach to environmental studies supercedes or ignores a squishier, more subjective one. Kimmerer is at home in both worlds and has a knack for transforming bleak, dry data points about a particular moss or plant or animal species into a narrative that, again and again, focuses on relationships and interdependency.

Here is an interesting tension: supporting worthy causes versus acquiring stuff. I always like to buy at least one thing if I visit a local independent bookshop, but I was on vacation, traveling only with my carry-on bag and a purse, and with limited shelf space at home. Financially support Reading in Public, an adorable bookstore and cafe in West Des Moines, or add to my growing mountain of stuff?

It comes as no surprise that I bought the book, of course. Now the escape route to avoid the mountain of stuff: am I deluding myself if I think that a curious reader taking the Greyhound out of Indianapolis will find the book before a harried cleaner just tosses it in the garbage? Would the profit earned by Reading in Public be worth whatever environmental cost may be incurred by the book once it leaves my hands? Is my motivator a noble detachment from stuff or the mindless disposability that naturally arises in a world filled with consumer goods that are constantly made anew? Am I a thoughtful steward of the planet or just lazy?

I suppose the only downside is that the people most likely to read and enjoy Braiding Sweetgrass are the ones who are already asking themselves those sorts of questions—preaching to the converted. But better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

Rose/House

Appropriately enough, this review of an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick will go up while I’m en route to Austin!

A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace were some of the best sci-fi I read in…whatever year it was. So when a new novella from Arkady Martine was announced, I immediately suggested it to the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club.

Rose/House is a completely different beast from the Teixcalaanli books. Rather than the far-flung reaches of space, we’re on Earth in a relatively near future. A world-famous architect who incorporated AI into all of his creations has recently died in the last and best of his houses, Rose House. In accordance with his will, the only visitor allowed in the house is his archivist and former student Selene—and since the Rose House AI takes this protocol extremely seriously, it’s more than a little concerning when the AI calls the police to report the presence of a dead body inside the house. Selene is therefore flown in as a person of interest, not to mention that investigating officer Martinez has no other way of accessing her John Doe.

Some novels should be short stories; some short stories should be novels. Or I’m not sure what this should be. There’s a lot that’s implied that requires reading between the lines—something I’ve never been good at as a reader. The solution to the mystery also feels like a cheap trick, and the hint to a later plot twist was so heavily telegraphed earlier on that it feels unsatisfying.

A comparison naturally arises to Six Wakes (sci-fi locked room whodunnit) and on the plus side, this was a much quicker read and therefore all the more enjoyable for not wearing out its welcome. Nonetheless, Rose/House doesn’t live up to the impossibly high bar Martine set up in the Teixcalaanli novels; I would have been hard pressed to name her as the author if I hadn’t known going in. I don’t know that I necessarily want more Teixcalaanli novels from Martine—it’s always something of a tragedy, I think, when a character’s or series’ popularity essentially forces their author to continue along a track they’d much rather abandon—but the brand of noir in Rose/House doesn’t seem like her strong point.

Null States

Hats off to Malka Older for enticing me enough to read a sequel to a more or less standalone book. Null States  is set a couple of years after Infomocracy and tackles yet another crisis in this ever-shifting and adapting “microdemocracy” that Older envisioned in the first book. This time, rather than natural disasters and election fraud, the benevolent-ish Google-esque “Information” organization is up against multiple potential assassination attempts in developing (or up-and-coming) centenals. What’s the end game? Who’s behind the hits?

I probably waited a bit too long to start on this after Infomocracy; there were plenty of character names that were familiar, but I couldn’t always place the name to the person I had first encountered in Infomocracy. It’s not necessarily anything that ruins the book or makes it impossible to follow, and in all honesty I’d rather be a little bit lost than have the author waste time and ink giving a condescending and awkward “last time, on Infomocracy” recap. Older also does a great job shifting the focus outward from the three principal characters in the first to another secondary character rather than just running a concept (or character, in this case) into the ground. My only complaint for both Infomocracy and Null States is a spoiler-y one and has to do with a particular character trope that I dislike. Worth noting, I guess, but it’s also not anything that ruins the books.

Scars of Sweet Paradise

One of my all-time favorite singers is Janis Joplin, and like any other esteemed member of The 27 Club there is no shortage of biographies on her. Out of the three in my possession, Alice Echols‘ Scars of Sweet Paradise is my favorite for being incredibly thorough and grounding Joplin’s career in the wider social context of the times. (That said, I have vague aspirations of one day reading Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren.) I read it once in high school and felt compelled to revisit it now.

An interesting book to read once at age 17 and again at 37. Two different sides of the 27 club.

It’s a well researched and well documented account of Joplin’s life, with numerous quotes and insights from all kinds of people who knew her, either personally or professionally. I think part of the reason she became one of my all-time favorites was because Echols’ biography immediately revealed someone who went through trials and tribulations not dissimilar from my own: either too precocious or too out of step to connect with her peers, deeply sensitive, struggling to escape the black hole of beauty standards. There was a lot for a teenager in the early 2000s to recognize in teenager life 40-odd years ago. Plus ça change.

There is very little editorializing from Echols, who treads a reasonable middle ground between often polarized camps: Janis as queer icon, Janis as feminist, Janis as promoting, purveying or appropriating Black culture. There’s also enough history and context presented that anyone interested in the fifties and sixties as historical periods would find a lot of value in it (though Echols’ subsequent general history books, such as Shaky Ground or Daring to be Bad, might be an even better bet). Certainly not a must-read biography for the general public but for anyone with the interest, it’s fantastic.

Infomocracy

Another selection from Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club! Alas, I had to miss the meeting for this book because sometimes sacrifices must be made to keep the tabletop RPG campaign going.

Malka Older’s Infomocracy opens on the eve of a major international election. We’re in a near but unspecified future, where nation states are (largely) a thing of the past and people instead live in enclaves of 100,000 that elect a governing party every ten years: microdemocracy. This is due in no small part to the machinations of the tech giant blandly called “Information,” which functions as a kind of worldwide ISP mixed with search engine and public media. Somehow the rise of Information-the-service led to the rise of microdemocracy, though exactly how is unclear.

These governing parties are global in scale, so you could have a chunk of what is now Australia and a chunk of what is now Brazil governed by the same party; you could have two adjacent chunks of Australia governed by completely different parties. The party with the most enclaves is declared the Supermajority, which grants them some kind of governing advantage. The reigning supermajority, the Heritage party, is losing votes and looking for a way to stop bleeding out. A renegade reactionary party is blowing up by insinuating that military conquest will be on the docket if they become the new Supermajority. Through all of this we follow three characters with interests that are often unaligned or even flat-out competing as they navigate a tumultuous election rocked by fraud and hacking attempts.

There’s thrills, there’s intrigue, there’s speculation about how technology will continue to develop. Much of the book clearly draws on Older’s experience in humanitarian aid and natural disaster response, which makes her near-future feel much more grounded and connected to the present day than, say, something like Star Trek. Top notch world-building all around. The best example of the complexity and thought that Older put into it is the sheer number of parties that turn up in the book. Only a handful are in focus for the big important plot stuff (Heritage, Liberty, Policy1st), but nonetheless an easy dozen or so come up in passing and yet manage to maintain a distinct personality and agenda. Nestlé is a party in this future. So is PhilipMorris. (Is that any different from today oh ho ho.) Then you have groups like All4One/AllFor1, YourStory, LesProfessionels, 888, Free2B, SecureNation, Earth1st, one that uses Kanji that I’m never going to remember, others that are essentially theocracies, still others that are vestiges of the idea of a nation state (1China), and others that are entirely unknown to our characters as they zoom around the world. A lazier writer would have capped it at four or five, but Older went all in. Respect.

Infomocracy ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. I say “a bit” because while most of the narrative threads get conclusively resolved, they still set the stage for some further intrigue down the line. So I just went ahead and checked the next two books out of the library and we’ll see if I finish them before my vacation at the end of the month!