entirely ruined her disposition with books

And we're back with book updates!

What I finished:

+ Lady of Perdition, the 17th (!) Benjamin January book by Barbara Hambly. This is one of the field trip books that's set outside New Orleans, this time in the Republic of Texas, which sounds like it was hell for anyone who wasn't a white dude, even more so than the rest of what would become the southern US later. The inciting incident of the book is so harrowing in concept (though not in actual description) I don't even want to speak of it but is very much a reality of being Black in the antebellum US.

It's also one of the ones where we meet up with a character from an earlier book, and those always make me wish I weren't reading the series so very slowly. The last time we met said character, it was back in book 7! Which I read several years ago! So I had vague memories of her and much stronger memories of the vibes of that book. But Hambly does a good job of reminding us of what we need to know without being heavy-handed.

Lots of good Ben-and-Hannibal stuff in this book, though, as always when we're away from New Orleans, I miss Rose and everyone back home. And as always with every single book in the series, I spend the whole time going, "When will Ben get a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep?????" Poor guy is in his 40s, won't someone let him rest? If you're into whump, you don't get much better than Ben. I want to wrap him up in blankets (actually, no blankets, since all the places he goes are so very hot) and let him sleep for a thousand years.

All in all a good but not standout entry in the series. A thousand bonus points for a plotline involving stolen archives, apparently based on a real occurrence! THE TEXAS ARCHIVE WAR WAS A REAL THING.

+ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, which I appreciated a lot but did not love. Tesh is a great writer, and this book has a fantastic premise--one of those dangerous magical schools books, but told from the perspective of one of the instructors. What makes this work so well is that Tesh clearly has a background in education and the book is, in many ways, an exploration of what it's like to be a teacher, both in the basic dealing with administrative tasks and finding time to grade papers and also in the struggle to connect with and inspire students. The book is suffused with real details of what teaching in a British school is actually like, and I always enjoy a take-your-job-to-ficbook take.

Our main character is, as in Tesh's last book, another strength. Tesh writes fantastic flawed characters--Walden isn't as immediately off-putting as Kyr from Some Desperate Glory, but her besetting sin is pride and it's a doozy. She's so well-intentioned and trying so hard and she's way more likeable than Kyr starts out, but also, like, LADY. So realistic in the depiction of an academic with a PhD and a certainty that her understanding of her field (in this case magic) is superior to everyone else's. The book is about her learning her limitations and to appreciate other people's insights and I liked that a lot.

We get a fun outsider pov of the four students who would, if this book was written by anyone else, be the main characters, and I must say that I would absolutely read a fic bout Will pining for Nikki. The magical system is quite fun and distinctive and lends itself well to formal study.

So yeah, I think this is a very strong book, I really liked it, but it didn't scratch any particular itches for me that would bump it up into the tier of books I love. Still, I like Tesh's writing so very much and can't wait to see what she does next.

+ Miss Silver Comes to Stay, the 15th(!) Miss Silver book by Patricia Wentworth. As usual, I don't have a great deal to say; I always enjoy a Wentworth book, but they're always doing loosely the same thing. I do appreciate her commitment to having the victim be someone we really hate.

+ The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I haven't read this one since my British Gothic Fiction class in undergrad. (This was a summer semester class and there were only four other people in the class, and I think I was the only one who really wanted to be there. But I really wanted to be there, so hopefully I made up for the others' lack of enthusiasm.)

I remembered this as more of a horror story, but I think that's me confusing it with the film adaptation The Innocents, which is a banger of a movie and highly recommended. The book is also a banger, but it feels much more like a psychological thriller than a horror story imo. The fun of it is the perspective of our main character, an example of the gothic governess type, whose mind we're immersed in. Is she crazy? Is she evil and lying to us? Is everything she's describing really happening?

This is a book about suggestion and subtext, and I love that about it. More is not stated than is, which is always really effective in a ghost story. In this case, though, the things that aren't stated aren't related to the actions or appearance of the ghost/monster/killer but instead to the nature of the damage the bad guys are doing to the alleged victims. The book is more chilling than scary, which I'm into.

This was apparently James's selling out book, and I, for one, wish he sold out more often. There can never be enough gothic novels in the world as far as I'm concerned.

What I'm reading now:

+ Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie. I read most if not all of the Poirot books in middle school, but that was...over twenty years ago, so I remember nothing about this particular one. Shoutout to scripsi for mentioning it as one of her favorite Christies!

What I finished:

+ Westmark by Lloyd Alexander. I read the Chronicles of Pyrdain a couple of times when I was a kid and also The Iron Ring, but I completely missed this series. Several people with good (read: my) taste had it on their 100 books list, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

I see why people imprinted on it! I did not imprint on it, being not the right age for it, but it went directly to my "wish I'd discovered it as a kid" shelf on GoodReads. Alexander is better at the prose level than I realized as a kid, and it was a joy to read his writing. I liked our main character Theo, who is a person who always tries to do the right thing but is not always sure what that is (relatable) and is surrounded by people with different ethical frameworks than he has. I hate to be all "the publishing industry has gone downhill!" but honestly, very few authors (Hardinge, as always, is a big exception) are doing this level of nuanced morality and prose on even the YA level, much less the MG one. It's a joy to read "old school" YA/MG books and be so totally trusted by the writer. That said, it is very much a book for kids, so every time I wanted the writing to really dig into a particular idea or feeling, it didn't, but, like, that's a me problem. It's perfect for a MG reader!

I also think it's interesting how his worldbuilding looks at a glance like Generic Medieval European Fantasy, but it's clearly not--this is actually Reformation-era fantasy with the importance of printing presses and a Cromwell-esque villain, and it reminded me that your worldbuilding doesn't have to be complex to be good and distinctive. Just a few details make things feel realistic.

Also, this is an aside, but I was looking at Alexander's GoodReads page, I do not think I'd ever seen a picture of him before, and I am so taken by his face, especially his nose. He looks like a Froud illustration! Exactly what a children's fantasy author should look like! What a wonderful face!!!

+ Also, Everything Is Tuberculosis again. I had long ago put both the book and the audiobook on hold at the library and then ended up buying a copy of the book instead, so I read it right after it came out, but the audiobook hold finally arrived last week so I listened to it again. I still think it's great; I still wish it was longer; I still understand why it isn't.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Still working on City of Stairs. I might not finish it before it's due back at the library and then I will probably have to wait for it to come around again!

+ I also finally started Tendencies by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. This is my first time reading more than short excerpts of queer studies icon Sedgwick and damn, that woman could construct a sentence. This book is a collection of essays and I am reading one essay at a time. It'll take me a while to get through it but she is not a writer that you rush through! Many of her insights seem even more relevant now than they did in the early 90s when she was writing.

What I finished:

+ More than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, which I LOVED. When I say I recommend this book to everyone, I mean that I am following you around your house or place of employment with the book in my hand trying to push it into yours. That kind of recommendation.

This book just bursts with humanity, which is the highest compliment I can give a book. I love all the different things it's doing, weaving lots of strands together while still being fairly short, incredibly clear, and very readable.

The premise is, "People are saying that AI has killed the English class essay. How should we react to that?"

Warner's answer, "Good riddance to the English class essay!" (He has written an entire book about how terrible the 5-paragraph essay is that I can't wait to read.)

He starts with the question: "What is writing for?" To communicate, obviously, but that's not all. Writing is a way of thinking and feeling, and he talks about how important experience and context is to writing. He's very clear about how what AI does is not writing in the way that humans do and he's pretty forceful about how we need to stop anthropomorphizing a computer program that is incapable of anything like intention. He discusses what AI does and what it doesn't do, asking, "What are the problems it's trying to solve? Which of those problems is it capable of solving? Which can it definitely not solve?"

And he also asks, "Why do we teach writing to students? What do we want them to learn? And are our assignments actually teaching them that?" Warner, a long-time writing teacher and McSweeney's-adjacent dude, hates the way writing is taught and he's very persuasive in convincing you that we're going about it all wrong, teaching to the test, prizing an output over process, when the process is every bit as important as the output. He has lots of ideas about how to teach better that made me want to start teaching a writing class immediately (I should not do that, I would not be good at it, but he's so good at it that it energized me!) and I am convinced that if we followed his guidelines, the world would be a better place.

He also talks about the history of automated teachers and why they don't work and spends several chapters giving us ideas to approach AI with. He's like, "Look, if I try to speak to specific technologies, by the time this book is published, it'll all be obsolete and I'll look silly. So instead I'm going to give us a few lenses through which to look at AI that I think will be helpful as we make choices about how to implement it into society." He is a fierce opponent of the shoulder-shrugging inevitability approach; he wants us--and by us, he means all of us, not just tech bros--to have real and substantive discussions about how we are and aren't going to use this technology.

He's not an absolutist in any way; he thinks that LLM can be useful for some kinds of research and that other, more specific forms of AI could be really useful in contexts like coding and medicine. I agree! It's mostly LLMs that I'm skeptical of. He's very fair to the pro-AI side, steelmanning their arguments in ways that the hype mostly doesn't bother to do. (Most of the people hyping AI are selling it, after all.)

Throughout, he insists on embracing our humanity in all its messiness, and I love him for that. Basically this book is a shout of defiance and joy.

Here's some quotes I can't not share!

"Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things. No one was stunned by the interpretive insights of the ChatGPT-produced text because there were none. People were freaking out over B-level (or worse) student work because the bar we've been using to judge student writing is attached to the wrong values."




"The promise of generative AI is to turn text production into a commodity, something anyone can do by accessing the proper tool, with only minimal specialized knowledge of how to use those tools required.. Some believe that this makes generative AI a democratizing force, providing access to producing work of value to those who otherwise couldn't do it. But segregating people by those who are allowed and empowered to engage with a genuine process of writing from those who outsource it AI is hardly democratic. It mistakes product for process.

"It is frankly bizarre to me that many people find the outsourcing of their own humanity to AI attractive. It is asking to promising to automate our most intimate and meaningful experiences, like outsourcing the love you have for your family because going through the hassle of the times your loved ones try your spirit isn't worth the effort. But I wonder if I'm in the minority."



"What ChatGPT and other large language models are doing is not writing and shouldn't be considered such.

"Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we're trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.

"Writing is also feeling, a way for us to be invested and involved not only in our own lives but the lives of others and the world around us.

"Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.

If ChaptGPT can produce an acceptable example of something, that thing is not worth doing by humans and quite probably isn't worth doing at all.

"Deep down, I believe that ChatGPT by itself cannot kill anything worth preserving. My concern is that out of convenience, or expedience, or through carelessness, we may allow these meaningful things to be lost or reduced to the province of a select few rather than being accessible to all."




"The economic style of reasoning crowds out other considerations--namely, moral ones. It privileges the speed and efficiency with which an output is produced over the process that led to that output. But for we humans, process matters. Our lives are experienced in a world of process, not outputs."

et cetera

As I said on GoodReads, this should be required reading for anyone living through the 21st century.


+ I've also started a Narnia reread for the first time since I was a kid. I have now read the first two and I had opposite experiences with them: I remembered almost everything from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and almost nothing from Prince Caspian. This is no doubt the result of a combination of a) having reread one way more than the other as a child and b) one being much more memorable than the other.

There were a few tiny details that I hadn't remembered from TLtWatW, like the fact that Jadis is half-giant, half-jinn or that it's textual that the Turkish Delight is magicked so that anyone who eats it craves more. But everything else was very clear in my mind: the big empty house, the lantern in the woods, Mr. Tumnus, the witch in her sleigh, the conflict over whether Lucy is telling the truth, the Beavers, Father Christmas, the statues, Aslan and the stone table, the mice and the ropes, waking the statues, etc. This book is so chock-full of vivid images and delightful details that truly it's no surprise that it's a classic. Jack, your imagination! Thank you for sharing it with us!

PC, on the other hand, is much less memorable, imo. Truly the only thing I remembered going in was the beginning where the kids go from the railway platform to Cair Paravel and slowly figure out where they are. That is still a very strong sequence! Oh, and Reepicheep! Reepicheep is always memorable! But there aren't nearly as many really good images in this one as in the first one.

That said, there were a few that came back to me as I read: Dr. Cornelius telling Caspian about Narnia up at the top of the tower, the werewolf (it's "I am death" speech is SUPER chilling), everybody dancing through Narnia making the bad people flee and having the good people join. And Birnam Wood the trees on the move! Tolkien must have loved that bit! I'd forgotten that Lewis did it too!

It seems really important to Lewis that there be frolicking and dancing and music as part of joy, and I love that. Both books include extended scenes where the girls and Aslan and various magical creatures are frolicking. There's also a very fun bit where Lewis describes in great detail the different kinds of dirt that the dryads eat which adds nothing to the story but is so weird and fun that you don't mind. He clearly had a blast writing that sequence.

But still, this book just isn't nearly as compelling as the first one, imo. It's fine! I don't dislike it! But it doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies the way the first book does.

Both of the books are told in a style that is very storyteller and not novelist. The narrative voice is absolutely that of an adult telling a child a bedtime story, which is charming and also absolutely the reason so many people have so many formative memories of being read these books aloud. They lend themselves to that so well!

But of course the down side is that there's very little real characterization. On the whole, this is fine, because that's not the point. But it does make me appreciate writers who can do both even more. There is character conflict (should we believe Lucy? Edmund's whole arc; etc.) but the characters are very loosely sketched. What do I know about Caspian except that he thinks Old Narnia is super cool? Not much! Frankly, the dwarves in book 2 are, besides Reepicheep, the strongest characters.

I actually think the Aslan dying for Edmund bit is not as heavy-handed as it could have been as an allegory. Like, yes, it's very much matches up the Passion story, but the idea of a character dying in another's stead is universal enough that I can see how those who weren't familiar with the New Testament just totally accepted it and didn't find it confusing.

I found the sequence in PC where Lucy is the only one to see Aslan much more heavy-handed in a "you must be willing to follow Jesus even if no one else will go with you" kind of way. There were a few lines that made me say, "Really, Jack? You could have dialed that down a notch." I do super like that Edmund was first to see him after Lucy though!

So yeah, I look forward to seeing how I feel about the coming books. I remember the most of Dawn Treader and am looking forward to Silver Chair more than the others. The only one I'm dreading is Last Battle, for obvious reasons.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Voyage of the Dawn Treader! The painting of the shiiiiiiiip.

Been super busy with other things, so I haven't read much lately. But I did finish two books in the last two weeks:

What I finished:

+ How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. Schur is the creator of Parks and Recreation and, more relevantly, The Good Place. To write TGP, he did a massive amount of research into moral philosophy, and he decided to use all that knowledge to write a book for laypeople (with a little bit of help from an actual moral philosopher).

And it is so delightful! I listened to the audiobook, which was absolutely the right choice. He has the stars of TGP make little cameos reading certain things, and it is so delightful to guess who he'll have pop up when (obsessed with how he has Jameela Jamil read all the most British things and Marc Evan Jackson whenever he wants to emphasize the dryness of a certain quote). Also, Schur has a great style of reading which is conversational without being too conversational. If you can do audiobooks at all, listen to this instead of reading the book.

Basically it's an overview of different strands of moral philosophy by way of lots and lots of dad jokes. Schur is a deeply dorky guy (complimentary)--if you've seen his shows, you know what I'm talking about. But he also cares so much about being a better person and making the right decisions. I particularly loved that he introduced us to various streams of (mostly but not entirely Western) thought (deontology, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, etc.) and treats them like a toolbox-- his take is that some are more appropriate at one moment than another, and sticking to just one is probably a bad idea (agreed!). Some things come easier to some people, but if you work hard, you can get better in all areas. He's gentle and forgiving of human frailty, understands that a lot of this is difficult, and really wants his readers to connect with these ideas and build a better life with them.

His whole ~thing~ is trying to be better today than you were yesterday, which reads as super Jewish to me even though this book is not from a religious perspective at all.

I enjoyed this book from start to finish and recommend it to all!

+ Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates.

YIKES. This book is excellent and readable but also probably the most harrowing non-war book I've ever read. It does what it says on the tin.

Bates dives into different (mostly online) subcultures that are made up of men who really hate women in different ways and with different philosophies of how to react but with similar results (violence, basically). I don't know that there's anything new here, but the service this book provides is uniting a bunch of disparate cultural strands, understanding misogyny as one of the most powerful forces in 21st century society, and helping you see that the effects of it all on our culture. Bates really hammers home the differences in how we treat terrorists who are Muslim (or even explicitly white supremacist) vs. how we treat terrorists who hate women. I don't think I'd realized just how many of the mass killers of the past decade or so are more motivated by hatred of women than by even white supremacy (though that usually goes hand-in-hand).

Bates has a lot of compassion for boys and very young men who stumble into these ideas--there's a chapter about how the internet, particularly YouTube, funnels them in this direction whether they want to go there or not. If she was writing now, she'd probably add TikTok and podcasts to this, but either way, I came away convinced that even though it's almost certainly not the intention of the designers of these platforms to push boys and young men towards extremism, it's happening as a function of the way the platforms work.

Bates very much focuses on Anglophone culture, but there are similar dynamics from Brazil to France to South Korea. The book is a couple of years old, and honestly I felt really conscious of how much worse it's gotten since it was published, the way that people influenced by these ideas are in power now through the current administration's merry band of sexual abusers, and how misogyny has become an explicitly political force. I have been increasingly concerned about the divergence in political views of young women and young women, and while those particular statistics aren't outlined here (probably because they hadn't been gathered when she was writing the book), they were there in my mind the entire time I was reading it.

The last chapter is a "what can we do?" chapter, because there's always one of those. I have mixed feelings about how effective I think her propositions are, but I do think she's right that this is a problem that men have to fix themselves. The blackpilled men are simply not going to listen to women, no matter how sympathetic or right we are. Men have to come up with different models for masculinity. Bates honors the men who are doing this work...but I myself am not particularly optimistic that there are enough of them to turn back this tide. I hope I'm wrong. I really, really hope I'm wrong.

Honestly, it was probably a good thing I read this right after Mike Schur's book because I needed to hold onto the reminder that there are lots of men out there who are doing their best to be good people. Obviously I already knew that, but it helped to be able to say, "But there are lots of Mike Schurs in the world too!" to myself as I was reading.

What I'm currently reading:

I was starting Babylonia and feel unsure about whether I could put up with the style to read a book that will no doubt be very interesting, but I immediately dropped it when I got an alert on Libby yesterday. I thought I'd have to wait a couple more weeks for A Drop of Corruption, but some lovely person returned the ebook early so it came through yesterday! Yay! Obviously that is my first priority!

What I finished:

+ Towards Zero by Agatha Christie. I picked this one up because I wanted to read it before watching the miniseries...only reading it made me not want to watch the miniseries! Not because the book wasn't good--it's a very solid Christie--but because it was clear from watching about 20 minutes of the show that they'd made a ton of unnecessary changes, so I quit watching in a huff.

My main takeaway was exactly what it always is with a well-done Christie: a need to immediately go back and reread and see how she did that. I don't particularly read Christie for the plot and not for the characters. I read her because it's such a joy to watch someone do something so well; in this case: crafting a whodunit. Competence porn!

I liked this one's focus (a divorced man, his ex-wife, his current wife, and various family members) and liked how, per the title, there was a lot of lead-up to the actual murder. If you like Christie and haven't read her, you should read this one!

I'm very miffed about the miniseries, though. When a story is this meticulously crafted, you can't change things without ruining the story, so why change things???? I really can't understand why they thought the changes were necessary. Why are these adaptations so hit and miss? For every Why Didn't They Ask Evans? we get a Towards Zero. Boo!

+ Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Petr Beihart. This book was not what I thought it would be, which is partly my own fault for not looking into it more before I started it but also the fault of whoever chose the title. I had hoped it would be a real moral reckoning with what Judaism is going to look like now that Israel is committing genocide. I think this is desperately needed and we need to apply our moral imaginations as individuals and a community to figuring out how to create a post-Zionist Judaism. (Or, at least those of us who aren't doubling down on Zionism need to. My hope is that once we can clearly articulate one, we might be able to coax along those who are still clinging to Zionism to join us. This is probably a naive hope.)

That's...not really what the book is about. Instead, it's a very short but readable and well-done argument against Zionism. I feel like it's really a book for Jews who want to question Zionism but haven't felt like they could. I can definitely see the arguments in it tipping someone over the fence. So if you're looking for something very readable for someone who needs a little push, this is a very good resource for that.

Oh, and I super enjoyed the perspective of a South African Jew. Not one I encounter a lot, and his insights re: apartheid were great.

+ Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time by James Gurney. I hadn't reread this one since I was a kid, but someone on my flist recently read it for the first time, and I was like, "I should reread that!" So I did!

The story itself is relatively flimsy, but it doesn't matter because the art and worldbuilding are so wonderful. (Thank you, Mr. Gurney, for addressing waste disposal!) It's just such a labor of love, and it's always a joy to encounter art where the artist's love for their own creation just leaps off the page. This edition had an afterword about the writing--all about how Gurney spent years and years working on it, got people to dress up and pose for him, studied dinosaurs, etc. Which was great fun! It's so wonderful that all his hard work was rewarded with universal acclaim (and money).

A joyful book! Has anyone read the sequels? I never did, but maybe I will now.

+ The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. I didn't love this novella, but I appreciated it a lot and think it's very good. The idea of drawing parallels between slave ships in the 18th-19th centuries and generation ships was really brilliant. I'm always up for a generation ship story, and this one was an interesting blend of parable and a more novelistic approach. There were many times when it felt like the kind of parable that could be told around a campfire, and other times when the little details (Majorie, the cocktails, etc.) were perfectly novelistic.

I liked that the story's view of oppression, resistance, and recovery were not simplistic--it's nice to encounter ideas like,

"Find your allies wherever you can, even if you don't like them and they're in it for the wrong reasons," "You might not be able to give up the trappings of oppression right away, and that's fine if you need them as a crutch while you work new muscles," and "People from the privileged class who you might think were on your side might actually hate and resent you if you start to try to dismantle oppression instead of trying to become One of the Good Ones." Also really nice is: the community that you were forced to create because of oppression can be the very thing that empowers you to resist oppression!

Anyway, this one is recommended too!

What I'm currently reading:

+ Got my copy of Everything Is Tuberculosis! Very excited! It's shorter than I anticipated though. :(((

+ The Jesus Machine by Dan Gilgoff because Focus on the Family/James Dobson is one of my hobby horses. This is only available on Hoopla, and I haven't figured out how to get that on my very old Kindle, so I have to read it on my phone, and I hate reading on my phone, so it's going slowly.

+ Also still dabbling in The Historian now and then.

What I finished:

+ On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. Read for my anarchist book club, lol. This was actually my first time reading Chomsky? Which is wild, but my whole life he was presented to me as some kind of kook--as a public intellectual, anyway, I don't think most people in my life knew he was a linguist so they didn't care what he said about that.

Shockingly (lol), I do not find him a kook when it comes to politics, I find him imminently reasonable.

But anyway, as with most collections, this was hit-or-miss. There's nothing that's bad, it's just some of it was certainly more interesting or relevant to me. It also would have benefited from being arranged differently and certainly from having some DATES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ESSAYS. Why do editors never include the dates when the pieces were written?

The bits I liked best were the pieces of interviews where he talks about his political background, the way he views anarchism, etc. These were mostly from the first part, which was excerpts from Understanding Power, which I now want to read. There was also another little interview second-to-last, and since that one talked about his life and how it affected his politics it REALLY should have been the first essay.

There was an extended essay that was a critical reading of another writer's history of the Spanish Civil War, which was well done, but didn't mean as much to me as it should have because I am not terribly educated on the Spanish Civil War (though I definitely want to read more about the anarchist communities that flourished for a short while). The final essay was a speech he gave on a topic assigned to him--language and freedom. This was a fairly dense text full of references to Rousseau and Humboldt and the Enlightenment in general that was mostly interesting to me because it combined Chomskys two big Things, linguistics and politics. I wish he'd grappled with it more straightforwardly, but I caught some interesting glimpses.

I don't think this particular collection is the best introduction to Chomsky's thoughts on anarchism--I want to seek out something better--but I am glad I read it.

+ Terre Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land by Sven Lindqvist.

This was paired in ebook form with the first Lindqvist book I read; together, the volume was called The Dead Do Not Die. They went extremely well together, though I counted them as the two separate books they were written as.

This one was about colonialism in Australia and the destruction of Indigenous life and culture. As with Exterminate All the Brutes, it's also part travelogue, though it works better here because the places he's describing are the places where the history he talks about took place.

I of course knew that the settlers treated the native peoples terribly, but I didn't know details, really, other than having a vague idea of the indoctrination schools that some children were taken to. It's horrifically fascinating to me, the way that colonialism takes education, a space that is meant to enlighten and expand our worlds, and turn it into incredibly brutal spaces of obliteration and torture. There's a dissertation to be written--actually, I'm sure it's already written, I'd just need to find it it--tying together the experiences of Native kids in boarding schools in the US and Canada with Indigenous kids in these schools in Australia and Romani kids in Central/Eastern Europe. And probably in other places too that I don't know about.

Lindqvist's argument is straightforward: the "settling" of Australia was horrifically brutal, many Australians don't want to face this, but this history is all around in the land that was stolen, the land that was everything to the Indigenous way of life. The story is mostly told through white eyes, a series of historical figures who encountered the native people of the Australian continent and the widely varying ways in which they reacted. There are people here who were straight-up evil in their actions, people who had good motivations but bad results, and people who managed to do some good. The glimpses of Indigenous culture we get are very intriguing and make me (yet again) want to read more about them.

Taken together, the two volumes are an incredibly powerful indictment of white settler colonialism and imperialism; Lindqvist just wants people to face the fact that Western wealth and power is built upon unspeakable brutality committed against millions of people in the global south. I think he does this well. He's not doing any original research per se (at least as far as I can tell), but he's pulling together a wide variety of sources and putting them together in an effective and provocative (complimentary) way.

What I'm reading now:

Bury Me Standing: The [Romani] and Their Journey. Speaking of the Romani, I had been meaning to read this one for a long time and I've finally gotten around to it. I have mixed feelings about and I'm sure I'll have things to say when I finish. For now, I'll just say that it's uncomfortable to me that they still haven't updated the language used at least in the subtitle.

What I finished:

+ Julian Abele and the Design of Duke University by William E. King. A brief account of the career of a Black American architect in the first half of the 20th century who ended up mostly designing both campuses of Duke University but whose contribution was (unsurprisingly) forgotten for decades. This was almost certainly written as a kind of marketing push by Duke to look more inclusive--they seem to really be pushing the whole "Look! We were designed by a Black man!" while ignoring the whole, "At a time when Black students were not allowed to attend the university." It feels like they're using Abele in the way that tokenistic way that a lot of institutions do. But I guess it's better to talk about him than not to.

The subtitle is "an extended essay," and that's what this is: an essay accompanied by some excellent visuals. If, like me, you're looking for an in-depth look at Abele's life and work, you will be disappointed. But for a very brief overview of his life and career with an emphasis on his work for Duke, this works as an introduction. The pictures include photographic portraits of Abele and others, blueprints and studies of his architectural works, and many historic photographs of various buildings he was instrumental in designing. It's a very well-put-together little volume, and while I hope a full biography of Abele will be written sooner or later, I'm glad to have at least this much information about him.

+ Nanette's Baguette by Mo Willems. As some of you may remember, my mom’s part-time job in her retirement is spending hours on the library catalogue, putting books on hold, going to the library to pick books up, reading them to my niblings over facetime almost every day, then taking them all back to the library.

The other morning, she read one to them that she liked so much that when I, her 30-something daughter, called her in the afternoon afternoon, she read the entire thing to me over the phone. And she was right. It was delightful.

Mo Willems is one of those children's book authors like Dr. Seuss or Sandra Boynton who delights in silliness and language and seems to have been destined to write children's books. I am glad he found his way to his vocation.

+ Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction - Read for an online book club. This was a very hit-or-miss collection with honestly more "mehs" than hits. I really liked the first one by William Tenn ("On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi"), the one by Robert Silverberg ("The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV"), and the last one by Harlan Ellison ("I'm Looking for Kadak"), the former more than the latter. For some of them, I'm looking at the names of the stories right now and even though I read them last week I can't remember what they were about. Which probably says enough on its own.

A couple of observations:

1. This was less "Jewish fantasy and science fiction" in general than it was "second gen Ashkenazi Americans write fantasy and science fiction" but honestly it was interesting as a time capsule for that reason. Quite a bit of it hasn't aged well, but what can you expect from stuff that was written (mostly by men) from the '50s-70s? (Though one of the worst offenders was written by a woman.)
+ One of the great joys of the collection is that so many of the writers leaned into recreating the dialects of their Yiddish parents/grandparents and so the voices were wonderful. I just love the way the sentences are put together! It was such fun!
+ Any time we got into Talmudic arguments and digressions I was THERE for it. My jam.
+ It's really interesting how many of the stories grapple with the perennial "Who Is a Jew?" question through the lens of "Look! Aliens who say they're Jews!" I did really enjoy that a lot. We all seem to take it for granted that if we encounter other intelligent life, sooner or later some of them will end up being Jews. Which I adore.
+ It also provides an interesting reflection on the way Ashkenormative culture kind of freaks out when it encounters Jews who don't look like what Ashkenazim think Jews should look like or Jews who do things differently (I'm thinking of Bene Israel and Beta Israel specifically, but of course there are others).

All in all, glad I'm read it, I think it's got an A+ title, but only a few of these will stick with me in any way.

+ "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide by Sven Lindqvist.

To start with, two quotes:

"Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested."

"And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew."

Lindqvist powerfully argues that the Holocaust was proceeded by a policy of genocide enacted by European imperialists around the world. Centuries of unspeakable brutality and domination abroad were justified by scientific and philosophical works by Europeans back home--the consensus, by the end of the 19th century, became that "lesser/weaker/darker" races would naturally be exterminated by "greater/stronger/whiter ones." Hitler just appalled the world by applying that same logic to Europe, marrying it to existing antisemitism.

Lindqvist patiently lays down layers of European thought and intellectual tradition to show how, by the 20th century, these ideas were at the heart of European culture itself. Keeping Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a touchstone, he presents ideas and atrocities not in chronological order but topical order, which makes it a bit confusing to keep a timeline in your mind. But he builds up the evidence brick by brick until it is, in my opinion, undeniable that he's getting at a real truth.

I'm less convinced of the utility or necessity of the interwoven travelogue, but perhaps it works better for other people than it does for me.

+ Eternity Ring by Patricia Wentworth, a Miss Silver mystery. Pretty good! I have nothing else to say because these books are, as I've said before, the literary equivalent of one of those personal-size bags of potato chips. And I mean that in a good way.

What I'm reading now:

I started Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose and I am really enjoying it so far.

I got lazy yesterday, but here I am today!

What I finished:

+ The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Shockingly, this was the first time I read this book. I can see why it was so hugely influential and beloved to many fantasy writers coming up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For one thing, the prose is just gorgeous. So many unexpected sentences! And yet it never seems purple--it's too clear and straightforward for that. "Pure" is the word that comes to mind, though I'm not exactly sure why. It's astounding that someone in their mid-20s could write like that.

Equally astounding: that a man in his mid-20s could write Molly Grue. The same way I reacted to Tamsin with "how did this man who was never a teenager girl write a teenage girl so well?" I reacted to Molly Grue with, "how did this young man write an aging woman so well?" Her reaction when she first meets the unicorn...how did he know to write those words??? A miracle.

The book is an interesting mix of the high and low (the butterfly scene threw me for a loop, but the more I think about it, the more I like it) and overall a lovely reflection on how love can ennoble. I enjoyed it very much and wish I'd read it at 12 or so, when I could have integrated it into my personality.

+ The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World... by David Graeber. What is that ultimate hidden truth? That the world is something we make, and could just as easily make differently, which was Graeber's whole thing and why I love him. [I might quibble with the "easily," but I understand what he's getting at.]

This is a collection of various essays he wrote through the 2000s-2010s. As such, it's kind of all over the place, but mostly in a good way--in the same way that Graeber's mind was all over the place. I am a huge Graeber fan, as he was the first person who actually introduced me to what anarchism really is and made me realize I was an anarchist. As I said the other day, every time I start to think I'm not, I read some of his work and think, "Oh, no, I definitely am."

Some of the essays were short enough that I was like, "No wait! Come back! Tell me more!" whereas others were the length they needed to be. Obviously some resonated more with me than others, as is always the case with a collection of written works, but I appreciated all of them.

There are some more expected pieces, like those in conversation with his book on debt and his thoughts on the violence of bureaucracy, but there are others that were totally unexpected, like the one about the use of giant puppets in radical protests (I didn't know this was a thing, but now I am a puppet fan).

I especially appreciated "There Never Was a West," "Culture as Creative Refusal" (I want more of that! There's some of it in The Dawn of Everything, but it's clear this was an idea he was still exploring at his death and there was so much more to come), and "What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?"

Rebecca Solnit's foreward is titled "With Ferocious Joy" and I think that joy was one of Graeber's great gifts. What an extraordinary person--to have been able to look at the world from a different angle than most other people; to write with great clarity and style; to commit himself to the hard work of activism; and to be so in love with the world, human communities, and all of their potential.

I took away two things from this book: a sense of how beautiful the world is (the last essay about viewing play as central to the makeup of the universe in particular inspired this sense in me) in all its potential and a great grief that Graeber's mind and heart are lost to us. I'm thankful for the writing he left behind and anticipate a few more collections, but we'll never know what else he might have written and done, and it breaks my heart. We need him.

+ The Case of William Smith by Patricia Wentworth. My reading of the Miss Silver books continues apace. This was one of the stronger ones; I liked it a lot.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. I'd meant to get around to this one from the time it was published but never did. Then earlier this week I listened to an interview with her for the On the Nose podcast (from Jewish Currents) and was so taken by what she had to say about IsraelPalestine that I was like, "Oh I've got to read this book now."

I haven't gotten very far yet, but as with all her other books I've read, I love her writing and the way her mind works.

I have been so busy that I haven't read all that much for the past week and change, but here's what's been going on with me:

What I finished:

+ The Devil at His Elbow by Valerie Bauerlein.

For those of you who haven't encountered the story (which I imagine is most people, although there was a Netflix documentary and a zillion People magazine cover stories about it), the Murdaughs are a family of lawyers who dominated the power structure in a rural South Carolina county for a century. I won't go into the details of how they managed it, but it's dire. These people had tons of money, social esteem, and literal political/judicial power, and they probably would have continued having it and abusing it if the main member of fourth generation hadn't started screwing up so dramatically. That screwing up included fraud and embezzlement (especially from people who were already poor), drugs, boat accidents, teen alcoholism, and murder. (Just how much murder remains a mystery.)

This story dominated the news in the US south for several years from the time of the murder of two of the Murdaugh family to another's huge trial. You can understand why: it's almost unbelievably dramatic and full of the kind of details that you can't make up (for several decades, Hampton County had a literal fence all the way around the county, necessitating anyone going in or out to get out of their car and open a gate, drive through, then close the gate behind them. Like, that is almost too on-the-nose).

I thought this book was incredibly well done. I'm always leery of reading books about the south, particular the rural south, by outsiders, and the writer works for the Wall Street Journal. However, she's also from the south and got her start down here, and I think you can really tell. She communicates the fact that this story is actually bat-shit insane while not being one of those drop-in "Can you believe these stupid hicks?" type of writers. She seemed level-headed and compassionate to all of the Murdaugh's victims--she doesn't leave them out, but makes them an integral part of the story. You never forget that this family hurt people, incredibly vulnerable people.

Anyway, if that sounds intriguing to you, I definitely recommend the book. It ends, thankfully, with more justice than you might expect (though obviously never enough).

What I'm reading:

+ The new Emma Lion book is out!!!! I just started it and haven't gotten far yet but I'm so happy. What a perfect way to head into the darkest part of the year.

+ Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs by my dude Mo Rocca. This is exactly the kind of audiobook I like to listen to and while I'm taking a leisurely stroll through it, I'm enjoying it very much. Did I cry in the car on the way home from work yesterday? You betcha! Definitely more on this after I finish it.

What I finished:

+ Wild Faith:How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin. Here's my GoodReads review:

Exvangelicals are so lucky to have Talia Lavin on our side.

No "outsider" takes the Christian right as seriously as Lavin does. She's the only writer I can think of who didn't come from a Christian right background who actually sees that this is an internally consistent worldview held by people who believe it down to their bones. She doesn't dismiss or condescend or jeer--she takes Christian nationalists just as seriously as they take themselves. And because of that, she sees just how dangerous it all is. And she's determined to do whatever she can to make everyone else see it too.

I don't think there was really anything in this that I, personally, didn't already know (mostly from living it), but it's an excellent introduction to the topic for people who didn't grow up in this world. And there's also something really validating about having an outsider tell the story of your screwed-up subculture and go, "Wow, isn't that screwed up?" Yes, it is screwed up! I'm glad you noticed!

In my opinion, the last few chapters on children (child-rearing, education, corporal punishment, etc.) are by far the strongest and most important chapters. I honestly wish she'd just written an entire book focused on this so that she could do more of what she does so well here: a) bearing compassionate witness to the immense pain that those of us who were raised in this kind of authoritarian Christianity carry around and b) linking it to authoritarianism and violence in the public sphere. I'm glad that she and others like D.L. and Krispin Mayfield are sounding the alarm about these links because I think they are the biggest part of the political puzzle that others have been ignoring. I don't think you can understand anything about our culture if you don't understand how the conservative Christian obsession with punishment, control, obedience, authority, and the "redemptive" power of violence touch every single thing about our culture and politics.

That isn't to say that the rest of the book wasn't good--of course it was. Lavin is an excellent writer of prose and an excellent researcher. Every time I would think, "Isn't it time for her to mention [Josh Harris/Leonard Leo/Francis Schaeffer/Stormie Omartin/the Danvers Statement]?" she would then mention exactly that. She knows her stuff, she did her homework. She also has a beautiful compassion for and righteous protectiveness towards people who have been hurt, and that's what sets this book apart from all the (many) "please please please take the Christian right seriously, they really do want a Christian nation, they really may get it" books that have been published over the past few years.

I appreciate Talia Lavin more than I can say. Thanks for being our megaphone, Talia.

[Also, I'm waiting for someone to write the magnum opus about the Dobson legacy. Did any single figure in the US in the last half of the twentieth century do more harm to more people?]

+ The Friend Zone Experiment by Zen Cho. Never has a book had such an inappropriate name. Like, I actively hate this name and how little it has to do with the book. This was not a fluffy romcom as the name and cover implies, though it also wasn't grittily realistic either. What it was was the story of two people reconnecting after misunderstanding and both confronting family issues that cross with politics. And also about how the baggage from your home country follows you even when you immigrate and start a new life far away.

I like Cho's writing style, liked the characters, I thought the themes of ambition and its limits, the messiness of family, and the search for justice in an unjust world were well drawn. I don't know why I didn't love this book--maybe it's just my usual disinterest in contemporary non-speculative fiction? At any rate, I did enjoy it much more than other contemporary romances. If you like contemporary novels more than I do, then you should definitely check this one out.

+ The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. What a surprise this book was! I was not prepared for how much I would love it!

I used to watch some Vlogbrothers videos back in the day, and I've read The Fault in Our Stars and been generally aware of the Green brothers' internet presence. If you'd asked me, I would have said that John Green seems like a very nice guy who writes books that are not to my tastes. I would have said that I appreciated the way he and his brother try to bring humane content to the internet and that as much as I love Tumblr, I still haven't forgiven it for what it did to him.

I would never have expected that he could write something that moved me so much, that delighted me so much. I was aware of the book, that it had sold well and lots of people really liked it, but honestly I probably would never have picked it up if chestnut_pod hadn't recommended it. Our tastes overlap enough that I decided to give the audiobook a chance, and I'm so glad I did.

As I've mentioned before, I do not in general enjoy audiobooks, but I'm glad I listened to Green read his own work instead of reading it. I'm also very, very picky about essay collections and memoirs--those don't tend to be my thing either. And this was kind of a combination of essay collection and memoir--maybe an episodic memoir? I would not have thought I would like that, but I loved it.

I love the conceit of reviewing the Anthropocene, which is both a clever idea and really well executed. I love how it's a kind of struggle with what it means to be human in our current moment. (Most of it was written around the time of the pandemic, and that hangs over a lot of the essays and lends them a poignancy that I didn't expect.) I love the range of things reviewed--sunsets, scratch-and-sniff stickers, Diet Dr. Pepper, velociraptors, Canada geese, the ginkgo tree, humanity's capacity for wonder, the Indy 500, etc. etc. etc.

I developed very protective, tender feelings for John Green of the kind I always develop when I hear about people's struggles with anxiety and depression. (This is a book about mental health and grief of different kinds, even in the essays where that is not explicit.) I came out of this book just liking and appreciating him so much as a person.

I would have listened to a million more hours of this book. I laughed, I cried (multiple times), I learned stuff. This book made me want to live harder. And what more can you ask of a book than that?

I really really hope that Green will do more of this kind of writing. I will lap it up.

I don't tend to give star ratings to art anymore since that violates my ~philosophy of art~, but what the heck: I give The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green four and a half stars.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Dipping in and out of Eden Undoneby Abbot Kahler. I kind of don't know why I'm reading this since I have read another book about this exact same thing and seen a documentary about it! (I cannot for the moment remember the name of the book, but the documentary was The Galapagos Affair.) I guess I am just helpless against the kind of situation where a few very disparate personalities are forced into close proximity to each other and conflict develops.

Also: Ecuador. I think I'm one of the few people who is reading this book hunting for hints about the political and social situation of the country at the time. (Which is not wise, because that is so not what this book is about. But there are so few popular histories of Ecuador! I guess I need to dig into the university library and pull up some academic texts.) I did learn that in the 20s/30s, a bunch of Americans conspired to pool their money and buy the Galapagos Islands for the United States and the Ecuadorian people were so pissed off at this idea that they were like, "We'll lease them to another country before we do that!"

Thankfully, that did not happen.