Identity and Alcoholism, Sci-fi Style

If I were to choose one genre-- and only one-- that I would have to read and watch for the rest of my life, I think it would be science-fiction . . . while I love a good mystery/crime thriller, you can could inject that element into a sci-fi plot-- but I just love seeing how writers and directors explore our modern problems (and problems that we can barely dream of) in a story where the setting, the technology, and the alternative reality is the main character . . . so here are the two most recent sci-fi stories I ingested, sauce and all:

1) The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis-- the author of The Queen's Gambit, Tevis struggled with alcoholism most of his life, and this beautiful, sad novel uses a single humanoid alien on a mission to find food and water and resources for his advanced but dying race to explore loneliness and addiction-- Jerome Newton, the industrious, resilient, and polite alien slowly builds an empire by introducing advanced technology to earthlings, but along the way he experiences futility, ennui, and profound disconnection-- and alcohol seems to assuage this;

2) Bong Joon Ho's new film Mickey 17 is a fun and satirical journey into space and the ends of identity-- we go to the far reaches of the galaxy, where a hysterically Trumpy Mark Ruffalo is leading a band of colonists to settle on the ice planet Niflheim and one of the members of the expedition is an "expendable"-- which means they can send him to die over and over and then reprint him with most of his memories intact . . . Mickey Barnes becomes an expendable because of money issues-- and this criminal/mystery subplot is underdeveloped and a bit silly, but that is no matter-- because it gets us out into space and exploring what it means to be a unique person . . . or what philosopher's call the "Ship pf Theseus"dilemma-- because (spoiler!) not only is there a 17th version of Mickey at the heart of this movie, but also Mickey 18-- and so the usual "multiple" hijinks ensue, with Pattinson doing a great job face-acting the subtle differences between the two Mickeys and his girlfriend Nasha showing true love for both her soulmates . . . because they really are both versions of Mickey-- but which one deserves to live . . . and the aliens of Niflheim kind of steal the show at the end, an added bonus that makes this epic satirical sci-fi not only a philosophical conundrum but also an entertaining and snowy visual maelstrom.

Unintentionally Dry January (But Not Sand Island Dry)

I was determined NOT to do "Dry January" for two very good reasons—

1)I’m already a moderate drinker 

2) January is so dark, cold, and dreary that a little alcohol helps me get through without going full Jack Torrance

but this January wasn’t fated to be a wet one for me-- two weeks ago I came down with a stomach virus, then my wife caught the flu, and just as she recovered I got a mild case of COVID, so aside from a couple of parties and our outing to see Louie C.K., I barely touched beer, wine, or spirits-- but I'm not complaining because I just read Matthew Pearl’s new book, Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder, and my January—despite its lack of alcohol and abundance of sickness—was a walk in the park compared to what the Walker family endured after their sharking boat shipwrecked on a spit of sand in the North Pacific (Midway Atoll), where they survived for eighteen months on seabirds, seabird eggs, the occasional fish, a bag of moldy rice that washed ashore, and an unlucky turtle—but no beer or tobacco; Pearl’s book is a gripping account of the shipwreck and the surrounding murder and mystery, including the presence of a nutjob named Hans, who was already living in a hut on Sand Island when the Walkers and their crew washed ashore-- and the book gets quite complicated with intrigue, it's not a tale like Swiss Family Robinson or Gilligan's Island, mainly because of the sinister first mate and his past crimes and new alliances, and honestly, after reading this, I'm astounded that anyone in the 19th century would willingly board an ocean-going vessel, given the abundant threats of shipwrecks, piracy, opium smuggling, scurvy, sharks, insurance fraud, blackbirding, and mutiny-- Pearl’s book is an astounding tale of survival, persistence, and malevolent maritime machinations and if you're looking to feel better about your landlocked piece of property, read it.

Which Wych Elm?

The answer to the titular question is: the wych elm in the garden of Ivy house, the one keeping a sordid secret-- but it's going to take some preliminary reading to learn this, and some of it isn't going to be pretty: brain damage, brain cancer, and a lucky, privileged young man brought to his knees by events from his past-- events that had consequences that he was oblivious to then but are horribly apparent now . . . I'll say no more, aside from the fact that The Wych Elm is another masterful mystery from Irish-American author Tana French.

Lord of the Flies is Lame (No Tanks)

If you think Lord of the Flies is a bit tame and you want a book where the kids really go bonkers then check out Cixin Liu's Supernova Era . . . a supernova eight light-years away unleashes a pulse of radiation that hits the Earth with delayed but deadly consequence-- leaving only children under thirteen immune to the eventual (9 months or so) chromosomal decay and death-- so as adults face imminent death, they race against time to train the kids to take over the planet-- and then the adults die and the kids act just like kids and utilize none of the wisdom passed to down to them and instead squander time and resources and engage in insane war games in a globally warmed Antarctica and then things get really batshit wild and the book addresses one of the truly unfair things about human life on planet earth-- the fact that where we are born very likely determines our destiny.

If You Don't Think Everything Sucks, You are the Victim of an Illusion

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew Bacevich addresses the question asked by Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike's 1990 novel Rabbit at Rest: "Without the Cold War, what's the point in being an American?" and the answer may be an exercise in dark futility because the tenets that we thought were bulletproof and led to us vanquishing Communism haven't turned out to be made of Kevlar:

1) capitalism and globalization come with corruption, inequity, and environmental and social costs;

2) same with the military-industrial complex and all the "forever wars" we are fighting;

3) the rest of the world doesn't think American autonomy and freedom are the bee's knees

and so Bacevich whips through the recent presidents-- Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump-- and explains how they were all deficient to varying degrees . . . but he also points out how the first Trump term wasn't nearly as impactful and catastrophic as the pundits predicted . . . and so the book concludes with the question from the start: "What does it mean to be an American?" and we wonder if being an American has to be different than being a Canadian (or a Belgian or a Malaysian or any other country that doesn't profess to be a shining example of exceptionalism, a City on a Hill) and this may not be a question that is answered in my lifetime . .  we shall see.

Go To Hell (Novelistically)

If you want to read a totally fucked up book about a disgraced knight trying to protect a sanctified child in the bleakest of settings-- plague-ravaged France in the 14th century-- but that's not enough fucked-uppededness for you, and you also need Book of Revelations style monsters and a war between earth and heaven (plus some historical corruption . . . the Avignon papacy scandal) then Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman, is the novel for you . . . I enjoyed much of it, but parts of it were beyond my comprehension and the story did get a bit tedious towards the end-- I had to skim some until the action picked up again-- but this is an incredibly visceral, incredibly researched, and fantastically conceived literary project, and worthy of a better, more patient reader than me.

A Head Full of Choices (and Ghosts)

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay, is a genuinely scary (and very transparent) pastiche of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Exorcist, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" . . . with some modern touches (including a very entertaining blog, written by the lone survivor from the family, Merry-- who mistakenly poisoned her family, while being manipulated by her possibly possessed or possibly mentally ill sister . . . or was the poisoning a mistake? or was Merry possessed? or was the whole family possessed? or was it all a stunt for reality TV? you'll have to read it-- if you dare-- and then decide for yourself).

Spenser Being Spenser

Robert B. Parker's fourth Spenser novel, Promised Land, is more about relationships than crime, and I should warn you: there's quite a bit of romance between Spenser and Susan Silverman (blech) which makes me think something terrible is going to happen to her later in the series, and-- far more fun-- we learn about Spenser's complicated connection to Hawk, a gangster adjacent black dude who Spenser knows from back in his boxing days . . . anyway, this isn't my favorite Spenser book, but it still has its moments; here are some highlights from my Kindle notes:

Spenser on radical feminism . . .

“No,” I said. “Annoyed, maybe, if you push me. But not at her, at all the silliness in the world. I’m sick of movements. I’m sick of people who think that a new system will take care of everything. I’m sick of people who put the cause ahead of the person. And I am sick of people, whatever sex, who dump the kids and run off: to work, to booze, to sex, to success. It’s irresponsible.”

Susan Silverman on Spenser . . .

“More than maybe,” Susan said. “It’s autonomy. You are the most autonomous person I’ve ever seen and you don’t let anything into that. Sometimes I think the muscle you’ve built is like a shield, like armor, and you keep yourself private and alone inside there. The integrity complete, unviolated, impervious, safe even from love.”

Spenser on human nature and belief . . .

Everyone gets contemptuous after a while of his clients. Teachers get scornful of students, doctors of patients,  bartenders of drinkers, salesmen of buyers, clerks of customers. But, Jesus, they were saps. The Promised Land.  Holy Christ.

Spenser and Pam on the city in the distance . . .

“What is it,” Pam Shepard said, “about a cluster of skyscrapers in the distance that makes you feel… What?…  Romantic? Melancholy? Excited? Excited probably.”

“Promise,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of everything,” I said. “From a distance they promise everything, whatever you’re after. They look clean and  permanent against the sky like that. Up close you notice dog litter around the foundations.”

“Are you saying it’s not real? The look of the skyscrapers from a distance."

“No. It’s real enough, I think. But so is the dog litter and if you spend all your time looking at the spires you’re  going to step in it.”

“Into each life some shit must fall?”

“Ah,” I said, “you put it so much more gracefully than I.”

Spenser being Spenser . . .

Outside I bought two hot dogs and a bottle of cream soda from a street vendor and ate sitting by the fountain in  City Hall Plaza. A lot of women employed in the Government Center buildings were lunching also on the plaza and I ranked them in the order of general desirability. I was down to sixteenth when my lunch was finished and I had to go to work. I’d have ranked the top twenty-five in that time normally, but there was a three-way tie for seventh and I lost a great deal of time trying to resolve it.

The restaurant wasn’t very busy, more empty than full, and I glanced around to see if anyone was casing me. Or looked suspicious. No one was polishing a machine gun, no one was picking his teeth with a switchblade, no one was paying me any attention at all.

Spenser on Hawk . . .

“Why did you warn that black man?” Pam Shepard said, putting cream cheese on her bagel. She had skipped the hash and eggs, which showed you what she knew about breakfasts. The waitress came and poured more coffee in both our cups. “I don’t know. I’ve known him a long  time. He was a fighter when I was. We used to train together sometimes.” 

“But isn’t he one of them? I mean  isn’t he the, what, the muscle man, the enforcer, for those people?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Doesn’t that make a difference? I mean you just let him go.” 

“I’ve known him a long time,” I said.

Hawk on Spenser . . .

Hawk shrugged. “Me and your old man there are a lot alike. I told you that already. There ain’t all that many of us left, guys like old Spenser and me. He was gone there’d be one less. I’d have missed him. And I owed him  one from this morning.”

A Mystery with a Curveball

Mortal Stakes-- the third book in Robert B. Parker's Spenser series-- is about things I love: athletics, the ethics of sports, a conflict between ethical systems, the seedy underworld of 1970s prostitution and pornography, and-- of course-- ingenious blackmailing schemes.

The 1970s . . . Characterized by Four Crime Novels

 

If you lived through the 1970s, but were too young to remember much of it-- aside from the absurd commercials and network TV-- then this episode of We Defy Augury should be helpful and entertaining-- I take a look at how four crime novels characterize the zeitgeist of the 1970s (and I also take a few trips into the fuzzy abyss of my own memories of my first decade existing on this planet).

70s Crime, Boston Style

Robert B. Parker's first two Spenser mysteries-- The Godwulf Manuscript and God Save the Child-- will give you a perspective on crime in the 1970s in both inner city Boston and the surrounding suburbs . . . and the counter-culture of the 1960s is starting to permeate both locales.

Dave's Book List: 2018

Another end of the year book list . . . yuck . . . so let me boil it down to something practical. First some boilerplate: I read a bunch of good books this year, and I'm proud of that (or fairly proud . . . Stacey delivered a healthy whack to my self-esteem) but I understand that you're probably not going to enjoy the same books as me. Certainly not forty-three of the same books.

It's really hard to recommend a good book. Reading-- real reading-- is deeply personal. In the end, it's what you think about the words that makes the book good for you or not. Not that I subscribe to relative aesthetic ethics . . . I think some sentences are written far better than others. But once a book reaches a certain level of competence, then it's really up to the reader to appreciate and make sense of it. And if it sounds like "hillbilly gibberish," as Darryl McDaniels categorized the lyrics to "Walk This Way"-- then even if you sing it like you mean it, it still might not mean much to you at all (even if everyone else loves it).

So skip the list if you want, but grant me one sincere, universal, sure-fire recommendation. A list of one. I would trade all the books on my list for #39. Boom. Literally.

I'm talking about Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Anderson is so passionate about his subject matter that it doesn't matter if you're a Thunder/Flaming Lips fan, or a tornado junkie, or a history buff who wants to know more about the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889-- which Anderson says should either be called "Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town" or "Reckoning of the Doom Settlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie-- none of that matters, as the book races along at EF5 speed towards the inevitable explosion.

Read it.

1. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik


2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe


3. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander


4. White Tears by Hari Kunzru


5. The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield


6. The Night Market by Jonathan Moore


7. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth


8. The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann


9. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson


10. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt


11. Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy by Noam Chomsky


12. Beartown by Fredrik Backman


13. Requiem for the American Dream by Noam Chomsky


14. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin


15. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson


16. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli


17. Drown by Junot Diaz


18. The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga


19. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt


20.  The Changeling by Joy Williams


21. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom


22. Florida by Laura Groff


23. Ask the Dust by John Fante


24. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie


25. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy


26. The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler


27.  Calypso by David Sedaris


28. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer


29. The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum


30. Borne by Jeff Vandermeer


31. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky


32. A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron


33. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer


34. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher


35. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt


36. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher


37. Vox by Christina Dalcher


38. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh


39. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson


40. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data Andrew Wheeler


41. American Prison by Shane Bauer


42. Middlemarch by George Eliot


43. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven JohnsonFarsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson

Literacy: It's Not a Contest . . . Or Is It?

Over the past year, my friend (and fellow philosophy teacher) Stacey did something rather remarkable. I'm going to let her tell her story . . . but, before she begins, I have some rather remarkable commentary about her story (of course I do). I've conveniently put my words in vivid red, so if you want to skip them, you can proceed directly to Stacey's post. But you'd be missing out on some interesting context (and, not only that, you'd be missing out on all my thoughts and feelings, which-- if you've made your way to this corner of the internet-- you find either incredibly fascinating or so annoying that you can't stop reading them).

When Stacey started this project I was worried. Worried that she threw out the proverbial baby with the proverbial bathwater. I use the word "proverbial" here so readers unfamiliar with the idiom do not call DYFS and report Stacey for infanticide.

The "proverbial baby" Stacey tossed out of her life has more than a passing resemblance to an actual baby. It's immature, needs support in getting established, and possesses great potential. And it has a cute name. Podcast. Stacey threw out listening to podcasts, the nascent audio format that's still toddling around the media-milieu with an adorably anachronistic name. This freaked me out, because Stacey and I have both bonded with a number of different podcasts. It seemed kind of cold-blooded of her to cut ties completely with the art form (especially since we make one of our own). This would be like Steven Spielberg deciding not to watch movies (which might be the case, judging by how old the movies are that inspired him).

I'll let Stacey explain the specific ins and outs of why she quit this fledgling media cold turkey, but her general reason was so she could read more books. Now I'm all for reading books, but I don't like these kinds of arbitrarily strict deontological rules. I prefer case-by-case utilitarian ethics. The "deon" in deontological is Greek for duty, and Stacey decided it was her duty as an English teacher and an intellectual to change her ways. But I don't think you should completely quit something with as much potential value as podcasts. The right number of podcasts to listen to isn't zero. The right number is of podcasts to listen to is difficult to determine, but the golden mean, the amount of podcasts you can enjoy while still finding time to read, is probably somewhere around two per day. That seems reasonable. I wrote a long and winding post about the difficulties with this kind of Aristotelean morality and I do concede that it's easier to make a categorical rule if you want to get things done, but a good podcast is better than a bad book. I explained all this to Stacey, but she stuck to her principled guns.

I had other reasons for worrying about Stacey's project, some of them altruistic and some of them selfish. In all sincerity, I wanted Stacey to enjoy the new season of Serial. I wanted her to listen to two fantastic takes on human memory, one of them dead serious serious (Revisionist History "Free Brian Williams") and the other absurd and funny (Heavyweight "#16 Rob"). I wanted her to enjoy the weirdness of Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything "Victory is Ours." But she would not bite. She was determined and focused.

Slightly more selfish was the fact that I wanted to be able to kill time at work discussing these podcasts with Stacey. I'd recommend them and she'd tell me "Not yet. I want to finish strong . . . December 2nd." I'd tell her she was nuts, that life is too short for hard and fast rules, and she shouldn't deny herself the pleasure, but there was no talking to her.

I was also worried that she might be reading a bunch of crap, just to amass a huge list of books. Loads of Jojo Moyes and Liane Moriarty and Nicholas Sparks. Chick-lit and cheese. This was rather stupid and sexist of me, it turns out.

My greatest anxiety was a selfish one. I was worried that she would read more books than me. I average forty-some books a year, a number I'm quite proud of. I always post the list, and I'm always impressed with myself (which isn't difficult . . . I set the bar low). It turns out I didn't need to worry about this. It wasn't even close. Stacey read so many books that I'll never count how many books I read in a year again. Because I'll never live up to her list, so why bother to count? It's not a contest anyway. Right? And the point of this blog is to slow down . . . so perhaps with my shorter list, I'm winning the contest.

I'd also like to clear up what might be a misconception: if you think Stacey was doing some sort of analogue back-to-basics return to reading on paper from books checked out from the library, you'd be dead wrong. She spent a shitload of money on this project-- that's how she rolls. She checked zero books out of the library. She bought zero hardcovers with which to adorn her shelves. Instead, she purchased the Kindle version of each book and the discounted Audible version as well, so she blew through books in an efficient digital combination; she read for about an hour or so each day on her phone, and then when her eyes got tired or she was driving or getting ready for school or working out, she listened to the audio version. High tech.

Stacey's Story of Her Badass Book list (In Her Own Words)

Every year around this time, I try to reflect on my life. I evaluate my strengths and weaknesses and think about the type of life I want to lead.

My father and I had a conversation once about how New Year’s resolutions are always so strict and limiting. They force you to place unnecessary rules and restrictions on your life.  These resolutions tell you what you can’t do and seldom leave room for any fun. We both agreed we were sick of resolutions telling us “don’t drink soda,” “don’t eat sweets,” “don’t watch as much tv” and the worst: “don’t drink beer.”

We decided that, from that point on, we would make our resolutions positive. For a full year we resolved that we would curse more — much to the chagrin of my mother. Whenever I called, my dad would bellow: “How the fuck are you?!”

Cursing more was fun. It was funny. It was easy. At the end of the year, we wished each other a “happy fucking New Year,” and I set to work picking another positive resolution.

Last year, I realized I was wasting an inordinate amount of time listening to podcasts hosted by self-congratulatory comedians boasting about the importance of their work. Of course, there would be an episode of Serial or Waking Up With Sam Harris thrown into the mix, but overall, I was not listening to anything of real academic merit. The etymology of the dick joke could not be considered high brow media consumption. Clearly, this was not a valuable use of my time.

My resolution became clear: I wanted to read more. Anytime I would normally spend idly listening to a podcast - I would instead pick up a book.

I started December 1st (I am never ready to make big life changes on the 1st of January). I find I can keep my resolutions if I have a month to ease into them, but it didn't matter for this one. I did not “ease” into this resolution. In December of 2017 I read eight books. This quickly turned my resolution into a challenge. I wanted to see how many books I could read in one year. I didn’t think I could maintain the pace of two books a week while still working full time - but I wanted to see what I was capable of.

Any time one of my friends mentioned a book they were reading, I immediately added it to my list. I scoured the New York Times and Washington Posts “Best Books of the Year.” I joined Goodreads at some point in this venture (I can’t believe it took me this long). If a book was highly rated - I was going to read it.

I did not select books based on how long they were (even though Dave would like to believe I did). Maybe next year I will do that, so I can double my list — but that doesn’t sound very appealing.

As this year draws to a close, I can say that my resolution was a success. I am incredibly proud of myself for what I have accomplished. I’ve read more this year than I have in probably the past six or seven years combined.

I have not yet decided my next resolution - if you have a suggestion, I am open... As 2018 draws to a close, I can truly say “this was a good fuckin’ year.”

(Editors note: Dave has bolded all the books he has read, and therefore approves of. Thirty of them! So many good ones, but number 80 is my favorite book I read this year).

2018 Books:

1. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

2. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

3. Behind Closed Doors by BA Paris

4. The Power by Naomi Alderman

5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

7. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

8. The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley

9. The Outline by Rachel Cusk

10. Little Fires Everywhere by Celest Ng

11. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

12. What Made Maddy Run by Kate Fagan

13. Atonement by Ian McEwen

14. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

15. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D Vance.

16. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

17. Tenth of December by George Saunders

18. Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers

19. American Gods by Neil Gaiman

20. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

21. Bear Town by Fredrik Backman

22. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman

23. White Houses by Amy Bloom

24. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

25. Cemetery John by Robert Zorn

26. The Breakdown by BA Paris

27. The Identicals by Elin Hilderbrand

28. Less by Andrew Sean Greer

29. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

30. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

31. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

32. Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin

33. Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

34. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

35. I’ll Be Gone In The Dark by Michelle McNamara

36. Surprise Me by Sophie Kinsella

37. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jasmine Ward

38. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

39. The Woman in The Window by AJ Finn

40. Drown by Junot Diaz

41. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

42. Artemis by Andy Weir

43. Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman

44. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

45. Calypso by David Sedaris

46. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

47. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

48. The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

49. The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

50. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

51. The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine

52. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

53. All The Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

54. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

55. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

56. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

57. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

58. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

59. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

60. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

61. Ask The Dust by John Fante

62. Lamb by Christopher Moore

63. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

64. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

65. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

66. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

67. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher

68. Straight Man by Richard Russo

69. Where the Crawdad Sings by Delia Owens

70. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

71. The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

72. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

73. This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

74. Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

75. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

76. Florida by Lauren Groff

77. The Other Woman by Sandie Jones

78. Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

79. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

80. Boom Town by Sam Anderson

To Coddle or Not To Coddle

My take on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's new book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is that it's based on a fairly reasonable premise:

prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

and I think the authors do a great job extending the ideas from the viral Atlantic essay they wrote a few years ago . . . since then, there have been even more issues of "safety-ism" and the abrogation of free speech on college campuses and the book details these, including the shrieking girl at Yale, the assault at Middlebury, and the riots at Evergreen College; the authors worry that this new generation of students, labeled iGen, have been taught three great untruths:

1. what doesn't kill you makes you weaker

2. always trust your feelings

3. life is a battle between good people and evil people

and this has led to all sorts of logical problems, such as catastrophizing, call out culture, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, etc and that the fact that college campuses have become more and more liberal, with less and less representation by conservative professors, has led to a very sheltered and polarized, almost religiously fanatical us-against-them atmosphere on certain progressive campuses (I just read that more people identify themselves as LGBTQ than conservative at Harvard and Yale) and while this may have some very just causes-- the President Trump/Alex Jones nut job fringe right wing contingent-- there is still a serious problem with the lack of perspectives and the inability of many young people to deal with a diversity of thought, and this ability to debate and discuss ideas that might be slightly repulsive is an important part of a democratic nation; the first amendment is an extraordinarily powerful right, to not only believe and speak, but to amplify with the press, assemble other like-minded people and then petition the government . . . and the authors see some of the behavior on college campuses as a strike to dismantle this right . . . especially because administration rarely support the "offending" professors, who often meant well-- but intentions don't matter, only feelings-- and because college is so expensive, it's less a place of intellectual discourse and more of a luxury item, where "the customer is always right," but the book does offer hope and sees a way forward, away from "micro-agressions" and victimhood and blame, and towards CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and debate and dialogue . . . and this all sounds excellent to me-- I teach logic and rationality in my Philosophy and Comp classes, and regularly try to expose my students to controversial texts and topics (right now I'm presenting my sophomores  with Bundyville, a different take on the American Dream than they are used to) and I teach them to have reasonable and intellectual discourse on ideas that may be foreign to them . . . but apparently not everyone agrees with me about this book-- there's been some blowback-- and some view the book as a betrayal and a turn rightward by "elite liberals" in America . . . this Guardian review says it all, the advice is fine and good if your middle class and the book (horror!) was written by a couple of white guys, so it's easy for them to be reasonable-- and it might even have good advice if you're a minority attending one of these elite institutions, to help you navigate the waters, but if you're really progressive, then it's not enough to prepare the child for the road . . . you need to imagine how the new generation can change the road . . . but that's a little scary to me, to narrow and pave the road means serious revision to our first amendment rights, and in a society that's moving towards total surveillance, that may be all we have left . . . people -- especially kids-- are not that fragile, and the dangers that plagued humanity for most of our existence-- disease, constant warfare, threats of violence and crime, inequality and slavery-- there have been great inroads made in all these areas and so instead of seeking more and more safe havens, isolated from those that are different, we need to find common ground with the people that we don't necessarily share values with and understand that our children are going to come in contact with texts, words, people and ideas that they disagree with (and perhaps even disgust them) and that sunlight is the best antiseptic . . . anyway, read the book, see what you think, and perhaps even put some of the ideas into action, while raising your own kids or thinking your own thoughts.

They Maced Me! I Cried! And You'd Cry Too!

Someday, I will tell the story of Pip and the Mace (it's set in Daytona, circa 1991 . . . a classic) but while today's post is about tears, it's not about Pip's tears in a portable cell at the tail end of a wild night in a sleazy spring break beach town, it's about my tears and how I had to stop reading a book at the dentist to avoid looking like a fool; the book is W. Bruce Cameron's A Dog's Purpose, which my son Ian chose for our family-book-club, and he finished it weeks ago . . . on the beach . . . this is the only book my son has ever read while at the beach, my wife said it was bizarre-- he actually couldn't put it down (my wife loved it as well) but when I started reading, it seemed to me like a creative writing assignment gone bad: it's the story of a unique canine consciousness searching for its purpose-- but the dog lives through multiple lives, reincarnating after each death . . . the synopsis is utterly ridiculous and childish and silly, and the book feels that way for the first five pages but then -- especially if you're a dog owner-- the story becomes riveting and also makes you contemplate the philosophy of the whole animal consciousness thing (which apparently is far more sophisticated than people once believed, read this book for the latest research) and then there's the crying . . . I cried multiple times while powering through the book yesterday, our new dog Lola napping at my feet, the ghost of my old dog Sirius roaming through my house and my memory and I only had twenty pages left when I took my son to the dentist today, and so I brought the book-- but I also brought a back-up book, something dry (Mark Kurlanky's Salt: A World History . . . pun intended) in case I started blubbering in the waiting room . . . and when I started reading, I could feel the tears coming (my son Ian, a tough kid, said, "If you don't cry at the end of this book, you have no soul") and so I switched over to Kurlansky's take on the divinity and wonder and significance of sodium chloride, and avoided clouding up my own eyes with brine and finished the book in the privacy of my home, my trusty dog nearby.

Living in the Aftermath . . . Fun To Read, Not So Much To Live

I often have a sinking sensation--  when I am stuck in traffic or taking a hot shower on a cold day or eating take-out food with disposable cutlery-- that this modern life of convenience and technological wonder is not sustainable . . . we just can't keep living this way, it's all going to come to an end and the people in the future will look back upon us with awe and envy; Jeff Vandermeer explores this premise with great relish in his new novel Borne, which is set in a dystopian future where biotech has gone wrong: biotech-- which was supposed to be the answer to food, disease, clean air and water, mental illness-- turns out to be catalyst for the collapse of civilization; Rachel and Wick scavenge among the ruins of a city devastated by the experiments of a biotech company (which still exists in some sort of skeletal form) and Rachel discovers and "raises" a piece of biotech which attempts to become a person but is actually something else entirely . . . the book centers on the complex relationship between Rachel, her lover Wick and the sentient biotech creature Borne, and all this takes place in a surreal and vividly rendered survivalist nightmare . . . a good pick if you're looking for some sci-fi written with literary flair.

Facebook Doesn't Want You To Read This (or Does It?)

Many liberals believe we need the government to protect us from the power of corporations and corporate lobbying, and many conservatives believe we need corporations, capitalism, and competition to protect us from unchecked government power-- and, in modern America, whether you think the corporations or the government is winning this battle is often determined by your political persuasion; Republicans are desperate to repeal Obamacare and end this heinous government intrusion into our personal lives and the Trump administration has given corporations a healthy tax cut, meanwhile Democrats lament the death of the EPA and how corporations will now be able to pollute with impunity, no check on externalities such as lead, carbon emissions, toxic air pollutants such as benzene and dioxin, and the return of invasive coal mining and believe the government is the only referee who can prevent greedy business and lobbying interests from destroying our air and water . . . and obviously there is truth to both sides and-- ideally-- there will be checks and balances between the two (although conservative economist Luigi Zingales argues that big corporations and the government are one and the same in America now, especially under Trump, who is running America the same way corrupt business tycoon Silvio Berlusconi ran Italy) but Franklin Foer, in his ominously titled new book World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech believes that in the realm of technology, the scale has irrevocably tipped towards the giant corporations (referred to as GAFA in Europe . . . we all know them: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) and their power and consequence is unlimited and while these companies promote a utopian ideal of efficient networks and unfettered information-- and argue that monopoly is the only way to realize this-- they are actually moving us towards a drone-like existence in a hive-mind, where there is no individual genius; here are a few of his points and rhetorical methods:

1) he compares the industrialization of the internet to the industrialization of the food industry-- while the technology of convenience produced wonder and efficiency, it also contributed to obesity, diabetes, our sedentary lifestyle, and a terrible environmental toll . . . Nabisco and Kraft and such food conglomerates studied us the way Facebook and Google do now, figured out how to create processed foods that would never sate our appetite and sold them to us for next to nothing (for a great book on this subject that will totally freak you out, read The Dorito Effect) and these companies essentially created food that was not nutritious but pandered to the taste of the masses; Foer sees the content of GAFA, especially in journalism, as analogous to this and worries their dominance and monopolistic tendencies will squash diversity and create homogenization . . . think about how hard it is to buy actual free-range tasty chicken now, it's impossible . . . chicken flesh has become an industrialized homogenized hormone laced water filled nutritionless fungible commodity . . . and he is worried that the same is happening to our arts and culture;

2) he also sees hope in this metaphor . . . the counter-culture food movement, which has now pervaded much of middle-class America (or at least around here) and lauds organic, local, home-grown, slow-food and encourages people to really think about and understand what they are eating offers an alternative to the industrialized food industry . . . he hopes the same can happen with the internet;

3) he worries about the power of algorithms and the fact that "data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear"

4) he points out that the "Victorian Internet," otherwise known as the telegraph, followed a similar pattern as today's internet; Abe Lincoln was obsessed with commanding his armies in the Civil War by telegraph-- the Union army strung 15,000 miles of wire, to the rebels paltry 1000 miles, and this proved to be an enormous tactical advantage . . . Western Union was best positioned to privatize this network and did so, swallowing "the weaker firms" and becoming an "implacable behemoth" that dominated for the next hundred years;

5) Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon want the same sort of monopoly and they are lobbying hard to do so . . . they barely pay taxes, they are monopolies, the government does not seem interested in breaking them apart, they own our data, they own the media, they produce the journalism that most people read on a daily basis, they have pushed the value of the written word down to free, they don't particularly care about intellectual property or copyright law, and their hope is to produce AI that denies us our autonomy . . . but they sure are easy to consume;

6) Foer certainly has his own axe to grind-- he witnessed the demise of print journalism first-hand, from the inside, and he laments this; he notes that the New Republic paid $150 dollars for a book review during the Great Depression, and it still pays the same amount today for the same length review for the Web Site; in 1981, the average author made 11,000 dollars a year (35,000 when adjusted for inflation) and by 2015 that amount dipped to 17,500 a year . . . and he blames the big companies that run the internet and promote small news stories written for free and push anything that is behind a pay-wall down the search list . . . who has the time for that?

7) his solutions are fairly simple and practical, though they may never happen . . . the government needs to enforce anti-trust laws again; we need a new agency to protect us from these monopolies-- we got one after the 2008 crisis (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect us from rapacious banks determined to make a profit in any way possible) and while this can't happen under this administration-- for some reason, Republicans hate consumers and the rights of citizens to be protected from corporations (just look at what's happened with the EPA) but perhaps it will happen soon enough, it will just take a big enough hack, or enough foreign meddling in our news and elections, and it will have the political impetus to move forward;

8) his final solution is one I espouse-- the refuge of print on paper; Americans are still reading books-- and the Kindle has not supplanted the actual book-- and when you're reading an actual book, the big companies can't get to you . . . you are alone with your thoughts, without advertisement, distraction, and consumer agenda; he hopes that perhaps this can happen again with journalism, that Americans will find room for long-form, intelligent, paid journalism . . . with intelligent gatekeepers, lots of gatekeepers, not just four big ones, some method of vetting and editing, and some moral purpose behind the print . . . so stop reading my stupid, poorly edited blog and pick up a copy of the New York Times or a good book and sit down and think your thoughts, without the all-knowing eye of GAFA watching your thoughts . . .

9) Franklin Foer also wrote How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, which I recommend.

You're Welcome, David Sedaris!

The new David Sedaris memoir/essay collection Calypso is darker and perhaps more candid and sincere than anything he's written previous; it may be his best work (though not his funniest . ..  that would be Naked or Santaland Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One Day) but be forewarned-- you're going to deal with death and the afterlife and eldercare and mental illness and suicide . . . you'll still laugh and there's plenty of wry observations on mundane events (plus he feeds his benign fatty tumor to a bunch of turtles . . . though not to the exact turtle he wanted to feed his tumor too, the turtle with a tumor on his head because that turtle died before Sedaris could toss his tumor off the bridge) and I'm also pretty sure that Sedaris has either been reading my blog or stealing my thoughts, because his essay "Boo-Hooey" is about how he can't stand people talking about ghosts and dreams and how he does not believe in the significance of either topic and fans of Sentence of Dave know I've been writing about the same for many many years.

You Are Where You're At

I finished two powerful and poignant books (and thoroughly enjoyed both) on vacation that hammered home the exact reason you go on vacation-- because when you locate yourself to a different place, you become a different person-- there are many conservative folks that bristle at this, people who believe in choices and autonomy and free will, and while I will acknowledge that it certainly might be good to believe you have control over your life, it probably isn't true;

1) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, uses one South Angeles murder to look at the big picture-- black-on-black violence in traditionally African-American enclaves like Watts and Compton are generally under-policed and justice is rarely meted out . . . Leovy turns cause and effect on its head, proving that it's not because these places are inhabited by gang members that make them difficult to police . . . instead, because they have never been policed with much intensity and intent-- unlike white neighborhoods in the same city-- the denizens have learned to solve their problems outside the aegis of traditional authority, witnesses-- fearing injury or death-- have learned not to testify, and it has come to be understood that in these places-- whether it be the Wild West, the territory of the Yanomami, or South LA-- that the state does NOT have a monopoly on force and violence . . .

"take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened . . . signal that no one cares and fail to solve murders . . . limit their options for escape . . . then see what happens"

and if the book sounds depressing, in the end it is not-- because there are select police that work homicide in the ghetto in an inspirational manner, and this details such a case and the men that solved it-- and this is a case that has to be solved, because it is the murder of Bryant Tennelle-- 18 years old-- the youngest son of a highly respected Los Angeles detective Wallace Tennelle . . . a principled officer that chose to live where he worked and paid the ultimate price for it; the book might change your mind about how gangs work (far looser and more disorganized that you might think) and how murders are handled when they are insular and comprised only of African-American men, and it will remind you that you really can't control where you are born and where you live . . . or often not until it's too late;

2) Sherman Alexie tells a similar story of growing up in a difficult, possible barren and futile environment in his YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian . . . my wife coerced me and the kids to read it for a family "book club" and we all loved it; Alexie tells the semi-autobiographical story of Junior's life on the Spokane reservation and his daring "escape" to the nearest white high school off the rez-- 22 miles away-- because Junior recognizes that though he loves his family, his people, the land, and his best friend Rowdy, that the setting is inevitably hopeless, fostering alcoholism and endless repetition of the same losses and drama . . . this is the story of his commute and his very real adaptation to a new setting-- Alexie says the book is 78% true and it rings true, it's gross, sincere, candid, hysterically funny, and really moving (plus it has lots of basketball, so I was getting choked up fairly often, because sporting stories are the only ones that make me cry).

You Haven't Read "Ask the Dust"? That's Sad . . .

Our friend, colleague, and book club participant Nicole is heading to California with her husband, to teach in LA, and so for my book club choice, I wanted to do a classic book set in the City of Angels, because then Nicole could Skype in to book club and offer her opinions-- and everything I read online touted John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust as the quintessential LA story-- it is regarded as "The Great Gatsby of the West Coast"-- so now when she gets out there she can immediately brandish some elitist Jersey-douchebaggery and say to natives, with feigned shock: "You haven't read Ask the Dust? Really . .  that's so sad, it's the quintessential LA novel, the Great Gatsby of the West Coast . . . you should check it out . . . I can't believe you've never read it" and I'm even recommending this book to people that live on the East Coast, while I can't offer my thoughts (those are reserved for book club) I will tell you that my wife said it is "the best book I've ever recommended to her" and she loves it as much as I do.