tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72988939882620425582024-03-19T14:22:50.828-07:00Four books at a timembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.comBlogger132125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-36008690670414403332024-03-19T14:22:00.000-07:002024-03-19T14:22:19.141-07:00A healthy future: Lessons from the frontlines of a crisis by Ryan Meili<p>It's been just over 4 years since the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a global heath emergency, but in many ways we seem to have forgotten that the pandemic ever happened. The only people who mention COVID-19 these days are anti-vax crazies and conspiracy theorists who rewrite the history of those years to be a story of unjustified government over-reaction and oppression.</p><p>But more than 1,000,000 people are confirmed to have died of COVID-19 in the United States. More than 50,000 Canadians died. More than 1900 died in Saskatchewan.</p><p><i>A healthy future</i> is the story of the COVID-19 pandemic in Saskatchewan, as told by the leader of its official opposition, family doctor and health activist Ryan Meili. The book is an effort to un-erase the history of COVID-19 by following events from beginning to 'end', from month to month, through COVID wave after COVID wave. It serves as a much-needed reminder of those long months and years: I spent the first 4.5 months of the pandemic in Saskatchewan and even I was shocked at what I'd forgotten. Restrictions began with a 250 person gathering limit??? WTF? Oh yeah, that's right -- I remember now. The right-wing Saskatchewan Party's COVID response began with that weird under-reaction of a restriction on March 13, 2020, the day after the province's first confirmed case of COVID.</p><p>I left Saskatchewan near the end of July 2020, so I didn't follow events in that province as closely afterwards. But the overall story that Meili tells is familiar -- COVID waves, deaths, restrictions, vaccinations. Government responses that ranged from frustrating (why NOT tell us where in the province cases are happening? It's human nature to feel that something is 'somebody else's problem' without concrete data that tells you otherwise) to well-thought out (drive-in vaccination lineups made perfect sense in Saskatchewan) to heart-breakingly stupid (most of the rest of the Saskatchewan Party's policy decisions). </p><p>My one criticism of the book is also one of its strengths: <i>A healthy future</i> keeps the focus squarely on events and policy decisions in a single Canadian province. Readers from other places might not feel as engaged with the book when the specifics of their COVID experience will have been different. But at the same time, sometimes being specific is the best way of approaching the universal. By limiting himself to telling the story of his own province, Meili is not only rescuing Saskatchewan's COVID story from oblivion, he is rooting his observations and recommendations in a very particular set of facts.</p><p>I'll close with a quote that Meili includes in his concluding chapter "Lessons for the next wave":</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> "Among countries with available GDP data, we do not see any evidence of a trade-off between protecting people's health and protecting the economy. The relationship between the health and economic impact of the pandemic go in the opposite direction. As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too" <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy" target="_blank">[1]</a></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-52692277860839449892024-01-17T09:51:00.000-08:002024-01-17T09:51:27.341-08:00Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky<p> I find it puzzling. Why do I struggle to connect with and <a href="https://fourbooksatatime.blogspot.com/2023/06/babel-by-r-f-kuang.html">enjoy certain amazing books</a>?</p><p>By any objective standard, I should have loved <i>Children of Time</i>. It has a fascinating premise, a mind-alerting perspective, novel technologies, and a pair of intertwining plot threads that are by their very nature compelling.</p><p>And yet...reading it felt like a duty. I had to force myself to complete the book.</p><p>Am I just old? Brain ossified? Maybe I've just 'outgrown' SF, where by 'outgrown' I mean 'aged out of'? (For perspective, I'm thinking of "aging out of" in the same sense that gymnasts (at least used to) age out of being competitive before they reached age 20, not in the sense of "leaving childish things behind.")</p><p>I don't know. But I do think that with <i>Children of Time</i> there are several things going on, at least for me. </p><p>To talk about them, I need to talk about the specifics of the novel. And apologies, there are going to be some spoilers.</p><p>The book takes place in the far future and has two main plot threads. In the first, (PT1) a grand star-spanning human civilization crashes, leaving behind a science project running on a distant isolated planet. We then follow the artificially-accelerated evolution of a species of uplifted spiders across thousands of generations as they evolve from simple spiders to intelligent social beings with a planet-spanning civilization. Plot thread two (PT2) begins centuries after PT1 begins, when an Ark ship from the reconstituted human civilization arrives searching for a new home for the last remnants of humanity. Earth (and every other human habitat) is dead. </p><p>Both stories take place over thousands of years: the spider story told as a series of vignettes illustrating key moments in their evolution and in the development of their society; the human story told as the human "sleepers" on the ship wake to deal with one crisis or another as their mostly-automated ship travels the cosmos looking for a home for its sleeping cargo of otherwise doomed people.</p><p>Here is the first problem with the story, at least for me -- it takes place over far too long a time span. I couldn't read <i>Years of Rice and Salt</i> by Kim Stanley Robinson. I simply got too frustrated with the structure of the book, which featured the same characters reincarnated again and again over the course of a long alternate history. The story was interrupted over and over again, you had to figure out which character was which every time (names, of course, varied for each incarnation), and there wasn't a clear story arc for the overall book. I rapidly stopped caring.</p><p>The spider story arc (PT1) inherently has these same problems. Strike One.</p><p>However, Tchaikovsky does something clever. The protagonists of each episode of PT1 have a consistent set of names, even though the actual players change with almost every episode: "Portia" is always our enterprising heroine, "Bianca" our spider super-scientist, "Viola" a political leader, "Fabian" a genius male spider struggling to advance the interests of males within spiderdom. The consistent set of names gives the episodes a spurious feel of continuity, which was enough to keep me engaged -- at least after the spiders developed a degree of sentience. Strike two: this took almost 100 pages. </p><p>The second plot thread (PT2) should be a no-brainer -- lots of drama, a clear plotline, a consistent set of core characters throughout. The problem? Holsten, the viewpoint character in PT2 (I hesitate to call him the 'protaganist') is one of the most passive characters I've encountered in fiction. </p><p>Holsten is not one of the leaders of the expedition, involved in making decisions about the expedition, taking dramatic action, inspiring others, or in figuring things out. Instead he is a specialist woken only when he is needed to decipher messages in the languages of the lost civilization. So he is not necessarily involved in the key events and crises that affect the human voyage. Even that might be okay, because after all, this book isn't really about the drama of those events. It's about the <SPOILER, BUT I THINK YOU CAN SEE THIS COMING> events that lead the human ship into conflict with the spiders. So, okay, the events setting up the conflict mostly do involve Holsten, albeit only in a supporting role.</p><p>The real barrier? Holseten is personally incredibly passive. When conflict breaks out on the Ark ship, he doesn't take sides: he doesn't even have a clear sense of which side he thinks is correct. When he discovers something earth-shattering, he sleeps on the decision about whether to tell the captain, even though the information is critical and the ship is operating under a time limit. He doesn't speak up when he begins to suspect the true nature of the messages he is receiving from the planet of PT1, even though that revelation is also critical. Over and over again he decides nothing, he says nothing, doesn't act, doesn't have an opinion, doesn't appear to care deeply about anyone -- not even the person who supposedly falls in love with him (I say supposedly because that deep love doesn't seem believable within the context of the book). </p><p>Holsten is a very frustrating character to follow through PT2.</p><p>Strike 3 against the book.</p><p>I have some theories about why Tchaikovsky wrote Holsten this way. One is that it was in the interests of verisimilitude. Who is most likely to survive a centuries-long voyage? Someone who is key to every decision and has to be awakened repeatedly to act (using up their lifespan), or someone less central? Okay, plausible but not definitive. Any author worth their salt could work around that one somehow.</p><p>A second reason Tchaikovsky might have made Holsten so passive is that Tchaikovsky felt that a more detached viewpoint gave a more appropriate tone to story that takes place over eons -- Holsten's detachment lends the story a more eternal quality. Sure, but is that worth the potential loss of reader interest?</p><p>I think my third theory is the strongest one: Tchaikovsky wanted to balance our interest in both plot threads even though our sympathies are naturally going to skew towards humanity in any contest of "human vs spider". Holsten's detachment was Tchaikovsky's way of lessening our engagement with the humans.</p><p>Unfortunately, that third strike against the book meant that even after I started feeling engaged with the fate of the spiders, I kept procrastinating about reading the book. I didn't like the viewpoint character in PT2. In fact, I didn't really like any of the humans.</p><p>I mean, I love SF for the way it explores ideas, but fundamentally, stories are about people. </p><p>Okay, okay. Counter examples: Foundation and anything else Asimov ever wrote. In fact, almost any SF that predates the "New Wave" of the 1960s, and a good chunk of that too. I mean, how long was it until anyone other than Ursula K. LeGuin focused on humans as humans? </p><p>Which brings me back to the "aging out" comment. Maybe my brain has degenerated to the point where I need a human story line in order to really engage with SF. Or, hopefully, it's just a phase I'm going through. :-) Because I don't think SF is ever going to be only human-centred, and I probably wouldn't want it to be.</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-25187279668651681672023-12-28T16:40:00.000-08:002023-12-29T13:58:10.648-08:00One book leads to another: Half-Breed, The One and a Half Men, The Northwest is Our Mother<p><i>The Northwest is Our Mother</i> by Jean Teillet: an activist political and social history of the Metis people</p><p><i>The One and a Half Men</i> by Murray Dobbin: an extensively researched political biography of two Metis activists active from the 1930s through the 1960s</p><p><i>Half-Breed </i>by Maria Campbell: a personal memoir showing the impact of Metis social and political history through the story of one Metis woman</p><p>OR, in reverse order....zooming out from the story of a few decades of a single life (Campbell), to one thread through political and social life of the Metis people over the course of two men's entire lives (Norris and Brady), to the story of a people (Teillet).</p><p><b>One book leads to another: <i>Half Breed</i> by Maria Campbell </b>leads to<b> <i>The One and a Half Men</i> by Murray Dobbin </b>leads to<b> <i>The Northwest is our Mother</i> by Jean Teillet</b></p><p>First I re-read <i>Half Breed</i>.</p><p>I read Maria Campbell's book many years ago, when I lived in Saskatoon. Even then, before she was perhaps technically an elder, she was an honoured elder Metis, a noted indigenous activist, and a legend. Our circles didn't touch, but that was because I was an unremarkable white juvenile activist who wouldn't have rated an introduction even if we had happened to be in the same place at the same time. Maria was a celebrity, someone who people would name-drop if she'd been at their baby shower or potluck, or especially if they'd rated an invitation to her place at Gabriel's crossing at Batoche.</p><p>What did I think of <i>Half Breed </i>on re-reading it more than a half-century after publication? First, how the book still resonates in so many ways. The vividness of Campbell's stories leap from the page, especially as she tells the stories of her childhood living as one of the 'road allowance people' in North-Central Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 50s. Those are stories of poverty and struggle, discrimination and official abuse -- but also of happiness and family and connection, at least until her mother dies and her father falls apart, leaving her and her younger siblings to struggle and ultimately be separated for many many years. Broken families are nothing new for indigenous peoples in Canada. Neither are the tough choices and unhappy circumstances that lead to sex work, addiction and often despair, as they did for Campbell in the 1960s.</p><p>Campbell overcame. She reclaimed her life and her heritage, became politically active, and wrote the story of her life in the early 1970s. In the process, she became one of the first indigenous voices to be published in Canada, and the fore-mother of a new literature.</p><p>So, how did this book lead me to <i>One and a Half Men</i>? When Campbell talks about the forces that destroyed her father's life, she talks about his deep disappointment with the failure of political organizing by the Metis people in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, and his disappointment with the noted Metis organizers Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris. She also talks of the many betrayals of the Metis by the CCF government (who are otherwise heroes of mine). It made me curious. I googled Brady and Norris, and discovered <i>One and a Half Men</i>, a political biography written by someone I had actually known in my long-ago Saskatoon days -- Murray Dobbin.</p><p>Murray wasn't someone I knew well -- he was of the notable political generation just ahead of mine. But the combination of a book by someone I knew and a history I did not made finding and reading this book irresistible.</p><p><b>One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin</b></p><p>My initial reaction: Wow. What an amazing book.</p><p>Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that everyone should drop everything right now to read <i>One and a Half Men</i>. It's an extensively researched and competently written political biography, but it's probably not a book that will change how you see the world. It isn't written with ground-breaking literary quality. It isn't the self-expression of an oppressed people and it doesn't tell a universal story of interest to people everywhere in the world.</p><p>But writing <i>One and a Half Men</i> was an extraordinary act of respect and service to the Indigenous communities of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Murray Dobbin spent years diving into archives and interviewing friends, families, and political allies and foes of the legendary Metis political organizers and activists Malcolm Norris and James Brady. Because he did so, a detailed record exists of their decades-long political struggle from the 1920s and 1930s in Alberta (where they were responsible for the grudging creation of the Metis Settlements by the Alberta government) through the late 40s, 50s, and 60s in Saskatchewan where they nurtured the spark of Metis Nationalism through dark times while mentoring and inspiring future generations of Metis activists and leaders.</p><p>This book is an important historical record of one part of the long struggle of Indigenous peoples against colonial settler society. You can read it to learn more about the racism, neglect, hostility, and extraordinary vindictiveness* of mid-20th century government officials towards Metis and Indigenous peoples, particularly those who dared to advocate for themselves. More importantly, it allows people today to see and honour the strength and dedication of two extraordinary men who spent their lives in service to their people.</p><p>Metis people would undoubtedly themselves tell this story differently -- and next I should seek out <i>The Northwest is our Mother</i> by Jean Teillet to see how. But because Dobbin did the research, asked the hard questions, and donated his records to the Saskatchewan archives, researchers have much more detailed source information than they otherwise would. </p><p> * The supremely competent but politically outspoken Norris was fired from his Saskatchewan government job mere months before he qualified for a pension by the Liberal Ross Thatcher government -- who then went on to make sure that he was fired from his replacement job at the Prince Albert Friendship Centre. Norris died of a stroke soon afterwards.</p><p><b>The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet</b></p><p>In her introduction to <i>One and a Half Men</i> Maria Campbell explains that her immediate and visceral reaction to the book was that she did not want Murray Dobbin to write about her heroes -- even though Murray was a friend and the book was excellent. She did not want a white historian to tell Brady and Norris's story. </p><p>After reading Jean Teillet's history of the Metis People, I completely understand Campbell's reaction. </p><p>Teillet's book is the story of the Metis people, told from the perspective of the Metis people. </p><p>What does this mean?</p><p><i>The Northwest is our Mother</i> is comprehensive and extensively researched, and tells the stories that are important to the Metis. One example: the book includes a few pages explaining the brief visit of a white grifter to the Forks in the early 19th century. Why? This is not a particularly notable event! But there is a traditional Metis song mocking this man and his pretensions, so of course it is of interest to the Metis to understand the song's origins. Another example: Teillet describes in detail the Metis perspective on what she calls "the Northwest Resistance" -- when the Metis' heart-breakingly reasonable requests of the Canadian government were met by Gatling guns at Batoche. She doesn't describe events during the Resistance that involved only First Nations peoples, even though those are important to understanding the overall arc of events. Teillet is telling the story of the Metis, not an objective history of Western Canada. A final example: Teillet focuses on a single decade of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's lives, the decade of activism and struggle that led to the creation of the Metis Settlements in Alberta. In doing so she gives a much better perspective on the importance of those settlements -- because despite the profound disappointment Norris and Brady felt at their limited land and their limited autonomy, the settlements remain to this day the Metis' only secured land base and so remain profoundly important to the Metis people.</p><p>But it's not only the content of Teillet's book that is striking. She speaks in a Metis voice. Her language is sometimes non-academic. She focuses on the perspective and experiences of the Metis in all situations. She includes stories about how these historical events impacted members of her family, and how those events are remembered today. In telling the story of the Metis she not only explains the origins and history of her people, she tells us what the Metis remember, what they valued and who they are. </p><p>Dobbin is alway sympathetic to his subjects, but he writes <i>about</i> Metis lives, Metis politics, and Metis history. He is always at at least one remove, the objective observer. Not to mention that the very title of his book is offensive: it is based on a historical story that positions the Metis people as 'other' and not entirely human: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"...in the early 1850s...he asked a Catholic priest about a nearby group of boisterous men. They were dark skinned but obviously not Indians. 'They are the one-and-a-half men,' the priest replied, 'half Indian, half white and half devil.'"</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p>And while Dobbin researched and wrote within 10 years of Norris and Brady's deaths, and so had access to people who knew them and remembered events described in his book-- reading Teillet's book reminds me that the stories important to the Metis would not have been lost. Those men's families, their compatriots, their communities: they remember. They told and continue to tell their own stories, both as inheritors of the oral culture of their indigenous ancestors and as descendants of highly educated and literate French Canadians and Hudson's Bay traders.</p><p>The Metis did not need Murray Dobbin to tell Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's story, any more than the Woman's Movement of the 1970s needed Murray to create a 'Men's Auxilliary' and hold bakesales to raise money for them (which he apparently did in his youth).</p><p>So, in the end, the most amazing and impressive of the three books is undoubtedly Teillet's. Not only does she tell the Metis stories about themselves that they need to know and remember, her book clearly explains to white Canadians just who the Metis are. Which makes it clear just how insulting it is when pretendians with some tiny random fraction of indigenous ancestry call themselves Metis. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-41521494581891510412023-06-21T21:36:00.000-07:002024-01-17T10:12:28.438-08:00Babel by R. F. Kuang<p> I pretty much hated this book, and I am struggling to understand why. </p><p>First of all, why would I expect to love this book? Well, what's not to love? </p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Kuang is an award-winning author, whose books have been best-sellers. Those factors should mean that her books are both well-written and engaging. </li><li>As far as topics go, <i>Babel</i> takes place in a fictionalized fantasy version of 19th Century Colonial Britain, featuring a hero who is a half-Chinese scholar born in Canton. It's an interesting setting, with an interesting premise.</li><li>Kuang is a first generation American whose parents were born in China. She herself is a scholar of Chinese history and culture. The book should be told from a highly expert and insightful perspective. </li><li><i>Babel</i> features an anti-colonialist hero who first joins a secret society designed to undermine British hegemony, and then builds a student-worker coalition as part of a rebellion against colonialism.</li></ol><p></p><p>All good, right? </p><p>Alas, in practise I stopped reading Kuang's first novel, <i>The Poppy War,</i> half-way through and I had the same impulse half-way through <i>Babel. </i></p><p>This time pushed to the end, trying to understand what wasn't working for me.</p><p>It's not that Kuang is a young academic, and that her books show it. The protagonists of both the <i>The Poppy War</i> and Babel are brilliant, penniless young students, but the struggle of the heroine of <i>The Poppy War</i> to triumph in the imperial entrance exams kept my attention. So did the beginnings of the academic journey of the hero of <i>Babel, </i>who is scooped out of China as a young boy, and set to intensive study of Latin and Greek to prepare him for Oxford and his future at the Institute of Translation. <i>Babel</i> continued to hold my attention as 'Robin Swift' enters Oxford and encounters his first real friend -- fellow student Ramy-- and as together they build their academic careers through their first years of university.</p><p>But about half-way through <i>Babel</i> my interest really began to flag. There were lots of events -- so many events! So much drama! -- as Swift and his classmates struggle with various challenges at Oxford, year by year, and as Swift encounters his mysterious brother Griffen and the even more mysterious Hermes Society. </p><p>But at some point I stopped caring. Maybe there were simply too many events? It felt as if this story could have been several books. Or perhaps the problem is that Kuang should have pruned this story to create a more satisfying overall story arc. As it is now there were too many challenges, too many mini-crises and resolutions, with no clear emotional direction for the overall story.</p><p>It didn't help that I felt a limited emotional connection with the characters.</p><p>Only Robin our hero was fully-drawn. To a lesser extent Ramy also comes alive on the page. But we don't see enough of Griffen to understand him, or care about him and his passions. (When we finally do begin to understand Griffen, it's because Robin <b>tells</b> us about him, not because Kuang <b>shows</b> him to us.) Dr. Lovell is an evil colonialist. Letty is a caricature, and annoyingly, one whose character and life story don't feel true to 1830s England. Victoire hardly existed at all until the very last pages of the book.</p><p>Then there are the plot problems that start coming thick and fast from the midpoint onwards. Why would Babel overlook what seems to them to be Robin's treachery? Why do they also send the other 4th year students to China alongside Robin, when those student's skills are irrelevant to the project at hand? And how does it happen that four of the most brilliant scholars at Oxford are so beef-witted about covering up a crime? </p><p>And then Kuang suddenly kills off most of the characters to create a crisis point. </p><p>I 'm so old I remember when it was considered edgy to kill off central characters! But instead of it being a shock that enlivens the story, here killing off central characters feels like a contrivance -- one that makes it hard to feel invested in the story's ultimate outcome. It doesn't help that our hero claims to be devastated but we don't feel that devastation. Or that our Hero and his remaining brilliant colleagues (and their revolutionary working class allies) seem so naive about strategy. </p><p>Am I a curmudgeon? Undoubtedly. Can I write a book as good as R. F. Kuang's? Of course not. Will her writing improve as she matures and gains both more life experience and more writing experience? I hope so. Or maybe I am just being far too curmudgeonly in even saying that! She's writing relevant books that appeal to a best-selling-sized audience, an audience that cares more about her passion, her perspective, and her world-view than the flaws that I see.</p><p>Good for her. May she write many more. I just doubt that I'll read them.</p><p>----------------Addendum--------------------------------</p><p>I attended the Surrey Writer's Conference this past November, and a comment that Mary Robinette Kowal made there stuck with me. Roughly "Readers will love your work for what you do well."</p><p>Readers love R.F. Kuang for what she does well -- write stories from a uniquely Asian perspective, foregrounding the experience of People of Colour from non-Western cultures.</p><p>Babel does this extremely well -- it makes Imperial Victorian England an entirely new place to a Western reader situated in a culture that mostly sees this era through the eyes of contemporary authors like Dickens (where the Empire that makes his society possible is invisible) or modern authors like Neal Stephenson (who use the era to create a romanticized steampunk past). </p><p>Even the annoying ahistorical Lety serves a purpose in this perspective: she exists to allow Kuang to vividly illustrate the idea of 'white women's tears' and the impact on POC of supposed white allies who don't see their own privilege and whose words and actions centre their own experience instead of supporting those of POC.</p><p>I can see and appreciate those values. I took them too much for granted in my previous review, perhaps because there remains something about how Kuang paces her stories that really doesn't work for me, making me focus on all of the elements of her books that annoy me, instead of all of the things that she does really well.</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-16799586904482520472023-04-17T08:40:00.000-07:002023-04-17T08:40:03.116-07:00The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow<p>I expected to love this book. I expected to want to write about it in some detail. I began enthusiastically, underlining passages and taking notes as I read.</p><p>Spoiler alert: I did not love this book. It took me a long time to finish, and my notes have been sitting unread for weeks. I also feel very unmotivated to revisit them and to write this review.</p><p>But waste not, want not. Given that I went to the effort, I might as well share a few thoughts.</p><p>To start with, don't get me wrong. <i>The Dawn of Everything</i> is eye-opening! It may well change the way you understand human prehistory. You will certainly learn a lot, even if you already have some interest in prehistory and/or have visited some of the archeological sites referenced in the text. Not to mention that the authors are frequently amusing. Graeber and Wengrow bring a sly sense of humour to what is literally 'ancient history'.</p><p>My fundamental problem is that the book failed to answer the question it set for itself -- not the question that they began their journey with ("what are the roots of inequality in today's societies?") -- but the question they circle through all 500+ pages of their text "are the kinds of deeply unequal societies we live in today inevitable?"</p><p>To be fair, it's a lot to expect an answer to that question and I probably shouldn't have expected one, despite the frequent promises in the text itself. I might have been overall more satisfied with my reading if I had expected exactly what this book delivers: a re-examination of the evidence we have about human societies throughout history and prehistory, and a thorough debunking of the mythology of "human progress" that we are all familiar with. You know the one: "Humans started as hunter-gatherers, living in an idyllic state of nature in small groups. Then we invented agriculture and settled down, developing task specialization, cities, and kings and armies along the way." Or possibly the more Hobbesian view (shared by Stephen Pinker) -- "We developed civilization to protect ourselves from the unending 'war of all against all'". </p><p>As it turns out, neither perspective offers much value as a description of human prehistory. </p><p>As Graeber and Wengrow point out, it's easy to forget that human prehistory is very very very long. Biologically modern humans have existed for somewhere north of 150,000 years, while our oldest written records date back only about 5000 years. That means that there is time enough for human prehistory to be far stranger, more complex, and more various than we generally imagine.</p><p>For example, the more we learn, the more we discover that prehistory abounds with examples of settled groups of hunter-gatherers (Haida, people of Çatalhöyük), peoples who adopted agriculture and then abandoned it (notably, the builders of Stonehenge), and even non-hierarchical cities (Teotihuacan does not contain the kinds of images of warrior-kings found in other MesoAmerican ruins, instead featuring vast complexes of apartment buildings that housed peoples of all social classes. There are ancient large circular settlements in Eastern Europe that seem to be designed that way on the 'Arthur's round table' principle -- in other words, they seem deliberately designed to prevent any subgroup from claiming undue significance or prestige due to their location within the larger group.)</p><p>Which brings us to one of the other main points that Graeber and Wengrow are at pains to make: we have no reason to believe that ancient peoples were any less clever than we are, or any less deliberate in making choices about how, where, and with whom they lived. Just because a people did not have a written language (or a written language that we still have evidence of or that we can still read), does not mean that those people somehow lived 'in a state of nature' dictated by their predetermined stage of 'cultural evolution'. </p><p>So read this book if you're interested in learning more about recent discoveries about human prehistory, and if you're interested in a contrarian view about what those discoveries show and mean. Also read this book for the many interesting perspectives and asides that the authors provide about human culture and cultural influences. </p><p>One example: Wengrow and Graeber examine the possibility that North American First Nation's way of life influenced and inspired the European Enlightenment.</p><div>After all, how was it that European thinkers like Rousseau developed their ideas around liberty, equality, individualism, toleration, and rationality in the first place? There was literally no precedent for these ideas in the religiously rigid, hierarchical societies of late medieval Europe. Could the rise of these ideas have anything to do with the contemporaneous contact that French society had with egalitarian North American cultures like that of the Wendat (Huron) people? </div><div><br /></div><div>The Wendat viewed with something between horror and disdain the idea that anyone had the right to compel obedience from another. Instead they chose to govern themselves via councils that featured endless articulate and philosphic debate. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sounds like a stretch to think that the Wendat helped to inspire the Enlightenment? One of the most popular books in early 18th century Europe was a book written by a French priest (Lahontan) who had recently returned from what is now modern Canada. The book is a scathing critique of French society written in the form of a dialog between Kandiaronk (a notable Wendat) and the priest. </div><p>The book has traditionally been interpreted as being a liberal critique of French society that simply uses a mythical Wendat as an interlocutor. Perhaps -- but Kandiaronk was a real person. His existence is documented in First Nation's oral history, and in multiple contemporary European historical accounts. Moreover, these historical accounts (letters, journals, church reports) are uniformly admiring of Kandiaronk's intellect -- one Jesuit calls him 'surely the most intelligent man who ever lived'. And remember, Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic Church. </p><p>So why shouldn't we believe that the critiques of European society attributed to Kandiaronk were his own? Particularly given that Lahontan knew Kandiaronk, and there is a plausible argument to be made that Kandiaronk himself actually visited France as part of an Indigenous delegation that visited the French court in 1691. So why shouldn't we believe that a book that was widely read and widely translated affected the intellectual climate of its time? </p><p>That argument gives you a taste for the kind of information and analysis that Graeber and Wengrow provide throughout the thoroughly entertaining (and well-referenced) pages of <i>The Dawn of Everything</i>. Just don't expect their discussions to come to the conclusions that they claim to be pursuing.</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-30488780332392947532023-02-19T14:22:00.003-08:002023-02-19T14:23:35.368-08:00Meditations by Marcus Aurelius<p>It's absurd to write a critical review of a book that has endured for more than 1500 years. It's even more absurd to do so without finishing that book, especially given how short it is (163 small pages in the edition I picked up from my closest little free library).</p><p>But I just can't.</p><p><i>Meditations</i> is a foundational work of Stoicism, written by the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD. The very fact that this text still exists after all this time is a testament to the wisdom that generations of readers have found in its words. </p><p>But when Aurelius writes of accepting whatever life gives you with a quiet mind because it is what Nature has allotted to you, I can't help reflecting how much easier it would have been to do so as the adopted son of an emperor, and then emperor yourself than it would have been to do so as one of his own slaves. When Aurelius rates the "womanish" sins of desire (sins that are pleasurable) as worse than the (more manly) sins of passion (involuntary loss of control), I reflect first on the misogyny of calling such sins feminine, and then on how sins of desire primarily hurt the sinner while sins of passion like 'striking out in anger' hurt others. And then there's the irony of the passages that speak of the futility of seeking lasting fame. :-) </p><p>This isn't a book that speaks to me, even if I could learn from the Meditations on procrastination, keeping an even keel, and the other lessons that I haven't yet read (and probably never will).</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-90584694190597150022022-09-11T21:30:00.001-07:002022-09-11T21:30:41.939-07:00From Left to Right: Saskatchewan's Political and Economic Transformation by Dale Eisler<p>What happened to Saskatchewan? I grew up in a province that was home to the NDP, the cooperative movement, the Wheat Pool, and Medicare. Last year my sister said to me, off-handedly, "Saskatchewan is a right wing province". It startled me, but she's right: the NDP has lost every federal seat that they once held, and the right-wing Saskatchewan Party has a stranglehold on provincial power. Voters don't care about serious financial and political scandals (Global Transportation Hub), or huge financial deficits (Grant Devine conservatives, current Saskatchewan Party), as long as the perpetrators are self-proclaimed conservatives. In 2021 pandemic policy became "Whatever Jason Kenney says". The resulting wave of deaths and the near-collapse of the province's health care system reduced the current premier's popularity, but hasn't brought any real political consequences.</p><p>What the f* Saskatchewan?</p><p>When I saw this book I grabbed it, hoping for answers. </p><p>Sigh. </p><p>I didn't want the answer to be "It's because people are stupid and easily led."</p><p>To be clear, that's my conclusion, not Eisler's. Eisler blames the NDP itself, after outlining political events in Saskatchewan in some detail from the 1970s through the 2000s. But while the NDP certainly had "fails" (that coalition with the Liberals in 1999 certainly looks daft for both the Liberals and NDP in retrospect), nothing the NDP did or didn't do explains a few mysteries. </p><p>Why don't the Saskatchewan people care if conservative governments run deficits? In the 1980s, Grant Devine took Saskatchewan from a surplus to the largest per-capita deficit in the country. Today's Saskatchewan Party has won 4 majority governments in a row while consistently running deficits -- mostly during an era of high commodity prices that should have made running surpluses a piece of cake.</p><p>Why don't the Saskatchewan people value competent government? The Romanow government of the 1990s made some hard choices to eliminate the Conservative deficit. But apparently those choices completely destroyed the credibility of the NDP in rural Saskatchewan, despite farmers' supposedly hard-headed pro-business perspective on economic issues, and despite the depopulation of rural communities which made those policies rational. Why didn't the Calvert government of the 2000s get credit for the economic growth that they created? Why does the credit instead go to Brad Wall, who simply continued or doubled-down on NDP economic policies?</p><p>Eisler's answer would be that politics in Saskatchewan is essentially populist. Saskatchewanians feel like outsiders in the Canadian federation. They feel that their political and economic interests are subsumed to those of Ontario and Quebec, which gives them a sense of grievance that is core to Saskatchewan identity. Tommy Douglas was successful because of his charisma, and because he understood that sense of grievance and offered a collectivist solution: in Saskatchewan we work together to build a better life in spite of indifferent Easterners and rapacious capitalists. Grant Devine was successful and defeated the fiscally competent Blakeney government (that was focused on the fate of rural communities, no less) because he spoke to people's immediate concerns about affordability (concerns derived from factors that were entirely outside the control of the provincial government). Brad Wall defeated the competent, growth-focused Calvert government because he was charismatic and projected a vision that Saskatchewan could be "more".</p><p>In other words, people vote based on emotion, not based on facts. Or, as I prefer to put it, people are stupid and easily led. </p><p>Yes, I understand that phrasing the issue in this way means that I don't have a future in politics. But I want politics to be about issues. I want the art of politics to be about figuring out how to implement rational, intelligent policies in a competent way, and political difference to be about differences of opinion about priorities and the relative importance of certain shared values. </p><p>Apparently that makes me either an alien or naive. </p><p>Eisler certainly belongs to the camp that sees gaining political power as the sole point of politics, and policy simply as a tool to keep that power. I mean, he's not alone: the entire existence of the Liberal Party of Canada is based on those principles, and no political party is without adherents to that philosophy (looking at you Bill Tieleman). But because Eisler doesn't doesn't see politics as being fundamentally about values, he doesn't really address the question of values in his book. And I think that's a real gap. </p><p>So I still don't know WTF happened to the province of my birth. Other than to believe that Saskatchewanians are stupid and easily led -- which, given that 40% of them don't believe that climate change is real, might actually be the answer. <tears></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-27073378394206446762022-08-16T19:26:00.000-07:002022-08-16T19:26:01.172-07:00Everyone knows your mother is a witch by Rivka Galchen<p>This book has a great title. Who wouldn't pick it up off the shelf? The title also really captures the voice of the protagonist and the tone of the writing. It's thematically appropriate too. If there isn't a book award for titles*, there should be, and <i>Everyone knows</i> should be nominated.</p><p>Title aside, <i>Everyone knows your mother is a witch</i> has a lot to recommend it. First of all, it's short. Yeah for short books, and especially for short historical fiction! There's a time and a place for wrist-busting world-building, but <i>Everyone knows</i> shows that you don't need to include pages of historical background, detailed descriptions of places, people, and things, or write in an accurate historical dialect to capture something essential about a time and a place and a person. Instead, <i>Everyone</i> uses the voices of the accused witch (Katharina), her neighbour Simon, and the depositions of Katharina's accusers to build a compelling picture of an aged widow whose sharp eyes, sharper tongue, and complete lack of tact turn much of her community against her.</p><p>So read about Katharina Kepler, the illiterate mother of Imperial Mathematician (and famed physicist) Johannes Kepler, laugh at her observations of the ducal governor Einhorn (the false unicorn), smile at her fondness for her cow Chamomile, and ponder the fate of this "frighteningly intelligent woman -- also a fool". </p><p>You won't regret it.</p><p><br /></p><p>(*The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookseller/Diagram_Prize_for_Oddest_Title_of_the_Year" target="_blank">Diagram Prize</a> is awarded to the book with the oddest title, which is not at all the same.)</p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-33813230835065853462022-07-27T10:05:00.000-07:002022-07-27T10:05:06.979-07:0021 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Robert P. C. Joseph<p>I wasn't sure I needed to read this book. While I'm not a student of Canadian history, I was pretty sure that I was already familiar with at least some of the most egregious parts of the Indian Act: things like residential schools, the pass system that confined Indigenous peoples to reservations unless they had written permission to leave, legal provisions that stripped "Indian" status from women who married non-Indigenous men, suppression of vital cultural practices like the Potlatch and the Sun Dance, and the paternalistic administration of reservation lands. In short, maybe "I knew this stuff" and there might be better books for me to read about the experiences of First Nations peoples in Canada?</p><p>But you don't know what you don't know. I decided to read it anyway. </p><p>I did learn some important things. For example, context. In the 18th Century and before, "Canadian" governments saw First Nations....as Nations. For all their inadequacies, treaties were genuinely viewed as treaties in the same sense as international treaties are today. The Indian Act crystallized a changed understanding. In the eyes of the Canadian government,"Indians" became wards of the state, dependents, problems to be managed, and peoples to be assimilated. </p><p>More context: despite the fact that Act-imposed "Band Councils" are democratically elected, their powers are limited in scope, prescribed by the federal government, and emasculated by having extremely short terms of office -- one or two years -- limiting Councils' ability to plan and act. </p><p>And yet more bitter history: forced "enfranchisement" stripped "Indian" status from any First Nations person who had the temerity to pursue a legal career or become a clergyman....in other words, the Indian Act declared that anyone who attempted to gain a position of power or respect within white society ceased to be an Indian. </p><p>Yeah. Sit with that for a minute before moving on.</p><p>There is a lot more to digest, of course, in the pages of this book. But overall, <i>21 Things</i> is a "beginner book" on Canadian - First Nations history, and it only offers a brief introduction to the issues it discusses. For example, <a href="https://fourbooksatatime.blogspot.com/2021/06/firewater-how-alcohol-is-killing-my.html" target="_blank">Harold Johnson's</a> book has a different understanding of the history of prohibition of alcohol on reserves, and a different perspective on alcohol and its place in White and First Nations communities. <i>21 Things</i> will not inform you about these differences, or offer insights into the complexities of this or any other issue. That's not what this book has set out to do. </p><p>Instead, the goal of <i>21 Things</i> is to open eyes, raise issues, and challenge assumptions by giving an overview of the impact of the Indian Act on First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities who live within the borders of what is now Canada. Most of us settlers will learn something by reading it. Most of us should probably go on to learn more after we do.</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-32011648469702114082022-04-17T15:28:00.002-07:002022-04-17T15:28:55.406-07:00Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty<p> Pages: 1041 (including inline footnotes, excluding index)</p><p>Piketty became an international intellectual super-star back in 2014 after releasing <i><a href="http://fourbooksatatime.blogspot.com/2018/07/capital-in-21st-century-by-thomas.html" target="_blank">Capital in the 21st Century</a></i>. <i>Capital and Ideology</i> (published in English in February 2020) is his followup book, intended to answer the question "What now? Can we do something about wealth inequality?"</p><p>I can summarize Piketty's answer fairly briefly.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">There is nothing natural or inevitable about the level of income or wealth inequality that currently exists. In fact, inequality was much lower across a broad range of societies in the period 1950-1980 AND economic growth was higher. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">There are proven policies that we could use to radically reduce inequality like steeply progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes, and wealth taxes. Coupled with transnational treaties and transnational governance designed to eliminate tax competition between nations, we could radically and quickly reduce inequality. It is desirable that we do so for reasons of innate economic justice, to build funding and support for critical initiatives like combatting climate change, and because extreme inequality is fostering zenophobia and division.</p></blockquote><p>But Piketty is not brief. In fact, <i>Capital and Ideology</i> is 1041 pages long. What's worse is that you could get the gist of his argument if you read the 47 pages of the introduction and the 75 pages of <i>Chapter 17: Elements of a participatory socialism for the 21st Century.</i> </p><p>So why is <i>Capital and Ideology</i> so long? </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Piketty (or his translator) is wordy: several times I found myself taking a pencil and editing an entire long paragraph down to a sentence. </li><li>The book is repetitious. Given how long it is, the repetition can be helpful. On the other hand, if the book were shorter it might not be as necessary.</li><li>Piketty took both the praise and the critiques of <i>Capital in the 21st Century</i> a bit too seriously: </li><ul><li>The quotations from Austen and Balzac in that book really enlivened his descriptions of the economies of 19th Century Britain and France. His attempts to find relevant literature to quote when describing the economies of every nation and every time period included in this book just seems laboured. </li><li>Piketty was obviously critiqued for focusing too much on Western economies in <i>Capital in the 21st Century,</i> and he makes a real effort to discuss a wider range of nations in <i>Capital and Ideology</i>. Unfortunately, data for many of these countries is not as complete, which makes his efforts to be more inclusive sometime feel more like a 'tickbox' exercise than a true broadening of the discussion.</li></ul></ul><div>More importantly, obviously Piketty backs up each point that he makes with copious data and examples, and all of that takes words (and pages).</div><div><br /></div><div>Should you read this book? Well, Piketty has much more to say my summary does, and some of his stories are fascinating: did you realize that the 19th Century Sweden was the most highly unequal country in Europe? Or that the ruinous and unsustainable level of reparations imposed on Germany after WWI amounted to approximately the same percentage of national income as the debt imposed on Haiti after their 18th Century slave revolt? (Haiti's debt was intended to reimburse slave owners for their losses. Haiti repaid that debt in full over the following 125 years. Sickening, no?) Or that France made an attempt to create a transnational governing body for it and its colonies as they gained independence? (The attempt failed because France refused to share real power.) Or that the American Civil War cost about 1/3 of what it would have cost to compensate slave owners for the economic "loss" of freeing their enslaved workers? (and that no one seriously considered compensating the freed workers for the loss of the value of their years of labour, let alone the trauma of their enslavement?)</div><div><br /></div><div>These stories are interesting, and sometimes enlightening. Not to mention that none of what I've said so far even mentions Piketty's analysis of changes in voting patterns since the 1960s (Chapters 14-16) and the rise of 'nativism' in many countries (think Le Pen, Orban, Trump....). These chapters are thought-provoking and could warrant an entire post of their own.</div><div><br /></div><div>But sometimes a book makes an impact because it appears at just the right time to <a href="http://fourbooksatatime.blogspot.com/2015/11/paris-1919.html" target="_blank">illuminate the world around it</a>, and sometimes a book fails to make an impact because its timing is 100% wrong. </div><div><br /></div><div>I suspect that <i>Capital and Ideology</i> falls into this latter category.</div><p>Reading this book in 2022 reminded me how different the world feels today than it did in 2019, post-pandemic, post-Floyd George, post-Ukraine invasion, and as the climate crisis accelerates. </p><p>If you want to learn more about <i>Capital and Ideology</i>, you can check out some of the professional reviews of the book, like this one from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/capital-and-ideology-by-thomas-piketty-review-if-inequality-is-illegitimate-why-not-reduce-it" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>. You can also check out <a href="https://fourbooksatatime.blogspot.com/2022/04/notes-on-capital-and-ideology.html" target="_blank">some of the notes</a> I made after finishing it.</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-86268548618915370452022-04-17T15:28:00.001-07:002022-04-17T15:28:47.458-07:00Notes on Capital and IdeologyMajor points: <br /><ul><li>Every inequality regime needs a rationale, an ideology that justifies why it exists, why it's fair. Ours says that it's a "meritocracy" where the entrepreneurial and hard-working thrive. It is therefore much more "blamey" than, say, medieval society because in our society if you aren't successful, it's your own fault. This argument is problematic for many reasons. One is that access to education, particularly higher education, is highly unequal, and highly correlated to economic success. </li></ul><ul><li>Our current inequality regime is not "natural" or "inevitable". It evolved out of a particular set of historical circumstances, and can and has changed over time, sometimes radically and quickly. Piketty illustrates this by describing a wide variety of historical circumstances ranging from Ancien Regime France through post-colonial India. For example, Britain financed the Napoleonic Wars by issuing interest-paying bonds. The money to pay the interest on these bonds was raised by levying regressive taxes (like tariffs) on the entire population. Over the next century, this amounted to a huge wealth transfer from lower and middle income tax payers to the wealthiest members of British society (who were bond-holders). However, Britain paid for the First World War by introducing a progressive income tax and steep death duties, both of which primarily affected the wealthiest. The difference? The franchise was extended in the late 19th to early 20th Century to cover all adult males (and eventually females).</li></ul><ul><li>No form or conception of "property" or ownership is natural, inevitable, or universal. (see different conceptualization of property ownership in Ancien Regime, which included numerous obligations for land owners). </li><li>No particular level or type of inequality is necessary to have a high growth economy: economies where the top decile takes 20% of all income and economies where the top decile takes 80-90% can both be economically successful (although levels of inequality that high generally only occur in slave societies)</li></ul><p>What changes should we make? </p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Reconceptualization of ownership as 'temporary' and only justified when it causes a social good. ie/ </li><ul><li>Return to having high marginal tax rates on the highest incomes (rates reached 80-90% in the 1970s in Britain and the US), a steeply progressive inheritance tax on the largest fortunes, and a wealth tax. Think of the wealth tax as an extended "property tax", that applies to all wealth and not just real estate.</li></ul><li>Structural redistribution of societal wealth, funded by wealth tax. That is, every young adult gets an equal allotment of capital at age 25 equal to perhaps 60% of average wealth in society (or 3.5 X annual income, or $150k in Canada). Think of it as an early universal inheritance, that comes at a time of life when it can do people the most good.</li><li>Weaken the power of "ownership". Make the involvement of workers in the governance of all firms compulsory, as it is in Germany and Sweden where workers get seats on corporate boards. Perhaps couple this measure with further limits on the number of corporate board votes per $ invested to limit the influence of the largest shareholders</li><li>Stop the 'race to the bottom' and inter-state tax competition. Stop making treaties like NAFTA or CETA that focus on trade and freeing capital from international control, and start making pacts that focus on economic justice, enforcing financial transparency, and minimum taxation levels.</li><li>Create transnational unions with real teeth, where the transnational union focuses on enforcing consistent inheritance taxes, income taxes, corporate taxes, etc. between nations.</li></ul><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Analysis of changes in voting patterns across a wide range of societies:</div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li> Piketty talks about how support for social democratic parties has collapsed amongst those in the lowest deciles of income beginning in the 1960s but particularly since 1980. Reason? social democratic parties had no answer to Reaganism/Thatcherism, and instead largely adopted the neo-con's destructive anti-tax and globalist agenda. This has impoverished those in the bottom 50% of the income distribution. </li><ul><li>Political participation in this group has dropped dramatically overall. </li><li>Because no one seems to be representing their interests and because all political discourse focuses on how TINA to current economic policies, they turn to zenophobic and exclusionary parties and politics. Think of it from their perspective: they are told that the pie has to be smaller, so there's a certain logic to their saying that we need to exclude immigrants to preserve what's left of the pie for them. </li><li>support for social democratic parties scales with education: the most educated are the most likely to support social democratic parties. This "Brahmin left" benefits from globalization and inclusionary policies, as economic success in a globalized economy is correlated with education.</li></ul></ul><div><br /></div> Random facts/points:<ol><ul><li>Since 1980s, top decile's share has risen to 55% while bottom 50% share has decreased to 15%. Globalization has benefited richest (top 1% have taken 27% of all global growth), and poorest in poorest countries (bottom 50% globally got 12% of global growth). Middle suffered.</li><li>the change in the 1980s led by Reagan/Thatcher to much lower taxes and to privatization was a mass transfer of public assets/wealth to private interests. Comparable (though smaller) than the liquidation of the assets of the Soviet empire which enriched Russian / Eastern European oligarchs/ kleptocrats.</li><li>on around page 600-630 Piketty includes an interesting discussion of how China is governed, and how it sees the West and its governance</li><li>p. 666: carbon emissions are as inequal as wealth. Yellow vest movement in France shows you cannot reduce taxes on wealthy while imposing a carbon tax on everyone. "there can be no effective carbon policy that ignores economic justice or people will rebel"</li></ul></ol><ol><ul><li>His discussion of slavery as an economic issue not a social issue felt kind of sickening, frankly, even though it's enlightening. I suspect that in the future our current arguments that we can't act to stop climate change because we can't afford it will feel just as apocalyptically unjustifiable as the economic arguments made at the time against abolishing slavery. (There was a general feeling that slavery could not be abolished without fully compensating slave owners for their economic losses, which would have been a huge economic burden. To today's ears, the focus on compensating slave-owners, and the complete lack of consideration to compensating enslaved people for their enslavement is appalling.)</li></ul></ol><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-2405000450219525772021-06-27T18:51:00.000-07:002021-06-27T18:51:04.914-07:00Firewater: How alcohol is killing my people (and yours) by Harold R. Johnson<p>This book was not written for me or for any <i>kiciwamanawak </i>(white settler). Harold R. Johnson is a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation who is a senior crown prosecutor in Treaty 6 territory (south-central Saskatchewan). Johnson wrote this book for <i>niwahkomakanak</i> (his relatives): the Woodland Cree and any other First Nation that struggles with alcohol.</p><p>Personally and professionally, Johnson has seen the impact of alcohol abuse first hand. He has stood by the graveside of friends, relatives, and community members who have died by accident, overdose, or alcohol-induced illness. He has defended or prosecuted countless individuals who "are nice guys when they aren't drinking", often the same people over and over again. He has seen families destroyed, he has seen people try to stop drinking and fail (or sometimes succeed). He has been a hard drinker himself and he has been sober. </p><p>He estimates that alcohol causes the deaths of half of his people.</p><p>Harold Johnson has no use for alcohol. He doesn't understand the stories that <i>kiciwamanawak</i> tell themselves about alcohol and and he doesn't understand why we give it such a central place in our society. He wants <i>niwahkomakanak</i> to start telling themselves different stories. He wants his people to embrace sobriety.</p><p>This book is a polemic by an elder who has seen too much. His focus is squarely on the members of his own community, and his stories use the traditions, language, and perspectives of that community to propose a path forward. </p><p>Should you read it? Perhaps, if you are <i>niwahkomakanak. </i> If you are, like me, <i>kiciwamanawak, </i>this book was not written for you. I'd say read it only if you are willing to listen respectfully to someone else's conversation.<br /><br /></p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-84113564995318540942021-06-27T16:24:00.001-07:002021-06-27T16:24:58.919-07:00What have I been reading?<p>I just realized that I haven't blogged in a couple of months. Here's a few of the books I've read recently: </p><p><b>The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel</b></p><p>I got this one for Christmas and tackled it mostly to be completist. I'm glad I did. Mantel writes wonderfully well, of course, and there was something satisfying about seeing Cromwell's story to its tragic conclusion. </p><p><b>The Sense of an Ending</b> by Julian Barnes</p><p>This book is yet another example of why I should overcome my baseline prejudice against literary fiction. It's the first person life story of an unreliable narrator, with a closing twist that makes you want to turn back to the first page to understand everything that went before. Given that it's a novella, I should probably do that, even though the book definitely falls into my literary novel stereotype of being 'about the boring struggles of boring middle class people'.</p><p><b>The Duke of Uranium</b> by John Barnes</p><p>Was there really a market for a Heinlein juvenile in the year 2002? I was surprised (and disappointed) by this book after reading Barnes' <i>Orbital Resonance</i>, <i>The Sky so Big and Black</i>, and <i>Candle</i>. </p><p><b>Dancers in Mourning</b> by Margery Allingham</p><p>A surprising number of Golden Age mysteries are well worth reading. Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Josephine Tey's books are all still entertaining reads. And then there's Margery Allingham. Maybe she wrote better books than <i>Dancers in Mourning?</i> This one wouldn't convince me to read more of her back catalogue.</p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-77464378790125932332021-04-06T10:15:00.000-07:002021-04-06T10:15:31.861-07:00White Fragility by Robin Diangelo<p> 2020 was the year of the Black Lives Matter movement. But I was inspired to read this book by a personal experience. Some time ago....2018? I had a conversation with a friend about sexism and racism. During this conversation I told him a story about myself, a story about a time when I had acted in a racist way. </p><p>He refused to accept that my actions had been racist. "That's not helpful" he finally said the third or fourth time that I challenged his resistance. His refusal puzzled me. When I learnt about the concept of white fragility, I wondered if it could provide some insight.</p><p><i>White Fragility</i> was written by a white American woman who does diversity and anti-bias training. Fundamentally it's about how anti-Black racism manifests even amongst 'liberal' whites in the United States, and how those liberal whites resist awareness of their own racism. But while elements of her discussion are specific to the American context, the basic discussion of white racism and white defensiveness about our behaviour are more broadly applicable. </p><p>Here are some quotes, and what they taught me.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"...we have been taught that racists are mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race; racists are immoral. Therefore, if I am saying that my readers are racist...I am saying something deeply offensive; I am questioning my reader's very moral character."</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"The simplistic idea that racism is limited to the individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic. "</p></blockquote><p>Okay, that is a light bulb moment: that's why my friend couldn't accept that I had acted in a racist way. When I said that I had been racist, I was acknowledging that in the situation that I described, my discomfort had led me to take actions that had a negative impact on a group of people of colour. In doing so, I had made a mistake that I was embarrassed about, and that needed to be corrected. My actions had a racist impact. To my friend, me saying that I had acted in a racist way was factually incorrect -- I had not intentionally acted in an unkind way -- and so I was unjustifiably identifying myself as an immoral person.</p><p>Which brings us to: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"emphasizing intentions over impact...privileges the intentions of the aggressor over the impact of their behaviour on the target. In doing so, the aggressor's intentions become the most important issue.....minimizing the impact of racism on people of color."</p></blockquote><p>Yes, I had not acted intentionally to disadvantage those students because of their race. Nevertheless, my actions had done so. My actions were racist. I didn't have the words to explain this to my friend, who resisted the idea that the impact of my actions was more relevant than my intentions. He resisted centring the perspective of the students of colour.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>"Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge -- the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias. This defensiveness is classic white fragility...."</p></blockquote><p>Ah, another light bulb moment. My friend was getting defensive (on my behalf, no less), because he does not recognize that racial bias can be unconscious. </p><p>And then one more quote, from Diangelo's sarcastic rules for giving feedback about racism to white people without triggering white fragility:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>"1. Do not give me feedback on my racism under any circumstances. </p><p>"If you insist on breaking the cardinal rule, then you must follow these other rules:</p><p>"2. Proper tone is crucial -- feedback must be given calmly. If any emotion is displayed, the feedback is invalid and can be dismissed."</p></blockquote><p>I feel that second point (of 11 in total). I was having this conversation about sexism and racism in the first place because I had called out this friend's sexism. He asked to meet to discuss my comments. The end result: I left the meeting in tears, feeling at fault, having apologized....because I had gotten angry. The conversation became about my anger, and not about his sexism. </p><p>I don't know what it's like to be Black, or Indigenous, or to have any of the multitude of other identities of colour. But I know how that one feels. I understand white male defensiveness, white male fragility.</p><p>So, reading <i>White Fragility</i> helped me understand a situation I've mulled over many times since I experienced it several years ago. Maybe this understanding will help me deal better with similar situations in the future, by preparing me for defensiveness and by giving me words to help discuss it.</p><p>But reading <i>White Fragility</i> with this incident in mind was also a hindrance. The parts of the book that resonated most with me were the parts that illuminated this experience, an experience where I "come off better" than my friend. Alas, despite my recognizing and addressing my racism in this one specific case, I can't claim to be without racism, and I can't claim to be without defensiveness about it. I would probably have been better served had I paid better attention to other parts of the book. </p><p>For example, why am I so uncomfortable talking about myself or my friends as being white? I've actually lowered my voice when saying the word 'white'. Why? Because in white society it is polite to pretend to be colour-blind?</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"A white participant said....'I don't see race: I don't see you as Black'. My co-trainer's response: 'Then how will you see racism?'.....If she were ever going to understand or challenge racism, she would need to acknowledge this difference. Pretending that she did not notice he was black was not helpful to him in any way...."</p></blockquote><p>Or is it because as a white person, we believe that we are all individuals, and not members of a class? </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"Whiteness rests on a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm......White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one's life and perceptions."</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"...a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race -- 'just human'. .... To say that whiteness includes a set of cultural practices that are not recognized by white people is to understand racism as a network of norms and actions that consistently create advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color. These norms and actions include basic rights and benefits of the doubt, purportedly granted to all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people."</p></blockquote><p>Is <i>White Fragility</i> the definitive book on racism? No, of course not, particularly not for white Canadians. The book is American in important ways. Is it a useful book for white Canadians to read even so? Yes, I think it is. Diangelo speaks directly to white attitudes about racism and to white defensiveness about racism. In doing so, she helps make them more visible, and therefore more addressable.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-34424011763856245802021-03-08T17:05:00.003-08:002021-04-05T19:46:41.693-07:00The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt<p> Pages: 771 pages</p><p><br /></p><p>As I read <i>The Goldfinch</i>, I couldn't help but feel that smothered within its pages was a really good 400-500 page book. </p><p><br /></p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-78977750895864458552021-03-08T17:02:00.002-08:002021-06-27T18:56:07.610-07:00A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor<p> My last entry was about <a href="https://fourbooksatatime.blogspot.com/2020/06/time-travel.html" target="_blank">time travel novels</a>. This book IS time travel.</p><p>In 1933, an 18 year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Netherlands to Constantinople, beginning his journey by more-or-less following the Danube River across central Europe. More than 40 years later, in 1977, he began publishing an account of this journey. <i>A time of gifts</i> is the first volume, telling the story of his journey as far as the border of Hungary.</p><p>Although the book was actually written in the 1970s, it takes you immediately back to 1933: the 1933 of inherited privilege, the weight of English and European history, actual Nazis, lost marshes full of birds and frogs, and lost villages surrounded by Romas and occupied by studious Jews, friendly peasants, and faded but welcoming aristocrats.</p><p>Fermor was the son of a senior official in the Indian colonial government, expelled from a succession British Public Schools before spending a long year of intensive private tutoring meant to prepare him for entry to Sandhurst (and thus a career in the military). <i>A time of gifts</i> reflects this privileged background: Latin and French phrases are not translated -- everyone reads Latin and French, surely? -- obscure bits of British history are taken as given (everyone knows the romantic story of Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, no?), and it is only natural that one should be taken up by the smart young set in Vienna, or that the British consul in Munich would spot you 5 pounds when a misfortune deprives you of all of your funds -- your father is Someone after all, and one one does what one can.</p><p>In other words, <i>A time of gifts </i>captures in words a world that has vanished, in the style of the era that it describes. It's a well-loved book that's considered a classic of travel literature, or at least, it's a classic young man's adventure story.</p><p>It's not a book that I loved. In the words of a couple of GoodReads reviews "It’s windy, self-satisfied, lifeless, and dry" or "It was meandering and musing and fascinated, all without actually being interesting". Not for me: witnessed by the fact that I began this review 7 months ago, and then completely forgot to finish. </p>mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-33401661066394990542020-06-12T11:31:00.000-07:002020-06-12T11:31:00.723-07:00Time travel (<i>Version control</i> by Dexter Palmer, <i>The future of another timeline </i>by Annalee Newitz, and <i>Recursion</i> by Blake Crouch)<br />
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Who would have thought that there would still be so much life in the time travel story, after so many years, and so many books?<br />
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It's easy to understand why time travel stories are still being written. We all have regrets about some of our past actions, we all wonder "what if". So much of our every day lives, so much of our current world seems very contingent on chance, on arbitrary choices, on circumstances.<br />
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But 125 years after H.G. Wells, is there really anything new to say?<br />
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<i>Version control</i>, <i>The future of another timeline</i>, and <i>Recursion</i> each try to do so in their own way. And amazingly, on some level each of them succeeds. They all feel fresh.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Future</i> is the most conventional of the three novels...or rather, it has the most conventional take on time travel. Like Zelazny's <i>Roadmarks</i>, it posits the existence of a class of time-travellers who go back and forth in time, altering what they find, remembering pasts that no longer exist, and meddling in events in an attempt to align 'reality' with their memories. Unconventionally, and in complete contrast to Zelazny, the heroine is not a loner, is not a flaneur. The heroine is a member of a revolutionary feminist cadre whose meetings always begin "I remember a time when abortion was legal in the United States".<br />
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<i>Version control</i> reads more like literary fiction than genre fiction. Perhaps it's because Palmer deals with themes not typical to SF (such as how everyday life feels to millennials). But it's a time travel story: one protagonist is a physicist who is researching and attempting to build a "causality violation device" (NOT a TIME MACHINE, so sensational. Seriously!) The twist is that in the world of the novel, if the past changes, everyone's memory of the past changes too. Somehow Palmer manages to stay in the POV of characters immersed in this world, while making it clear to the reader what's happening. Very skilfully told. Ah, also with insights borrowed from past SF greats. As per Octavia Butler, why would a black American want to travel into the past? As a black person, are you going to enjoy visiting 1850s Mississippi? Or 1950s Mississippi for that matter? The present is challenging enough.<br />
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In <i>Recursion</i>, time travel is performed using a special secret device. You can only travel into your own past, by accessing particularly vivid memories that you have mapped ahead of time. Twist: you must die in the present to send your consciousness into the past, and then you must live your life forward from that moment to the time of your death. You are free to change the world. You do not die again when you reach the point in time where you "died" to return to the past. BUT: everyone remembers the original past, all of the original pasts, when you once again reach the moment of your death. So if you flee to the past on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to prevent the Twin Towers from falling....you might succeed. But at 9:41 am on Sept. 11, 2001 everyone across the world will suddenly simultaneously remember their fall, while seeing the buildings still standing and everyone who died in them still living. Yes, this is disturbing. If you change the past in ways that only affect your personal life and personal connections, the woman you didn't marry might remember the child she didn't have, and might even commit suicide as a result. But when you change history...well, society doesn't react well to millions and billions of people having dual memories.<br />
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I recommend all of these books. Each of them is an engaging, well-written story. But they are all of them interesting too for what they say about society, about human nature, and about memory.<br />
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<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-69142067095004110342020-04-14T06:53:00.002-07:002020-04-14T15:20:31.653-07:00The future of another timeline (a review of Trouble and her friends by Melissa Scott)Reading <i>Trouble and her friends</i> made me nostalgic. Remember when we thought that Usenet would evolve into an entirely different world that was separate from, but connected to our own? When we visualized it as a place of abstract shapes and arbitrary physical laws, a virtual frontier where outlaw crackers would battle through corporate Intrusion Control Entities (ICE) for data or for valuable code? Remember when we thought the internet would be "Cyberspace"?<br />
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As I was reading Scott's book, I was reminded of the title of Annalee Newitz's latest book: <i>The future of another timeline</i>. Trouble lives in the future of a timeline not our own.... the future as imagined in 1993 or so, a future where you visit cyberspace by plugging a cable directly into your augmented brain. A future that is an oddly hopeful dystopia where dispossessed kids can develop world-shaking skills, and world-shaking reputations.<br />
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I wonder if Scott is ever nostalgic for that future too? It seems so remote from us now. The internet is ....just so ordinary. It's out-of-date websites that local businesspeople don't have the access or the skills to update with their COVID-19 opening hours (if any). It's corporate news sites, struggling to find ways to gather the money to do journalism. It's advertising tracking you through your days. It's working from home, doing yoga from home, having video calls with your pet. It's the crazy uncle you used to only have to talk to at Christmas posting offensive political memes on your Facebook page. It's community and an excuse never to talk to anyone directly, all at the same time.<br />
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Unless you're William Gibson (who scares me), we suck at predicting the future.<br />
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And all of that is a digression from saying that <i>Trouble and her friends</i> is a well-imagined world with engaging characters, an interesting plot, and interesting ideas. Why haven't I read more Melissa Scott? I need to scare up more of her books, and visit more of her past futures.<br />
<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-11491423244082620592020-01-20T21:28:00.003-08:002020-01-20T21:28:43.609-08:00Grocery Story by Jon SteinmanThe full title of this book is <i>Grocery Story: the promise of food co-ops in the age of grocery giants.</i><br />
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I bought this book in my local food coop. The author was there with a table one Saturday, flogging copies to shoppers.<br />
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The author is very dedicated to food: local food, empowering farmers, empowering eaters, growing diversity in the food economy. He spent a decade creating a weekly podcast on food issues, helped organize a collective that put grain grown by local farmers directly in the hands of eaters, and served on the board of the Kootenay food Co-op in Nelson BC for a few years.<br />
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He wrote the book as an expose of the state of food economy and the enormous power yielded by food retailers on consumers and on the entire supply chain. Farmers and food manufacturers can be bankrupted by the fickleness of huge monopolistic chains who contract for a supplier's entire production, and then renege on their obligations, leaving farmers with huge quantities of unsellable food. Manufacturers are universally forced to pay retailers tens of thousands of dollars in "shelving fees" in order to get their products stocked....only to have those same retailers copy their products by issuing cheaper "own brand" versions, undercutting their business. Whole Foods required a small-scale chocolate manufacturer of the author's acquaintance to provide days of volunteer labour annually to take her turn managing the entire chocolate section of every BC store: removing all products, cleaning shelves, and restocking in exchange for the privilege of selling what she produces the rest of the year. <br />
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The solution? Well, Steinman points out that until well past mid-century, anti-monopoly laws controlled the concentration of ownership of grocery stores. But the days of government acting in the interest of communities or of consumers is well past. Today Steinman advocates food coops as a way for consumers to take direct power over what they eat, and as a way to create the food economy that they want to participate in.<br />
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Steinman means the book to be inspiring: he even ends with a call to action, telling readers that they can found their own coops, join existing coops, and participate in a food revolution.<br />
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But the stories he tells about coops .... are mixed. He discusses the history of food coops, mostly in North America, focusing on the wave of natural food food coops founded in the 1970s. He talks about the history of his own Kooteny coop, including the story of the recent-to-eater grain collective sponsored by that organization. And he talks about a new wave of food coops founded post 2008. <br />
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The two "modern" coops whose stories he tells in some detail, both founded in "food deserts" in American low income communities....failed, no more than 3 years after they opened, despite the huge amount of fund-raising and organizing that went into their creation. After a roaring start, the Kootenay grain coop shrank....Steinman seems forcedly patient at the lack of commitment of members who found that they couldn't manage to mill all their own flour and then use it to make all of their own pasta and bread. He doesn't talk about how many of those 70s era coops are still thriving, and why...I know that some are barely hanging in there, and many have closed.<br />
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Overall, the book has many ideas for improving coops, best practices from active coops, and a whole lot of passion for the ecological, economic, and practical benefits of local control of food. It just isn't inspiring in the way that the author intended. <br />
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<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-10080397168177859712020-01-04T19:57:00.002-08:002020-01-04T19:57:39.997-08:00Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Ragged Company by Richard WagameseThese two books don't have very much in common, other than being the two novels that I have most recently completed. Why am I discussing them together? Maybe because the alternate title for this post could be "Literary fiction".<br />
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I don't read much literary fiction. Mostly I find it dull or I assume that I will. I think of literary fiction as books about the boring problems of boring middle class people much like myself. Who could possibly want to read that?<br />
<br />
But in fact, that sort of literary fiction has been out of fashion since at least the 1970s. You can read <i>A portrait of an artist as a young man</i> if you want to, but <i>The Sympathizer</i> by Viet Thanh Nguyen or <i>A gentleman in Moscow</i> by Amor Towles are a lot more <i>au courant.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
So why do I think of literary fiction as dull and/or simply unattractive, especially given that I quite liked both <i>Underground Railroad</i> and <i>Ragged Company</i>, and wasn't tempted to put either book down despite my new resolution not to waste time with books when they aren't working out?<br />
<br />
Good question.<br />
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When I'm reading for relaxation, I want books that are both engaging, and predictable in certain prescribed ways. If I'm reading crime fiction, I need to know that the heroine's beloved pet cat will not be harmed and that the villain will be brought to justice by the last page. If I'm reading "junk SF", I need to know that there will be a strong coherent plot with lots of action and adventure, relatively few inconsistencies, and an engaging protagonist.<br />
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If I'm reading for ideas, I want a novel that explores "what ifs" about society, human nature, or science. I want a novel that stretches my mind, and makes me think about what could be, what might have been, and why things are the way they are. In other words, there's a reason why I never say "SciFi". My best-loved genre is "Speculative Fiction", thank you very much.<br />
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Where does that leave "literary fiction"? On the shelf, usually. Literary fiction can be very unpredictable. There may not be a predictable story arc: in fact, there might not be much of a plot. Characters might be unsympathetic and difficult to empathize with. If it's very literary, literary fiction can be dense and difficult to read. Bad Things are very likely to happen, because this is Serious Fiction. You are (or at least I am) constantly suspicious that there's More Going On Than Meets the Eye...which means that I feel like I really ought to be trying harder. <br />
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In short, I don't try to read literary fiction for relaxation.<br />
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If I'm interested in reading something "harder"....well, there's lots of good SF that I haven't gotten to yet, and good SF seems to ask more interesting questions. <br />
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All that being said....when I was trying to take out an e-book for my Christmas trip, I couldn't find anything that looked interesting that was available to download now. So I reluctantly defaulted to <i>Underground Railroad</i>, because I'd heard that it was based on the conceit that underground railroad for escaped slaves had been an actual physical undergroud railroad. That sounded interesting....almost SF-like.<br />
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<i>Underground Railroad</i> reminded me why one wants to read literary fiction. It is not dull. It is not predictable (in the Bad Way of having a hackneyed plot and stale characters). It is beautifully written. It tells a searing story. And while the novel might not be necessary reading for me, as a non-American -- I don't live in a society where I have a visceral need to be reminded of the realities of this particular horror because of the way that it continues to scar every day's social and economic reality -- it's still an important reality to understand. I really enjoyed it, insofar as you can enjoy something like this or like <i>Slave Narratives of the Underground Railroad</i> (a nonfiction collection of stories collected from contemporary books, pamphlets, and newspapers, which I read in 2017). <br />
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It inspired me to finally download something by Richard Wagamese, who I've been meaning to read since running across his obituary in 2017 (a sad way to learn of an author's existence). Reading stories by and about Canada's indigenous peoples IS a visceral need for Canadians, given that the ongoing story of colonization is the equivalent Canadian scar.<br />
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<i>Ragged Company</i> is the story of four homeless people who band together as a "street family", and what happens when they unexpectedly find a lottery ticket worth $13 million. It's not one of Wagamese's best-known books. I'm also assuming it's not one of Wagamese's best: the characters are well-drawn, but the story doesn't move quickly and it's a bit predictable. But it is an interesting read. Three of the five main characters are indigenous, although First Nations identity and traditions are only truly important to one of them. All of the homeless characters are deeply traumatized (which is something far more likely to happen to indigenous peoples here in Canada), and the point of the book is not so much the story of their unexpected good fortune as it is the story of how those past traumas have made them the people they are today, and what a path out of that trauma might look like.<br />
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It's a book that made me think: not about the novel's structure or its literary conceits (which is the kind of question that <i>Underground Railroad</i> left me with), but about the people who surround me. Who are the homeless people that live around Granville and Broadway? What are their stories?<br />
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It made me see them as people again, not as panhandlers to be guiltily avoided or as a Social Problem personified. <br />
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That's a valuable thing.<br />
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So, maybe I've been too hard on literary fiction. Maybe I should be more open-minded. Maybe if I select the books I want to read, instead of having them selected for me (via a bookclub), I can actually enjoy and appreciate more literary novels. Maybe I should start adding them back to my literary diet.<br />
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<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-52797086488305453502019-12-09T16:54:00.001-08:002019-12-09T16:54:22.944-08:00SPQR by Mary Beard<i>SPQR</i> is a brief modern history of Rome from its earliest beginnings to the end of its prime years of empire. Beard has a full and distinguished career as a classicist behind her, and in <i>SPQR</i> she writes fluently and insightfully not only about what we know about ancient Rome, but also about what the Romans thought they knew about Roman history, what most of us think we know about Roman history, and what we actually don't know and can't now ever know.<br />
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For example, did Livia really poison Augustus by painting the figs on a tree with poison to clear the way for her son Tiberius to become emperor? Was Claudius really so in love with gambling that he outfitted his carriage such that he could continue to dice even as he travelled from place to place? Did Nero use a self-sinking boat in an attempt to assassinate Agrippina, and was her maid murdered in her stead when the maid falsely claimed that she was her mistress assuming that the guards would rescue rather than kill her? <br />
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These are the kind of stories that make Roman history the stuff of melodramatic television series almost 2000 years after the fact, and these are the kinds of stories that we love to read about Rome. However, Beard points out that in most cases, we do not have contemporary accounts of these events. Roman historians like Suetonius or Tacticus wrote 50 or 100 years afterwards. Just how could some of the stories they tell have escaped the palace walls in the first place? How accurate were those stories 2 or 3 or more generations down the road? Especially when contemporary politics made it convenient to play up the debauchery of a Nero, or the competence of a Hadrian? It seems likely that substantial parts of the stories about Rome that we love to read might just be pure invention. <br />
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Beard brings this kind of questioning perspective to the full sweep of Roman history, from the competing mythologies of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome by Aeneas to the economic and political reasons behind the fall of the Roman Republic. She asks questions about what we think we know, and reminds us how much of our knowledge is based on a somewhat random collection of surviving stones and inscriptions, and a very incomplete collection of stories, letters, and histories. <br />
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<i>SPQR</i> is an interesting read. <br />
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But as I was reading, I wondered why. Knowing more about Roman history, or even knowing more about historiography, doesn't really serve any long term interests of mine. And <i>SPQR</i>, while well-written and erudite, isn't one of those amazing books that turns your understanding of some part of the world upside down. <br />
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Fundamentally, these days I feel that I no longer have an infinite number of books in my future. I've recently given myself permission to put down novels part way through if they aren't really working for me. Maybe it's time to be a bit more selective about what which of my random curiosities I choose to pursue by reading nonfiction?<br />
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Unfortunately, saying that out loud makes me feel rather old. mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-73772318651540332272019-10-13T15:10:00.001-07:002019-12-01T22:00:47.540-08:00On Writing by Stephen King and Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin<br />
These are very different books. <i>On Writing</i> is partly memoir, partly an inspirational work, partly a guide to the writing life, and also, in small part, a guide to writing. <i>Steering the Craft</i> is a technical writing workshop in written form, complete with exercises and instructions on beginning your own writing group.<br />
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In composing his writing manual, King relies almost entirely on story. He tells stories to illustrate the importance of "reading a lot, and writing a lot". He tells stories about the pernicious adverb, and invents stories to illustrate their evil. He tells stories about agents, about writing careers, about adding and removing detail in your work, and even tells stories about writing the book that we hold in our hands. What his book is NOT about is language. This is ironic, given that the story that King tells about the origin of <i>On Writing</i> is that he was inspired by Amy Tam, who bemoaned the fact that no one ever asks writers of popular fiction about language.<br />
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In contrast, it's no surprise to learn that Le Guin is the daughter of professors. <i>Steering the Craft</i> reads like a beginning textbook for a creative writing class. Let's start at the sentence level, and cautiously expand to discuss elements of story like Point of View. Let's illustrate our points with references from various literatures. Let's give students an opportunity to practice what we've just covered by including exercises. Let's learn.<br />
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I found both books useful, but I picked up more useful nuggets from King's book than from Le Guin's, despite the fact that I love Le Guin's novels and don't find King's very interesting. Oh well.<br />
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I do regret a bit that I read these two books simultaneously. I have a long-standing insecurity about paragraph breaks. After you get past the basics of "one subject, one paragraph", just how are you supposed to decide exactly when to start a new paragraph? I've always felt that there was some secret that I was missing. But one of these two books gave me a great insight: after you get past the basics, paragraphs are about the rhythm of the work. I wish I knew which of these two authors to credit.<br />
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<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-69938501090975678882019-08-25T11:06:00.000-07:002019-08-25T11:06:31.460-07:00Northhanger Abbey by Jane AustenYes, of course I've read <i>Northanger Abbey</i> before. But I ran across an omnibus edition of <i>Northanger Abbey</i> that includes <i>Lady Susan</i> and <i>Sanditon</i>, and thought it might be interesting to read Jane Austen's juvenilia and unfinished last work, respectively.<br />
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I started with <i>Northanger Abbey</i>.<br />
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What struck me on this reading is how much <i>Northanger Abbey</i> reminded me of a Georgette Heyer novel.<br />
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Why? The book focuses on a young heroine making her debut in the world, as so many Heyer books do, and <i>Northanger Abbey</i> takes place in Bath, the scene of so many Heyer novels. But the greatest similarity is that this is a light book, written to provide amusement. The heroine of <i>Northanger Abbey</i> faces no life-altering stakes. Her immediate happiness is very often at risk, as is her social comfort. At one crisis point, she is humiliatingly embarrassed by her own lapse of judgement -- but she learns from it, and becomes closer to the friend who provides her with guidance. Even the climax of the novel, where she is thrown out of the Tilbury's house and forced to make her own way home, unprotected and uncertain even of how to get there...passes without serious threat. Catherine Morland makes her way safely back to her family. And just as in a Heyer novel, the climax of <i>Northanger Abbey</i> is quickly succeeded by our heroine's marriage to her worthy and much-loved suitor.<br />
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This lack of stakes is in sharp contrast to Austen's more mature works. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr. Collins, she is putting both her own future and the future of her sisters and mother at jeopardy. Elizabeth's only hope is a good marriage, but the neighbourhood has a paucity of eligible gentlemen and she and the other girls have only their looks and their characters to recommend them -- which is very little in a world where property is the primary requirement for belonging to the class that they were born into. In <i>Mansfield Park</i>, Fanny Price lives as an undervalued poor relation -- but in much greater comfort and with much greater gentility than is possible for her mother and younger siblings, who suffer from their mother's improvident marriage. Not to mention that the book features the utter ruination of Maria Norris, who marries for money but then falls into scandal when she afterwards falls for the fickle and irresponsible Henry Crawford.<br />
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<i>Northanger Abbey </i>is the book of a young woman, full of high spirits, who is amusing herself with her writings and aims to amuse her readers too. The book not infrequently "breaks the fourth wall" when the author speaks directly to her readers with asides about the value of novels, or the happy fate of her protagonist.<br />
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Heyer doesn't explicitly do the amusing asides -- although she delights in showing her characters in a charming and yes, amusing light -- but almost all of her books very much feel like this one.<br />
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Comparing Austen to Heyer is of course absurd -- Heyer wrote in imitation of Austen. But after re-reading Northanger Abbey, it seems that in particular Heyer wrote in imitation of <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, as well as in imitation of the types of melodrama that Austen satirizes here.<br />
<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-76148832915187306982019-08-21T20:51:00.004-07:002019-08-21T20:51:54.637-07:00Summer will show by Sylvia Townsend WarnerPages: 329<br />
Published: 1936<br />
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This is an odd novel.<br />
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It does some things very well. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that seems to capture so well the experience of living through momentous events. As you live your life, you don't necessarily know that you're living through something that history will regard as significant. And as the experience drags on, day by day, week by week, month by month...well, you have to eat, and get dressed, and be hungry or bored just as you would if History weren't happening. Your friends will still misunderstand you, your ex-husband might still betray you for the most personal of reasons. And the fact that you're literally part of a Communist plot might not feel as important to you as your lover's life or happiness.<br />
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Some parts of the characterizations are also skilful. The entire first section of the book captures in a very plausible way the interior life of an upper class British woman of the mid-19th century. Mrs Willoughby of Blandameer is both focused on perfectly meeting the obligations of raising her children and of managing her estate, and is impatient with them. The doctor's wife is a mouse who is fiercely, secretly opposed to meddling in her neighbour's life. The lime kiln keeper is equally indifferent to the expectations and the griefs of his mistress.<br />
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And yet, the novel does some things so badly. It's disjointed: there are jumps in time that don't really make sense. The fatal, compelling attraction of the main character to her ex-husband's mistress Minna isn't well drawn, and the previous mutual attraction between the ex-husband and Minna seems implausible once you meet both characters. It also assumes things you may not be familiar with: if you don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 you might not realize that the characters are in the midst of them, and the ending of the novel will not have the same resonance if you don't recognize that Sophie is reading the Communist Manifesto.<br />
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I picked this up at the library, initially thinking that it was an imprint of the Virago Press. Instead it's a similar 'lost classics' imprint from the New York Review of Books. It has a similar interest: in the moment, it is impossible to tell which books will be thought to be important by a later era. And yet, the books that "don't last", that aren't characterized as "classics", and that don't join the "canon"....can still be interesting reads. This is one of them.<br />
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<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7298893988262042558.post-61893712668627629652019-06-09T10:31:00.002-07:002019-12-01T21:15:00.888-08:00On not finishing books ... or why I am going to abandon my bookclubIf I start a book, I usually finish it. But over the last year or so I haven't been finishing much non-fiction: particularly not complex, long, and intellectually challenging non-fiction. I'm looking at you, <i>Adults in the Room</i> by Yanis Varoufakis and <i>The Righteous Mind</i> by Jonathon Haidt!<br />
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Okay, both of those books are really popular non-fiction, but each of them has complexities.<br />
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In the first, Varoufakis explains the history and economics of the credit crises of 2008, the underlying causes of the ongoing collapse of the Greek economy, and the various proposals that the Northern European economic superpowers had for "fixing" the problem, along with his own analysis and counter-proposals to lift his home country from the mess. It's actually a fascinating read, even before you dive into the personalities, politics, and maneuverings of the brief era when he was the Greek finance minister.<br />
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I didn't finish it.<br />
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I rarely read -- have never read? -- a book like this in isolation. As the title of this blog implies, I'm usually reading more than one book in parallel, often one "serious" book and one simple consumable book at the same time. But that's not really the problem here. Over the past year or so I've just had other things that I've needed to do that have limited the time and attention that I have to spend on a book like this.<br />
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That's what happened with <i>Adults in the Room.</i> I'd read 50 pages, 25, a hundred, then go on with the other things in my life that were a more immediate priority. I'd come back to the book several days later, and read 5 pages more. Somehow a week and a half would elapse, and suddenly, I couldn't keep the thread anymore. What was that economic argument again? Who was that person? What does that acronym mean? When is it, in the life of the book?<br />
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Something similar happened with <i>The Righteous Mind</i>. It's a book about moral psychology. How do humans make moral judgements? What current research is there on how and why we do this? What are the impacts of our moral psychologies on our politics, our society, on our everyday human interactions? What does all of this say about (mostly) the current US political scene, and what are the practical implications for politics and society?<br />
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In the case of the <i>Righteous Mind</i>, it wasn't so much the difficulty of following and remembering the arguments and terminology of an unfamiliar field that gave me grief. The difficulty of the book came in following, remembering, and accepting controversial research and ideas. Don't get me wrong. I'm willing to learn, and to be challenged. But 95+% of anything I've ever read that has resembled sociobiology has been a smug, self-serving, "just so" story composed to justify the author's reactionary ideas about why people and society HAVE TO be exactly as they are. "Women have evolved to be loving baby-carers while men are intrepid hunters, because I made up a story about hominids based on stereotypes. So shut up and get back into the kitchen, you sweet little no-nothing. It's SCIENCE."<br />
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Ahem.<br />
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To be fair, very little of Haidt's book is based on sociobiology. (That's just my allergy talking.) The book is overall pretty interesting and I felt that I was learning some important things even as I was mentally arguing with the author.<br />
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I didn't finish it.<br />
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I'd been following Haidt out onto a limb, step by step. He had evidence, he explained limitations, he was travelling in an interesting direction that seemed worth exploring. I followed him, with reservations, preparing to leap with him into the next tree to see where we might end up. But.... my breaks in reading his book became longer than the intervals of reading, and at some point ...my foot slipped, I missed the branch, and I plummeted out of the tree.<br />
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In other words, Haidt's arguments felt and looked like garbage again.<br />
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It had just been too long for me to remember how we'd gotten to the spot we were at, and it would take too long for me to retrace my steps.<br />
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Before I'd begun them, I'd been really interested in reading both <i>Adults in the Room</i> and <i>The Righteous Mind</i>. As I read them, I learnt something, and the reading was a pleasure, not a chore. But...instead of finishing these books, I just have the regret of not finishing.<br />
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Which is why I'm finally quitting my bookclub. My book club books have become one of the things that keep me from reading the books I really want to.<br />
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In the end, I'd far rather have read <i>Adults in the Room</i> or <i>The Righteous Mind</i> than <i>The Parcel</i>, <i>The Elegance of the Hedgehog</i>, <i>At Home</i>, or <i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>. And while I enjoyed <i>Less</i>, <i>The Sympathizer,</i> and <i>A Gentleman in Moscow</i>, would my life have been less rich or interesting if I hadn't read them? Maybe, a little. But of those three, only <i>The Sympathizer</i> really gave me any insights I wouldn't have otherwise had.<br />
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So, even though <i>The Origin of Waves </i>is beautifully written, I'm going to gracefully detach myself from the group by expressing my appreciation for being included and by talking about how my other priorities don't allow me to continue. Maybe in August, seeing as I won't be around for July's book anyway.<br />
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I'll miss the social aspect, but there are so many other books I'd rather read than the ones that this bookgroup is interested in. There might even be other books that I'd much rather write.<br />
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<br />mbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12487872855165402801noreply@blogger.com0