On not finishing books ... or why I am going to abandon my bookclub

If 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, Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis and The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt!

Okay, both of those books are really popular non-fiction, but each of them has complexities.

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.

I didn't finish it.

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.

That's what happened with Adults in the Room. 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?

Something similar happened with The Righteous Mind.  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?

In the case of the Righteous Mind, 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."

Ahem.

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.

I didn't finish it.

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.

In other words, Haidt's arguments felt and looked like garbage again.

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.

Before I'd begun them, I'd been really interested in reading both Adults in the Room and The Righteous Mind.  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.

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.

In the end, I'd far rather have read Adults in the Room or The Righteous Mind than The Parcel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, At Home, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And while I enjoyed Less, The Sympathizer, and A Gentleman in Moscow, would my life have been less rich or interesting if I hadn't read them?  Maybe, a little.  But of those three, only The Sympathizer really gave me any insights I wouldn't have otherwise had.

So, even though The Origin of Waves 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.

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.

Property Values by Charles Demers

Each member of my book group takes turns suggesting what we'll read next but there is an element of democracy.  The proposer brings a list of three books and the group chooses one of them as next month's selection.

Last month was my turn.  Of the three "Vancouver" books that I proposed, the group chose Property Values.  (The other two options were Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor and JPOD by Douglas Coupland.)

Now that I've read it, I have to say that Property Values is the most "Vancouver" of the three. JPOD had as much or more to say about tech culture as it did about Vancouver, and Stanley Park was also about contemporary food culture.  Property Values is squarely about Vancouver and only Vancouver.

Nominally, Property Values is a crime novel.   The plot follows the adventures of our hapless hero as he gets caught up in a gang war between the "Underground Riders" and the Da Silvas. Along the way, we hang out with a multi-cultural cast of characters, experience the craziness of the local real estate market, and watch our characters touchily navigate every variety of political correctness.

Yes, the whole book is nothing but Vancouver tropes. Does that sound deadly?  It's not.  Every page is funny, and almost every laugh comes from playing with "true stereotypes" of the city and its people.

The Polis restaurant is "an authentic Hellenic experience" owned and operated by a Sikh family who've been in Canada longer than 90% of the white residents of the Lower Mainland.  When our hero plans a drive-by shooting of his own house in an attempt to drive down its value, he considers several options for a getaway car -- including a Car2Go.  At a "meet" with a biker, our pretend-gangster hero decides that he can't order his usual decaf London Fog because it's not a masculine-enough beverage.  Not only do the hero's best friends come from Asian, Indian, and Egyptian backgrounds, his Asian friend is half Korean and half Chinese "meaning that whenever people guessed at Josiah's ethnicity -- as they invariably did -- they were always a little right and a little wrong".

Even the gang warfare featured in the novel is a Vancouver trope. The Asian Gangs era of the 90s was followed by the 00s era of the Bacon Brothers, the United Nations Gang, and the Independent Soldiers, who all operated alongside the ever-present Hell's Angels.  Our current outbreak of shootings of people "known to police" hasn't been publicly attributed to any particular gang or gangs.  But maybe that's because of the continuing decline of local reporting....which has also been a constant theme since the 90s. ("The glamour of the [news] office had been in decline for decades, but in the rearview mirror the Golden Age kept getting paradoxically closer.  Five years ago, things had felt austere -- but today, five years ago seemed like Old Hollywood with unlimited budgets and bacchanalian Christmas parties, not to mention city council coverage and a theatre reviewer.")

Is Property Values high art?  Well, it's an entertaining read that reflects Vancouver back to itself. It's fun and it feels true.  That seems like more than enough.

At Home: A short history of private life by Bill Bryson

Over its 19 chapters At Home  explores every aspect of private life in Western societies.  It ranges widely in time and space, outlining what we know about the evolution of domestic life from the Neolithic onward.  Along the way it discusses everything from the origins of agriculture to the historical composition of paints to the vagaries of personal hygiene through the ages.

Each chapter uses a room in Bryson's English home as a jumping off point.  Some rooms provide obvious subjects.  "Kitchen" and "Dining Room" deal mostly with food and drink, nutrition, and social habits around consuming food.  Other chapters have a more tenuous connection with their titular room.  "Cellar" mostly deals with building materials, such as concrete, wood, and brick, while "The Passage" is mostly about the telephone, although it begins with a long introduction about the construction of the Eiffel Tower and the excesses of the Gilded Age. 

These kinds of digressions are highly typical, and key to the book's charm.  As At Home progresses you feel that you are being led a wandering path across the landscape of knowledge by a genial guide.  One paragraph leads to another and before you know it, you are learning about the 18th Century Kit Kat Club when you thought you were  here to discuss the concept of comfort, the idea of crop rotation,  the workforce of the Industrial Revolution, or English Country Houses, all of which are discussed in the first 4 pages of "The Drawing Room".

Given the book's scope, you are likely to encounter familiar faces (such as Thomas Edison) and familiar ideas (the discovery of the critical role of Vitamin C in preventing scurvy) as well as much less familiar ones (the idea that Edison's genius largely consisted in his mastery of systems, necessary to roll out electric lighting on a large scale, or the revelation that it was decades after John Snow demonstrated that cholera was spread by bad water before public health officials accepted that 'bad air' was not to blame).

But fundamentally, this is a comfortable book.  You will learn many new things, and unfamiliar perspectives on familiar things.  But you are unlikely to be faced with uncomfortable facts or to be really challenged.  Bryson spends 4 pages discussing tea, but no time at all informing you of the fundamental role of slavery in the transatlantic sugar trade.  He characterizes death duties as 'punishment' of large aristocratic landowners, without discussing the implacable economic and social forces that led to that taxation, and the unprecedentedly egalitarian and democratic society that this dilution of wealth fostered in the 20th Century.

Bryson is writing popular nonfiction for the reading class, which in his implicit understanding is at least upper-middle-class.

This is a warm, idiosyncratic, eclectic, and rambling view of British and American society.  Be prepared to google for pictures of the many grand buildings he mentions, and for more background on some of the many surprising facts he mentions in passing.  But don't expect analysis, and don't expect to be challenged.  At Home is a warm bath, not a cold shower.

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

Leaving Berlin does some things very well.  Notably, it paints an indelible portrait of post-War Berlin 4 years after the defeat of the Nazis. The city is divided between the American, British, French, and Soviet zones.  The city is in ruins, the Berlin airlift is in progress, and the stunned survivors of the war are trying to navigate an uncertain and ever-shifting present.

We see Berlin through the eyes of the prominent novelist Alex Meier.  Alex is a German Jew who fled the Nazis before the war, and who is now returning to the East as an honoured guest to help build his homeland's socialist future.  But Meier is also a refugee again:  this time from the House Un-American Activities Committee.  When asked to name names he had a fit of temper and told them to go fuck themselves.  As a result, he was exiled from America and from his 10 year old American son.

In Berlin Alex encounters places and people that he knew before the war, but everything has changed.  The city is little more than piles of burnt rubble.  The younger brother of a socialist friend is now an ambitious East German apparatchik who is helping build what will become the Stasi.  One daughter of the man who saved him from the camps lives in West Berlin and is the self-justifying wife of a (former?) Nazi doctor. Her sister, his first love, is the mistress of a Soviet general in charge of slave labour camps. 

Everything is painfully familiar but painfully different, and Alex cannot bridge the gap.  He did not experience the war as they did, and can no longer truly understand the city or the people he left behind.

I think Leaving Berlin would have been a more interesting book if that summary of the book were  complete.  But Leaving Berlin is a thriller.  Alex is actually an American spy.   After his encounter with HUAC he was offered a deal by the CIA: if he gathers enough useful information in the East he may be allowed to return to America and be reunited with his son.

The tropes follow thick and fast:  Alex is, of course, also recruited as an East German informer almost as soon as he arrives, doubling the opportunities for intrigue.  No one is quite as they seem, Alex is quickly pulled between old and new loyalties, and soon Alex doesn't know where to turn or whom to trust.  The plot is driven by constant action.  Alex becomes embroiled in deception, murder, and betrayal the morning after his arrival, and transforms from a naive observer of events to a polished undercover operative over the course of  a single week.

Leaving Berlin is an effective thriller.  I raced to the end even though I'm not entirely sure that I followed all of the plot convolutions.

But Kanon did too good of a job evoking post-War Berlin and its inhabitants.  I wanted to spend more time with Bertolt Brecht, who, as Alex observes, is nostalgic not for pre-War Berlin, but for the 1920s.  I wanted to understand the idealism of the socialist returnees, and to see their struggles and compromises as their hope for a new society fades in the face of Soviet totalitarianism.  And I wanted the portrayal of the vindictive 'bad guy' Russians to be moderated by an understanding of how their attitudes towards Germans and Germany were formed by the 20 to 40 million Russian casualties of World War 2.

It's not entirely fair to critique a novel because it's not a different type of book.  Perhaps it's a tribute to the quality of Kanon's writing?  It left me wanting more from the novel than action and intrigue.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is brief, but in 209 pages it brilliantly invokes the traditional village life and spiritual beliefs of the Igbo, then shows their swift unwinding at the hands of missionaries and the colonial administration of Nigeria. 

It's no wonder that this book is considered The classic work of African fiction.  Things Fall Apart was written by an Igbo and is told from an Igbo perspective.  The book centres African experience and challenges the colonial narrative of "exploration", "conquest",  or "savages and civilization" by showing the complex social, political, religious, and cultural traditions that were disrupted by the introduction of alien traditions -- literally at the point of a gun. 

It's hard to imagine how radical it must have felt to read this book when it was published in 1957.   Things Fall Apart helped spark an African literature as one nation after another gained independence through the 1950s and 1960s, and writer after writer starting telling their own stories. 

Ironically, part of the power and influence of the book undoubtedly came from its colonial influences:   Things Fall Apart was written in English, giving it an inherently larger audience.  It also follows a very conventional Western narrative structure -- the novel tells of the rise and fall of an exceptional man (Okonkwe) using an impersonal 3rd person narrator -- making its unfamiliar perspective more approachable for Western audiences and for those educated under colonial systems across Africa.

Both of these decisions make sense: according to Achebe, written Igbo is itself a product of colonialism.  The missionary who decided how to transcribe the language into written form decided that written Igbo should be the 'average' of all of the different dialects -- so written Igbo does not reflect how anyone speaks or understands the language anyway.   And as a student of English literature, it makes sense that Achebe turned to a colonial narrative form to tell a story from the history of his people.

But I wonder what Things Fall Apart might have been like if Achebe had instead followed more closely the model of the stories told at the firesides of his ancestors:  the masculine stories of the land,  full of violence and bloodshed, or the feminine stories like that of the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged the whole world to a wrestling contest, and was finally thrown by the cat.....wait a minute!  In his youth, Okonkwe challenges the whole world to a wrestling contest and triumphs by throwing the reigning champion, Cat.... Maybe there's more going on in this novel than meets the Western eye.

I was out of town for the book club meeting where Things Fall Apart was discussed.  I wish I could have benefited from the insights of my fellow readers.

Ru by Kim Thuy

I'd read Ru years ago, shortly after it won the Canada Reads competition  in 2012.  I remembered it as a short, beautiful, and poetical book about the refugee experience, which is why I recommended it as a selection for my book club.

It's more properly a novella than a novel, having only 141 sparsely populated pages, so I delayed re-reading it until just before the group met.   I tore through the book again, finishing two days before our meeting and thought "But what am I going to say about this book?". 

It was only then that it occurred to me that Ru is a novel, not a memoir.  Thuy is a Vietnamese refugee who came to Canada as part of the huge exodus of "boat people' in the mid-70s.  The book is written in the first person, and she did draw upon her own experiences in writing the book.  But Ru is a novel.  That means that the incidents and structure and language of the book have been carefully selected by the author to produce a certain effect, and to convey a certain message.  I couldn't assume, as I had unconsciously been doing, that Thuy had simply been recounting selected incidents from her life.   I needed to re-read, thinking about why, how, and when the author had inserted each incident, and what she was trying to say with what she was writing.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the book for a second time before we met.  But the more critical re-reading I did have time to do was a revelation.   The book has a beautiful structure.  In French, a "ru" is a flow, as of a stream of water or tears.  In Vietnamese, a "ru" is a lullaby.  And the book itself is a ru....it is a series of linked stories, linked not by chronology but by themes.  One fragment will end with mention of a photo, or of a floor, or of the narrator's voicelessness.  The next will begin across time and space with a mention of a different floor, a different photo, another incident of speech or silence, the stories connected only by the theme and the fact that they tell fragments of the same person's life.  The book was also filled with interesting images:  what was the significance of the pink acrylic bracelet filled with diamonds used to smuggle wealth out of Vietnam, but stolen and discarded by thieves in Canada who had no idea of the value hidden inside?  How could I have missed the metaphorical nature of the brick wall built dividing the author's childhood home, half given over to the communists, and the other half invaded by soldiers that they were obliged to billet?

I didn't finish my re-reading, but reading the book as a novel definitely enhanced my enjoyment of it, and my appreciation of the artistry involved. 

The other striking feature of the book is that it was written in French, and translated.   The translator did a fabulous job of capturing the poetic language of the book. 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A Tale for the Time Being is a playful book from page 1.   Or perhaps right from the title page, as the title is a pun:  a time being is a being who lives in time, like a person or a tree or an animal.   But of course, its also a tale for today ie/ "the time being" and a tale that is "good enough for now".  And that's only the beginning of the ways in which the author plays with words, with time, and with meaning as she interleaves two stories:  that of a middle-aged American writer who lives on Cortes Island, and the story of an unhappy Japanese teenager as told in a diary that the writer finds washed up on the beach.  

The book is very engaging.  One of the stories is a mystery:  what happened to Nao, the Japanese schoolgirl who wrote the diary?  Was she killed in the 2011 Japanese tsunami? How did her diary end up on Cortes? The other story is also a search:  Nao's search for a reason to live.  Nao is suicidal, or says she is in her diary.  She also says that she's going to tell you the life story of her 105 year-old great grandmother, an anarchist feminist novelist and Buddhist nun.  But you can't always believe everything Nao says, although she tells her story in such a personal and immediate way that it's not always easy to keep that in mind.

Everyone in my book club liked the book, except for M, who prefers books that have a clearer structure or theme.  I see her point: A Tale for the Time Being is bursting with characters, themes, ideas, animals, and events.  In some ways it doesn't cohere.  But the thread of Nao's story, and of Ruth's quest to understand it were compelling.  I was content to think of all of the 'extra' elements as ornamentation that added interest (if not additional meaning) to the story of Ruth and Nao.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

This is an unusual novel.  It has a story arc, it has characters, it has character development.  It just doesn't have continuous stretches of prose.   The entire story is told in either dialog, or in quotations from real or invented historical accounts of Abraham Lincoln's life. It reads a bit like a play, as pointed out by another bookclub member, and apparently there is also an audio book version, which probably works particularly well for this book.  

There was an interesting split in the reactions to the book at our meeting:  the four Canadians liked the book well-enough, or were indifferent to it.  The two Americans thought it was a masterpiece.  Our retired medievalist had a great insight about the split:  the American Civil War is one of the defining events of American history, and a defining part of the American experience.  So a novel about Abraham Lincoln has far more resonance for Americans than it does for the rest of us.

What did I think?  I thought the novel was very well executed.  The characters were well-drawn, as were their tragedies and obsessions. Saunders was very skilled at drawing a story together from fragments -- by a quarter of the way through, I was immersed in the Bardo and Lincoln's life. And I'm embarrassed to admit that it didn't occur to me until after I was finished the novel that some of the 'historical' accounts had been invented for narrative purposes.  In other words, they were convincing.

However, not being an American, I found the novel a bit unsatisfying.  After I finished, I wasn't sure why the author had written it.  What was George Saunders trying to say?  I'll have to accept that his goal was to comment on the Civil War and its place in the American psyche, because the book didn't speak to me.

The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

I found this a challenging book to read.  Not because it was unconventionally written, or had disturbing subject matter, or because it was poorly written.  Rather the contrary, actually.

It is the story of a Sicilian nobleman and his family, as they traverse a few crucial days and weeks of their lives in the 1860s and beyond.  It is a beautifully written and psychologically astute elegy for a lost way of life,  in a society and in a landscape that seemed like it could never change.

My problem with the book? Mostly that I am fundamentally not that interested in elegies to aristocracy.  Unlike the author, the actual last Prince of Lampedusa, I come from solid peasant stock on both sides of my family, and tend to look forward rather than back.

We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

This is a difficult book to review, because the author hides a key element of the plot until about a third of the way through the book.  If a reviewer mentions this key plot element, the reviewer subverts the author's intention of drawing you into the story in a particular way, and with a specific perspective. But any discussion of the book that doesn't mention the hidden plot point leaves a reviewer....hanging.   The review can't mention the issues that make the book so unique and compelling.  It's also going to be difficult to draw in the readers who are most likely to be interested in the book.

Most reviews discussed the hidden plot point.

Personally, I thought it was a wonderful book, even though I knew the secret.  My book group said that they couldn't imagine reading it without the surprise -- one member even said that the revelation transformed the book from not particularly interesting to one of the most compelling books that we've read.

You can make your own judgement:  this book was short-listed for a Man Booker prize in its year of publication, and the internet is lousy with spoilers, if you're interested in tracking down that kind of review.

I'm going to avoid the issue entirely by addressing a relevant but unrelated question:  is this book SF?

What makes a book science fiction?  Or, 'SF' as I like to think of it, where 'SF' means 'speculative fiction'.

Now that's a question with many answers, and a question that deserves a much longer and more thoughtful analysis than I'm planning to stick in a book review.

One answer is very simple:  SF is written by SF authors.  Karen Joy Fowler....does she qualify?  Maybe.  She hangs around with SF authors, like Pat Murphy.  Fowler is also one of the founders of the James Tiptree, Jr award, given each year to the SF work that best explores the meaning of gender. So at a minimum, Fowler has tight ties to the SF community.

Another answer:  is the book filed in the SF section of your bookstore or library?  Hm...second point in favour.  I found my copy in the SF section of Munro's bookstore in Victoria.

Third answer:  does it read like SF?   Again, yes.  As is typical with SF, the story explicitly starts in the middle.  SF generally launches into  the middle of a story, situation, or future that you'd never have imagined for yourself, and it's only as the book progresses that you begin to understand what's going on.  Why is SF structured this way?  Mostly because starting a novel with a bunch of exposition about the universe you're in, the future you've immersed in, or the technology that the story is discussing would be a very very boring way to start a book.

Fourth answer:  is the book about character, is it about events, or is it about ideas?  The *best* SF (IMHO), is about ideas, and We are all completely beside ourselves is definitely about ideas.  Big ideas, fundamental ideas about our society.  Check.

Final possible answer:  is the book about science or technology?  Contrary to popular opinion, IMHO, this is the weakest test.  In fact, this is why I prefer to think of SF as 'speculative fiction' rather than 'science fiction'.  Science fiction is, I guess, a fiction that explores science, science futures, or the implications of science on society.  In its degenerate form -- as long as you understand that I'm using 'degenerate' in its most positive possible sense -- science fiction is fiction that includes specific scientific innovations like space travel and laser beams.  And battles.  And very very big bangs.  While speculative fiction is simply fiction that asks 'What if'.

We are all completely beside ourselves definitely asks 'What if'.   Check again.

So, if you enjoy SF, particularly thoughtful, well-written SF that has compelling characters and asks challenging questions, you'll enjoy We are all completely beside ourselves.

But you are also very likely to enjoy the book even if you would never voluntarily read a book with a space ship on the cover.  There are no space ships in this book.  It takes place in the present (okay, 2007, but that's when the book was published), not the future.  And it does not involve a single piece of uninvented technology.

It only starts in the middle, and takes you to an unexpected place.

Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

I've joined a book group again!  This is the third book that I've read with the new group.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a brief novel told in the second person.  The narrator is a Pakistani who meets a stranger on a street in Pakistan, takes him for tea and then supper, all the while telling the anonymous listener the story of his life.

The narrator is a young Pakistani man from a 'good' but impoverished family who travels to the US for University, falls in love with an American woman, and works for an American finance firm for a couple of years before becoming disillusioned and returning home post-911.

This is a book that I didn't enjoy on first reading.   I'm all for artificiality -- I read science fiction! I enjoy meta-narratives! I am not opposed to the post-modern -- but the frame story felt contrived, and the ambiguous ending seemed like a gimmick.  Overall, it seemed to me that the book was an overly clever attempt to educate post-911  Americans about why they were not necessarily universally loved.

The night before the book group meeting I picked it up again in an attempt to figure out something more to say about the book during our discussion.  This was a useful exercise.   The book was actually more cleverly structured and written than I had originally noticed.  The narrator's American love....was actually a metaphor for America.  The title of the book was actually significant, and rather different than I had assumed.   No matter where I opened it, I found quotable text that not only moved the plot along, but illustrated the underlying themes of the book in ways that I hadn't noticed when I was concentrating on the plot.

The discussion during out meeting last night was also useful.  It reminded me of how immediately engaging the book was, and how the second person narration pulled you in to the story.  It pulled out details of the book, its plot, and its characters in ways that I hadn't thought of myself.

In summary, reading this book as part of a book club made me appreciate it much more than I would have had I encountered it on my own.   I still think that its topicality is one of the reasons that it was short-listed for a Man Booker when it was published in the mid-2000s.  But is that such a bad thing?  And the book is better-written and more complex than I initially gave it credit for.