Book Report: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Periodic Table is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi, generally arranged in chronological order (with a few diversions) so that they trace the arc of his career as a chemist, from his childhood in northern Italy, his time in Auschwitz concentration camp at the tail end of World War II, and his return to Turin.

The book's ingenious structure is that each story corresponds (and is titled) with an element of the periodic table: for example, "Zinc" tells a tale of university lab work, while "Lead" and  "Mercury" tell something akin to folk tales in distant lands.

Levi wrote other books concerning his experiences in Auschwitz, so this book doesn't spend a lot of time on those details, but Auschwitz, as well as Fascism in his native Italy, are supporting characters throughout the book. In fact, a "colleague" at a factory that was using Levi as slave labor while he was in Auschwitz re-enters his life years later in "Vanadium," and Levi forces the man to reckon with his actions during that earlier time.

I don't feel like I'm in an adequate state of mind to effectively communicate why I related to this book so much, but I just feel like Levi spent many years trying as a chemist to be a competent professional, and this book conveys that spirit in a way that I haven't experienced before. That in attempting to do a thing well that thing, though not transcendent in any way in and of itself, can become a way to convey transcendence upon our actions. Levi seeks answers in a very temporal, immediate vein in his work, and in that way his words lift up his work, perhaps. He is a modest man, but he has shown me so much in how he has gone about his daily life.

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 3

Go back to Day 2
Go back to Day 1

Media

A quick aside to let you know the structure of my workdays while in Indonesia: I wake up at about 4 a.m. because jet lag, then I try to stay busy in the hotel room with phone calls or emails until the breakfast buffet opens at 6. The factory sends a car or minibus to pick me and any other hotel guests who are visiting workers at W-, and the vehicle departs the hotel at 7:30. It’s about a half-hour drive to the factory, and I work from 8 to 5. A different driver takes us back to the hotel; the first couple of nights the drive back has taken 90 minutes, so arriving at the hotel about 6:30 p.m. I motivate myself to go out and find something different to eat, or else I order one of the five entrees that’s available through room service, and I pass out at about 9 p.m.

OK, on to media. Surabaya doesn’t appear to have any readily-available English-language print media. There are little newsstands at random points on the sidewalks or between other business shanties that feature a few newspapers, a wide variety of bottled water and cigarettes (Dunhill is the only brand I’ve recognized, but there are also Apache and others, at about $1 a pack), as well as some little publications featuring smiling women on the cover that I’m assuming are porn of some type. All the newspapers and magazines are in Indonesian, even in the Barnes-and-Noble-type establishment that I found in the mall. I’m guessing that in Jakarta (or maybe Bali or other tourist destinations for Westerners or even foreigners) you can probably find the Financial Times or Economist or International Business Tribune, but I haven’t seen any of those here.

The TV in the hotel gets about six or eight news channels, of which most are in English (CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.) or Chinese. I’m assuming that some of the Indonesian broadcast channels also feature news programming, but I’m probably not watching at the time that that would be featured. There are also several sports channels: Fox Sports 1 & 2 which broadcast in English, Soccer Channel which broadcasts in Indonesian, and a random sports channel that’s had anything from table tennis to judo which broadcasts in Indonesian. The hosts on the Indonesian-language channels are refreshingly less polished-looking than I’m used to seeing from TV hosts, and they appear to have been selected less for their conventional attractiveness.

Before visiting the mall last evening, I would have said that there is very little sex used to sell anything in advertising in Indonesia, at least on anything visible from the street. There are no barely-clothed, smiling women featured in any billboards or store signs, which is quite nice to experience. The influence of political Islam on culture: it doesn’t have to be all bad! However, the mall had all the same stores that you’d see in a mall in a suburban American city, and all the same vacant-looking pretty white people in their signage. It was very depressing, to be honest, but the use of sex to sell really stood out after a few days of not being exposed to it elsewhere. While at home, I think that I definitely get desensitized to it after a while.

As far as the internet is concerned, things are a little bit restricted. For example, Blogger isn’t linked to from Google’s Indonesian site, so I had to enter the URL for my blog manually and then bookmark it. There are several other Google apps that appear to not be linked to here – the matrix is considerably less populated when I click on the little tic-tac-toe board from my Gmail account. Also, my preferred site for – ahem – lonely business traveler purposes (which is entirely text-based and not at all exploitative by the – admittedly extremely low – standard of websites for the lonely business traveler) is blocked. I’m guessing that similar sites for lonely people with more visually-minded tastes are also unavailable, although I’m not certain whether that’s something that’s regulated by the hotel wifi or a larger organization. Indonesia: encouraging business travelers to be more imaginative.

Go to Day 4

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 2

Go back to Day 1

Rather than give you a full blow-by-blow of every day of this trip, in each post I’ll try to handle a different aspect of the culture here as I am observing it. A disclaimer: I don’t speak any Indonesian, I’m pretty shy in general, and especially shy when I’m in a situation where I don’t speak the language and am clearly not from there. So, a lot of this is going to be pieced together based on my first-hand observations as well as some internet sleuthing and whatever information I can clean from some very awkward conversations with the folks I encounter while I’m here. I’m afraid I don’t have the social skills to be an effective journalist in a foreign country, so I apologize in advance for what I’m going to get wrong. I’m going to try to give you the newcomer’s perspective on Indonesia, for better or worse.

Today: Alcohol

At the risk of telling you something you already know, Indonesia has the largest population (~270 million) of any majority-Muslim country in the world. According to Wikipedia, about 88% of the population identifies as Muslim. Sometime in the early middle ages, Islam replaced Buddhism and Hinduism as the major religion in this part of the world, and it’s been that way since (once again paraphrasing Wikipedia).

As I would assume as a fairly direct result, booze is not a big part of daily life here. I have not seen any advertising for alcohol anywhere, it’s not available in any of the convenience stores or grocery stores that I’ve visited, and as far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a liquor store in Surabaya. I know there was a duty-free store in the Surabaya airport, and I’ll need to check and see if there was any alcohol for sale there. There were a few street vendors selling glass liter-sized bottles of some sort of undetermined liquid the first day I was walking around in the city, but I’m assuming that’s fuel – I will try to get to the bottom of that one. Wherever there’s prohibition, formal or informal, there’s certainly some sort of black or grey market that exists, right?

At any rate, it’s not completely unavailable. The hotel that I’m staying in has a few beers available for purchase in the Café, the restaurant that I’ve eaten at so far, and the Thai restaurant that I ate at in the mall also had beer available for purchase. Alcohol is highly taxed, so the beer is quite expensive compared to food or other drinks - 68,100 Rupiah (about $5) for a Bintang, San Miguel or Heineken.

Bintang is basically Heineken – the brewery was built by Heineken in the ‘50s, it was nationalized by the Indonesian government in the ‘60s, and now it’s owned by Heineken again. The label design even looks like Heineken. 

I took this at a grocery store last night. It's a metaphor, maaaannn.

As far as I can tell in my internet research, it’s the only brewery in Indonesia that actually sells beer in Indonesia (Bali Hai appears to brew only for export, and Djakarta - maker of Anker - seems to not actually brew in the country?). You can get a Guinness or Corona as well, but those are even more expensive. I haven’t seen any mention of wine or cocktails anywhere, but I’ll let you know if that changes.

Since I’m staying on the “Executive Floor” of the hotel, I have access to a free happy hour in the lounge on the floor above my room. I went up there after work tonight, and they have some appetizers and a refrigerator with soda water and soft drinks, but no alcohol. The attendant asked if I wanted a beer, and seemed extremely relieved when I said no. I haven’t had anything to drink since the night before I left home, which is the longest dry stretch in quite some time. It’s probably good to abstain once in a while, just to mix it up.

There are karaoke clubs, which I’d assume serve alcohol. Maybe I’ll check one of those out later in the trip. If they’re like the ones in Malaysia, you’ll have a scantily-clad young lady who will rub your shoulders while you drink, which sounds ok in theory but is at least as awkward as a strip club in practice. I’m thinking that I’m just not very good at interpersonal interaction, especially when there’s an implied financial component.

Go To Day 3

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 1

I’m currently in Surabaya, Indonesia for a plant startup. The flight was Minneapolis -> Seattle -> Tokyo -> Singapore -> Surabaya, which was about as direct as I could figure out to do it. I left at 9 a.m. Monday and arrived at 10 a.m. Wednesday (with an overnight at the Singapore airport). Things are pretty slow at the outset here at the plant as I wait for the last of the construction to be completed, so in order to make it look like I’m staying busy and doing computer work rather than showing my hand and openly reading a book all day, you’re going to get a very detailed account of my trip so far.

Indonesia, Day 1

I flew from Singapore in the early morning. I’ve been to Singapore three different times now, and have always flown in late at night and left early in the morning, so I’ve never seen anything other than the airport and the Crowne Plaza attached to the airport, and it’s been dark most of the time that I’ve been there. I flew Scoot Air, which is a small airline based in Singapore. Their strategy appears to be offering cheap flights to less-touristy locations (such as Surabaya) and having any amenities be at an additional charge. There were no free beverages or anything else on the flight, and the seat was extremely uncomfortable, although I checked a bag for free and the plane and service and everything were fine. Not bad for $78 one way.

A note about the Singapore airport experience: you go through security when you go to your gate; the gate opened a little more than an hour before departure, and there were two gates served by the single security checkpoint: my flight and a Silk Air flight to Darwin, Australia. As you might expect, the clientele for those two flights were considerably different; I was (I think) the only westerner on the flight to Surabaya (and I was nearly a head taller than the next-tallest passenger), and the flight to Darwin was evenly split between groups of (white) students and elderly (white) couples. A woman with (white) hair shorter than mine came through security as the line was forming to get on the plane to Surabaya, and she looked a little confused, but just fell into the line because what are you going to do? I was pretty sure that she was headed to Darwin, so I told her that this wasn’t the line for her flight, and she didn’t follow at first, but eventually she got it. Don’t follow me lady, I’m with these dark-complected folks over here.

I landed in Surabaya at about 10:30 a.m. If you didn’t have anything to declare, you were supposed to be able to go through the “green channel” for customs, but there were only three lines, and they were all the “red channel” for people with things to declare. I am still not sure if there was any way to bypass that or not, but if there was, I missed it. The whole baggage claim/customs area was a congested mess of families with carts piled high with luggage, but I made it through in 30 minutes or so. There was supposed to be a driver from W- there to meet me, but I couldn’t spot them in the mass of people at the entrance, so I settled down to wait, secure in my knowledge that I would be pretty easy to pick out of that crowd. After another half hour or so, I was proven correct. In the meantime, I’d received an email that I didn’t need to come to the plant until the next day, so I wasn’t in any big hurry.

The parking lot was on the south side of the airport, and we needed to go north to get to the hotel, and it took about 30 minutes to get from the parking lot to the north entrance to the airport, because the road was about 1 ½ lanes wide and overrun with heavy vehicle traffic while scooters weaved in between the vehicles. Surabaya is the second-largest city in Indonesia, with a population of 3 million in the city itself and 10 million in the metro area. It appears that any road that is an expressway (limited access, where scooters aren’t allowed) is a toll road, and traffic lights are few and far between. I also haven’t seen any evidence of public transportation, so it’s about like you might expect given those constraints.

I’ve decided to keep a running D&D-style attributes matrix based on my work travel experiences. Your mileage may vary, of course. Here we are so far:

Lawful Good: TBD                 Neutral Good: Brazil                       Chaotic Good: Indonesia

Lawful Neutral: China            True Neutral: Singapore                  Chaotic Neutral: Malaysia

Lawful Evil: Japan                  Neutral Evil: Eddyville, Iowa        Chaotic Evil: Mexico

I checked into my very nice, 4-star hotel, where I have a room on the Executive Floor and the rate is somewhere around $35 a night including meals, but alcohol is additional. I had lunch in one of the several hotel restaurants; I’ll go back and look up what it was called, but it was a chicken drumstick and a couple of beef skewers with a fried egg on top of a cake of seafood fried rice, with a few vegetables on the side. Pretty good!

By this point, it was 2:30 p.m. or so, and I went for a walk. Surabaya is aggressively pedestrian-unfriendly, at least in the several miles of neighborhoods between my hotel and the central downtown area. If there’s room for a sidewalk, then there will be scooters or vendor carts or a car parked directly in your path. Several “streets” are so narrow that I could stretch my arms and nearly touch the buildings on each side, but that doesn’t mean that scooters won’t buzz through there while families hang out on the stoop in front of their apartment. 

It’s tough to navigate on foot, is what I’m saying. I saw a few brave souls on bicycles, but motorized transport is pretty much the only way to go.

I’m going to include a couple of photos of the cemetery that I walked through here, because I don’t think any description that I could make would do it justice.

I walked past the edge on my way out, and then thought I could cut back through on my way back to the hotel as dusk descended at about 5:30 p.m. (this near-the-equator year-round-equinox stuff is difficult to adjust to). This is where I have to assume that Indonesia’s general lack of motivation to fuck up a lost dorky looking white boy really shone through, because nobody messed with me or even said anything that threatening, as I doubled back a couple of times, obviously lost, and they just hung out and made their trash fires on the ground and did not assault me. Thanks very much for that, random decent folk who are unconscionably poor but not predatory.

Indonesian children hanging out on the street apparently like to call me “Mister” and want to shake my hand. There are a few white people about, but I could see where my presence in their neighborhood would be a novelty, and I admire their ability to not run away in horror, unlike their rural Chinese counterparts. This “mister” stuff happened on a number of occasions in the afternoon, with the largest group being 8-10 kids who shook my hand in turn. I didn’t really have a good feel for the vibe going in, so I didn’t know if they were going to ask for money or what, but it seemed very genuine and cute after having it happen a few times. I try to make a not-uncomfortable amount of eye contact, smile and keep walking fairly briskly when in doubt of my situation, and that seemed to work well.

My destination was a monument commemorating the Indonesian victory over the Dutch in 1945, securing their independence, and the Surabaya museum nearby, which had a similar theme. I didn’t find the monument, which either wasn’t located where google said it was, or I just didn’t recognize it, and the museum had just closed when I arrived, so that was an overall bust. Oh well. The river running through the central city is pretty nasty-looking. I stopped at a Giant hyper-mart on the way back to the hotel and checked out their grocery wares. The plant I’m working at while here makes palm and palm kernel oil, and it’s the local custom for that to be packaged in plastic bags, kind of like a quart-size Capri Sun, except clear. So that’s weird. It seems like Indonesia has a little different outlook on packaging recycling – lots of disposable containers. I’m sure their amount of trash generated and overall carbon footprint is much smaller than the US, but we definitely do a lot more virtue signaling with our packaging choices and preference for four-cycle engines.

I was pretty much beat by the time I got back to the hotel, it was dark, and since the day’s Ramadan fast had just ended at sundown, the hotel restaurants were packed, so I just downed my welcome-gift plate of fruit that had been left in my room and called it a night after watching some French Open tennis and AFF U19 soccer action.

Go To Day 2

Book Report: Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl is more exhilarating, inspiring, entertaining, and brave than any memoir by a botany researcher has any right to be. It educates about plants, points out the inherent problems with funding for curiosity-based science, and gives a glimpse inside the mind of a brilliant but troubled scientist.

We follow Jahren, a native of the never-named but thinly-disguised Austin, Minnesota, from childhood to doctorhood to parenthood, with stops in between in Minneapolis, Berkeley, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Hawaii. It’s interspersed with frequently-fascinating asides about plant science, where you will learn many things you didn’t know you didn’t know about why plants do the things they do. For example, why the leaves on a tree are larger and darker on the top of the tree than on the bottom, and the thousands of years-old lotus seed that was found in a Chinese peat bog.

Jahren grows up in a family that, as many of us who grew up in the small-town Midwest can relate, does a much better job of showing their love than talking about it. Her father taught science at the local community college, and Jahren got free run of the place in the off hours. That interest in science brought her to the University of Minnesota on a scholarship, where she considered medical school but couldn’t afford it.

She worked a series of part-time jobs to put herself through school, including a jaunt as an IV-bag mixer at the U of M hospital. It’s during this time that Jahren’s manic tendencies are first hinted at, as she goes several days at a time without sleeping while studying and pulling double shifts at the hospital.

UC-Berkeley is her next stop, as Jahren puts herself through grad school on a research assistantship which includes a lot of incredibly boring-sounding soils research. It’s through that work that she meets Bill, a kindred spirit who platonically accompanies her through the entire rest of the book, building labs, crashing in (and once, just straight-up crashing) vans, and eating as horribly as their meager earnings allow.

Jahren and Bill sojourn onward to Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins, building labs, running mass spectrometers, and carbon-dating the shit out of things. They push themselves too hard for too long with too little money, and eventually the cracks begin to show. After some significant individual breakdowns, things get better and they move to Hawaii, with Jahren tenured and Bill on solid financial footing thanks to a savvy real-estate move. Jahren gets married to an intellectual equal and has a child, and things end as happily-ever-after as anything can for people who are well aware that they live on a dying planet giving too much for what will never be a reasonable return.

As someone who works a job much more for a check than for anything that can be considered passion, I greatly admire the sincere enjoyment and full-on commitment that Jahren brings to her work. I’m also curious how much of that brain chemistry that drives her to unparalleled excellence in her field is the flip side of the manic-depressive coin. And also, is that mental instability part of the price that she has to pay for the work necessary to rise to the level of her more-privileged male counterparts, whose ability was never questioned because of their sex? These are all compelling questions, and while Lab Girl doesn’t offer easy answers, it provides plenty of food for thought.

Book Report: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I guess the worst thing I can say about The Underground Railroad is that it wasn’t transcendent; I’d rather commend it with faint criticism than damn it with faint praise. What it is is really good and really depressing. The central conceit of the book, which recently received the Pulitzer Prize, is that the Underground Railroad existed as, you know, a literal railroad that operates literally underground. That’s genius, and Whitehead probably deserved the Pulitzer for that innovation alone. He otherwise plays it straight without too many other elements of magical realism, as the waning days of the slavery-era south need no embellishment.

The book begins in Georgia, where the central character, Cora, runs away from the Randall plantation, which is depicted as suitably hellish. She and her fellow-traveler, Caesar, are transported to South Carolina via the titular means. South Carolina is depicted as a reform-minded place, where blacks are given some measure of freedom and opportunity for self-improvement. However, there’s a dark side to that “progress”, as whites conduct Tuskegee-style syphilis experiments and coerced sterilizations on slave and free alike.

Cora and Caesar decide that maybe further north would be their speed, and they end up in North Carolina. The Tarheel State has taken a different tack on the slavery issue, as they’ve chosen to eliminate their black population through a targeted lynching program, stringing up bodies for miles through the trees in a so-called Trail of Freedom. North Carolina’s slaveholding farmers have decided that importing poor white immigrants is less trouble and not much more expensive than managing a growing black population, so they intend to either kill or drive off those blacks who are currently about. Cora goes into hiding in the attic of a former conductor of the defunct local spur of the Railroad, but is found out when she’s sold out by the house’s Irish servant. The cowardly couple who had hid her are lynched, and Cora is taken away by the Anton Chigurh-like Ridgeway, a runaway slave catcher who intends to return her to Randall.

Ridgeway conveniently has to make a long detour through Tennessee and Missouri to pick up some other “strays”, which gives Cora an opportunity to be rescued by a couple of gun-toting free blacks and taken to a Utopian black-owned communal farm in free Indiana. No one can have nice things in this world, though, so Ridgeway and a posse massacre the farm, killing Cora’s rescuer in the process. The book ends with Cora revealing the opening to an abandoned Railroad station to Ridgeway, but then killing him by grabbing him and pulling them both in a heap down the platform steps, bashing in his head in the process. A severely injured Cora takes up the hand-powered car and seesaws her way through the darkness into an unknown future.

Whitehead does a tremendous job of taking what seems like a well-worn period in American history and creating an even bleaker, more gruesome tale than I would have imagined possible. Pretty much every white person that Cora encounters is either fully evil, entirely deluded in their motivations, or completely incompetent (frequently two of those or more), which I can’t say is at all unrealistic. The only hope that exists in that world – and perhaps in the current one – is in the striving for something better a little further down the road.

Book Report: The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

This was the May entry for the Science Book Club, and I thought it was outstanding. Kean does a great job of finding interesting stories about the elements that make up the periodic table, as well as the people who worked to discover them.

To be honest, I thought the stories dried up as soon as the focus moved to sythetically-creating a few molecules of a new element in the lab, instead of isolating and discovering the naturally-occurring elements. And the Nobel Prize politics didn't make much of an impression on me. But there are plenty of really good stories here, from Gandhi to Einstein, Hitler to Fermi. There are heroes and villains, unintended consequences galore, and all sorts of interesting stuff in between.

Book Report: Stiff by Mary Roach

I volunteer at a local bookstore, and they were looking for someone to take over the Science Book Club. I figured I could try that, so I selected Stiff by Mary Roach as the first month's entry. If you've ever wanted to learn more than you could ever wanted to know about dead bodies, here you go. It was a little too gruesome for me in several parts, but Roach is an eternally curious researcher, and her enthusiasm is contagious.

Book Report: Satan is Real by Charlie Louvin

I can't recommend Cocaine & Rhinestones, a country music history podcast by Tyler Mahan Coe, enough. One of the first episodes in the first season is about the Louvin Brothers, and their "blood harmony" singing that is perhaps only possible to achieve among relatives. Coe recommended Charlie Louvin's autobiography, Satan is Real, the library had it, and here we are.

It's a quick, easy read, broken up into short chapters, and Louvin's conversational style is engaging. Coe pointed out several instances where Louvin made claims that don't hold up to scrutiny, so who knows how much of the book is actually true. Charlie spends most of the book tearing down his late brother, Ira, for his heavy drinking, surly attitude, and poor marriage decisions, which comes off as pretty self-serving.

The life of a touring musician in the '40s onward doesn't sound like much to aspire to. Charlie relates all kinds of tales of driving all night from one gig to another, with only enough time to rinse off his face before taking the stage again. Amphetamines were crucial to the lifestyle, and while Charlie stayed married for his whole adult life, it doesn't sound like he had much of a family life. There were a couple of photos of his kids, but he had way more to say about Ira's exes than any of his own children.

A couple of closing thoughts: 1) Damn, "Knoxville Girl" is a brutally gruesome song. 2) Hoo boy, I'd really like to own a Nudie suit.

Book Report: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

I hadn't read any Octavia Butler before, and this became my what-I-read-while-volunteering-at-Boneshaker the last month or so. I thought the plot of Parable of the Sower was very engaging, but the narrator's attempt to shoehorn her own religion (Earthseed - primary belief: God is Change), was ham-fisted and detracted from the book's quality.

Parable of the Sower is set in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area in the mid 2020s. American society/economy hasn't dramatically collapsed, but things have proceeded further down our current downward trajectory. Global warming has made water scarce in most places, very few jobs are available that actually pay money rather than just rent or company scrip, and most neighborhoods have walled themselves off from the outside world in order to prevent attack. Some sort of drug known as pyro results in a sex-like euphoria from setting fires, leading to many arsons. Slavery has returned.

The narrator is a teenage girl who has a physical empathetic response to others around her who are in physical pain, and wants to start a religion called Earthseed and eventually colonize Mars. Aside from items described in that sentence, most of the plot resides in a recognizable world. It ends up being a road trip book, and it's an entertaining read.

Book Report: Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Maybe I should just accept that the experience of reading Annihilation, the book, was like catching lightning in a bottle, not reasonable to expect it to be repeated. Because Authority, the second book in the Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, and the movie adaptation of Annihilation, were both so much less enjoyable than Annihilation, the book, that I don't have high expectations for the third book in trilogy, Acceptance.

Did you ever read a mind-bending quest book featuring almost an entirely female cast, and then hope that the author would follow it up with a miserable slog detailing office politics with male characters tangentially related to those on the quest? If so, hoo boy are you in for a treat. The only reason I stuck with this book is that my wife was reading it ahead of me and assured me that the third book is better. I hope she's right.

Book Report: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Future Home of the Living God covers a lot of the same thematic ground as The Handmaid's Tale, and I enjoyed it despite that. Not to say that Handmaid's Tale isn't an excellent book in its own right, but its unrelenting bleakness and too-close-to-home imagining of a theocracy colonizing functional wombs makes for brutal reading/viewing. For Erdrich, it seems like it's worth covering some of the same ground in light of recent events...

I've tried to read several Louise Erdrich books on several occasions, and haven't disliked any of them, but I've never gotten pulled into one enough to finish it. Recently I had to spend some time in airports over multiple consecutive days, and that was exactly the motivation I needed to finish this book. Living God follows a young half-Ojibwe woman who was "adopted" as an infant by Minneapolis liberals, and in young adulthood, becomes pregnant in a time of theocratic takeover when evolution appears to be reverting. So, women are having extreme difficulty getting pregnant and delivering healthy babies, and society appears to be collapsing. Oh, and there are occasional megafauna and dinosaur-like-creature sightings. It's complicated.

I didn't like any of the characters initially, which probably would have led me to put this book down under different circumstances, but since I was a bit of a captive audience, I stuck with it. Whether they were written more sympathetically as the book went along or I just got used to them, I grew to like most of them by the end. Which turned out to be unfortunate, because a lot of really horrible shit happens. Dammit.

Book Report: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I've been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, and it may not be great for my outlook about the world, but there's a lot of excellent writing on the subject, including Station Eleven. In the near future, an incredibly deadly and contagious flu variant wipes out the vast majority of the world's population, precipitating a societal collapse.

The book flip-flops back and forth in time, following several different characters' lives up to and after the outbreak. It's geographically tethered to Toronto in the Before, and in a fictionalized version of western Michigan in the After. The through-line of those two plots is a woman named Kirsten, who was a young actress in a performance of King Lear beforehand, and is part of a traveling Shakespearean troupe wandering the upper midwest after.

While performing as King Lear, a famous actor and aging accidental(?) lothario named Arthur Leander has a heart attack and dies, and soon most of the people of the world die of the flu. Mandel does an excellent job of weaving many storylines together, and there are several characters worth rooting for.

Book Report: Cat Pictures, Please by Naomi Kritzer

Naomi Kritzer lives in St. Paul and writes really engaging speculative fiction, as well as being a really engaging political blogger. I found about about the first part by reading her work as the second part before last fall's election, and then I requested Cat Pictures, Please from the library. This collection of stories is always inventive, but by turns sad, exhilarating, and suspenseful.

The highlights, for me, were the titular story, in which a search engine has achieved singularity, and it's happy to use its powers for good, so long as you keep feeding it the cat pictures it desires. Kritzer does an excellent job of weaving familiar folk tales into unique stories. For example, "Comrade Grandmother" incorporated Baba Yaga into the siege of St. Petersburg, and "The Golem" sees, well, a golem attempt to save a young pair of women from the Holocaust.

Kritzer is fantastic, and I'm hoping to read more of her stuff. These stories veer from straight sci-fi to magical realism, and I enjoyed them all.

Book Report: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I'm sure that Margaret Atwood is a fine person, but her opinion of humanity in general has got to be pretty low. In Oryx and Crake, as was well established in The Handmaid's Tale, pretty much everyone is horrible, some of whom are more destructive than others. There are a lot more descriptions and discussion of kiddie porn here than I was able to tolerate, but other than that it's a gripping, thoroughly depressing trip into the near future.

The narrator is Jimmy/Snowman, the same person at different points in time. The main timelines are Jimmy's childhood, spent in closed-off "compounds" made up of employees and families of biotech companies (as opposed to the "pleeblands" that make up the rest of the country), and sometime after Jimmy is a grown man, when he's known to himself and a group of clone-type humanoids as Snowman, and is the only or one of the few survivors following some sort of worldwide plague. Clear enough?

The book alternates back and forth from Jimmy to Snowman, and eventually the early timeline catches up with where the later timeline began. Atwood does an excellent job of doling out information slowly and ominously. Jimmy, who is a bit of a dope, doesn't intend to hurt people but does plenty of that anyway, even though he has some glimmer of a moral compass. Crake is flat-out brilliant and has high-minded ideals, but has an extremely dark side. They end up in a love triangle focused on Oryx, a former child porn actress from somewhere that sounds a lot like Southeast Asia. Things are never great anywhere, but they get so, so much worse as the book's dual timelines converge.

Oryx comes across a lot like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and the book doesn't pass the Bechdel Test as far as I recall, which is weird for a book from a female author. And the criticisms of genetic engineering come off as a little heavy-handed, although chillingly rendered. Overall, it's an extremely engaging book that left me extremely pessimistic about any hope that humanity might have for reversing the death spiral that we find ourselves in. The only remedy that Oryx and Crake seems to see is to accelerate and steer into the skid, which, if this book is any indicator, will have catastrophic results.