Book Report: Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Nevada is a story of Maria, a thirty-ish trans woman living in Brooklyn and working a shitty job in a bookstore, getting fucked up and riding her bike around town trying to figure out a way to break up with her girlfriend, Stacy. Then Stacy breaks up with her, Maria gets fired, and then Maria borrow-steals Stacy's car and ends up in Star City, Nevada, a few weeks later. She meets James, who is 20, works at Wal-Mart, is distant and kind of terrible to his too-good-for-him girlfriend and jerks off to porn involving men who are turned into women by magic. Maria sees a lot of herself in James, and decides that the reason for her quest is to help him overcome his gender issues. She convinces him to go on a road trip to Reno with her. However, she's totally condescending and monologue-y to him on the trip, and he ditches her and has his girlfriend come pick him up.

I enjoyed the book a lot more when Maria was just fucking up her own life and not projecting her fucked-upness onto others. She seemed like a cool person for the first half of the book, making mistakes and being emotionally withdrawn from her relationships, but at least enjoying who she was and what she was doing on her own time. Maybe she should have just stayed where she was.

Book Report: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler

I requested this book from the library because the titular story was highly recommended by a writer at Deadspin. I enjoyed that one, but I have to say that I enjoyed most of the rest of the stories in the book even more. I read The Parable of the Sower last year, and I didn't mind it, but I can't say that I was drawn in. After reading these stories, I think that I am a bigger fan of Butler's short stories than her novel-length work. My favorite of the stories was "Amnesty," a story of a woman who was abducted by alien invaders who look like big haystacks (I pictured them looking kind of like Gossamer - I looked it up - the hair monster from Looney Tunes) and completely subdue the human race. The aliens don't initially have a way to communicate with earthlings, so they perform a bunch of experiments on them and hurt and kill many of them as part of their research. However, they can connect with humans by enveloping them in their bodies, a process which has comforting effects on both the aliens and humans. Anyway, the woman becomes more or less an employee of the aliens, attempting to train new humans to act as translators between aliens and earthlings. It's a pretty great story! And there are others that I enjoyed nearly as much! There are also a couple of essays about Butler's writing process, which I could see being very helpful to others trying to follow the path that she blazed.

Book Report: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

Longtime readers of this blog (haha, just kidding, there are none) may be tiring of the ongoing saga of the Boneshaker Science Book Club, but I regret to inform you that there have been a couple more twists! And turns! So, I was all set to pull the plug on the club last month, but then three people other than me showed up for the discussion of Reason for Hope, by Jane Goodall, and it was really nice to talk through the book, and I felt like everyone got something out of it. A biology teacher from Brooklyn Park named Lindsey had just randomly found the event on Facebook, had coincidentally been listening to the audiobook, and seemed to really enjoy the discussion. She suggested The Hidden Life of Trees for a subsequent club, and since I didn't have any better ideas, I totally went for it. There wasn't a paperback option available, but it was available on both audiobook and from the library, so there were lower-cost options. I ordered four copies, since we hadn't sold more than two or three of the book club selection for months, and they immediately sold out. I ordered four more copies, and they sold out again. Meanwhile, the Hennepin County Public Library went from having several copies available for loan to having 30 people on the waiting list, almost overnight. And there are several people who said they'd go to the event on Facebook, plus like 90 people interested. I'm really curious to see how many people show up on Saturday. It'll probably be just me and Nick like in November, but I could be pleasantly surprised.

Anyhow, this is a very interesting book. If I would describe my favorite kind of pop-science book, it would be: full of fun facts. And The Hidden Life of Trees has many fun facts! I had no idea that growing up in an old-growth forest had such an effect on the life of the trees contained within. I guess that it's nothing for beech trees (which I don't even know for sure if I would recognize) to live for 400-500 years, growing very slowly and because of that, being more resistant to pests, weather, etc. If I could summarize the theme of the book, it would be that trees need a community in order to reach their full potential, and I'm not sure if there are very many habitats that exist any more in which that can happen. Which is unfortunate, but there's not really any way to un-ring that bell. The old growth forests are few and far between, and you can't really re-create that habitat. Still, there's a lot of things to be learned from that idealized arrangement.

Book Report: A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

A Cure for Suicide is more than a bit too twee for my taste. In its defense, it's structured unusually, with lots of white space on each page, so even though it's a thick-ish book, I felt like I was a really fast reader as I tore through it. It's set in the near future where people who want to commit suicide are given the option to take an injection and basically get their brain wiped. Then, they re-learn how to do everything, basically, under the care of a personal-life-coach-or-equivalent while living in a huge house in a rural community. First off, the Republic (as the one world government is called in this book) doesn't seem to be concerned about keeping health care costs in line at all. And it was never made clear to me what the advantage was of basically giving people brain damage instead of just letting them kill themselves. It's not a clear upgrade, imho. There are some elements of 1984 as the protagonist betrays a fellow treatment-getter, but then it turns out at the end that maybe he didn't after all?

Anyway, there was a particular type of book or short story that I really enjoyed when I was in college: a boy is sad and struggling, and he meets a girl who's obviously too good and together for him, but she sees something in him that no one else can see (probably not even him!), and they, against all odds, become a couple (finally, someone gets him!), and then something tragic happens before their pairing is revealed to be actually not-the-best. A tinge of sadness is always present, which just makes it that much more poignant. I was too young for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to have a name, but that was definitely my thing. The example I remember best is "Testimony of Pilot" by Barry Hannah. We also would have accepted the doomed romance in All the King's Men. I can't say that I'm embarrassed to have enjoyed those stories, but they definitely doesn't touch me in the way that it did when I was young and (even more) awkward, and was really looking for a relationship that would make a good story more than, you know, a good relationship. There's also some misogyny lurking in all that over-sensitivity, I'm afraid. I was a sexually frustrated and very pretentious young man. Anyway, A Cure for Suicide has one of these types of stories as its final act, which leads in to why the protagonist wanted to end it all at the beginning of the book. That story is the best part of the book, but that's damning with faint praise, I'm afraid.

Book Report: A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett

I hadn't really been around trans folks much at all before moving to Minneapolis, and that's one of many areas that I still have a lot of room to grow in my knowledge of and empathy toward. Lauren Theisen, who's trans and writes for Deadspin, recommended this book, and it's great and unsettling and beautiful and heartbreaking and all that. Casey Plett wrote this collection of stories, which is set in many different places across our great continent, from Portland to Winnipeg to what's probably Fargo (uncredited) to Brooklyn, and shit is hard everywhere for trans people. Sex is brutal even when that's not what they want, and work sucks, and even when you're trying to carve out a little community with like-minded people, a lot of those people are terrible. And parents can be awful, too.

Book Report: Vacationland by John Hodgman

I love John Hodgman thoroughly and more or less un-self-consciously. If you also enjoy John Hodgman, then you will love Vacationland, because it is peak John Hodgman. He inherits a vacation home in western Massachusetts from his mother, and then buys a vacation home in Maine with his I'm-a-PC TV money, and lives in Park Slope, but somehow doesn't come off as an asshole. As I mentioned, I'm totally in the bag for him, so your results may vary, but I loved every minute of this book and knocked it out in a couple of days.

Books I Read in 2018

1. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
2. Cat Pictures, Please by Naomi Kritzer
3. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
4. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
5. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer
6. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
7. Satan is Real by Charlie Louvin
8. Stiff by Mary Roach
9. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
10. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
11. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
12. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
13. Merle Haggard, the Running Kind by David Cantwell
14. Good Company by Douglas A. Harper
15. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbard
16. Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger
17. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
18. Molly's Game by Molly Bloom
19. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
20. Spook by Mary Roach
21. Slouching Toward Fargo by Neal Karlen
22. Who Really Feeds the World by Vandana Shiva
23. Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
24. Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
25. A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky
26. Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
27. Reason for Hope by Jane Goodall
28. Obscura by Joe Hart
29. Palestine by Joe Sacco
30. Headstrong by Rachel Swaby
31. Heartland by Sarah Smarsh
32. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

Book Report: Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

I would say that I've always appreciated Sleater-Kinney more than I've enjoyed their music. And I guess the couple of times that I've watched Portlandia, I've felt similarly. Carrie Brownstein is a tremendously talented artist, but one whose work I've never really felt a deep personal connection to. So, I really liked her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, but I enjoyed it at a remove.

Brownstein started with a pretty standard suburban upbringing, but her mother struggled with anorexia and left the family, and her father came out of the closet a couple of years after his daughter did. And then she moved to Olympia and Sleater-Kinney happened. She gives a realistic-sounding description of what it's like being in a band whose fame and cred vastly outpaced any kind of actual real money coming their way. She struggles throughout the book, but seems in a better place by the end.

Book Report: Heartland by Sarah Smarsh

I'd read a couple of excerpts from Heartland on different websites earlier last year, and my appetite was whetted as I waited several months for my turn to come on the library waiting list. If you like Barbara Ehrenreich's working class slice-of-life tales, you'll enjoy this memoir of a hardscrabble Kansas upbringing. Smarsh is the daughter of a many-times-married mother, and she managed to avoid getting pregnant at a young age (and hoo boy does she beat that drum a lot). She was therefore able to stay in school and get an advanced degree that allowed her to claw her way up to middle class.

I spent most of the book comparing my own upbringing to Smarsh's - we were probably on equal footing economically, but her parents divorced at a young age, and she had a lot more familial instability and mental illness on both sides of her family that I had to deal with. On the other hand, she grew up in and near Wichita, while I was a lot more isolated geographically. For those who have no idea what it's like to grow up semi-rural and poor, this book will be quite enlightening, but it was a little too heavy on the precise documentation of who-moved-where-when-and-divorced-who than was necessary.

Book Report: Headstrong by Rachel Swaby

Rachel Swaby undertook a fantastically ambitious project with Headstrong - she spent 4-6 pages each on 52 different women scientists throughout history, no more than a handful of which I'd ever heard of before. There are certainly compelling stories here, and I greatly admire the hustle, but I will confess that all the stories start to run together after a while. Some of the stories deserved to have a longer treatment, and some were stretched to fill a few pages. Hedy Lamarr was probably the most compelling story, but she was also the one that I already knew a little bit about. I'd like to report that there were some hidden gems that were unearthed here, but while there was tremendous scientific work which Swaby shines a light on, there weren't any must-read narratives that came along with them. I appreciated that Swaby told the stories in a straightforward way without overselling, but that meant that the hooks were few and far between.

Book Report: Palestine by Joe Sacco

Did you know that Boneshaker Books (conveniently located just off Franklin Avenue in the Seward Neighborhood) has an extensive collection of extremely well-executed, overwhelmingly bleak graphic novels? It's true, and many titles by the eminent Joe Sacco are among them. Sacco excels at showing up in war-torn places and just kind of embedding himself in the daily lives of ordinary folks who have suffered through all sorts of unthinkable shit. I read most if not all of his volume on the former Yugoslav countries a couple of years ago, and it was of a piece with this one.

On this one, Sacco takes taxicabs around Gaza and drinks tea with all sorts of locals whom he genuinely empathizes with and also feels guilty about exploiting for their stories. I read this one over the course of a month on my shift, which was probably the way to do it. I think any larger chunks closer together would have been too overwhelming and sad. As it was, the stories started running together anyway. I want to have a larger capacity for empathy. Sacco is a brilliant chronicler (is that a word) of oppression, and I can appreciate his work even if I can't enjoy it much.

American Printing House for the Blind: Louisville

Molly and I visited the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville on December 3, and it was very interesting. We saw how they printed Braille books and observed them recording an audiobook. 

Book Report: Obscura by Joe Hart

I've been reading more sci-fi and post-apocalyptic fiction both because I enjoy it and also because Molly enjoys it, which gives us something that we can read together. My friend Elliot read this one over the course of a couple of days and lent it to me before it was due back to the library. Molly described it as having a lot of soap-opera plot elements, which is legit, but it's also imaginative and entertaining in ways that harder sci-fi isn't. There's opioid addiction, teleportation, a race to find a cure for a strange neurological disease (which killed the protagonist's husband and may kill her daughter if she doesn't hurry!), and so much more. It's fun, and it is just classy enough to avoid a guilty-pleasure label.

Book Report: Reason for Hope by Jane Goodall

This was suggested as the Boneshaker Science Book Club selection for January, and I accepted that recommendation readily, because I was completely out of ideas. I guess I thought it would be more of an overview of her life’s work or more of a conventional memoir, but instead it’s a framing of her life in terms of her religious beliefs, which was not terribly interesting. The discussion at the book club was a lot more interesting than the book itself, and touched on Dr. Goodall's "religious privilege," which I thought was a great way to express the way that I feel about how she presents her beliefs. She had a very pleasant, un-forced religious upbringing, so she has positive feelings about it, and doesn't seem to realize that many others had different experiences with religion. 

Book Report: Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

This book was the first graphic novel nominated for the Man Booker Prize, so I put in my request at the library and waited patiently for months, assuming that it would be more than worth the delay once it arrived. And goddamn, was I disappointed in this book that I spent no money to acquire and read. It was really terrible, and I don’t want to dwell on it, but I need to make a few points:

The art is minimalist, which I don’t have a problem with, but it’s so unadorned that it’s difficult to tell the characters apart.

The dialogue is extremely flat, which when combined with the boring art, makes for a boring-ass reading experience.

The plot, such as it is, deals with the aftermath of an abduction and killing of Sabrina (in Chicago, I think), and the descent into Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorizing of Sabrina’s boyfriend. The dude is understandably depressed and shaken, but he’s an absolute cipher of a character, as is his high school friend whom he’s staying with in the southwest.

Everyone is a damn cipher, and their motivations and feelings seem completely arbitrarily assigned. Most of the heavy lifting of the plot is done by the disembodied voice of the conspiracy-theorizing radio host, which is a very alienating way to experience a story.

Thesis statement: Assholes in real life are also assholes online, I guess, and we’re in a real dark place as a country. I agree, but this book still sucks. At least it doesn’t take long to read.