Incomplete Book Report: October by China Mieville

I was really excited to read October, and I gave it the old college try, but I had to give up about 100 pages in. It's just not a compelling narrative in Mieville's hands. There are hundreds of principal characters, introduced briefly and often discarded immediately, but the book reads like research notes that need to be included to justify the effort expended to acquire them. There's probably a good book in here somewhere, but I don't have the patience to sort through it.

Book Report: Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla

I read an excerpt of Ants Among Elephants on Longform or something similar a few months ago, and my interest was piqued enough to request it from the library. The book follows the story of the previous two generations of Gidla's family, leaving off when she is in elementary school. It is, like several books I've read lately, extremely bleak, with the procession of disappointment and near-starvation only occasionally interrupted by brief rays of hope.

Gidla's family are untouchable (or "outcaste") Christians in Andhra state of southeastern India, meaning they cannot live in the primary village and are socially and economically oppressed by the Brahmin, reddy, and other castes, as well as generally by Hindus and Muslims, who are held in higher esteem in Indian culture. Many untouchables were converted to Christianity by western missionaries because they were excluded from other religions. It was very enlightening to read an account of the caste system from an Indian national, and while the philosophy behind it doesn't make any more sense (but, hey, neither does racism), I understand the structure a lot better than I did.

There's no attempt to sugar-coat anything involving Gidla's family (or any other families connected to them, really) as the joyous poor, freed from the encumbrances of their material possessions, or anything like that. The closest thing I can compare it to is if an entire country was made up of the Joad family in Grapes of Wrath, except with way less food available. Even when Gidla's mother, Manjula, is able to hold down a university teaching job, she barely has enough money to keep her three children fed. Her husband is able to nearly bankrupt the family by the profligate habits of brewing two cups of tea per day and smoking cigarettes. And these are well-educated people! Who are presumably several rungs above the least fortunate! There are plenty of decisions made with which one could quibble, but when you're running on such a knife's edge your entire life, it's hard to see how things were going to work out well even if you do everything perfectly.

Patriarchy is a strong overarching theme of the book. The women often have just as strong employment prospects as the men, but they are expected to hand over their paychecks to their husbands. Gidla's uncle, Satyam, is probably the most sympathetic character in the book, and he leaves his wife and children alone without income for months and years at a time while he travels underground as a Communist revolutionary, returning only to impregnate his wife another time. I guess that's another way to say there really aren't any sympathetic characters in this book. Mother-in-laws conspire against daughter-in-laws, caste people lord their tiny amount of power over outcastes, etc., etc. They are all worthy of pathos, but it's difficult to like any of them.

Book Report: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is a really great book, and you should read it before the movie adaptation starring Natalie Portman comes out in February. I zoomed through the 195 pages in three sittings; it's not a breezy read, but it's tough to put down. Annihilation is deeply weird and profoundly unsettling in ways that I haven't experienced from a book in a long time, if ever. The closest comparison I can make to the experience of reading this book is watching the first hour or so of Seven, when the depth of John Doe's depraved and elliptical, but chillingly logical, punishments are slowly revealed, mixed with a healthy dose of Lost (I haven't seen Lost, but you know, you pick up plenty of the sense of it by just existing). Now imagine that John Doe is NATURE. /bong hit

An group of five unnamed women -- the biologist (our narrator), the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist, and the linguist -- are making the twelfth expedition into Area X, part of the Southern Reach that experienced an Event thirty years ago, and has been entirely isolated since then. The previous 11 expeditions went to complete shit in entirely different ways, and, spoiler alert, this one doesn't go so smoothly either. It's an amazing book, and I can't wait to read the second and third entries in the trilogy.

Combining Deep Thoughts

I ran the combine for about 9 hours on Saturday, which is enough time to catch up on some thinking. I hadn't combined corn before, which doesn't exactly reinforce my farm-kid bonafides, but that is what it is at this point. Running the combine is pretty mindless, but you also need to stay focused enough to react fairly quickly if something goes wrong. So, for something that involves sitting on your ass and driving around 2 miles per hour, it's sort of mentally exhausting after a full day. You can space out, but not too far, or else you'll end up driving through the field with the unload auger running and dumping all that nice, freshly-harvested corn back onto the stubble.

Grandpa has told me stories about picking corn by hand following behind a team of horses when he was in high school. Dad has told me stories about running the two-row picker, which mounted onto a tractor without a cab, before he and Grandpa bought their first combine in the mid-'70s. So, even though Dad's combine is as old as I am, I was still considerably more comfortable than previous Gillespie generations had been while doing this job.

While most attention gets paid to ethanol, nearly as much corn is fed to livestock in the U.S. as is used to produce alcohol. My parents raise sheep, and their goal has been to raise all the feed, roughage and bedding material for the sheep (a combination of corn, alfalfa, oats (for both feed and straw), and grass) on their farm, and sell the excess as they're able, depending on how the year goes. Last year, there was a big alfalfa hay crop, so Dad sold what he couldn't use from that. This year, oats and corn were the bigger producers. So, their 160 acres takes in seed corn, diesel fuel, fertilizer, herbicide, and some other miscellaneous inputs, it produces enough cash to support my parents, and the meat from 600 sheep or so is the primary product that goes into the larger world.

I'm still working out how I feel about that, and what I would prefer to see done with the land if it were up to me. It's decent land in an area where it would be used for agriculture regardless of who owned it. I really enjoy that it's not just a slab of earth with half corn and half soybeans every year, but anything that you do beyond that requires orders of magnitude of additional effort, planning and thought. Would it be better if they just sold the corn, oats, and hay, and left the livestock raising to someone else? Would it make more sense to change the makeup of the sheep flock to be more for wool production than meat production, so that less grain is required? Should some of the ground (more than their gigantic garden) be turned into vegetable production? Should it all just be turned into a hemp farm, maaaannn? I have no idea, but I'll continue to ponder. Eventually, it'll be up to me, so I need to get a semblance of an idea of a plan.

Book Report: Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

It sucks to be poor at any age, but Nomadland puts a very fine point on how much it sucks to be poor and elderly. So poor, in fact, that stationary housing is not even a consideration. The book centers around older Americans (not all past retirement age, but close) who have began living in RVs, trailers, vans, and cars in order to reduce their cost of living. None of the people we meet have enough savings to retire, and most don't have enough to buy a $4,000 vehicle without taking out a loan. Most travel around following whatever jobs are available to people their age: Amazon warehouse picker, sugar beet harvester, and national park campground attendant are the most common. Those jobs in particular seem to have developed a recruitment strategy (and a compensation scheme to match) around older folks who pretty much need whatever job is offered to them.

Bruder is an exceptionally empathetic tour guide to the RV parks (and stealth campgrounds) of primarily the Southwest, and she has a gift for getting female workampers (as they're called by Amazon, at least) to open up to her about the winding paths that their lives have taken. There's a lot of optimism present in their stories, but much of that struck me as delusion that's necessary for them to get through the brutal options that each day presents them with: drive 45 minutes each way to work so you can shower in a dumpy RV park, or crash in the Walmart parking lot to save gas? Eat, or fill the gas tank? Nomadland echoes the best of Steinbeck and Eirenreich. I'm privileged and lucky to have stable, well-paying employment, and I've never been so motivated as I am now to pay down my mortgage quickly and put every penny I can save into my 401(k). I hope that ends up being enough to avoid being a story like those told in this book.