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.

Book Report: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz

If you've ever driven to the west coast from anywhere east of the Rockies, you know how much of the United States is a complete wasteland. There are thousands and thousands of square miles unfit for human habitation. In the Distance spends most of its time in that unforgiving place, following a Swedish immigrant named Hakan (pronounced Hawk-can) from boyhood to old age as he does little more than survive. The landscape is unrelentingly bleak, and it's an apt metaphor for Hakan's life. After getting separated from his brother, Linus, on the voyage to America in the mid 1800s, he ends up in San Francisco and makes it a goal to reunite with Linus in New York. He speaks no English, and so the early part of the book is nearly incomprehensible, as the events are seen through his eyes and interpreted incompletely based on how Hakan understands the situation. He's held captive by some sort of criminal gang based in a California gold-rush town, led by a violent, disgusting woman with rotting gums who makes Hakan her sexual slave.

After escaping her clutches, he spends most of his life avoiding other humans, especially after killing most of a band of marauding religious extremists called the Avenging Angels and becoming a wanted man. Hakan is a giant, and is for the most part a gentle soul who I rooted for, but he's in mortal danger for nearly the entire book. He's either on the verge of starvation, or freezing to death, or dying from an infection, or thirst, or at the hands of whatever bloodthirsty vigilantes who have stumbled across him. In between, years pass as he merely subsists in isolation. He comes into contact with a few good people, but they die off more quickly than your average Spinal Tap drummer, often in similarly gruesome fashion. It's a rough world, and Hakan inhabits one of the most unwelcoming areas of it, with unpleasant results.

Book Report: Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

We live about a mile from a really cool sci-fi and mystery bookstore, Uncle Hugo's & Uncle Edgar's, and until a couple of weeks ago, we'd never darkened their door. I found a really cool mass-market paperback copy of The Sirens of Titan (very similar to the one pictured above, but in even better condition) by Kurt Vonnegut for $4. The store is extremely cool, and it gave me an excuse to read one of Vonnegut's books that I'd never read before. I would like to know enough about sci-fi to purchase a book by someone who I was less familiar with, but that's a goal for a different day, I guess.

Most of the enjoyment that I got from reading the book came from some unexpected twists in the plot, so I'll try not to spoil any of the surprises that I enjoyed here. The Sirens of Titan was Vonnegut's second novel, after Player Piano, and came out a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five. It didn't seem like his satirical knife was quite as finely-honed as it was by the time Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle came out. The main themes (which I certainly enjoy) of the absurdity of both war and organized religion are firmly in place in The Sirens of Titan, but they seemed to have benefited from some additional reps by the time of his later works.

The main character of The Sirens of Titan is Malachi Constant, who begins the book as the richest man on earth. Fellow rich person Winston Niles Rumfoord is in some sort of cosmic loop where he and his dog materialize at different times in different places, and Rumfoord can see the future. There's a war fought by Martians who invade Earth, and a religion which emphasizes both God's disinterest in humans as well as the disproportionate influence which luck has over humans' outcomes. Constant is brought low, goes to Mars, then to Mercury, and then back briefly to Earth before heading to Titan, a moon of Saturn, where he's reunited with Rumfoord's wife, whom he raped on the initial voyage to Mars, and their son who was conceived at that time.

The Sirens of Titan is a good book, but it left me slightly cold. None of the characters seemed to be intended to be fully recognizable or relatable as human. That left the story to do the heavy lifting, and while it's very imaginative and swiftly plotted, I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters' outcomes.

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.