The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards

There is a common term for many traditionalists today, decrying our ‘throwaway culture’. Used in Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ it’s used by many in the environmental community now to refer to our habit of single use objects and wastefulness. But in Lauadto Si’ and other Catholic writings, particularly those on abortion and euthanasia, it also refers to throwing away people who would be inconvenient. I agree that there are troubling ways in the modern world that we prioritize convenience over obligation to community and family, and that we need to build a support for one another in society. But haranguing today’s society – and liberals—for wanting to do away with inconvenient people ignores the absolute horror of life for people with mental or intellectual disorders for almost all of life, really until a PC culture of the 70s and 80s.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter addresses many of the bizarre realities of life not so very long ago. Set in 1964, a couple rush to the hospital with the wife in labor. In the first few pages of the book, Norah Henry gives birth to a son, Paul. And then, shortly after, a girl, Phoebe, who her husband, Dr. David Henry, quickly realizes has down syndrome. He makes the decision to ask his nurse, Caroline Gill, to take the child to a sanitorium he knows of and tells his wife that the second child, a daughter, was stillborn.

This lie is the foundation of the story, which switches perspectives to follow both Caroline Gill and the Henry’s. Upon seeing the sorry state of the sanitarium, Caroline Gill cannot bring herself to leave the newborn there, in a dilapidated building with an indifferent staff. Instead, she drives off with the child creating a new life for herself, passing the girl, Phoebe, off as her own daughter. The book follows not only her own narrative, charting a course for her and Phoebe, but also fighting for legal rights for children with Down Syndrome and disproving the prevailing thoughts on what they were able to do. The book is not overly preachy, but it is also clear about the lack of any sort of not only support but any expectation or even allowance that someone with Down Syndrome could lead a life.

Within the Henry’s life, the lie slowly eats away at them. Norah becomes increasingly depressed and isolated, not only grieving what she believes was a stillborn daughter but also having been denied (because of the nonexistence of a body) a funeral or opportunity to grieve. Dr. David Henry is adamantly opposed to the idea of a funeral and doesn’t understand why it was necessary. He also becomes increasingly distant, and, being haunted by the fact of a child with Down Syndrome, rejects out of hand the idea of having another child, with no discussion or explanation to poor Norah. This distance eats away at and destroys their marriage, and seeps into their son as well.

This seems a maudlin setting for a book, but it is exceptionally well done. Even with such an emotional topic, I never felt that I was being manipulated or steered by the narrative, or that it seemed contrived. The initiating event is terrible, without a doubt, but also very believable for an event in 1964, when anyone with a disability could be hidden away in a sanitarium and never spoken about, and when there was still a ways to go before it might be expected that women could be told about their own lives. My own grandmother had a miscarriage and full hysterectomy and when my mother, experiencing some health problems, tried to ask why, my grandmother said that she was never told why (!!!!) and that women wouldn’t have talked about such things. Turn TMC on late at night for a cross section of older movies to watch story after story of everyone agreeing that a woman couldn’t possibly handle the truth about her own health or her child or loved one.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter handled a story that could have been just too in your face and manipulative with sensitivity and realism. Reading of the Henry’s life was tragic, but the story was not overly sad and was moving and intriguing throughout. I really loved this story, and it shined a light on a part of our own society’s history that was reality not too long ago at all. I have thought about it for ages afterwards.

 

Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food

Lost Feast, Lenore Newman

We live in a somewhat contradictory world, culinarily speaking. On the one hand, those of us in one of the wealthier countries, or a wealthier city in any country, have an incredibly variety at our fingertips, more than could have been available just 20 years ago. An interest in food, and further immigration and cultural exchange, has led to me being able to pick up Icelandic yogurt, some dragonfruit, and a premade coconut curry at a standard grocery store in the suburban US. At the same time, however, globally our food choices have begun to disappear. Many traditional preparations have been lost, and the industrialization of food has caused local agriculture and fruit and vegetable cultivars, or landraces of livestock, to disappear, which author Lenore Newman refers to as a ‘disappearing library.’ The specialized cows who make Skyr, the Icelandic yogurt, only exist in Iceland and are grazed in small patches. Either we eat far less Skyr, or we need to crossbreed these cows with other breeds, industrialize the process and, in effect, make Skyr disappear. And the industrial process would prefer to see fewer and fewer breeds and greater conformity to make planting and harvesting easier—and that’s before even getting into seed patenting or GMOs, which Newman doesn’t really get into in this book.

Leonore Newman is a culinary historian, which means she travels the world researching different culture and eating lots of different food. It’s the type of job that makes me think my guidance counselors didn’t do a good enough job explaining career options to me when I was in school. Throughout this book she discovers the foods that have disappeared from our table, and the species we have caused to actually go extinct. The most famous of species we killed off are probably the passenger pigeon, which was once plentiful enough to make the skies go dark for days, and the dodo, but wild species we’ve hunted and gathered to extinction are far older than those. She discusses silphium, an herb that was greatly praised as a cooking ingredient and for medicinal purposes by the ancient Greece and Romans and at some point just disappeared. And even before that, our ancestors hunted most of the megafauna to extinction. There’s a clear link to be shown of human settlement and the extinction of mastodon and mammoth, aurochs, and moa. And today we see the same pattern, as species that cannot be domesticated and are only found in the wild face extinction from excessive hunting, excessive waste, and habitat loss. Whether they are expensive luxury items, such as white truffles, or the 80% of fisheries that are now overfished, we are continuing to race to use up our resources, without the excuses we had in the past. Now we know extinction is possible. Now we know we’re doing it. And now we have options.

And a lot of this is because of waste, then and now. Maybe not the first one. The Quaternary Extinctions that killed off the Stone Age megafauna was probably came close to a ‘natural’ extinction when a new predator came on the scene. Combined with a changing climate we killed off several species while we were trying to survive. We won’t know for sure, but it seems unlikely, given how hard a mammoth was to kill, that we were just clubbing them for fun. But it’s certainly a factor in the modern extinctions. Passenger pigeons were killed by the hundreds, strung up and sold for pennies, or just killed off for being a pest, and it’s no doubt that many of those pigeons did not need to be killed, and ended up rotting and thrown away. Today, not only is food waste a serious problem, but tons–literally tons—of sea creatures are killed and thrown back into the ocean as bycatch. They can’t legally be fished, but there is no way to completely prevent them from being caught and no regulatory agencies are watching the nets.

And in addition to those animals we have driven and are driving to extinction, we are smoothing out the genetic diversity of many of our domesticated species. This is bouncing back somewhat, as the Slow Food movement has taken off and small groups are forming to resurrect or save heritage breeds. And yet, in many ways our groceries shelves, which seem to have so much variety compared to 30 years, are almost bare. Consider this information Newman highlights:

If we compare the list of modern cultivars to the 1903 USDA master list of available seeds, we have lost 97 percent of the list cultivars of asparagus, all cultivars of broccoli available at the time, 93 percent of the listed carrots, nine out of ten corn cultivars, 95 percent of cucumbers and onions and radish cultivars….Five hundred varieties of lettuce shrank to thrity-six,… . We went from 500 varieties of cabbage to twenty-eight, and 86 percent of apple cultivars vanished, as did 87 percent of pears.

And why does this really matter, given all the ‘real’ problems in the world today? Well, more genetic diversity can help us make create new varieties and revive old foods, which I think is a good thing. But that’s not the most pressing issue today. The real answer is that genetic diversity can preserve food species. When a blight comes for a crop, old cultivars can help us respond. As the climate changes and our grazing periods and grazing options change, as we need to rethink which lands we can and should use for food, old landraces (the livestock version of a cultivar) that are more adapted to different diets and different climates will be essential. And as we need to rethink the amount of emissions we use by ripping down rainforests for industrial agriculture, and to keep produce fresh and ship it around the world, as we need to feed more people even as the climate changes and we need to use less land and less energy, new-old cultivars are going to become increasingly necessary. The spreading of a global monoculture and industrial revolution meant increasing yields but starting with crops grown in the U.S. or with Europe, not looking at local contexts, losing old ways of agriculture and old strains of crops. Rediscovering and encouraging and building markets for traditional crops, that are better adapted to the local soil or to cycles of drought and typhoon or able to resist local pests, will be essential. Looking to use these as the base to increase yields rather than thinking it can all be done from one clone will be important to rethink how we grow and use food. Despite the title of The Lost Feast, Newman refers throughout to the loss of food diversity as a lost and burning library, rich sources of knowledge disappearing.

The Lost Feast is a tragic tale. It’s strange to think of how completely and suddenly we have transformed the world, and how much has disappeared. One wonders if we can act quickly enough to save some of our current fish stocks, and what the future with a rapidly changing climate will bring. And it’s also a tale of adaptation. The book is wistful, and clear on how we depend on genetic diversity and natural systems, but it is not apocalyptic. Our diets have changed rapidly, from generation to generation, and we have learned to be quite creative in what we eat, adapting to whatever is handy and near by. Newman discusses the unique food of the Hawaiian islands, a blend of traditional food such as taro (itself an imported/invasive species) and canned meats brought over by colonists. She doesn’t discuss this in the book, but in Florida and Virginia ecologists are trying to use our tendency to overhunt for good, sharing recipes for lionfish and snakehead.  But it’s still hard not to feel the sense of loss. And wonder what in our cookbooks generations after us will read and wonder about and never, ever taste.

Velvet Worms and Horseshoe Crabs

Velvet Worms and Horseshoe Crabs, Richard Fortey

The great question of paleontology or biology or ecology—all the life sciences really—is how did we get to where we are now? Where (and when) did all these species come from? How did the current mix come to be? And, relatedly, what lets some species (or genera, family, order, etc.) survive when others went extinct?

Velvet Worms and Horseshoe Crabs explores these questions by looking at the species – bacteria, plans, fungi, and animals – who have survived. Things like horseshoe crabs, the only survivors of a once-sprawling (order? Class? I forget) that included trilobites and others back in the day. Other living fossils include creatures such as the extremophiles in Yellow Stone, the Australian monotremes, ferns and other of the earliest plants, and stromatolites, possibly the longest existing form of life on earth. These microbial colonies were likely here 3.5 billion years ago.

Each of the essays in this book was interesting in its own way. I like nature writing. I like learning about weird creatures, like clams that have managed to live in high methane environments. I am morbidly interested in past mass extinctions; in a weird way they give me hope about what we might see on the other side of this one. But I didn’t think there was a through line in the book. Fortey discusses these living fossils and why he is seeking them out frequently; he talks about learning the ways species stay the same and how they change, emphasizing that there is no true living fossil. Even something like the horseshoe crab or the crocodile has changed itself over time.

All of this, as I mentioned, is interesting. But it does not really answer the questions it was set out to answer. Are there any similarities? Is there any lesson? Maybe there isn’t, and that’s okay, too. Perhaps this are all just natural curiosities. I just wanted a bit more of a thesis, a bit more understanding of why this was a book and not just his own fun group of field trips around the globe. I also felt that in his effort to showcase many different groups, some were shoehorned in. In the discussion of salamanders, for instance, he is honest that it’s difficult to figure out which of the amphibians are closest to former ancestors. If this is the case, then perhaps leave them to the side. Look more at insects or arachnids or dive more deeply on the plant and fungus kingdoms. Instead, it seemed that a couple of the chapters were checking off a list rather than adding to the already-thin thesis. And, most unforgivably, during some of these I even started to get bored. And so I have to say that there are other books who cover weird animals, extinctions, or globe trotting with more wit and insight. It may be better to spend your reading time with them.

Barabbas

Barabbas, Par Lagerkvist

In the Passion story, when Jesus is condemned and brought to the cross, per tradition the Roman authorities offer to free one prisoner, chosen by the crowd. (Which, after hearing this story every Palm Sunday for my entire life, it is only now as I’m writing it out that it strikes me as how incredibly cruel this tradition was. It’s always presented as a ‘gift’ from the Roman authorities, but yeesh.) Back to the book –Jesus Barabbas, described as a well-known criminal, is the prisoner freed that Passover. The crowd demands that Jesus be crucified and Barabbas be freed. And then as far as the Bible is concerned, he disappears, never to be heard or seen in this narrative again.

This fairly short book follows Barabbas after he is freed, wandering and looking for meaning, a reason that he should be spared. It is a tale of searching, as Barabbas is fascinated by this character who is inspiring such a following, who literally died in his stead, and willingly went to his crucifixion. Barabbas wants to believe, and wants to have the feeling and meaning that Jesus inspires in the early Christians, even going so far as to try to convert when a fellow slave is evangelizing to him. But as soon as they are ordered to recant or die by the Romans, Barabbas does so, stating that he wants to but cannot believe as the Christians do.

This is a stark and tragic book. If it were a movie, it would be full of long, silent tracking shots, or scenes with only a minor key chord droning slowly in the background. It feels barren and empty, which seems a good style for what we are shown of Barabbas himself, wanting meaning, belonging, and belief and having it denied to him completely although he may try. Even this searching, though, seems mostly empty. It isn’t yearning or anything, it is devoid of feeling and emotion. It simply is.

It’s difficult to know exactly what to do with this book because of that. In a way, it is a story of faith through the eyes of someone who has none, a questioning of what does cause people to believe, and to sacrifice themselves for an idea or a religion or something outside of themselves. And it is an admission that this is unexplainable—to someone who does not grasp it or feel the same way, how can one explain what is basically an illogical premise, that of feeling something greater than oneself? It is also a fundamentally Calvinist book, suggesting that we cannot choose to believe of not, but that it is something inherent or to be given or denied by grace. A disquieting message to be sure.

2019 in Review– in Books!

Happy New Year, everyone! 2019 was a crazy year, wasn’t it? Just in my house my husband and I both switched jobs, throwing a huge surprise in our year. Out in the wider society, even more governments went crazy, the U.S. president was impeached, migrants are still being put in cages and, on the plus side, people seemed to finally realize there was something to this whole climate change thing. All of which added up to a lot more vigils and marches for me. But the new jobs came with more travel. Inconvenient for my family and bad if I want to stay on top of laundry and cleaning, but I got a lot of reading done in airports. Below, my 2019 in books.

 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami. Murakami is an author who I always enjoy reading, but I’m fairly certain I only understand around 10-20% of what I’m reading about. This short story collection is no exception, full of odd tales and bizarre stories but in such a way that the banal and magical seems expected and straightforward. This collection includes the story of someone constantly looking for a ‘door’, with no other explanation given, a woman who has her name stolen by a monkey, and a surprisingly normal story of a couple who go to the zoo to see baby kangaroos.

Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan. Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad is one of my favorite books of all time, but I wasn’t as blown away by this. It’s a much more traditional historic novel of a young woman in World War II whose family had fallen on hard times in the depression, and whose father, a former mob courier, has disappeared. The young woman ends up tangled in her father’s past while carving out her own life as a one of the first ever woman divers. It was a well executed and well written book, and I did like it for what it was. I guess I just had too high of expectations.

The Green Brain, Frank Herbert. From the deserts of Arrakis to the rainforests of Brazil. I’m all for a book on how we need nature and all that, so it could have been good. Unfortunately, between books Herbert completely forgot how to write coherent characters and that women can be people.

The Tangled Tree, David Quammen. I usually love Quammen’s science writing, and his explanations are fantastic, but the thesis here about how much inter-species genetic transfer is part of evolution, didn’t really hold through. There are couple really fantastic examples (mitochondria and chlorophyll) and we have junk DNA, but I felt like he never got into the exploration of some of the more interesting parts of all this.

Melmoth, Sarah Perry. An interesting and creepy gothic novel about the story of Melmoth, doomed to wander the earth forever in shame and looking for others to share her journey. It definitely gave me chills.

You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker. I loved this collection of short stories and essays by Alice Walker. It was a really fantastic exploration of race and gender in the 1970s, good in its own right and a ton of insight into the movements of the time. I’m not sure how much someone who didn’t have a background interest would like it—there were a couple essays I really appreciated as helping me think about second wave feminism but that read so differently than a feminist essay would today—but if someone does want to really dig into the beginnings of intersectionality or the history of our current social battles, this is a great place to do it.

Death’s End, Cixin Liu. I loved Three-Body Problem, one of my favorite books. Death’s End still had some incredibly creative pieces and really imaginative new technology and a future, but the story was so unsatisfying. It seemed to undo everything from the other two books.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Andrea Wulf. Alexander von Humboldt was a hero throughout the European influenced world in the 1800s, as both a naturalist and explorer and at the forefront of the new social revolutions. This was a very interesting tale of his life and the world he lived in.

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan. For anyone who is a fan of Mike Duncan’s podcast (History of Rome, Revolutions) reading this is a fun experience. I could basically hear Duncan’s voice the whole time, as the dry humor and informative style is exactly the same. This is a great book for our current political times, as it explorers not the final collapse of Rome, but the steps and falls that happened before Caesar and saw the Republic part of Rome start to crumble. Good lessons for today.

Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm, Leonardo Boff. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian Franciscan, has long been one of the foremost thinkers on Catholic ecology. It shows in this book, written in 1995, a good twenty years before Laudato Si’. Ecology and Liberation teases out the model of hearing the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, but much of this has been spread throughout other writings at this point. Interesting, but in 2019 not the massive shift it was in 1995.  More a historical interest now.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells. Oy. This was one of the best and most terrifying books I read last year. David Wallace-Wells writes about what happens if all of the scientists have been wrong about global warming. The already apocalyptic IPCC reports cover what scientists expect with 95% certainty. What if the worst-case scenarios are actually right? That’s what this book explores.

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, Dalai Lama XIV. As with other reviews here, sometimes I suffer with how much I read on any given topic. I read plenty of books on religion, plenty of books on science, and plenty of books on the two together. Given that, this mostly covered ground I’d read before. But reading from new cultures is always interesting to me, and just the list of Indian philosophers the Dalai Lama discusses reminds me of the vast gaps in my knowledge and a new reading list—if I can find them in English, that is.

Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett. Death might be my favorite Discworld character. When he becomes too much of his own character he is, well, not exactly fired, but lets say instructed to take early retirement by whoever is in charge of such things, and becomes human-ish. Shenanigans ensue.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandell. St. John Mandell isn’t interested exactly in the apocalypse. She doesn’t cover the battles or cannibalism or the fantasies of preppers. Instead, she envisions what happens right before, and what happens 20 years on as humanity rebuilds from a devastating pandemic. It’s written from the perspective of a theater troupe looking towards civilization, not just survival, and was really a beautiful novel.

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Milorad Pavić. I love, love, love this post-modern masterpiece. The Khazars were a real tribe in the Central Asia/Caucuses region but this book is entirely it’s own imaginative tale of their possible conversion to either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, with a tale told through a dictionary—more of an encyclopedia—and tales told through different definitions in the similar yet so different dictionaries compiled for the three major faiths.

Flood of Fire, Amitov Ghosh. The final installment of the Ibis Trilogy, a story of several individuals whose lives are interwoven during the opium wars in China. A very interesting tale in a period I don’t know nearly enough about, but it can’t help but be tragic. This piece also turned some of the characters on their heads in a way I’m not sure entirely how to feel about, but it was interesting throughout.

Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett.  The Witches! Fairytale narratives are being used nefariously in Discworld, taking over people’s lives, and the witches, particularly Granny Weatherwax, certainly aren’t going to stand for such a thing.

The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough. A little longer than I’d want, but McCullough delivers an incredibly in-depth tale of the creation of the Panama Canal. It really is amazing that such a thing was possible.

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens. A beautifully written book and murder mystery about a woman forced by circumstance to raise herself in the swamps on the North Carolina coast. I adore a book with a sense of place, and this was full of the sound and smell of mudflats, mangrove swamps, and low tide.

Early Riser, Jasper Fforde. Fforde continues his interest in dystopias either in the future or just to the side of our world with a world where strangely long, cold, and dark winters mean many people pass away and many others hibernate, and a government entity controls breeding, sleeping, and food. It’s not the lit-nerd fan service of The Eyre Affair, but it’s still clever and well-written.

Girl Waits with Gun, Amy Stewart. This was a very fun tale about one of the first woman deputies in the United States, when Constance Kopp, the oldest of three sisters living on their own and fairly isolated, takes on a gangster who rammed them in a roadside accident. Even more fun as its based on a true tale—the title comes from a newspaper account at the time.

Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi. Oyeyemi is one of the best authors today, taking the seed of a fairytale and growing it into something entirely unique and in a world that seems to exist on top of or alongside our own. This story is one of a family of women and their homeland, Druhastrana, which may or may not exist, talking dolls, changelings, and a ginger bread that is irresistible.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James. Nope. One of the books I hated most, it was page after page of unrelenting cruelty and graphic violence with no pause for even a second. I should have put it down after a few chapters, but it received such accolades I assumed there would be some sort of pay off. Friends, there was not.

The Obelisk Gate, N. K. Jemisin. The second in Jemisin’s the Stone Sky trilogy, we learn a bit more about the plan that led to the Fifth Season that started this all, follow Essun in making her new life, and follow her daughter’s story on the other end of the world. Jemisin’s trilogy is absolutely fascinating and creative and I couldn’t put this down.

Good Omens, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. The fun game with this, as with the Amazon special, is to try to figure out which lines are from Pratchett and which are from Gaiman. Either way, the novel shares the wit of both and their shared philosophy that no one, not even Gods, should just use people as a means to their own end.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman.  The Gods and myths of old countries have not found the United States they’ve been brought to a fertile ground, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still here with some power and eager for more, or that the new idols of our society aren’t fighting just as hard for our belief. I fell down a pretty good Wikipedia rabbit hole after this trying to identify all the characters.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz. I was really not as enamored of this book as the rest of the world seemed to be. It was fine, parts were really interesting, but mostly I was pretty meh on the whole thing.

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law, Peter Woit. I love reading about physics and, as a person with absolutely no training whatsoever, have some serious questions about string theory. So I was interested in this book which posits not only that string theory isn’t right, but that it can’t be proven and can be endlessly tweaked to try to fit our parameters and so isn’t a science and can’t even be called wrong. Sadly for me, this book was far heavier on the advanced math than I myself could follow and I only got about 20% of it.

The Pearl that Broke Its Shell, Nadia Hashimi. I may be taking a break from reading about women in Central Asia for a while. I get it; life has been unrelenting misery for generations. This book was well written and absorbing but just so, so sad.

The Stone Sky, N. K. Jemisin. The conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy, wherein we learn why Father Earth hates the humans, and the origin of all that is currently part of the Stillness. The story was so very original and fascinating and I love this trilogy so, so very much. Among the best things I’ve read and if you haven’t read it yet you should honestly just go get The Fifth Season right now and not do anything else until you finish the whole thing. I do hope I’m not overselling it…

Leviathan Wakes, James E. A. Corey. This book was exciting and suspenseful and I bet the series on Amazon is really fun since this definitely has a sci-fi show drama type of feel. I don’t feel compelled to read the others, but this one was a fun way to pass the time.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East, Gerard Russell.  I was deeply interested in this book talking about some of the oldest current religions that have held on in the Middle East and are facing extermination now, including Yazidis, Druze, Samaritans (yes, they’re still around!), Zoroastrians, and Kalasha, an indigenous religion hanging on in the mountains in Pakistan. What’s most fascinating is how little we know about these religions, and how many of them can only be practiced in their own communities. The idea of making sure everyone in the community knew the religious laws, and of conversion, were pretty revolutionary when they happened.

Mistress Masham’s Repose, T. H. White. This was one of my favorite books growing up, and it’s still a lot of fun. Some Lilliputians were brought back to Britain by Gulliver, put on display, and eventually disappeared and set up their own hidden town. Oh, and since it’s a children’s story from Britain there’s also a run down family estate that has seen better days and an evil governess to contend with.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness, Sy Montgomery. Exploring octopus intelligence is, as Montgomery points out, probably the closest we’ll come to interacting with a fully alien intelligence. They’re super smart, but have a completely different nervous system, way of understanding and exploring the world, communication method, etc. I so want to go touch a pacific octopus now.

Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood. Atwood isn’t all dystopian future or post-apocalyptic tales. She also just explores the reality of life as a woman or a girl. Moral Disorder is a series of stories written from the perspective or about a woman throughout her life and with her family in the 70s.

My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie. This is Eliza’s story, pieced together from her letters and letters about her and lasting well past Hamilton’s death into the tumultuous days of the republic. She was an incredibly fascinating person in her own right, and this was a very interesting exploration that paints a slightly different perspective on the events covered in Hamilton.

This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein. I finally got around to reading this, and Klein released another climate change book a month later. I have to say, though, I was a bit disappointed. Klein is usually a radical thinker, but I didn’t think that this book actually captured how much does need to change.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, William Easterly. Easterly wants to challenge current development theory, which is fine, and speak up for individualism and free market capitalism and against planning, but his thesis doesn’t seem to hold up and he cherry picks examples and then dismisses those that don’t support his ideas because of reasons *waves hands.*

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, E. O. Wilson. I like Wilson, but this book is about the same as most of his others and for something written as an appeal to partner science and religion he sure didn’t bother learning anything about religious thinking on this or put any thought into why a person of faith who didn’t care about science would care about this instead of any of his other essays.

Stories of Nighttime and Some for the Day, Ben Loory. What a strange collection of tales. I think I didn’t really like it? But maybe I sort of did?

Our Kind of Traitor, John le Carré. Le Carre seems to have found his footing after having to experiment with new villains after the end of the cold war, and this was a strong novel from him. You just have to go in to le Carre without getting your hopes up about anything or getting too attached to anyone.

Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird, Katie Fallon. This incredibly informative book goes into the taxonomy, myth, and reality of vultures, primarily the turkey vulture here in the United States but also discussing condors and buzzards around the world. I was surprised to learn how endangered vultures are in most places, given how prevalent the turkey and black vultures have always been wherever I’ve lived. It was interesting, and Fallon has evident love for the birds, but I’m a bit ashamed to say I’m still not that in to vultures.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers. I wanted to like this book, I really did. Unfortunately, though, Chambers created a cool world and a bunch of super people she really wants to hang out with, and then completely forgot to make any sort of story or plot or conflict to put them in.

Small Gods, Terry Pratchett. To the extent Pratchett has an underlying thesis, this book probably spells it out as directly as any of them will, with a direct order to just do the next right thing and not try to force everyone else into the story you’ve woven for yourself/tribe/religion/etc. And it has many things to say about belief vs. ritual and the importance of either but in a very witty, Pratchett-y, Discworld-y way.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Jeffrey D. Sachs. The ideological opposite of Esterly, Sachs probably relies on the tyranny of numbers a bit too much. I think I like Sachs goals, but I’m uncomfortable with his way forward and the way too much planning limits different innovation and different cultures.  Plus, just in a realistic way, any book concerned with population that focuses exclusively on birth control and doesn’t grapple with the very real fact that growth is from infants and people living much longer even as people have less babies, and the changes we’ll see from an aging population, isn’t really facing things head on.

Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes things are unpublished for a reason. I love Vonnegut, and this is a great book for a completionist, but more than one of these seemed only 75% baked and that they could have used a bit more thinking on, although one or two really stood out.

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind, Richard Fortey. I wanted to like this more than I did. It was fine, and I’m never going to complain about reading about stromatolites, which are just crazy cool, but it got a bit draggy in some places.

Uprooted, Naomi Novik. This was such a pleasurable read and I loved everything about it! Novik’s fantasy novel isn’t exactly a retelling of any particular fairytale, but it does take the building blocks of any story about the woods, powerful beings demanding sacrifice, and the myths of Baba Yaga, and make something new out of them.

The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Fox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, Stephen Jay Gould.  Another book that was probably written for an audience that isn’t me. It was too insidery in its critique of how science and the humanities have drifted apart, with a whole section on the way conferences work in each field that had the cadence of a joke, but I didn’t get at all.

Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer. Don’t let the movie put you off of this, the first book in Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. It was enthralling, probably the best of the three although the whole trilogy was amazing. And oh how I love a good unreliable narrator.

The Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007, ed. Philip Zaleski. Meh. I don’t want to criticize a book for being a different book than the one I wanted, but I guess I expect spiritual writing to be a bit more focused internally, not just anything that has to do with religion or society.

Florida, Lauren Groff. A wonderful collection of short stories about people in or from Florida, mostly exploring alienation, loneliness and connection, and the anxieties of raising children while the world is falling apart and all the places you love are going to be underwater, something I can particularly identify with right now.

Danubia: A Personal History of Hapsburg Europe, Simon Winder. Mostly pretty good, but I think it presumes more background knowledge of the locations of and leaders of Europe than I have at my fingertips. Winder wasn’t writing for us ignorant Americans.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton. This was a really inventive tale. It’s sort of a weird mix of Agatha Christie and Doctor Who and just really well written.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll. I love this book, even if the movie simultaneously fascinated and terrified me when I was a kid. (I blame it for my lifelong dislike of pansies). It’s a great introduction to the completely absurd, and should be read by everyone as a child and as an adult.

Authority, Jeff Vandermeer. The second installment of the Southern Reach trilogy it shares so much and still doesn’t answer anything and leads to so many more questions. I spent most of this book gasping and then demanding my husband drop everything to read it so we could talk about it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman. A grown up fairytale that captures the weird rules we live in as children and tells a story of the world’s hidden in ours. It was a short and affecting read, and reminded me how much history England has. Having grown up in a world where our 1960s house was practically original to the town, it’s always amazing me to contemplate how much history and memory some places have.

Acceptance, Jeff Vandermeer. This whole trilogy was so unique and intriguing, and the ending was just as strange as the rest of the book. Vandermeer manages to make a world that does truly seem wholly apart from us and impossible to understand, but still somehow real and knowable even if we don’t know anything about it.

Diversity of Vocations, Marie Dennis. A short book on how we can live out our calls to help others and live out the sacraments and beatitudes. Marie Dennis is a really interesting person (and super nice in person, full disclosure), but I did think this book didn’t entirely speak to how to live this out in the realities most of us live in.

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami. The English translation of Murakami’s children’s novella has the same dreamlike quality of all of his stories, where nothing makes sense to explain but all seems proper in the story. The English translation is arranged in such a way to be a visual tale as well, with strange pictures and a unique layout.

And that wraps it up for 2019! I plan on diving into books in 2020 to tamp down the existential terror I feel and the dread that increases with every minute that we get closer to November in the United States. At least, I’ll do a lot of reading until phone banking and GOTV takes over my life; make your plans for volunteering July through November today!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annihilation

Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer

We are given very little to hold on to in Annihilation, the first book in Jeff Van Der Meer’s Southern Reach trilogy. When we begin, we know that the expedition is made up of a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor and a psychologist. We know at one point a linguist would be joining. We know they are exploring Area X. We know that Area X is managed by the Southern Reach organization. We know there is a lighthouse in Area X, one that was on their map, and we know there is a tunnel tower that is on no one’s map. And we know others have explored the area before.

And this is it. We do not know anyone’s names, by design, the names of the expedition members having been stripped away during their training. We have no idea the size of Area X—Southern Reach has given an estimate, but no expedition member ever remembers crossing the border, going in or coming out. We have no idea what Area X is, or the shadowy Southern Reach (quasi governmental? It seems?) We don’t even really know where it is—the implication is that this is the United States, but there is nothing in the text to confirm or deny that. Even the animals the biologist sees are ill defined. Some are called out by name—dolphins and wild boars, some frogs and birds—but even most of the animals are maddeningly vague, with the “large water reptiles” appearing and most animals never being described beyond the most generic.

The story centers around the biologist. She has joined the expedition after her husband joined the previous one and never came back, or at least not really. Through a series of flashbacks we learn that his body reappeared, with no knowledge of how he left Area X or made it all the way back to their house, but seemed irredeemably changed. Within months he and all the other members of his expedition had died of cancer. We never receive the stories of others on the team. When the book opens, they are already in Area X. The psychologist had hypnotized them while they crossed the border; supposedly the border crossing is too intense for expeditions to handle otherwise.

And this is what we have to hold onto, and it is very sparse. The expedition is meant to explore Area X, study it, record all their observations and write them down in journals. There is a basecamp, and on all maps their attention has been drawn to a lighthouse. They also see, however, a small structure rising from the ground, which everyone refers to as the tunnel and the biologist can only mentally process as the tower while recognizing that it goes underground. The tunnel tower is either made of stone or a living, breathing structure. It has writing that seems vaguely religious on the walls, writing made of fruiting fungus with small, unrecognizable creatures. It has been there throughout all the expeditions or has only appeared in the last few months. There is nothing explainable here. And our disorientation continues the biologist slowly realizes how much of what was told in their training was a lie, and how much they were never told. And realizes that Area X is changing her, throwing us even more into disarray. How much that she is seeing and hearing is real?

It is a bizarre, disorienting story, from the very beginning. As a reader, we cast about for something to hang onto, some way to orient ourselves, but as I had the same realization as the biologist does of the Southern Reach, a deep realization of just how little Van Der Meer had given me to work with. But I also felt similarly fascinated by Area X. With so little to work with, he is still able to exploit a feeling of abandonment, of nature, and of vague unease that permeates the short book. I was pulled through quickly, wanting more of this strange, bizarre universe he’d built. There were no answers given at the end (I suppose they may be in the later books, but I deeply hope they are not), and so those who want closure will not be satisfied. But in a way the lack of explanation was an answer in itself. I look forward to the rest of the series, and the questions yet to come.

The Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007

The Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007, ed. Philip Zaleski

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from this book, but I was, well, underwhelmed. It wasn’t bad, per se. Just a bit dry in parts and not what I was looking for.

Defining ‘spiritual’ is tricky business. Who am I to judge what one person says is spiritual to them? What makes something spiritual rather than thoughtful. Does spiritual have to be related to religion? If someone is motivated by ‘the spirit’ is the activity then spiritual, even if it seems to be something else? For me, reading this book and finding essays that were fine, but not what I wanted here, I felt the formation of a definition that I didn’t know I had.

My definitions: spiritual writing is generally inward, rather than outward looking. It may focus on things happening in society, but primarily focused on how they represent or affect internal feelings rather than external systems. Spiritual is different from religious, in that it is more personal. Just because something is tangentially related to a religion doesn’t make it spiritual, and I don’t think that the culture wars are particularly spiritual, either. They are tribal, or political, but judging others and society—while a longstanding practice in religion—do not, again, have that reflective quality I look for. And that’s far too much of what I found in these pages. Explaining or judging or analyzing, but not necessarily searching.

Which isn’t too say it’s lacking entirely. There were beautiful poems interspersed between the many essays. There is a beautiful essay on free climbing, one that looks at not only where we find meaning but also explores what we owe ourselves and what we others, a key question for those of us living in community and living out religion. A short essay on laughter and what it means for humans stood out for me as well.

Elsewhere, though, I found myself feeling slightly put out by the book, as if I had been misled by the title. In Pandora, the streaming radio service that creates playlists, when listening you can rate each song, thumbs up, thumbs down, or “not for this playlist.” That was my rating for most of this book.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton

Reading a good book is sort of like being addicted, only with less bad consequences. From the first line, all I wanted to do was be in this story and finish this novel. When I wasn’t reading The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I was spending my entire day thinking about Evelyn Hardcastle and when I’d be able to read it again. I would sneak away to read a line or two if I could escape my family for half a second. And I happily ignored my own health as finishing this book was far more important than eating or sleeping.

This mystery novel is sort of a hybrid of Agatha Christie plus Quantum Leap.  We’re thrown in in the middle of the book, disoriented, with no knowledge or understanding of what’s happening, yelling someone’s name, and seeing a woman pursued through the woods. As the story develops we learn more about our situation, but there are still mysteries upon mysteries. We’re in a dilapidated and semi-refurbished house that has seen better days, and have been trapped in a loop—at the end of the night Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered. We will live this day through the perspective of different guests until we solve the murder. And, as is to be expected in a tale heavily influenced by the classics of British murder mysteries, every guest here has secrets upon secrets.

Along with the murder mystery, we find other stories that need to be unraveled, such as our own identity, how and why we became trapped in this tale, and what is outside of this day and this mystery. All of these answers are dripped out little by little, as the story unrolls and untangles with constant twists and turns. And while the final answer to the main mystery is one that might be a classic solution for a Christie novel, I never saw it coming. It might partly be because I inhaled this book so quickly I barely had time to think, but almost all of the twists and turns came as a surprise to me and the book thrilled me throughout.

This delightful novel was definitely one of the best books I read all year, and among the most creative. It appealed to all of my nerdy interests, from murder mysteries to time travel. It was a ton of fun all the way through.