Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries ****

I'm a sucker for books that explain the societal forces shaping unexamined aspects of our daily lives. The Secret Life of Groceries looks at various parts of the supply chain that enables "the dark miracle of the American supermarket."

The words "secret" and "dark" imply that the book might be an investigative exposé about the abuses required to ensure that Americans have cheap roasted chicken. Lorr acknowledges uncomfortable truths about food safety and the exploitation of workers, but he is more interested in the day-to-day reality of laborers involved –– truckers, buyers, food marketers, retail clerks –– and the reasons their jobs take the form that they do. The answer is almost always the modern tyranny of logistics and human capital management.

In the best parts of the book, Lorr does a passable imitation of David Foster Wallace's style and approach. He embeds himself with a worker, describes their life in an immersive and slightly ironic way, and explains how the details fit with broad underlying themes about the human condition, conveyed with complex sentence structures and discursive footnotes. I appreciated many of his conceptual insights, such as how the nature of the product changes as it moves through the system:

In the same way the fecal shrieking bird ceases ceases being an animal and becomes food, an item within the grocery matrix loses its identity as food and becomes a product. ... Now it is defined by the cubic inches of its packaging, its price per unit...

Far from being a muckraker, Lorr wants to present a balanced view of the conflicting motivations in the system. 

When he rides along with a long-haul trucker, he shows how tiring and dangerous the job is and how the economic setup makes it nearly impossible for her to succeed, but he doesn't demonize the trucking companies and notes that the truckers themselves value their freedom.

It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation... "This job is a misery, but it's the only thing in the world for me.

What people call the supply chain is a long, interconnected network of human beings working on other humans' behalf. ... The result is both incredible beyond words ––abundance, wish fulfillment, and low price––and as cruel and demeaning as [work slavery]. To me, this is as hopeful as it is depressing. 

The most intriguing sections to me were those about crafting a retail identity that helps the consumer (i.e. me) find meaning in consumption. The first chapter is about Trader Joes, and the penultimate chapter is about a retail consultant who helps stores find "bliss points" for themselves and their customers. 

The tone and thoughtfulness fade the farther Lorr gets from the American consumer experience. The final chapter travels to Thailand to see shrimp aquaculture at "the bottom of the commodity chain." Lorr makes good observations about the impact of treating something as a commodity, but there's no balance to be found in a situation involving slavery, overfishing, and shrimp eyeball ablation. It felt like a chapter he had to include, but it retrospectively cast a pall over the rest of the book.

Knut Hamsum, Mysteries ****

Knut Hamsun is a Nobel Prize-winning author from Norway. I re-read Mysteries in honor of our upcoming trip to Norway and my recent experience with a more contemporary Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard.

My review from 20 years ago holds up pretty well. Mysteries definitely feels like a modernist novel rather than one published in 1897. The enjoyment comes from trying to puzzle out Nagel's behavior, to determine the method behind his apparent madness. The main shortcoming is a lack of narrative progress.

Kelly Link, White Cat Black Dog ***

Kelly Link has a sterling reputation as a writer of "strange, surreal short stories" that riff humorously on genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, and hard-boiled noir. The stories in White Cat, Black Dog are modern versions of fairy tales.

I have now read two Link collections and I find her stories to be... fine. The narratives hold my attention, the tone is mildly amusing, the conclusions are never what I expect. I'm entertained. They often include a sentence that jumps out as an important message, as fairy tales should:

He was discovering that being loved could be as productive of anxiety as the lack of it was. ("The White Cat's Divorce")

We all want things it would be better not to want... We pursue them anyway, don't we? ("Prince Hat Underground")

They are monsters, I think, because we do not understand why they do what they do. ("The White Road")

You cannot always be the person you thought you were, not matter how badly you want to be her. ("The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear") 

   However, they don't engage my imagination as I hoped they would.

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite ** 1/2

Super-Infinite is a biography and appreciation of the Elizabethan-era poet John Donne. The title refers to Donne's typically expansive rhetoric, full of intensifiers and transformations.

The book is clearly pitched at readers like myself who know nothing about Donne beyond "no man is an island" and "ask not for whom the bell tolls." Rundell presents him as the ultimate love poet whose work blends the sacred and the profane, the soul and the body. During his lifetime, Donne was best known for the quality of his sermons as the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.

Rundell regularly praises Donne's uniquely sensuous style, going so far as to make the "case that Donne was one of the finest writers in English; that he belongs up alongside Shakespeare." However, she doesn't  provide sufficient examples or close readings to back up this claim. The snippets of his work are too short to properly illustrate his supposedly distinctive style. At other times, Rundell emphasizes the density of his writing: "He is at times impossible to understand." Bottom line: the book didn't entice me to read Donne.

Nor does Donne the person "come off very magnificently." He wrote his love poetry to entertain his smart-ass friends, made a poor marriage, spent years obsequiously courting the favor of various patrons, and treated his children badly. His biography is more interesting for what it tells us about his times than about him. For instance, everyone in Donne's social class was a poet; poetry was the social media of the day. Donne didn't publish his poetry; our primary source for it is his friends' commonplace books, which were essentially personal scrapbooks of knowledge. Just as she did with Donne's work, Rundell passes over these topics too superficially.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity ****

With many writers, it's easy to see what makes their work captivating: intricate plotting, immersive world-building, fascinating characters, realistic dialogue, sophisticated themes. Other writers are magicians, in that it's not clear how they achieve their effects. The notable facets of Knausgaard's writing style are all traits usually considered negative. His descriptions are overloaded with quotidian minutiae, his characters are mundane, and it's not clear where his story is going. And yet, somehow, the book is consistently compelling. How does he do it?

The story and themes of The Wolves of Eternity emerge very slowly from the day-to-day activities of Syvert, a 20-year-old Norwegian trying to decide on a direction after returning home from his military service. When Syvert's Russian half-sister Alevtina takes over as narrator, she brings an apparently different set of themes. Meanwhile Alevtina's friend Vaslisa is writing a treatise about early Soviet-era efforts to achieve immortality. It's only in the last 100 pages of this 792-page book that the threads come together. The primary theme, I suggest, is the question of what we lose when someone dies and whether we can resurrect any of it.

At the level of plot, I appreciated parallel scenes wherein Alevtina and Syvert each contend with chatty fellow travelers. The scenes naturalistically captured the experience, illustrated the differences between the two characters, and foreshadowed their meeting in Moscow.

The last two chapters introduce a link to Knausgaard's previous book The Morning Star. I'll likely pick up that book soon, unless I'm deterred by Knausgaard's typical intimidating length and by the fact that two more related books have already been published in Norwegian.

C. J. Box, Dark Sky *** 1/2

Evelyn typically includes a well-reviewed popular thriller among the books she gets me for Christmas. Coincidentally, the hero of this year's selection, Joe Pickett, is a game warden just like Mike Bowditch, the hero of last year's selection Dead by Dawn. Joe is in Wyoming, Mike in Maine, but perhaps they'll meet someday at a game warden convention.

In this 21st Joe Pickett adventure, Joe takes a controversial tech billionaire elk hunting. Another set of hunters is out to kill the billionaire, and they end up tracking Joe and their prey through the Bighorn Mountains. Dark Sky is not a mystery: we learn who the bad guys are and what they're planning right up front. It's an survival thriller featuring realistic Western action. The fashionable contemporary villains, I noticed, were out-of-touch liberals (the social media mogul and, in the B story, an antifa activist).

Dark Sky reads like the screenplay for a Netflix or Amazon Prime series. (Actually, the cover says it's on Paramount+ :-) The prose is as straightforward as the characters' motivations and as lean as their inner thoughts. The story has A and B plotlines to keep us engaged with the peripheral characters. People are introduced with a minimum of fuss, and past events are obliquely referred to, all as appropriate for an episode in a later season.

Edward Frenkel, Love & Math ** 1/2

Edward Frenkel is a mathematician who wants to introduce us to the "hidden parallel universe of beauty and elegance" that is mathematics. Sounds great! I am totally on board for this project. Unfortunately, Frenkel fails to engage me despite my receptivity to his message.

The problem is that Frenkel doesn't explain why we should care about the discoveries he presents. He excitedly reports that difficult problems in one area of mathematics, such as number theory, can be solved using methods from another area, such as harmonic analysis. But who cares that the study of automorphic functions can shed light on the counting of solutions of equations modulo primes? I understand the satisfaction that comes from making connections, but without knowing the significance of equations modulo primes or automorphic functions (or Riemann surfaces or braid groups or...) it feels like empty puzzle-solving rather than a view into the mind of God.

Frenkel reserves his most ardent enthusiasm for a research project called the Langlands Program, "considered by many as the Grand Unified Theory of mathematics. It's a fascinating theory that weaves a web of tantalizing connections between mathematical fields that at first glance seem to be light years apart: algebra, geometry, number theory, analysis, and quantum physics." In later chapters he finally attempts to bring the abstractions back down to Earth through connections to physics, but alas the "reality" of the quantum world is just as hard to imagine as multidimensional reduction. I got a better sense of the importance and beauty of symmetry from Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question, even though I won't claim to have understood Wilczek.

Love & Math includes sections of memoir, which I found more engaging because more relatable. Frenkel's reminiscences give a fine sense of the life of an apprentice mathematician and of growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.