Mark Greif, Against Everything *** 1/2

Against Everything is not what I was expecting / hoping for. The title and packaging lead me to expect a collection of contrarian essays on subjects of near-universal approbation; pieces along the lines of Philip Lopate's "Against Joie de Vivre" or Stanley Fish's There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and it’s a good thing too). But only the first essay meets this description ("Against Exercise"), and only those in Part 1 encourage the reader to reconsider their attitudes toward commonly accepted practices.

However.

Greif covers a wide range of cultural subjects—food, music, policing, sex—from a mildly Continental point of view (the names Marcuse, Derrida, and Foucault come up). He shows how our ideas and practices reflect larger developments in the culture, noting for example the conservatism that underlay food science. Even the weakest essays (such as the one about YouTube) offer insights.

In the essay "Learning to Rap," Greif describes how he "came of age at the same time as hip-hop" (in New York City no less), but failed to appreciate it until years later. He ponders the reasons why he favored the contemporaneous post-punk over the "new world-historical form." This essay is a great companion piece to Carl Wilson's book Let's Talk about Love in exploring how our tastes interact with our personal identities.

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights **** 1/2

We took the ferry from St Ignace to Mackinac Island. After touring the island by horse-drawn carriage, we walked along Main Street perusing the homes and shops. We found the bookstore in the courtyard outside the Lilac Hotel, and of course we went in. We always go to local bookstores. In the general fiction section I came across a book by an author I'd never heard of, advertised as "incomparably original" and "restlessly mercurial." I bought it, and while it sat on my shelf waiting its turn, its author won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Flights is a very impressive book, but I find it hard to describe. The author refers to it as a "constellation novel," meaning that it consists of short fragments that reflect upon each other. The fragments mostly relate to travel and to the preservation of the human body after death. It explores abstract philosophical ideas using concrete language and stories. Like all the best books, it made me feel like I was on the edge of a major revelation, that I was having profound insights that I couldn't quite articulate. Definitely a book to return to.

It's my understanding that each of Olga Tokarczuk's books in very different from the others, so I can't draw any conclusions about her style. I'll have to read another one soon.

George Johnson, Fire in the Mind ****

Fire in the Mind is a popular science book that attempts to explain the basics of physics, cosmology, and biology. It differs from the many other examples of this genre in that Johnson contrasts the latest scientific speculation with the worldviews of various groups in northern New Mexico. The fundamental theme of the book is that humans are pattern-seekers and that it is difficult to discern how much of the pattern is immanent in the world and how much is imposed upon it by our means of understanding.

The first section, which covers particle physics, does the best job of balancing the scientific summary and the philosophical concerns. Our theories are built on abstractions building upon abstractions, what Werner Heisenberg called, "this peculiar mixture of incomprehensible mumbo jumbo and empirical success." I've always felt like the mysteries of quantum mechanics must mean we've missed a critical conceptual piece, and Johnson openly acknowledges this possibility. Johnson also provides lovely descriptions of New Mexico, including footnotes with actual hiking directions ("Lake Peak can be reached in half a day by driving up Hyde Park road to the ski basin...").

The later sections of the book are less distinctive than the first, although they retain Johnson's clear exposition.

Kate Atkinson, Transcription *** 1/2

Transcription is a spy novel written by a literary novelist. It's similar to an Alan Furst novel in that the main character is not a professional but a regular person whose mundane job happens to involve espionage. 

London, 1940. Juliet is an eighteen-year-old who gets recruited into MI5 to transcribe conversations between an agent posing as a Nazi spy and the "fifth column" informants who pass him information. Her bosses also take advantage of her naive character to have her infiltrate a group of women sympathetic to the Germans. At the same time, she harbors romantic feelings about her (older) boss, who sends mixed signals about whether the feelings are reciprocated.

I appreciated how the espionage happened almost in the background of Juliet's personal development, leaving the reader to assume more than Juliet seemed to understand. When the story jumps forward to 1950, the pace of events picks up making the story a bit scattered. It starts to be more like a traditional spy novel in that we're asked to guess about everyone's motivations. And of course, many of the characters turn out to have had ulterior motives back in the war.