Jenny Offill, Weather **** 1/2

Written in the same epigrammatic style as Dept. of Speculation, Weather tells the story of a woman who comes to appreciate the gravity of the issue of climate change but doesn't know what to do beyond being anxious about it. Shouldn't she do something about it, just like she should do something more to support her son's advancement and her own success? The election of 2016 adds another layer of unfocused anxiety.

There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out of it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term "milling" to describe most people's default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.

The book is filled with pithy and hilarious nuggets, and it's a quick read. It does a great job of capturing the feeling that we are supposed to be doing more -- "what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls." I lost the thread a bit in the final pages.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing ***

The subtitle of this book is "Resisting the Attention Economy," which sounds like it could be a screed against Facebook and Twitter with a prescription to opt out of the capitalist system. Odell certainly does lament that social media companies profit from encouraging our natural tendency for a short attention span. Her remedy, however, is not to head back to nature or retreat to a meditation center; in fact, she has a chapter about how retreat is impossible. Instead she encourages us to "refuse in place" and be more intentional about our attention. Paying closer and more prolonged attention to our surroundings is rewarding in itself, and is a prerequisite for meaningful action.

I find that I'm looking at my phone less these days. It's not because I went to an expensive digital detox retreat, or because I deleted any apps from my phone, or anything like that. I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing I couldn't turn away.

The most distinctive thing about How to Do Nothing is that Odell's examples of refocusing attention are not spiritual or political but artistic. She is an artist herself and so her touchpoints come from other (mostly contemporary) artists. Art often seeks to redirect your attention or shift the context of your perception, which is exactly what Odell believes we all need to do on a regular basis.

Random fun fact: The next book on my shelf is Weather by Jenny Offill. What are the odds of reading two books in a row by different authors named Jenny O___ll?

Brian Freeman, Thief River Falls ***

The epitome of a three-star thriller. Thief River Falls is a competently written page-turner composed of all the modern trappings of the genre: A psychologically damaged protagonist; a boy in danger who recovers his memory of a traumatic event at exactly the pace required by the plot; a villain in a position of power; unexpected relationships; and, since it's a 21st-century thriller, clues that everything is not as it seems.

The final twist provides some justification for a vice I have long complained about: that characters make intuitive leaps about what's going on based on very little evidence and are invariably right. 

Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit ****

When I read Michael J. Sandel's book Justice ten years ago*, I was particularly struck by an idea that Sandel attributed to John Rawls: "differences of talent are as morally arbitrary as differences of class." It's no more fair to reward people based on their intelligence or character than it is to reward them based on their social class or family; all of it is outside of the individual's control. The Tyranny of Merit expands on this idea to explore the issues inherent in a meritocracy, even a well functioning one.

The first few chapters lay out the argument that a meritocracy inevitably leads to hubris on the part of those who succeed and resentment/humiliation on the part of those who do not. The idea that a meritocracy rewards people based on their merits is seductive, because it implies that (a) we have a great deal of control over our own success and (b) that we deserve our rewards. However, it also implies that less successful people have less merit and that their lack of success is due to personal shortcomings. For blue collar workers, the loss of social esteem is at least as problematic as falling behind financially.

Sandel notes that both "the center-left and center-right" aspire to meritocracy, differing only in their recipes for achieving it. He connects this fact with the rise in technocratic governance, in which political figures argue about logistical implementation (which can theoretically be judged objectively) rather than civic values (which cannot), and with the increased emphasis on education. The way in which we overvalue a college education and tell displaced workers to train for other jobs reminded me of James Rebank's reaction to being characterized as an underachiever in The Shepherd's Life.

The book's subtitle is "What's Become of the Common Good?" but I don't think Sandel really addresses this question. The policy prescriptions of the later chapters are much weaker than his analysis of the issues. He calls for us to have humility about the role of grace or chance in our place in society, to respect the contributions of our fellow citizens, and to revive public discussion of what constitutes success. Great suggestions all, but Sandel doesn't offer a compelling vision of how we get there.

* In recognition of how frequently I think about ideas from Justice, I hereby retroactively award that book a fifth star.

Alice Munro, Selected Stories *** 1/2

The highest rated book from my 2020 reading was an Alice Munro story collection, so why not start 2021 with an overview of her early career? Selected Stories covers Munro's first few decades, with stories from the 1960s through the 1990s in roughly chronological order.

Even the earliest stories are accomplished, but they become more ambitious over time. It is interesting to see Munro's development. Stories from the same time often share the same narrative strategies; for example, stories from the mid 80s start and end with the narrator describing their relationship with their parents then flash back to a story from when the parents were young.

Munro writes classic New Yorker-style stories," which I recently heard characterized as "a tale in which nothing much happens to one or more not especially interesting people until it all ends on a note of melancholy ambiguity." What makes her work distinctive is how the key moments arrive obliquely relative to the main story. For example, "The Moons of Jupiter" is about the narrator's father, but the epiphany (for me anyway) comes when the narrator starts withdrawing her tenderness from her daughter with leukemia. Munro is like an illusionist, misdirecting our attention in order to spring a surprise.