Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse ***

I Cheerfully Refuse feels like a writer of paperback thrillers attempting a literary novel. From the first page, Enger's writing style reminded me of plot-driven mysteries, something about the way he introduces characters and sketches their quirks. Frequent references to Don Quixote, Odysseus, and Orpheus suggest ambitions beyond a ripping yarn. The fictional work that provides the title says "our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it."

The plot kept me guessing. Its lack of predictability carried me past the many things that irked me. The story takes place after a societal collapse whose details remain hazy. The narrator blithely pulls into strange harbors without considering potential dangers. He sailed once fifteen years ago, yet shows remarkable skill when he escapes onto Lake Superior in a pocket cruiser. The author introduces MacGuffins (the author Molly Thorn and the suicide drug Willow) only to forget about them.

As the story approaches its climax, Enger even seems to forget about the themes he raised in the first 100 pages. The book becomes the action movie it was always destined to be.

Richard Price, Lazarus Man *** 1/2

I associate Richard Price with extremely realistic urban settings, excellent dialogue, and the ability to evoke full-bodied characters with just a few sentences. These virtues are on full display in Lazarus Man. What's missing, though, is any narrative drive. A building collapses in East Harlem, and the titular character is pulled out of the rubble three days later. The book follows a handful of characters in the aftermath of the disaster, but none of them have a clear goal to move the story forward.

Price's theme becomes clear in retrospect as the novel reaches its conclusion. It's about our need to connect with people and the challenges (of trust, mostly) that make it difficult. Price's books have always included peripheral moments of surprising connection and tenderness—a brief scene with an abusive boyfriend in Freedomland is the moment I remember best—but here they are the main attraction. Once the denouement made this clear to me, I re-evaluated earlier parts of the story in a positive light and found myself moved.

Art Davidson, Minus 148⁰ **** 1/2

Minus 148⁰ tells the story of the first winter ascent of Mount McKinley in 1967. The title refers to the windchill-adjusted temperature on Denali Pass when three climbers bivouacked there, I first read it in high school alongside other classic mountaineering tales such as Annapurna.

Most mountaineering books emphasize the heroic nature of the undertaking and the participants. They focus on the elaborate logistics (Everest, The Hard Way), the technical difficulties (The White Spider), the strange psychology of climbers (Beyond the Mountain; Touching the Void), or the anatomy of a disaster (Into Thin Air). The eight climbers in Minus 148⁰ are more relatable characters. In their enthusiasm they underplan the expedition; the climb is more a matter of endurance than climbing skill; and the author honestly admits to the petty divisions that spring up between teammates under stress. The nominal leader of the expedition loses his passion for the climb while still on the lower slopes.

The title aside, Davidson doesn't dwell much on the temperature or the short days. Yes, they suffer from frostbite and sometimes have to travel in the dark, but the factor that brings them near disaster is the 150-mph winds at the pass.

Davidson and a couple of the others had climbed McKinley in the past. I would have liked to hear more about how the trip differed from a summer climb. For example, they were able to travel more quickly over the glacier because the colder snow was more firm.

Annika Norlin, The Colony ***

The Colony is a novel about a motley group of seven people who live together in a remote house in the Swedish countryside. A burnt-out journalist spies their odd behavior from her campsite and befriends the teenager who seems cut off from the rest of the group.

In the early chapters, I found the characters' motivations intriguing. In various ways they feel oppressed by the demands of social interaction. Emelie is tired of justifying her burn-out to people; Jozsef feels compelled to comfort people and broker peace when there are conflicts; Sara has the magnetism of a natural leader and hates the feeling of responsibility it gives her. These characters have interpersonal skills that make them successful sought-after companions, but they find those skills burdensome. They seek to create a community in which no one imposes expectations on the others.

This theme comes in and out of focus as the story progresses. The other Colony members have more clichéd trauma. The group's vision shifts from self-sufficiency to environmentalism. The members do have expectations of each other. Sara emerges as something of a cult leader. Arguments for the superiority of their lifestyle are unconvincing (to the reader). It becomes hard to believe that the Colony would stay intact for as long as it does.

The final unraveling of the Colony is fast and rather too convenient from a plot perspective.

Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine ***

This memoir from concert pianist Jeremy Denk covers his musical education from his first lessons at age seven through his doctorate from Julliard. He describes his piano teachers and what he learned from them in the context of his family and school life.

Denk is a very good writer, especially talented at capturing the day-to-day details of living as a young musician: finding the time (and motivation) to practice, questioning how important music is relative to other life goals, learning your teacher's personality, reconciling conflicting feedback, staying even-keeled in the face of (constructive?) criticism. He effectively conveys the mix of arrogance and insecurity he felt as a clearly talented pianist. I enjoyed the earlier parts of the book best, before Denk knows for sure he wants to become a professional musician.

I was less impressed with Denk's writing about music. He describes what he learns from his various teachers, but the lessons tend to be either generic (pay attention to the composer's dynamics markings, vary the attack on the keys, "make it sing") or specific to a particular piece of music (don't play Chopin's "Raindrop" sonata exactly in time). I appreciate the countless factors that a musician needs to balance, both technical and interpretative, but didn't gain much for my musical appreciation. The chapters on harmony, melody, and rhythm are far too metaphorical to be useful to me.

For me, one of the most fascinating rhythmic comparisons in the classical canon is between Mozart and Beethoven, who composed at close to the same time, and using related language, with astonishingly different results. ... Mozart balances stoppage and flow. He knows when to interrupt, when to elide (an underrated virtue), when to gently turn a corner. ... But if Mozart wrote the ideally timeless, Beethoven managed to write something quite different: music in search of time.

This excerpt starts with a promising notion but fails to elaborate on it.

P.S. I feel I have to note that Every Good Boy Does Fine has the most amateurish cover design I've ever seen from a major publisher. An unbalanced layout, clip-art pasted into the upper right, mismatched fonts. Denk explicitly thanks the designer in his acknowledgements, which makes me question his aesthetic taste.

Michael Crummey, The Adversary ***

An engaging enough story about a brother and sister vying for control of an isolated town on the north coast of Newfoundland. The brother is a drunken bully, the sister a ruthless antagonist. The townsfolk endure their violent rivalry, the plague, bad weather, marauding pirates, and poor fishing seasons. 

The story has a fairy-tale or morality-tale quality to it, with the genre's flat characters to match. The narrative often takes unexpected turns, usually when an unexpected tragedy upends the anticipated plot development. Crummey revels in Newfoundland slang; the Acknowledgements section lists primarily works of linguistic scholarship. 

Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat ****

Hemingway's Boat is not a biography of Ernest Hemingway nor a literary analysis of his work nor a character portrait of the man. It's a bit of all these things, anchored by an account of his 38-foot fishing vessel Pilar. The heart of the book describes Hemingway's purchase of the boat and the early years during which he used it as a pressure-release valve for his volatile personality. During the years 1934 to 1937, Hemingway wrote The Green Hills of Africa, became a world-class marlin fisherman, and raged against the mixed critical response to his recent work.

Hendrickson is a master at vividly describing prosaic incidents such as the day Hemingway ordered Pilar. He imagines all the thoughts and feelings his characters are having at the time. The book includes full portaits of minor characters such as the boat builder, the young writer who served as his ship's steward, and the foreign service officer who married Hemingway's secretary. The last third of the book focuses primarily on Ernest's youngest son Gregory.

Hendrickson has at least three distinct goals, and is largely successful at all three:

• Reconstruct the mental life of Hemingway and his compatriots during a critical period
• Show that he could be supportive, loyal, and compassionate alongside his well-documented and undeniable egotism, boorishness, and malice
• Propose that his lifelong struggle with mental illness made his successes (as well as Gregory's) heroic

Hemingway's Boat has an idiosyncratic (lack of) structure. It's too long and goes too far afield, but it has a great humanity to it.

Henrik Ibsen, Six Plays ****

When I made a tour of Norwegian literature last summer, I omitted its biggest name, Henrik Ibsen. He wrote plays rather than novels, and I felt like I should see stage productions instead of reading them.

One of the books I read, Dag Solstad's Shyness and Dignity, featured a high-school teacher who has an epiphany while teaching Ibsen's The Wild Duck to a roomful of bored students. I shopped around for a collection of Ibsen plays that included A Doll's House and The Wild Duck. I found a used copy of a leather-bound Franklin Mint edition with these two plays plus Ghosts and Hedda Gabler.

A Doll's House is Ibsen's most popular play. Like most of his plays, it was controversial: it ends with a woman leaving her husband and children, unthinkable at the time. I enjoyed the play and appreciated Nora's courage of conviction, although I'm not sure her behavior in the early acts is consistent with her final decision. She is clearly acting the part of a supportive wife but seems a bit insecure even in private moments.

Ghosts feels like it goes out of its way to be controversial, with its explicit exploitation of servants and congenital syphilis. The major theme is the passing of trauma from one generation to the next.

The Wild Duck has a more sophisticated structure than the previous plays, and a more sophisticated message ("Rob the average man of his basic lie and you rob him of his happiness as well"). In the earlier plays, the truth or "Claim of the Ideal" is an unqualified good; The Wild Duck recognizes the value of self-delusion. My complaint about the play is that its setting includes an implausible attic in which people can go hunting.

Hedda Gabler features a manipulative title character that actresses surely love to play. By this point in Ibsen's development, the repressed woman has figured out how to use her position to her advantage. She gets her comeuppance in the end, so I imagine this play was less controversial.

These four plays from Ibsen's middle period find their characters pushing against social pressures. They share common elements such as unhappy marriages, knocked-up servants married off to other men, and principled suicides. After finishing them, I decided to add a couple of Ibsen's later works, Rosmersholm and The Master Builder. In these plays, the characters push against their own inner conflicts.

Rosmersholm tells the story of a landowner and pastor who has lost his faith and shifted his sympathies to the Radicals. He argues about this change with his conservative brother-in-law and with the editor of the Radical paper, and discusses its consequences with the young woman who led him to his new viewpoint. Almost nothing happens in this play beyond conversations and a few principled suicides at the beginning and end. I think its subtle messages would be better conveyed in a novel.

The Master Builder has a bullying title character who is afraid of losing his power to "the next generation." Like Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, it has a young female character demonstrating her power from within the confines of her social role. The final act has several reverses to our interpretation of the master builder's motivations. 

All six plays have something to recommend them. Dramatically, the best are A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder. Thematically, the most interesting are The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm.

Wendy Hinman, Tightwads on the Loose ***

Tightwads on the Loose is a terrible title for this account of a Seattle couple's "seven year Pacific odyssey." Sure, they can just barely afford their sailboat cruising lifestyle and often need to economize. Their 31-foot boat they can afford is too small for the voyage and for her tall husband. However, financial difficulties are not a key focus area in Hinman's story. Other challenges are more prominent: enthusiasm leading to a lack of proper preparation; equipment breakdown; unpredictable conditions and schedules; differing travel styles and life goals.

The first half of the book consists of fairly typical cruising stories like those you would read in Latitude 38 (a publication that Hinman has apparently written for). They buy a boat, sail to Mexico with the Baja Ha-Ha, swap stories with other cruisers, continue on to the South Pacific, and watch America's Cup and Volvo Ocean races in New Zealand. Their voyage in the second half of the book is more unusual as they abandon the popular westward route and sail north toward Japan. The hinge between the two halves is an electronic "meltdown" that leaves them without navigational equipment; to pay for repairing the boat, they work for a couple of years (!) at mundane jobs on an American military base in the Marshall Islands.

What I appreciated most about Tightwads on the Loose was Hinman's forthrightness about the tensions between her and her husband. She is an extrovert who relishes the social aspects of cruising; he is an engineer who relishes tinkering with the boat. She wants to keep cruising forever; he is ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. The book addresses questions about the value of the cruising lifestyle by showing the couple's differing views on the subject.

The descriptions of sailing adventures and anchorages are serviceable. For me, the most vivid sequence came when they sailed Kanmon Kaikyo, the channel between the Japanese islands of Kyushu and Honshu. It's a busy thoroughfare with a strong current, so they had to make their move on the dying ebb. Their engine dies (again), forcing them to short-tack in the narrow area outside the shipping channel... and make a beeline across when they reach the narrowest point. Meanwhile Hinman is trying to explain their situation to the Coast Guard, pausing every couple of minutes to grind in the jib on the new tack.

Stendhal, The Red and the Black ** 1/2

The Red and the Black delivers on Stendhal's reputation for ironical social commentary and psychologically complex characters, but it also shows how weak his writing is. I thought perhaps I'd  chosen the wrong translation (from Catherine Slater), but the most notable shortcomings of the prose are independent of the translation.

My biggest complaint is that Stendhal tells us about conversations that reveal his characters' natures but rarely shows us any of it. This issue is particularly acute with respect to Matilde, whose personality and moods drive the narrative. 

As soon as anyone displeased Mlle de La Mole, she had a way of punishing the offender with a joke so measured, so well chosen, so seemingly on the surface, and so appositely delivered, that the wound grew greater every moment, the more you thought about it.

The reader has to imagine these cutting remarks, which lessens the impact of the social satire.

Stendhal's vaunted psychological complexity manifests itself through the changeable moods of the characters: rapturously in love one minute, angry and miserable the next. Again the reader needs to suss out the reason for the reversals because the story doesn't provide sufficient detail.

The one area where there is more than sufficient detail is contemporary French politics. I gather that's what made The Red and the Black so controversial in its time.

Julian's final actions were pleasingly thought-provoking but it took too long to get there.

Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities ***

Geologists call a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment an unconformity. It's a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time. ... Life is filled with unconformities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding...

The Book of Unconformities is a book centered around geology, written by an anthropologist, inspired by the deaths of the author's two sisters in a span of three months. Each chapter is named for a type of stone (marble, sandstone, magnetite) that Raffles uses as a jumping off point for wide-ranging digressions. For example, the first chapter introduces the Inwood marble that underlays Manhattan and goes on to describe the history of the native Lenape; the "Sandstone" chapter mostly concerns the Neolithic standing stones in the Orkney Islands.

In its best moments, The Book of Unconformities achieves its goal of evoking the theme of disruption on multiple scales at once (geological, societal, and personal); it briefly captures a Sebaldian tone. Most of the time, though, it is telling an interesting story about the history of a place and a people, but without a clear connection to the author's larger concerns. I often found myself asking how we got onto this subject.

I felt a bit smug while reading this book because of how many of its tangents I was already familiar with: eruptions in Iceland, the Clearances in Scotland, Norwegian polar exploration, whaling at Svalbard.

Carys Davies, Clear ***

An impoverished Scottish minister travels to a remote northern island to evict its sole resident. He is seriously injured, and as the resident nurses him back to health the two men develop a bond.

Clear takes place against a rich historical background: the minister "became a poor man by throwing in his lot with the Free Church of Scotland"; the island resident Ivar is being evicted as part of the Scottish Clearances; Ivar is the last speaker of the language of Norn. Most of this context is window-dressing for a straightforward tale about a growing friendship.

Clear is a short novel that probably could have been a short story. It lacked the layering of themes that I expect from a novel. Its narrative beats were predictable via the principle of Checkov's gun.

Elias Canetti, I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole ** 1/2

This collection of writings from the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti opens with selections from his memoirs about his childhood in pre-WWI Bulgaria. They were excellent, vividly capturing his experiences and noting how they shaped his future development. I was particularly intrigued by a couple of his observations about language: he first heard Balkan folk tales from his Bulgarian nannies but remembers them in German, how and when did the translation take place; his parents spoke German to each other so he associates the language with love and secrecy.

Unfortunately I didn't find any of the other selections compelling. The modernist novel Auto-da-Fé lacked characters I could care about, the treatise Crowds and Power makes questionable leaps in its arguments, and the later Aufzeichnungen (briefs) felt like personal notes that Canetti never developed further ("I would love to study the faces in heaven. Otherwise I'd know of no reason to want to show up there. The faces in hell I already know well, as I wear them all at various times myself.").

Richard J. King, Sailing Alone: A History ***

The preface states clearly that Sailing Alone is not a typical adventure book:

My own solo crossing was not an exceptional feat of seamanship. ... I'm quite proud of the voyage in terms of endurance, and my will and energy to make the whole adventure happen, but the passage across the Atlantic took longer than projected, I did not sail efficiently, and the skills that I lacked the most were exposed in embarrassing fashion. ... This book is not the story of individual excellence, nor is it a compendium of sailing records or a practical manual on how to do it if you are considering a solo voyage yourself.

King includes stories about prominent solo sailors such as Joshua Slocum, but he talks about their motivations (which he calls their why go) more than about their adventures. He describes mundane details about day-to-day life alone on a boat while eliding storms and dismastings. The overall effect is pleasantly conversational and tones down the heroic aura surrounding single-handed sailors. It's amazing how ill-prepared the early circumnavigators were!

 

 

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season *** 1/2

A village witch is found murdered in rural Mexico. Their death is not particularly surprising given their clandestine role in many of the villagers' vices.

Hurricane Season is not a whodunit—we learn who killed the Witch fairly early—bur a whydunit. We learn about the events leading up to the murder from a handful of narrators, each of whom is caught up in the sex and violence of the local culture of macho poverty. Melchor uses the incident as a case study in the misogynist brutality of the society. It is intense and provides realistically insightful psychologies for its characters.

Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here ***

This book provides a history of US immigration policy since the 1970s, along with the contemporaneous history of the violent politics in the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). The flow of migration and counterflow of deportation ties the stories together.

I knew the broad strokes of the story. Blitzer does a nice job of filling in the details. He relates the history from the point of view of a handful of immigrants, so his opinions are clear even though he doesn't editorialize. I wish he had editorialized: as it stands, the book doesn't offer any ideas about how to handle the complicated politics and ethics of immigration.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time ** 1/2

The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance that involves time travel. The narrator is a (roughly) contemporary English woman who falls in love with the Victorian-era polar explorer she has been assigned to help transition to the twenty-first century. The Ministry also needs to keep an eye on the "expats" to see whether they survive the time travel.

The story prioritizes the budding romance over the sci-fi elements (until the final chapter), which is fine except that Bradley isn't a very good writer. Evelyn and I took turns reading aloud while the other person washed dishes, and both of us stumbled over confusing similes and awkward sentence construction. Evelyn frequently complained about the narrator's immaturity, and I found the characters' motivations confusing.

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires **** 1/2

You Dreamed of Empires is a historical novel about the day in 1519 when Hernán Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán and met Moctezuma. It tells the story from the point of view of several characters both Spanish and Aztecan, each one of them unsure about whether things are going well or very, very badly. Moctezuma welcomed the Spaniards into the city: does he consider them honored guests or is he planning an ambush? Is he a brilliant strategist or is he losing his touch?

Enrigue has an entertaining writing style that mixes historical detail with modern-seeming characters. He loves to deploy Nahuatl words for their interesting sound. The story often has a hallucinatory feel, which is appropriate given Moctezuma's penchant for mushrooms.

I loved everything about the book until the later sections where postmodernist trickery starts to intrude. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the conclusion, which (spoiler alert) is an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-type situation except that all of subsequent history, up to an including my reading of the novel, is part of the reverie.

Andy Clark, The Experience Machine ** 1/2

The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark argues that our minds are best understood as generative prediction models and that our subjective experience derives from the interface between the models' predictions and the incoming sensory signal. We use our senses to validate our expectations, and use "prediction errors" (i.e. mismatch with actual sensory signal) to train our model to make better predictions.

I wholeheartedly agree that we impose our understanding of the world onto the raw sensory data, and that indeed there is no such thing as raw sensory data "untouched by our own expectations." I agree with most of Clark's conclusions, but I find his arguments and conceptualizations hand-wavy. I was particularly unconvinced by his explanation regarding "action as self-fulfilling prediction."

Clark (or his publisher) tries to present this theory as being revolutionary "For as long as we've studied human cognition, we've believed that our senses give us direct access to the world." Really? I don't think we've believed that since the 18th century. He himself cites earlier authorities that go back at least as far as the mid-19th century. Clark's thesis is just an au courant version of the long-standing tendency to understand the mind in terms of the latest technological advances, in this case generative AI modeling.

To me, the most intriguing innovation in Clark's conception is his treatment of conscious attention as comparable to modeling precision.

By increasing or decreasing these "precision-weightings," the impact of certain predictions or of certain bits of sensory evidence can be amplified or dampened. ... What we informally think of as "attention" is implemented in these systems by mechanisms that alter these precision-weightings.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital *** 1/2

Orbital describes a day in the life of six (fictional) astronauts on the International Space Station. They observe the Earth as they circle over it sixteen times—passing from night to day every ninety minutes or so—and ponder their place in the universe.

Many reviewers of the Booker Prize-winning Orbital describe it as "meditative," which turns out to mean that it is the literary equivalent of the music they play when you're getting a massage. It favors atmosphere over development, incorporates images of nature, and encourages contemplation. Like guided meditation, the book is structured around a recurring rhythm (breath, orbits) and makes connections between mundane activities and abstract cosmic questions. 

Dan Charnas, Dilla Time **** 1/2

Dilla Time is the third book I've read in as many months about musical artists whose work I am largely unfamiliar with (following Time's Echo and Cocaine and Rhinestones). The artist in this case is J Dilla, "the hip-hop producer who reinvented rhythm" as the subtitle has it. The great thing about all of these books is that they provide vivid accounts of the contexts in which the artists worked and musicological analysis of their innovations.

J Dilla's most influential innovation was the creation of a new lurching way of keeping time, more complex and "sloppier" than swing time. He used a variety of techniques on drum machine/sequencers to achieve rhythmic friction; in particular, he subtly shifted the timing of the various drum components (snare, kick drum, hi hat) so that some feel rushed while others feel slow. His production technique created an entire genre of hip-hop in the 1990s and early 2000s, comprising such artists as A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, and The Roots.

Charnas does a nice job of explaining Dilla's approach and treating it as an important musical advance. He pays less attention to Dilla's unique way of handling harmony and melody, perhaps because it would take away from his main thesis. 

Charnas' previous book was about the business of hip-hop, so it's not surprising that he clearly navigates the maze of record labels, rights owners, and collaborations. After Dilla's death (at 32 from a rare blood disease) there was a battle over his estate, with different parties having legal authority, moral authority, and artistic authority over his legacy. Charnas presents the messy details even-handedly.

The book gave me enjoyable insights into musical artistry, the music business, the cultural milieu, and how they all impact each other. It reinforced my prejudice that hip-hop was the most innovative form of music over the turn of the century, with its artists exploring advanced techniques like jazz musicians do.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! ***

Martyr! is a hard book to describe. Its tone is that of an earnest novel of ideas, despite the exclamation point in the title implying comedy. Its main character is Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American struggling to overcome addiction and make his life and/or his death matter. However, many chapters are written from other characters' points of view, especially those of his parents who both died apparently meaningless deaths. The plot is minimal, relies on a few coincidences, and seems almost beside the point. Fascinating thoughts appear at regular intervals, but they fail to add up to a clear conclusion.

When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, 'gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.' But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff. Nobody thinks of now as the future past.

 

David Wallace, Philosophy of Physics ***

Philosophy of Physics is part of Oxford University Press' Very Short Introduction series. It identifies the metaphysical mysteries that arise when we try to understand modern physics, from relativity to quantum mechanics. What is the nature of space and time? How do we interpret probability? What the hell is happening with quantum mechanics?

I like to ponder these mind-benders from time to time. The unintelligibility of the undeniably successful mathematics must mean that our conceptual understanding has gone wrong somewhere, right? But where?

Wallace does a decent job of demonstrating the seeming paradoxes. However, I find the enigmas compelling enough that I want a longer introduction.

Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem *****

Chesapeake Requiem is an intimate portrait of the small crab-fishing community of Tangier Island, located in Chesapeake Bay. Their way of life is vanishing both literally and figuratively: every year the Bay washes away more of the island, and every generation loses more of its people to the mainland. The journalist Earl Swift lived on the island for a year. He describes the history of the island, both natural and cultural, the lifestyle of the residents, and the social questions raised by its not-so-slow erosion. 

I enjoyed the book for its detailed anthropological depiction of the day-to-day life and work of the islanders, and for the mostly subtle way it approached larger issues. Swift sticks closely to the lived experience of the people on the island, rarely making explicit the abstract ethical and political principles involved. For example, he explains how the watermen understand the causes of land loss rather than emphasizing their disbelief in climate change and sea-level rise. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the causes are, what matters is the most effective way to combat the problem. The specifics of Tangier's situation are unique, but similar forces are at work undermining traditional communities around the world.

Swift's year on the island was 2016 to 2017, which means he was on hand when islanders voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in his first election. Explicitly political discussions appear only in the final few chapters, but the sources of the residents' conservative views emerge clearly from their perspective on quotidian topics such as fishing licenses. 

The fundamental question at the heart of the story is how or whether to preserve the island and its community. How do we as a society decide what natural and social resources are worth saving? There are just over 400 people living on Tangier Island. Dropping enrollment at the school is as much a threat to their community as the shrinking land. Which is the more important reason to protect the island: the crab fishery or its position on the flyway for migrating birds?

Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey ***

The Extinction of Irena Rey is a comic novel about the relationship between an author and her translators, written by the acclaimed translator of Olga Tokarczuk's recent work. A group of translators gather at the author's house to work on her newest book. Their rivalries and differing approaches to translation lead to conflict and to the disappearance of the author.

I was not a fan of the absurdist humor in the first half of the book. There's nothing more painful than comedy you don't find funny. Croft's themes—the codependency of authors and translators, the relationship between human and ecological trauma, the appropriation at the heart of great art—come to the fore in the second half, making it far more engaging and thought-provoking than the first half.

Charan Ranganath, Why We Remember ****

I'll bet that Charan Ranganath is a great teacher (he is a professor at UC Davis). He has a talent for fitting scientific details into a clear big picture conceptual framework, while also tying it back to everyday experiences. He includes personal stories so that we feel like we know him; for example, the preface includes references to Hüsker Dü and fIREHOSE and many of the chapter/section titles are unattributed musical references.

The book is about the neural mechanisms of memory. Ranganath suggests that we should consider the purpose of memory.

Contrary to popular belief, the most important message to come from the science of memory is not that you can or even should remember more. The problem isn't your memory, it's that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place. ... The mechanisms of memory were not cobbled together to help us remember the name of that guy we met at that thing.

When you think about why we remember, how we use memories to learn and make decisions, many vagaries of the mind start to make sense: the things we remember vs the things we forget, the malleability of our recollections, the "tip of the tongue" phenomena. Our goal should not be to remember more but to be more intentional about what we remember.

The chapters in "Part 3: The Implications" felt more vague and speculative than the rest of the book. Perhaps that is appropriate given their broader scope, but it means the end was anti-climactic.

Eric LaRocca, This Skin Was Once Mine ** 1/2

This Skin Was Once Mine is a short collection of four horror stories. The horror in each story derives from a character's mental derangement which turns out to be greater than it seems and/or falls prey to even greater derangement in another character. 

The plots were fine but the stories disappointed me for three reasons:

• None of the characters think or act like normal human beings
• The metaphors for emotional trauma were obvious and not developed in any insightful way
• The prose is clichéd and repetitive

The title story did surprise me. It broadly telegraphs that the narrator's troubles come from misinterpreting why her parents forced her out of the house twenty years before, but her reaction to the truth is unexpected and interesting. Alas, LaRocca adds two more unnecessary plot twists.

Adam Shoalts, Where the Falcon Flies ***

Where the Falcon Flies is a travel adventure in which Shoalts travels by canoe and foot from his home in southern Ontario to the Torngat Mountains in Arctic Quebec. As the title suggests, this is the migration route for peregrine falcons.

For the first half of the book, Shoalts canoes in developed and populated areas, across Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and up the Saint Lawrence River past Quebec City. He stashes his canoe and hikes north to Labrador City, buys another canoe and navigates the maze of lakes and rivers in northern Canada. He stops in the Torngat Mountains to see the falcon nests, then arrives at the Arctic Ocean.

There's plenty of adventure along the way, but Shoalts neglects to develop any unifying theme to make the journey feel meaningful rather than just one thing after another. He rarely mentions falcons despite their role in motivating the trip, and offers three measly pages about their Arctic home. He tosses out the kind of miscellaneous historical facts you'd find in a guidebook (about battles in the War of 1812, for example, or iron mining) but moves on quickly. His descriptions of the natural environment are competent but uninspiring.

Weather conditions on his trip were uniformly miserable. He always seemed to be paddling against the wind, getting soaked with rain, or portaging amidst clouds of mosquitoes. The one bright spot was the repeated kindness of strangers.

Percival Everett, James ***

Let me start by admitting that I'm not a fan of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and recall very few of its plot points. I generally don't care for picaresque novels and didn't find the comic elements humorous.

James tells the same story from the point of view of the runaway slave Jim. The gimmick is that Jim is extremely well educated and merely plays the fool for the benefit of his white oppressors. The first few chapters show Jim teaching young black children "the correct incorrect grammar" for the "slave filter," and several plot developments involve white folks being confused when they hear a slave speak "proper" English.

It is not surprising that James focuses on language given that the vernacular is the most notable aspect of Twain's book and of Everett's earlier book Erasure (filmed as American Fiction). 

Everett leans too heavily on his themes. Not only can Jim read and write, he is inexplicably well educated. He has a dream in which he argues with Voltaire about natural versus civil liberties, and has visions of John Locke. When alone, the slaves have explicit conversations about their predicament. At the same time, Everett skims past the adventures, such as when Huck and Jim explore a house that comes floating down the river.

The story comes alive once it deviates from Huckleberry Finn. The ironic humor, the action, and the intensity all increase during the period when Huck and Jim are separated. When they are reunited, it is Jim who drives the action, not Huck. The final chapters are completely different in both incident and tone: Huckleberry Finn ends with controversial chapters that "devolve into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" (says Ernest Hemingway); James ends with violence and righteous anger.

Tyler Mahan Coe, Cocaine & Rhinestones ****

Cocaine & Rhinestones is a podcast about the history of country music. This book, adapted from its second season, centers on the tragic stories of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Or, rather, it uses their story as the main through-line for a wide-ranging exploration of country music and beyond. 

I enjoyed Coe's discursive style and was especially impressed with his insights into the art and business of country music: the meaning and development of "the Nashville Sound," the marketing of recordings in the era of regional distribution, the changing role of producers, the importance of artists' personas, the line between country and pop.

Many fans believe that the "& Western" part of the genre Country & Western is a reference to western swing. It's not. It's a reference to western music, or at least Hollywood's version of western music, performed by singing actors in Western movies, a.k.a. "horse operas," the biggest of which were given exponentially larger marketing budgets than the entire country music division of any record label at the time.

I appreciated Coe's firm convictions about the quality of the songs and his willingness to call bullshit on significant parts of the official narrative.

I was mostly fine with the totally tangential interpolations about pinball machines, bullfighting, the age of chivalry, and so on. Coe generally brought an interesting perspective to the subjects, and they provided a break from the relentless misery of George and Tammy's lives.

I found a 500+ track Spotify playlist that provided easy access to the referenced music. My favorite discoveries were not tracks from George or Tammy. Cocaine & Rhinestones is the second music book I've loved in the past month despite not being a huge fan of the artists in focus. I would have liked the book to have photos – of Nudie suits, for example, or of Jones' evolving haircuts – but I suppose podcasts don't have photos either.

By the way, the proper pronunciation of "Wynette" is win-net not why-net.