Ben Lerner, Transcription ***

Transcription is short enough and slight enough to count as a (long) short story rather than a novel. It riffs on how our relationship with smartphones shifts our experience of the world, but doesn't offer real insights. The individual incidents are well drawn but don't enrich each other.

Lerner retains his "impressive if over-intellectualized writing style." I was impressed by how vividly he painted the character of Thomas, the 90-year-old artist, with very few strokes outside of dialogue. In the short middle section, he nails the atmosphere of an academic conference.

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do ****

Traffic is a popular science book that explores a variety of topics related to driving: the mysterious causes of jams, why the other lane always seems to move faster, the theory behind metering lights, the underappreciated complexity of the task, the inescapable human factors that defy careful planning.

I first read this book in 2009. I remembered it as a fascinating collection of tidbits about traffic engineering, improving road utilization and safety. The introduction, for example, considers the question of what a driver should do when they see a sign announcing the imminent closing of the left lane; should you merge right as early or as late as you can?

In an effort to be comprehensive, Traffic also includes a lot of pop psychology to explain why we are worse drivers than we think we are, and the last chapter throws in inconclusive statistics about what causes accidents. (The subtitle hints at this, I suppose.) I found those parts trite and less compelling. The book is also starting to be dated, especially with the era of the self-driving car upon us.

Hisham Matar, My Friends ** 1/2

My Friends is a novel about three Libyan men living in England during Qaddafi's reign, and their differing responses when that regime begins to falter. As in his non-fiction book The Return, Matar effectively conveys the emotion strain of living in exile.

I find Matar's writing style to be overly ornate, with strained metaphors and a plethora of Conradian subordinate clauses. My Friends is organized as a series of memories as our narrator Khaled walks home after seeing off his friend Hosam at the train station, but the conceit is applied sparingly, making it disorienting when Khaled refers to his location in the present day.

Lastly, Khaled is a disappointingly passive character. His personality is ill-defined, making it hard to understand what attracts Mustafa and Hosam to him. I didn't feel his passion for literature.

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book **** 1/2

The Summer Book is a quiet, meditative novel about a six-year-old girl and her grandmother spending time together at their summer house on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The girl's father is there too, always in the background (he has a single line of dialogue, three pages from the end). Her mother has recently died, which no one talks about but which accounts for the existential undertone to many of the conversations.

The book consists of twenty-two "crystalline" vignettes about everyday life on the island, each one nearly a standalone story. Jannson's writing has lovely imagery that merely suggests the associated emotional depths. As Ali Smith says on the back cover, "Her sentences [are] simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth."

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire **** 1/2

How to Hide an Empire is "a history of the Greater United States," meaning that it looks at US history through the lens of its non-state territories. In the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, much of the West consisted of undigested territories, notably including the ever-shrinking Indian Territory. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States started claiming sovereignty over uninhabited islands (for their guano), then won several colonies in the Spanish-American War. We fancy ourselves a republic not an empire, so that status of these territories has always been murky.

The introduction talks about how we "mainlanders" talk about "Pearl Harbor" on "December 7, 1941," despite the fact that the Japanese attacked the much larger US territory of the Philippines at the same time... where it was already December 8.

The book is full of fascinating stories that I was only dimly aware of. Immerwahr shows how things look different from the provinces, and how the federal government has been able to take advantage of the murky legal status to act like other imperial powers (which is to say beastly).

After the Second World War, the US was in a position to greatly expand its empire but instead started divesting itself of many existing territories. Immerwahr argues that empires in the traditional sense are unnecessary in the modern world, where you don't need to control territory to secure trade routes or fight wars. He doesn't note it, but the other imperial powers also gave up their colonies after the war; see Postwar.

The only thing preventing me from granting How to Hide an Empire five stars is that the final chapters try a bit too hard to tie all aspects of recent history to our hidden empire. I felt like I had to do more work on my own to see the key points.