A short story collection that I picked up on my recent trip to Italy. The cool thing about it is, the stories are published as “parallel texts,” with the original Italian prose printed on the left (even-numbered) pages, and the English translation printed on the right (odd-numbered) pages. I don’t know Italian, beyond briefly dabbling in Duolingo, but I still tried to scan my eyes across the two pages to make connections between the vocabularies. I think it would be a great learning aid for someone picking up a new language.
It made me think about the process of translation as a whole. For this book, they seemed to have tried to maintain a strict alignment, i.e., the paragraphs start and end at the same vertical position on both sides of the page. I wonder if they were particularly rigorous because of the format of this book. If they didn’t need to present both texts side-by-side, would they take more liberties with sentence length and structure?
This was a vacation read, started on my recent trip to Italy, which involved long rides on a tour bus. It was not the best environment for intense attentive reading, and this novel fit the bill. The prose style is simple and sometimes a little bit quirky, which I appreciated for a light read.
The story follows a teenage girl named Frankie. Over the summer holiday, she meets a boy, a fellow outsider, and together they create a piece of art that they photocopy and post all over town. The poster features a poetical phrase1 that she composes:
The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are the fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
The emotional core of Freedom, for me, was the love triangle between married couple Walter and Patty Berglund, and Walter’s rock star best friend, Richard. The three met in college, and for Patty, it was the classic choice: lust for the wild and dangerous musician, or the comfort of the responsible nice guy.
The book has an interesting structure, starting with a section told from the perspective of the Berglund’s suburban neighbours. It’s got a gossipy feel, like they see the cracks in the marriage, but can only speculate on the couple’s true nature from a distance.
Then, we get a chapter that’s taken from Patty’s therapeutic journal. She writes about her life story in the third person, but inserts running commentary as “the autobiographer,” often with self-deprecating or rueful reflections. I thought it was a really compelling way to dive into a character.
I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.
I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.
The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.
Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.
The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.
For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.
I tried to tell myself not to read this book when I first heard what it was about. I’m already quite cynical about Big Tech, and I thought that this would only entrench my biases further, with no real benefit to my mental health. But I saw it sitting on the shelf at my library and I just couldn’t help myself.
The author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook in the global policy department, where her responsibility was (ostensibly) to help the company negotiate with countries around the world. She started with the optimism typical of tech companies in the early aughts, believing that she would “make the world a better place.” But over the course of the book, she becomes disillusioned by Facebook’s relentless pursuit of growth and profit, which came at the high cost of creating political instability in countries like Myanmar and ultimately the US.
None of this is very surprising, if you follow the news about social media companies over the last few years. But Wynn-Williams’ position gave her access to the top brass at Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, and she reveals some really bizarre behaviour by the leaders of the company. For example, Zuckerberg once asked her, on a visit to Indonesia, to organize a “gentle mob,” for no apparent reason other than to make himself look cool. These sections were both hard to read and hard to put down, having the feeling of learning some juicy gossip about someone you don’t like. You kind of have to take her word for it, because corroboration from other sources is not really built into the narrative style, but if it’s true, these incidents confirm the old adage that power corrupts.
Based purely on the title, I went into this book expecting something different. Maybe it’s just where my mind is at these days, but I thought it would be a treatise against the democratic backsliding associated with certain world leaders that I won’t name. But it turns out that Dave Meslin’s book is an exploration of the actual governing process, and reads more like a business/management manual, but applied to the systems of democracy. It’s more about logistics than political ideology.
Personally, my experience with democracy is somewhat intermittent: just go vote whenever there’s an election. It’s not very satisfying because it doesn’t feel like you’re contributing much, especially if your choice doesn’t win. Meslin agrees, and puts the blame on the systems and institutions of the government. And from there, he suggests tons of ideas of ways for those systems to change. I had many “a-ha!” moments reading this book, and I appreciated that the book is Canadian through and through, filled with examples and stories from nearby places.
Meslin is an excellent explainer, and simplifies complicated ideas, making them easy to digest. For example, he spends a lengthy chunk of pages describing alternatives to the first-past-the-post electoral system that we use in Canada. It’s kind of a geeky subject, but he makes it really clear how our current voting system leads to polarization and unfair election results.
A while back, I wrote about my history with e-readers, and highlighted in particular the Pocket app that’s available on Kobo devices. I named it “Kobo’s killer app,” because I think that e-readers hit their sweet spot with long articles: for shorter pieces, I can live with the slight eyestrain of reading on a phone or computer screen, and for full-length books, I’ll always prefer a physical copy. For me, e-readers are perfect for the in-between articles and essays that can be read in 15-30 minutes, and Pocket is the key piece of software that makes it happen. That is, until now.
By coincidence, I experienced a funny bit of synergy by reading this book and watching the show Bad Sisters at the same time. They’re both murder mysteries set in Ireland, and bled together slightly in my mind. I started to imagine the detective character in the book with the same appearance as the actor in the series. And because my ear had been hearing the spoken dialogue, I was able to mentally approximate the sound of the Irish accent while reading.
The novel is told from the perspective of Toby, and before the main mystery even kicks in, he gets assaulted by burglers breaking into his home, leaving him with a head injury. As he’s recovering at his fancy family home, his cousin’s kids accidentally discover a skeleton inside a tree in the yard. It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that the body belongs to someone from Toby’s high school days1, and various members of his family—his uncle and his cousins—all become suspects. Including Toby himself.
I just finished reading the third and final Fitzcarraldo Editions book that I bought in London last year (after The Observable Universe and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead). I really like the minimalist cover design and the quality of the paper that they use. The books have heft in my hand, and the pages are sturdy and satisfying to turn. I (and most readers, I’m guessing) don’t normally pay much attention to the physical “style” of a given publisher, so kudos to them for creating such a distinctive ethos.
Fifty Sounds is a memoir by Polly Barton about her experiences as an Englishwoman living in Japan. She’s now known for translating Japanese literature to English, which implies that she’s mastered the language, but as she tells it in this book, there’s a gap that’s essentially impossible to cross for a non-native speaker.
