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.
I don’t feel like I can fairly judge this book because I read it during a difficult time. My dog has been having some medical issues and it’s been an emotional roller-coaster. I found myself unable to really connect with anything I was reading. But even through my own numbness, I admired the author’s work.
All Our Ordinary Stories is a graphic memoir by Chinese-Canadian author Teresa Wong, who attempts to bridge the emotional distance between her and her immigrant parents by exploring their histories. Her parents lived through extreme events, escaping from the Cultural Revolution in China by swimming to Hong Kong. Wong struggles to understand their experiences because they don’t talk about their past. Partly, Chinese culture celebrates stoicism, and encourages them to bottle up their traumas; but also, there’s a language barrier between the generations that makes it hard to have any deep conversations.
I also can’t speak the language of my ancestors very well, but I’m uncomfortable speaking English with my parents because it seems disrespectful somehow. Some scenes in this book capture the communication gap so well that it feels both boring and profound at the same time: boring, because I’ve internalized the experience so much that it’s become run-of-the-mill, ordinary; but profound, because someone else has written it down and aired it out and shown how challenging it really is.
It’s a rare occurrence that a book hits this close to home… I may wish to revisit this book sometime when I’m more able to engage with it, but I’m almost afraid to do so because it may destroy me.
Here we are, at the end of the original Foundation trilogy. Over the course of reading the three books, I could sense that Isaac Asimov was gaining in confidence and skill. The style of the first novel was somewhat staid and dry, but by this third book, his writing had gained some flourishes, making it more fun to read.
By introducing the Mule and his powers in Foundation and Empire, the series added a new layer to the plotting. Both the Mule and the Second Foundation—a secretive parallel counterpart to the First Foundation that we’ve been following so far—possess mental abilities, which allows them to brainwash and control the actions of ordinary people.
Much of this novel feels like a spy thriller. Characters form alliances, but nobody can be fully trusted, because anyone can be a secret agent under the control of the other side. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the conclusion involves a series of scenes where an answer is revealed, only to be turned around with a twist, and the real answer being revealed… but then there’s another twist, etc. It’s almost comical how many times it undercuts itself, but I had a blast with it.
In Consent, author Jill Ciment reflects on her relationship with her late husband. They got together when she was 17 and he was 47, and stayed together until he passed away in his 90’s.
At the core of the book are the questions:
Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning?
[…]
Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?
I don’t think it’s a conflict that can be resolved: her and her husband’s long-lasting love was genuine, but he was her teacher and surrogate father figure when they met, which is indisputably icky. Through her writing, she does a good job of expressing her doubts, while also showing that she is ultimately at peace with the relationship.
My favourite parts of the book involve her revisiting her previous memoir, Half a Life, which she published in the midst of their marriage. In that book, she now sees a sort of self-censorship, where she glossed over the uncomfortable truths of how they first met, and made it seem like she had made all of the advances. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before, a double-layered memoir, showing in such a literal way how our recollections of the past change over time.
See also: the film May December, which covers some of same themes.
I much preferred this to the previous book, especially the second half, called “The Mule.” In the original Foundation novel, there’s a feeling of inevitability, which is kind of the point. The fledgling Foundation faces crises, i.e. threats from other planetary civilations, but it always turns out that Hari Seldon predicted what was going to happen. When the crises are resolved, always in the Foundation’s favour, it’s revealed that it was the only way that events could have unfolded.
Foundation and Empire turns the idea on its head by introducing a character called “The Mule,” who conquers planets at an alarming rate, and threatens to take over the Foundation. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the Mule is unique, and since Seldon’s predictions only work on broad social events, the Mule throws the preordained plan into chaos.
In contrast to the “everything always works out” ethos of the previous novel, the Mule creates real tension and suspense. We experience the story through characters who don’t know what’s going to happen next… which is basically like most stories we read, but feels refreshing in this world of predestination.
This novel came to my attention during the Booker Prize shortlist period. On paper, it’s right up my alley—a literary novel with a space travel/sci-fi theme—and so, when it won the award, I became quite eager to get my hands on it.
The novel puts us on board the International Space Station, along with its crew of six astronauts, as they orbit the Earth. It covers a 24-hour period, during which they go around the world 16 times. There’s no plot really, other than a growing typhoon over Asia, and the fact that another crew is launching a mission to the moon on that same day.
The prose is well-written, with many poetic turns of phrase and lyrical passages. It does a good job of evoking the hardships that the astronauts go through: their sense of time is all out of whack because they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets every “day,” and they’re fighting to keep their bodies healthy in an envirnoment that humans are not built for.
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand. They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form. While they’re here food tastes of little. Their sinuses are murder.
But ultimately, I was disappointed with my reading experience. I found it frustrating because there was little narrative drive for me.
I’m really hesitant to say it, but I didn’t really enjoy this one… of course it’s revered as a classic and I don’t doubt that it deserves it, but could it be that its stature is due to the strength of the series that it started, rather than its own merit?
A big part of the problem for me is the way that the story is told mainly through dialogue. Almost every scene involves a few people in a room, talking about grand abstract political or sociological ideas. There’s very little shown of how the various crises play out on the ground.
What does work are the ideas themselves: it is a fascinating bird’s-eye view of how a future civilization would develop over time. At first, the Foundation is set up to create a compendium of knowledge called the Encyclopedia Galactica, but it turns out this goal is simply the means to another end: namely, to give a reason for a small colony of scientifically-minded people to grow and thrive. Inevitably, they run up against the forces of surrounding planets, and they have to use unconventional (i.e. non-military) methods to continue as a society, including the creation of a religion based on the seeming magic of atomic power; and later, the use of economic trade to control their adversaries. In both cases, it’s their superior technology that allows them to win; the story’s conceit is that because the Foundation started as an academic endeavour, it allowed them to have the intellectual resources to develop said technology.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I wrote out that last paragraph that the chain of cause and effect actually clicked for me. During my time reading it, I found it hard to follow because it’s told at such a distance, with characters that are more mouthpieces than people. The two prequel novels that I’ve already read managed to balance the sociological concepts with adventure and character, so I think that Asimov’s skill as a storyteller improved as his career went on.
Set in a remote snowbound Polish village, this novel was a fitting read for the type of winter we’re having this year. The protagonist and narrator, Mrs. Duszejko, lives mostly in isolation. Most of the residents only spend their summers there, and she’s one of a handful of people who brave the cold over the winter.
The plot kicks off with her and her neighbour discovering the dead body of another neighbour, who had choked on a bone while eating. Soon, other villagers are found dead in increasingly bizarre circumstances. The book is sold as a crime/mystery novel, but it didn’t feel like that to me. Instead, the focus is on Mrs. Duszejko’s inner life.
I started last year with an optimistic non-fiction read, and coincidentally, I recently finished another book with a similar tone, in Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World. It feels right to start the year in a hopeful mood, so maybe this will become a quasi-New Year’s Resolution for me going forward.
Ritchie’s book uses a data-driven approach to examine the threats of climate change. She’s the lead researcher for the website Our World in Data, and as summarized by one of the articles published there, the book asks us to hold three truths at the same time: “The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.” It’s easy to get gloomy and focus on the latter two parts of that statement, but this book tries to shine a light on the first, and I appreciated the boost of optimism that it gave me.
Part of Ritchie’s goal is to “sort” the issues by the impact that they have, in a quantitative way. Environmentally conscious people like myself tend to worry about many different things, and feel guilty about every action that may harm the planet. But if you look at the data, some things matter more than others.
For example, palm oil and plastic packaging get a bad rap, but their impact is small, and the alternatives may actually be more harmful. (Other oil crops require more land to grow; and not packaging food would lead to more waste.) Conversely, the most impactful actions include: reducing beef and dairy consumption, driving an electric car (or driving less altogether), and of course, transitioning off the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
Ritchie sums up her ideas in a couple of videos online. Definitely bookmark-worthy, and if I’m ever in a hopeless mood, she will serve as a reminder that there is positive change happening, and a path forward.
I spent a lot of time in museums when I visited London in the fall of last year. The British Museum is a gigantic repository of artifacts, which seems to cover all of human history from all over the world. It was truly overwhelming and awe-inspiring, and I came away feeling ignorant. Our world has so many stories to tell and even if I really tried, I could only hope to learn a small fraction of them.1
During the same trip, I stumbled across a copy of Andrew Marr’s A History of the World in a used bookstore. Since I was feeling the urge to improve my historical education, I picked it up and started reading as soon as I came home.
It’s quite an ambitious work, to attempt to summarize world history in one book. It’s impossible, of course, but what is here is successful, I think. It reads like a series of articles, around the length that can be tackled in one sitting, each focussing on a specific event. Every once in a while, there’ll be a few pages where Marr attempts to synthesize and draw comparisons between the stories, for example, how both the Vikings and the Mongols shaped Europe via conquest. It’s all pretty readable, but since it has to cover so much ground, it does inevitably have to refer to some names that the reader is assumed to already know. A lot of times, I didn’t get the references, so had to keep Wikipedia handy.
