What I did for my movie-watching history in the previous post, I’ve done for my book reviews in this one. This habit started on Goodreads, but I grew dissatisfied with the UI/UX design on that site, and so moved over to The Storygraph.
With this, I think I can say that everything that I’ve ever written on the Internet (apart from social media, which, who cares?) now lives on this website, which I have full control over.
One thing I would like to explore in the future is going in the other direction. I.e. when I write something and post it on this website, I should also share it on Letterboxd or Storygraph, or whatever platforms spring up in the future. There’s a name for this approach: POSSE, which stands for “Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere.” It could be as simple as copy and pasting, but as a software developer, I can’t help but try to find a way to automate it.
In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy reading a lot. I also like to record my experiences, for example, by tracking the books I read on The Storygraph, and tracking the movies I watch on Letterboxd.
There’s an app called Readwise which is great for readers like myself. In the app, you can point your phone’s camera at the text on a page, and it will use OCR to save it as a quote. The app also allows you to review the quotes that you’ve saved in the past. It’s fun to revisit the favourite bits from books that I’ve read. The Readwise app implemented well, and I found it useful enough to pay for a subscription.
Having said that, I’m a firm believer in owning one’s data, so I decided to try to create my own solution. Introducing… “Quoteshelf”! This new section of the website contains all of the quotes that I’ve exported from Readwise. On the main page, I can swipe through a random selection of quotes, and I can browse the author index to find specific books.
A fun page-turner about a woman who visits “The Centre,” a place where people can go to learn new languages. Amazingly, you can go from complete ignorance to full fluency in only 10 days. All it takes is to cut yourself off from the outside world, sit in a cubicle with headphones on, and listen to a recording of someone speaking in your target language all day. There’s a dark mystery surrounding how the process actually works, and the novel gets a lot of mileage from doling out little pieces of the puzzle over time.
The protagonist is a Pakistani immigrant to England, and at one point, she visits her family back home; also, she befriends the manager of the Centre, and together, they go to India, where the founders of the Centre reside. These travels allow the novel to touch on the immigrant experience, as well as the fraught history of India and Pakistan, and how those two nations relate to each other.
Unfortunately, these digressions, while interesting, felt a bit disconnected to me. I enjoyed the book mainly because I wanted to find out what the twist was, and the relationships between the characters, and the accompanying cultural and society commentary, seemed engineered to allow the plot to reveal itself, and therefore not entirely believable.
I’m not sure how you would categorize this novel, but maybe it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it a rom-com. The main character, Greta, works as a transcriptionist for a therapist, listening to recordings of the sessions and typing them up. (Sounds like a great job to me.) But what gives the story a surreal edge is that she lives in such a small town that she’s constantly encountering the people whose voices she’s been listening to. Imagine that whenever you meet someone in a social situation, you already know their deepest and most secret thoughts, even though you’re a stranger to them.
The title refers to Greta’s nickname for one of the patients, a young Swiss woman, who shares with the therapist (and therefore, Greta) a traumatic story of physical assault. Predictably, Greta ends up meeting Big Swiss, at the dog park, and the two of them strike up a friendship which becomes a fling. Because Greta knows about Big Swiss’s past, the relationship dynamic is messed up from the start. It feels both funny and icky at the same time, similar to how Tom Hanks is both charming and sleazy in You’ve Got Mail.
Greta herself also survived trauma in her past, and one of the novel’s strengths is the conflict between the two women’s worldviews regarding their history. Greta has the tendency to fall back on her past as an excuse for her misdeeds, while Big Swiss believes in moving on by repressing her experience. The novel isn’t saying that there’s a right or wrong way to deal with trauma, only that people must try their best to figure out how to survive and flourish after. You’re left hoping that Greta and Big Swiss come away from their relationship having learned the lessons that they needed from each other.
In this second prequel novel for the Foundation series, we follow Hari Seldon as he works on his theory of psychohistory, while the Galactic Empire of which he is a citizen begins to decline. There’s a race against time, because he hopes that his theories will lead to make a recovery plan, a way for humanity to continue after the fall. Much of the decline takes the form of political unrest, and also the more mundane processes of failing infrastructure. The machinery that keeps society running continually breaks down, and there’s not enough money to maintain it. I felt somewhat unsettled because it’s hard not to see the same symptoms in the real world.
The novel is divided into four main sections, each occurring about ten years apart. In each section, he has to solve some crisis, like the increasing popularity of a demagogue politician, or an assassination attempt on him and the Emperor, or simply the difficulty of obtaining the funding needed to continue his research. Along the way, seeds are planted for where the series will go. Sometimes, it feels a little perfunctory, like when a character just brings up the idea of establishing a second Foundation, without really going into detail about how they arrived at this idea. I can forgive a little bit of prequel-itis, as the actual stories were enjoyable enough on their own. Plus, I was actually left feeling excited to continue the series, because I’m looking forward to seeing how these seeds will pay off.
When I travelled to London, England earlier this year, I visited many bookstores, as I am wont to do whenever I explore an unfamiliar city. On many of the shelves, something immediately caught my eye: the minimalist white and blue covers of the British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. I had only heard of them from a podcast, and their reputation for publishing award-winning books, but I’ve never seen them in North American bookstores, and so I made it a mission to get a few. The Observable Universe was one of my selections.
The author, Heather McCalden, lost both of her parents to AIDS when she was a child, and was raised by her grandmother. Because she was so young, she hardly knew her parents, and they’re defined more by their absence than by the scarce memories that she has of them. This memoir is her attempt to process the loss, and is made up of many “chapters,” many of which are only a few sentences long. Rarely are they more than two pages.
Each page of this graphic novel is formatted like a Sunday comic strip: landscape orientation, with the title appearing in the first panel, followed by three rows of illustrations. It follows the mishaps of a suburban family, kind of like For Better or For Worse or Adam@home, where the kids get into trouble and the parents get flustered. Isn’t it hilarious how the father keeps forgetting the kid’s name? Or how the mom is always sleeping in too late? Some strips have a punchline, but other times, it relies on awkwardness and cringe comedy.
But then, a darker story arc develops beyond the individual jokes. It becomes clear that the mother is suffering from depression and alcoholism, and that the father’s bumbling absent-mindedness is not just a lovable quirk: he’s genuinely disoriented and confused about the world around him.
I’ll discuss spoilers further down, but before I do, I’ll just say that I recommend reading this book. Something strange is going with this family, and the mystery box opens gradually and has a fun solution. It also gives the characters a satisfying emotional arc. Once you find out what happens, you can’t blame them for their earlier flaws.
After watching the recent and presumably ongoing TV series, I felt the urge to revisit the classic sci-fi Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. I had read the original trilogy for a course in undergrad, and remember enjoying it back then. I don’t think the TV show is great, but I’m still fascinated by the core idea of “psychohistory.”
Briefly, and without spoiling too much, psychohistory refers to a mathematical theory, created by a man named Hari Seldon, which can predict the path of human societies into future centuries.
Prelude to Foundation is a prequel to the original trilogy. I’ve chosen to read the series in chronological order (as opposed to publication order), because Asimov himself recommended it this way. As the novel starts, a young Hari Seldon has just presented his ideas at a conference—kind of like a TED Talk, I imagine—and it has caused quite a stir. But, as Seldon repeats many times throughout the book, he doesn’t know how to practically apply psychohistory yet to make actual predictions.
During my time with this novel, I experienced a few mornings where I woke up with a feeling of purposelessness1, like there was no point in the work that I do day in, day out. While I’m not saying that I’m immune to negative feelings, darkness is not my default mode, and I’m usually able to motivate myself just fine. That is to say, I do believe that the despondent mood of The Bell Jar rubbed off on me.
I mean this as a compliment to Plath’s vivid description of her protagonist’s spiral into depression. It’s a harrowing journey which is accentuated by the fact that it sneaks up on you. When Esther’s story begins, the narrative reads like a fish-out-of-water story, of a suburban girl who’s slightly overwhelmed by the big city, but who has enough wit and intelligence to float above and see through the bullshit. Over time, it becomes more and more clear that her detachment is a sign of her struggle to belong in the world. Mental illness can’t always be explained, and the book doesn’t try to do it: it simply lets us experience it through Esther’s eyes.
I can’t believe I used this word. It’s a joke from an old Rowan Atkinson bit. I’m sorry to make light while discussing a serious topic, but that’s what footnotes are for! ↩
When I started reading this book, I was surprised by its breezy tone. I had expected it to be more serious, given the grandiose subtitle and premise (not to mention the hyperbolic blurbs on the back cover): the author would tell the stories of ordinary people during a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and these tales would add up to show us the universal truths of human experience. But the way Gene Weingarten tells it in the introduction, the whole project was in fact kind of a fun lark that he and his editor came up with over drinks at the bar.
