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My first Erdrich. I enjoyed it and will read more. This novel is trying to do a lot of things, and it mostly succeeds! It's about love of books; ghosts; Covid-19; policing; incarceration; and holding onto Indigenous identity in a settler society, all interspersed with plenty of wit to balance out the grim moments.

This was discounted at my local bookstore as a remainder, which makes me suspect sales have dropped off because people don't want to revisit 2020 in a society that has seemed eager these past few years to forget both the racial justice demands of that summer and the lessons about community care from the pandemic. But for that very reason, I appreciated revisiting those events; and the book is also about much more.

Occasionally, the novel's devices for withholding information to create suspense feel too obvious, straining the suspension of disbelief. Overall, a well-told and intricately textured story with many comic moments.

Also: first ever shoutout I've seen in print to my favorite Minneapolis cafe, Hard Times.

A problem with some of these social-justice-y novels is that while they might have an important point to make about oppression and alienation, that doesn't mean they succeed in situating that point within an interesting story. This novella's main plot event — the narrator, who is herself a racialized immigrant to France who works as a translator for applicants for asylum, assaulting a refugee — is already made clear at the beginning. So all that's left to be revealed is what led her to do such a thing. But when we get to that part, there isn't anything very surprising or notable there, either.

This book gave me a somewhat greater appreciation for elements of the refugee experience, and the writing was good on a textural level, but plot-wise, it felt like a stagnant pool, lacking the dynamism of storytelling that would have made it more than the sum of its parts.

I was totally absorbed in this brilliant, very weird, sometimes quite silly, but mostly gripping and sometimes downright chilling, yarn about a giant squid heist and multiple predicted apocalypses vying for imminent fulfillment. The hero Billy Harrow is a perfect stand-in for the reader, both in his initial bewilderment at the complicated supernatural world he's been thrown into, and later in his realization, gaining confidence, that he knows more than he thinks. The characters are richly drawn, from the incorporeal labor organizer Wati who speaks by temporarily inhabiting statues to the heartbroken Marge, like Billy a regular person, who's drawn into the aetherial cult world seeking answers for her partner's disappearance.

It's overwhelming sometimes, particularly in part 5 (of 7) where the novel dragged a little with a subplot that felt extraneous, but the denouement brought me back, full of unexpected twists and turns. A fitting novel for our apocalyptic times. "End of the world?" "Ends."

Some good ideas in here. I was often skimming more than taking my time as it's a bit repetitive. Highlights:

24: "Dutch police actually do very little traffic enforcement. If too many drivers speed on a street, it is deemed a design failure and sent back to the drawing board." Chapter 2: good ideas on making welcoming residential streets 52-3: the value of having fewer traffic signals on your commute. 109-110: how walks with few cars make it delightful to go to commercial areas. 144: CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic requires bike paths to be direct (max 20% over as-the-crow-flies distance) and bike lanes at least 79" wide, versus NACTO 59". 163-7: Dutch Railways "operates like a national metro system" - I'm so jealous. Also how safe bike routes and abundant bike parking increase train station catchment area. 183: Roundabouts replace pavement with greenspace, mitigating climate change impacts and helping with stormwater drainage 187: Stat on sidewalk, bikeway and greenway projects creating more jobs per dollar invested than road widening

At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.

The book is organized in four chapters:

1. Long Emergency: An overview of all of the bad things coming our way due to climate change, including lots of conflict and migration. Felt pretty superfluous. This chapter has already been written by many people, notably Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, but I also feel like I've already read versions of it in more than one other Verso book on climate. Peppered with references to events you'll recognize from 2 to 5 year old news stories.
2. Mutual Care: Studies of mutual aid efforts including Occupy Sandy (the only one the author was personally involved in, which made this by far the most interesting section of the book), Black Panthers survival programs, and Greek solidarity networks in the wake of the 2011 crisis. Well worth reading.
3. Collective Power: Studies of collective decision-making structures, including Bookchin's ideas, Spanish municipalist movements, and Rojava. The author confidently asserts Rojava's experiments in radical democracy to have been effectively ended by increased aggression in 2019, but cites no source for this, and others don't seem to agree (AK Press is just now putting out a new book, Rojava in Focus, due in February). This section was a pretty good read.
4. Beyond Hope: Outlines the "lifehouse" concept, but again, it seems like a wishlist of things that would be difficult to achieve, requiring so much free time, energy, and material resources from participants that it almost presupposes a revolution already occurred.