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**2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, …
Skillfully melds the fear of living in an oppressive dystopia with the melancholy of the loss of memories and, first, the objects they're tied to. Tends towards feeling pretty dark, leavened only by the obvious love between the main characters.
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how …
Content warning spoilers
I felt like there was much joy in how Keiko had found her place in life, and fulfillment through doing a good job at the convenience store. Nicely critical of the way the people around her -- her so-called friends -- can't accept the choices she's made that make her happy and keep trying to push her into something else. The only sour note for me was Shiraha; I get why he's in the story, but every page with him on it was so unpleasant (perhaps I'd become weirdly protective of Keiko?) that I enjoyed the last third of the book much less than the preceding two-thirds.
Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …
I haven't read a lot of noir, probably because it's always seemed just a bit too cynical. 'These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart' translates noir into a dystopian near future with an anarchist commune and a trans MC, still feels like it has a lot of the key components of noir, but has so much more heart as it wrestles with what it is to be human, particularly a flawed one trying to find one's way in the world.
Collection of somewhat dark short stories (and I'm not sure 'Toddler-Hunting' is even the oddest), but when you get past the shock value there's lots to reflect on concerning topics such as marriage, childhood, illness, and death, but particularly through the lens of a woman in Japan in the sixties and the choices available, or not.
An existential manual for tragic optimists, can-do pessimists, and compassionate doomers
With global heating projected …
Hmm. Thirty pages in and we've already had two or three quotes from Paul Kingsnorth. Not sure I like the way this is going...
Content warning spoilers, death of a child
So, it's not really what you'd call a cheery book. Janet is a very bookish girl who never really fits in, either with her family (her father seems indifferent and her mother impatient) or at boarding school. Her only real friends seem to be animals. She struggles through her childhood and then is murdered at sixteen. The prose is quite charming, and there are some laugh-out-loud moments and other wry observations, but the ending is abrupt and hard to fathom, and just adds to the overall feeling of bleakness.
Interesting historical stuff, for example on the role of Cuba in the defeat of apartheid, but the real strength of the book lies in Akala's accounts of growing up in the UK.
Mindfulness is now all the rage.
From celebrity endorsements to monks, neuroscientists and meditation coaches …
Purser appears to have multiple criticisms of the craze for secular mindfulness, among them that it's stripped of any ethical framework, that its claims of scientific backing seem pretty weak (TBH, I'm taking his word for that -- he does provide references, but I haven't followed them up yet), that it claims to be inspired by Buddhism when it's useful to do so, but then ditches it when it's useful to be purely secular and, perhaps most pointed, that it's ideally suited to corporate wellness programs as it mitigates the stress of the workplace without challenging anything about why work is the way it is. Can feel a bit overly ranty, and maybe too personally directed at Jon Kabat-Zinn in particular. Also leans towards being repetitive, though the latter part of the book does break this down quite well by having separate chapters about mindfulness in schools, for example, or …
Purser appears to have multiple criticisms of the craze for secular mindfulness, among them that it's stripped of any ethical framework, that its claims of scientific backing seem pretty weak (TBH, I'm taking his word for that -- he does provide references, but I haven't followed them up yet), that it claims to be inspired by Buddhism when it's useful to do so, but then ditches it when it's useful to be purely secular and, perhaps most pointed, that it's ideally suited to corporate wellness programs as it mitigates the stress of the workplace without challenging anything about why work is the way it is. Can feel a bit overly ranty, and maybe too personally directed at Jon Kabat-Zinn in particular. Also leans towards being repetitive, though the latter part of the book does break this down quite well by having separate chapters about mindfulness in schools, for example, or in the military. Purser does admit that Buddhism can also fail here, such as the support of the Zen establishment for Japanese militarism in the early twentieth century. He does appear to allow that it makes sense that individuals use mindfulness to ameliorate their own life conditions, and direct his anger at the corporate-friendly practitioners and teachers, but the book felt weakest in expounding alternatives.
Content warning long, pretty negative
DNF'ing, which I should have done long before. The first few stories were at least an interesting take on vampirism, that's different from your usual blood-drinking count, though with the slight oddity that each story was followed by several paragraphs of the author explaining why they wrote it. In the ebook this wasn't even particularly set off from the story, which led to some confusion until I realized what was going on.
Things went downhill with Harlan Ellison's story, which was distinctly meh, and followed by pages of self-indulgent self-hagiography. I thought the name sounded familiar so I looked him up online and... yeah. It's not great when the 'Controversies' section of your Wikipedia page has ten sub-sections.
Not sure whether my lack of enthusiasm for the following stories is fair, or just tainted by Ellison's, but I'm done.
'Groundbreaking ... [provides] a deep history of the invention of the 'normal' mind as one …
Interesting stuff on eugenics, the anti-psychiatry movement and particularly its links with libertarian thinking, the history of neurodiversity, and the way disability and capitalism interact. The concluding chapter or two felt like an attempt to sketch out a way forward, but seemed a little too tentative for me.
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and …
Content warning spoilers, cw: suicide, bullying, sexual assault
I'm a bit torn as to how to review this. It was all going so well until the last fifty pages or so. Well, two of the main characters are suicidal for much of the book, and there's some pretty awful bullying going on, but it's still, somehow, enjoyable. All of a sudden things are neatly tied up by an intervention that comes out of nowhere, and then we're off into QM and Schrödinger's cat, and Everett's many-worlds interpretation, and I'm just wondering where the novel went to...
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign …
Content warning climate crisis, wildfire
Felt like several rather disjoint narratives -- a pretty short history of the tar sands, a discussion of how wildfires are changing, a lengthy account of the Fort McMurray fire, followed by a lengthy history of climate change and the way fossil fuel companies have concealed the facts so they can keep making profits. The first and last are, unfortunately, nothing new. The discussion of how wildfires are changing was a real eye-opener (I've since looked up 'fire tornadoes' on YT and, yikes!) but the description of the fire in Alberta, while perhaps interesting as an illustration of how things are changing so fast that it's hard for people to comprehend, ultimately felt a bit like a thriller, but written about real peoples' lives. A bit mind-boggling, I will say, that Fort McMurray had a population of around 90,000!
'Groundbreaking ... [provides] a deep history of the invention of the 'normal' mind as one …
Forgot to mention that Robert Chapman is interviewed on the Pluto Books podcast: www.plutobooks.com/blog/podcast-empire-of-normality/
If you want to buy it, there's a discount code associated with the podcast.
I'm making my way through it pretty slowly, partly because I'm making so many notes and partly because I mismanaged my library ebook holds and far too many came in all at once! Really impressed so far, especially by the chapters on eugenics and anti-psychiatry.
Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. Together with her cousin Yuu, she spends her summers …
Content warning cw: child abuse (incl. sexual), incest, murder, cannibalism
OK. Weirdest thing I've read in a long time. Not really sure how/why I finished it, especially as the first third-or-so, in which Natsuki is eleven, is a distinctly uncomfortable read. The CWs I've listed aren't even all the topics I'd probably mention, but I've forgotten some and others... I'm not even sure how I'd describe them. When you strip out all of the dialled-up-to-eleven weirdness, what you're left with is a novel that might have interesting things to say about how people (particularly Japanese women) deal with societal norms, expectations, and pressure, and about how the construction of a fantasy world can make sense as a way of dealing with childhood trauma. For me, though, it all felt a bit too heavy-handed -- the constant invocation of 'the Factory' felt a bit much after a while. Note: I haven't given a star rating because I just don't know how to rate it.
On first reading, it felt like an interesting survey of the state of thinking on the nature of consciousness, but when I went back over it I realized that the survey-like nature of it means that the explanations don't have enough space to really be satisfying. It did inspire me to revisit philosophy of mind, so there's that, but in the end I don't think I got as much out of the book as I'd hoped.