en-US Sun, 06 Jul 2025 21:08:40 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Friend1425064778 Sun, 06 Jul 2025 21:08:40 -0700 Review7712090331 Sat, 05 Jul 2025 12:59:27 -0700 /review/show/7712090331 David gave 2 stars to The Grace Year (Paperback) by Kim Liggett
bookshelves: angsty-teen
The Grace Year addresses issues of gender that, if not overtly a problem, always seem to be simmering just beneath the surface. In the book’s world, society is a patriarchal one where every tradition is built around the alleged superiority of men, women are forced to deny their own sexuality, and are either selected as wives or sent to live in the forest as outcasts. All this coupled with what sounded like a female version of The Lord of the Flies had me excited.

And then the conventions of the YA genre settle in: the use of present tense, a spunky, rebellious protagonist who is just flawed enough to allow for some growth, short sections that each end with quasi-ominous one-liners, periodic revelations that are supposed to be profound and moving but are flat and predictable, ginned up drama, ginned up romance. The book contains just about every cliché of these kinds of glossy, superficial stories that I have come to find not only grating but also disheartening in terms of what modern novels could and should be.

There are still a few times that the book flirts with some engaging ideas about the intangible things that really matter, the ways we assume things to be magical before we figure out how they actually work, and how systems can be used to pit individuals against each other. But even when it almost gives the impression that it’s grappling with some major ideas, it can never fully shake the fact that it is doing nothing more than churning out another by-the-numbers work of mediocrity.

Just go read The Handmaid’s Tale if you want something illuminating about gender dynamics and human relationships. ]]> Review7706383633 Thu, 03 Jul 2025 07:50:19 -0700 /review/show/7706383633 David gave 4 stars to How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Paperback) by Andreas Malm
bookshelves: politics
“The ruling classes really will not be talked into action. They are not amenable to persuasion; the louder the sirens wail, the more material they rush to the fire, and so it is evident that change will have to be forced upon them.”

So it is that Andreas Malm makes the case that sabotage against equipment and the means of capitalist production is necessary to mitigate climate disaster. The capitalists who only think in short term profits or in their own wealth and safety do not respond to anything else. The only thing that might get their attention is if their investments in oil extraction, refinement, or delivery may no longer pay the dividends they anticipate.

For too long, according to Malm, climate activists have been weary of doing anything too extreme for fear that any kind of backlash may hurt the cause. But, as Malm elucidates in a brief but well argued history of political movements, there has often been a radical flank of agitators–Malcolm X, Nat Turner, Emmeline Pankhurst–who have been there alongside the promoters of civil disobedience, and it is those who at least threaten violence who give the broader movement more force.

There is still the real threat of a public backlash, with media propagandists and big money interests ready to smear anyone who defies them, which could do more harm than good to the cause. But as one more option among many, such as divestment movements and various forms of disruption, the saboteurs of capital could provide a more persuasive argument to those who only think in dollars. ]]> Review7699021348 Mon, 30 Jun 2025 19:55:49 -0700 /review/show/7699021348 David gave 3 stars to The Cynic Philosophers: From Diogenes to Julian (Penguin Classics) by Robert F. Dobbin
bookshelves: philosophy
The cynics were a loosely associated group of philosophers who espoused notions of living in accordance with virtue and nature and criticizing wealth and social standing. They considered themselves to be homeless in terms of a city where they might pledge their allegiance and, rather, thought of themselves as citizens of the world. Their mantra was “deface the currency,” by which they advocated for the “inversion of all values.” They were somewhere in between Henry David Thoreau–with his challenges to mainstream society–and the Satanic Temple (the group that puts up statues of satan at courthouses where there are also statues of the Ten Commandments)–with their penchant for offending.

This particular collection contains excerpts from around fourteen adherents of the philosophy over the course of many hundreds of years. Some of them may not be completely authentic, but even these still provide the details of cynic thought.

Diogenes of Sinope, nicknamed the dog because of his course and filthy lifestyle, is the most famous and the most fun to hear stories about. He courted controversy wherever he went, as he would masturbate in public and advocate for things like cannibalism. But they all had a knack for rhetoric and one-liners. A later cynic, Demetrius once said, “The talk of fools to me is like the sound of farts. For what difference is it to me whether their rumblings issue from above or below?”

Unfortunately, their messages in a collection like this get repetitive after a while, and anyone reading these from anything but a scholarly perspective may get bored. And I know I’m looking at this from too modern a lens, but some of their views, while partially commendable, such as their stance on poverty, seem like they could easily be cynically (in the modern sense of the word) manipulated. And, too often, they ignore the importance of social connection. If I had to boil down my complaints, I like how they discard formalities and hierarchies but not how they discard certain aspects of humanity.

I may not fully agree with their beliefs or lifestyles, but I do appreciate anyone who is willing to challenge accepted conventions. And anyone who considers farting to be a political act is okay in my book. ]]> Review7694990418 Sun, 29 Jun 2025 13:26:37 -0700 /review/show/7694990418 David gave 4 stars to The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Hardcover) by Stephen Chbosky
bookshelves: angsty-teen
Within a sea of mediocre young adult books, The Perks of Being a Wallflower stands out because of its sincerity and underlying sadness and because its narrator has one of the most authentic teen voices I’ve come across.

There is little plot, per say, other than Charlie, the eponymous wallflower, slowly figuring out how the world around him operates and where he might fit in. A decent chunk of the book reminded me of a Richard Linklater hang out movie–updated for the 1990s–where one experience flows into the next and the events are filled with recognizable high school types who are just dynamic enough to feel real.

The moments Charlie dwells on also feel genuine and pretty much nails the ways people fail to communicate, or do the wrong thing when they clearly know what the right thing is, or come to understand that the bad guys in life are rarely as one-note as we’re made to think. There is an intimacy to all of these revelations that seems almost certainly culled from real life and gives them more emotional weight.

The book contains issues that go beyond the years of adolescence. Still, this is one of those books I wish I had read in high school because, for as much as I liked it, I feel like it would have had more of an impact on me then. ]]> Review7687170349 Thu, 26 Jun 2025 13:15:36 -0700 /review/show/7687170349 David gave 4 stars to What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory (Hardcover) by Brian Eno
bookshelves: cultural-criticism
Most people enjoy art in one sense or another, yet many still seem to consider it an extravagance, clearly not as important as the basics of survival. In What Art Does, Brian Eno pushes back on this assumption and makes a series of propositions as to why art is more pertinent to our personal lives and our broader culture than the naysayers would like to admit.

I think it’s conventional wisdom that art can be a safe way to explore emotions or the ways we might react to being placed in situations we’ve never actually been in, but Eno takes it a step further by clarifying that we make decisions based not only on a rational thought process or even our prior experiences, but also how our values and sense of the world are shaped by our engagements with art. And, in that way, the facts do care about our feelings.

Among other theories, Eno also suggests that art is how adults play. It’s an extension of what kids do when they use their imagination, so the people who have given up on the transformative power of art are the ones who have grown old, no matter their real age, while the ones who continue to engage with it remain young.

It’s a short work, one that could, of course, be developed more, as the subtitle indicates, but even the seeds of ideas it contains provide quite a bit to think about. ]]> Review7684603056 Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:33:42 -0700 /review/show/7684603056 David gave 4 stars to Like Water for Chocolate (Paperback) by Laura Esquivel
bookshelves: mexican
Like Water for Chocolate takes the form of a conventional women’s magazine with a serialized love story interspersed with recipes, but it showcases anything but conventional female characters. The women here can be just as cruel as they can be heartfelt, they attempt to toe the line between sexual freedom and chaste family orthodoxy, and they also grow toward a hard-won independence against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution.

The story itself is much wilder than I was expecting. It contains romance and spurned love, but it also reads like a Mexican version of Cinderella (and an adult one at that, I don’t remember Cinderella sleeping with her brother-in-law or Cinderella’s sister running naked through the town and having sex while riding a horse) or an adventure story that harkens back to something like Spenser’s Faerie Queene because it has so many unexpected and magical twists and turns. And it ends with a sequence that is a full on lysergic trip of ecstasy and love beyond death.

Of course, food is at the center of all of this. Food is language, culture, medicine, comfort, and so much more. Food preparation in this novel goes well beyond the putative “woman’s work” that it is often made out to be and becomes an integral part of life, not only because food is necessary for survival, but because the shades of cooking mirror the shades of life and require a level of attention that most people don’t pay it.

It’s possible that all the craziness going on here detracts from the central love story, but there’s so much fun to be had, you almost won’t miss it. ]]> Review7679376226 Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:42:52 -0700 /review/show/7679376226 David gave 4 stars to The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (Kindle Edition) by Chris Hayes
bookshelves: cultural-criticism
The ravages and vertigo-inducing disconnection of the current attention age may not be the first topic you attach to Chris Hayes, someone heavily invested in the world of politics and journalism, but considering he must capture people’s attention for his nightly show, the issue has clearly been on his mind for years. While the book may piggyback off other recent social critics (Jenny Odell, Jonathan Haidt) and some older theorists (Marx, Walter Lippmann, Neil Postman), it is still plenty insightful, drawing on literature and philosophy as well as a grounded understanding of our current relationship to technology and social media.

Where it really excels, in my estimation, is in its honesty. Hayes never downplays his own desire for social attention or how he sometimes breaks the very rules about screen time he’s laid out for his own kids or how even he falls victim to the discrepancy between what we know we should pay attention to versus what we actually do pay attention to. Similarly, he doesn’t dismiss the reasonable counter arguments about the inevitable changes that come with new technology and make critics like himself sound like nostalgic luddites. He treats them with genuine interest before explaining why he thinks the issue of attention in the digital age is still more personally fraught and devastating than many of us realize.

Hayes’ main contention is that our attention, in all its complex guises, is one of the core attributes of humanity and that commodifying it begins a process of dehumanization. Philosophers such as William James described people’s ability to enact voluntary attention upon one thing while a myriad of sensory details are being thrust upon them is what allows people to have free will. But when so many things are vying for our attention, as they currently almost always are, it becomes almost impossible to do this, and, thus, our choices are being taken away from us and our lives are being degraded.

Formerly, attention, in its ideal form, was a means to an end. If you wanted to make an important argument or divulge information necessary for a democracy to be even close to functional, you needed to make some noise first so you could deliver something worthwhile. Now, attention is an end unto itself. Whoever can scream the loudest will attract the most, but what they do with it will likely be to attract even more while the whole system of communication gets bogged down in spam in the process. Hence, the ubiquitous trolling and whataboutisms and conspiracy theories.

On a more personal level, the way our attention is fragmented and one-sided serves to diminish our relationships. Yelling the loudest will attract viewers, but real recognition–the core of relationships, romantic, parental, and otherwise–is only achieved when we treat others as fully realized human beings so they can return the favor.

Hayes offers some broad outlines for ameliorating our desperate situation. Many of them involve returning to a world of analog in one form or another, physical newspapers or vinyl records. These all sound fine if we can get enough people to make this switch. My preference would still be picking out a long novel and living in that world for as long as you can. ]]> UserFollowing329030749 Fri, 20 Jun 2025 23:04:17 -0700 /user/show/6268407-audra-ouija-reads David Stephens is now following Audra (ouija.reads) ]]> Review7670646574 Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:26:23 -0700 /review/show/7670646574 David gave 4 stars to In the Lives of Puppets (Paperback) by T.J. Klune
bookshelves: fantasy
“You were made to bring happiness. You are alive in ways we are not. You are soft and fragile. But you are complex and disturbing and sometimes foolishly brilliant.” This is just one of the ways a character in T.J. Klune’s comical fantasy In the Lives of Puppets describes humans. They are irrational and develop sentimental attachments to things and others, yet those same ostensible flaws give them something intangible that allows them to transcend artificial life.

And sentiments like these are perfectly fitting in a story–a kind of reverse Edward Scissorhands–of a lone human cast out into the world to recover his lost “father.” There is a sweetness to the whole undertaking, a backdrop of acceptance and the nurturing of tolerance that largely raises the emotional stakes of the story and only occasionally comes across as mawkish. For the most part, Klune hits the right notes of slapstick and heart.

My favorite aspect of the book might be the interplay between the main character’s two robot best friends. Nurse Ratched is a sociopath who must enact an empathy protocol to maintain decorum, and Rambo is a small vacuum cleaner who acts like an insecure puppy. They threaten and cajole each other but are willing to make sacrifices for one another. Their relationship is emblematic of everything that works so well about the book.

Otherwise, Klune softly injects questions of humanity and purpose and tells us all–human and robot alike–that we can overcome our programming. ]]>