My reading recovered a bit in 2021, which is good news; even major life events couldn't stop me from getting my reading back on track. I did suffer a major breakdown in review-writing, but I have decided to sunset my Goodreads and switch to the friendlier LibraryThing, where I will hopefully pick the pace back up again.
Once again it is hard for me to give a single recommendation. For fiction, I have to say that the Colleen McCullough and Jack Vance books are both incredible. For non-fiction, Scott Atran and Richard Hamming would both be great picks.
Fiction:
Ayad Akhtar - Homeland Elegies. Novels that blend fact and fiction to this degree - the protagonist narrator is also named Ayad Akhtar, his family is also Pakistani, his father was also a doctor, etc - have a major challenge in that while plucking bits of your own life and placing them in a book can save you same time and effort coming up with material, the pieces you choose had better work in the context of a plot that is more entertaining than your own life, unless yours is as entertaining as Hunter S Thompson's or something. On the contrary, Akhtar was actually quite successful at writing a novel "in the era of Trump" (a dangerous but unavoidable phrase) that doesn't feel dishonest or recycled at all. In fact it's quite moving; the relationships between the protagonist and his father, mother, half-sister, and so on are an integral part of the narrative, which moves across the US both geographically and culturally. Akhtar is good at rendering the kind of conflicts over legal and medical issues that one would start to describe as "uniquely American" were it not for the fact that so many of them are handled by immigrants much like his father, and quite skillful as well at handling multiple types of polarization, not only political but also generational.
. Properly summing up Texas literature in a single anthology volume is a blatantly impossible task, and even doing a cursory survey is daunting, but it would be hard to do a better job in one volume than Graham has done here. Ranging from the expected cowboy/settler/ranch tales of early Texas through to the social commentary and "real literature" of the modern era circa the publication date of 2003, Graham surveys the regions of the state - rendered here as West, South, Border, and Town/City - and does a great job showcasing characteristically Texan literature, neatly avoiding the age-old identity debate of what makes a piece of work "really" about a state - does the work have to be by an author from there, or living there, or about there, or inspired by there, etc - by cheerfully selecting representatives of all of the above. Henry, Webb, Dobie, Porter, Bedichek, Caro, McMurtry, Brammer, Wright, Barthelme, Ivins - they're all here, along with plenty of other authors that you probably won't have heard of. While you could wish for a few more selections from more adventurous genres like science fiction, this is a great introduction to Texas literature. There's a whole world in here!
. I thought of this as LeGuin's take on a Philip K Dick novel, since the premise and plot could have been lifted from any number of discarded PKD outlines. A future dystopian Portland Oregon wracked by climate change and overpopulation is existentially threatened by both the reality-warping powers of protagonist George Orr's technologically augmented dreams as well as an alien invasion. LeGuin being LeGuin however, her emphasis is not so much on the terrifying vertigo that being unmoored from reality brings, but the way that Orr tries to find peace in the stability of love. Orr's abilities are discovered by psychiatrist William Haber, who attempts to use his powers to change the world for the better. However, each time Orr falls asleep with Haber's instructions in his mind, something ends up wrong in the new world he awakes to. As he obligingly writes and rewrites history at Haber's beck and call, he slowly falls in love with his lawyer Heather Lelache, and though the Heather he sees at the end of the novel is not the Heather he originally fell in love with, LeGuin's typically keen ability to get you to feel for the protagonist emphasizes the value of learning to appreciate what you have while it's still in front of you.
. Well-crafted and addictively paced historical fiction that vividly illustrates the world of the late Roman Republic in all its sleazy, violent, all too human glory. As familiar as the era of Julius Caesar is to us in the modern era, his parent's generation was not any less full of interest or consequence to the fate of Rome, and McCullough brings Marius and Sulla, two of the most influential people in the entire history of the Republic, to full-figured life. As the book begins Marius is only beginning his rapid ascent to being the First Man of Rome, with Sulla as his junior partner, but over the course of the book they both navigate tremendous personal and political challenges as the traditional political system of Rome begins to buckle under the weight of the growing size of the state and the overwhelming ambition of... well, men just like Marius and Sulla! Even though large chunks of the novel are told in the form of suspiciously detailed letters between the characters in order to deliver background exposition and offscreen action, McCullough makes it work through her sheer skill at characterization. Those who know their history will appreciate the dramatic irony of how the book ends with Marius and Sulla's stout friendship and seeming triumph over the forces of reaction, while even readers who've never heard of the Cimbrian War will appreciate the incredible depth of research McCullough brings to every page of this massive epic. Luckily this is merely the first of seven volumes in her Masters of Rome series.
. This is a collection of 4 individual fantasy novels and short stories Vance published in between 1950 and 1984, loosely related by the world all the tales are set in, and to this day it has to rank as having one of the highest entertainment value-per-page of any fantasy series you could read. I particularly loved the middle two volumes, The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga, which focus on the unwilling wanderings of the self-styled Cugel the Clever through an incredibly rich and compelling future world. Cugel has been induced to burgle the manor of fellow magician Iucounu the Laughing Magician; when he is discovered, he is forced to go on a quest beginning on the other side of the world with a small demon embedded in his liver that will give him sharp pains if it senses that Cugel is insufficiently dedicated to his task. He proceeds through a fantastically gripping journey through a seemingly unending series of confrontations with the bizarre inhabitants of the world Vance has created and makes it home to confront Iucounu, only to mess up a spell and be transported back to his original starting point to begin his journey home yet again! The plot of the novels is filled with action and adventure and would be interesting enough on its own, but it's Vance's erudite but dryly comic diction that elevate Cugel's twin odysseys across the world to higher realms of literature. These books were incredibly influential on Dungeons & Dragons and other assorted fantasy games (to this day any magic system involving individual memorized spells is called Vancian magic), but his incredibly entertaining and astoundingly creative stories deserve to be enjoyed on their own terms as well.
Non-Fiction:
Scott Atran - In Gods We Trust. Even a committed atheist like myself is impressed at the depth and longevity of religion. Individual religions may come and go, but religiosity itself is as old as humanity, and even though secularism might seem to be on the rise, it's entirely possible that religious urges will never go away but merely change their external presentation. Atran uses the full battery of neuropsychology, sociobiology, and cognitive anthropology to do a superb job of showing how evolution has deeply embedded religious impulses in the architecture of our brains, and how everything from the omnipresence of ritual to the need to congregate makes perfect sense when religion is seen as not merely satisfying individual desires to make sense of the world, but also fulfilling vital societal functions of trust and morality. Every society that has tried to stamp out a particular religion or even general religiosity has been forced to replace it with either a new religion or something functionally equivalent to a religion, since human beings are genetically hard-wired to think and believe and behave in certain ways; even if individual humans don't have strong religious impulses, the vital nature that religion has played in enabling human groups to scale from small hunter-gatherer bands to globe-spanning civilizations cannot be ignored. This book is really useful no matter what you believe, since even though the specific future of the religious landscape is anyone's guess, it's unlikely that religions which have provided irreplaceable services week in and week out for thousands of years are going anywhere anytime soon.
. America's incredibly complicated and expensive health care system is widely resented by nearly every one of us at one point or another, but to truly understand why it's so depressingly resistant to change, it's worth looking at what happened the last time someone tried to make a few improvements to the way health care is paid for and delivered in this country. The ten year interval in the title is between Obama's election victory in 2008, won in part because of a mandate for health care reform, and the Democratic recapture of the House in 2018, after John McCain's famous thumbs-down doomed the ACA repeal effort, but naturally Cohn covers much more than that in order to give the full context behind all of the breathless headlines we lived through and to drive home just how damn hard it is to improve the system. Bill Clinton's failed reform effort in 1994 looms large, of course, but the in order to fully appreciate the incredible difficulty involved in expanding coverage and reducing costs while not touching anyone's revenue streams you have to read about the gory details behind America's many other reform efforts: Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, Romney's Massachussetts plan, and so on, which have gradually woven together the Gordian knot we have now. As year 1 of the Biden era closes we seem to be stuck with this incoherent mishmash of public and private payers and providers indefinitely, and it's anyone's guess what tomorrow will bring, but one can hope that we'll get to truly universal coverage someday. This makes a great companion for Mike Grunwald's The New New Deal, a similarly well-reported book about the 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, AKA the stimulus.
. Why is every big movie these days part of some kind of superhero franchise? What happened to the actor- or director-focused movies that we all grew up watching, which showed up in theaters like clockwork every year until sometime in the mid 10s? The cultural shift from the type of movie that Michael Eisner so memorably termed "singles and doubles" - films based on original screenplays with mid-sized stars and a capable director - to the current torrent of mega-blockbusters has been so jarring that it almost seems the product of a deliberate conspiracy. It turns out that there are a lot of factors you could blame: changing tastes, particularly with "prestige TV" as a competitor; increasingly precise demographic targeting; international growth, particularly China; studio mergers; shifts in film financing structures; the rise of streaming services as preferred viewing platforms, content distributors, and content producers. That final factor turns out to be key, and Fritz uses the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures as the starting point to reveal how the "big six" film studios struggled to compete with the rise of Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as major players in the war for viewership, profits, and prestige, eventually realizing that audiences crave familiarity to a degree previously unknown, and that therefore the safe bet was to acquire as many reliable franchises as possible, Disney being the archetype of this tendency. James Stewart's Disneywar is one of the all-time great looks at the industry but it was published in 2004; Fritz's book is an essential update on the state of the movie industry now, still as cutthroat behind the scenes as it is glamorous in front of them.
. It's been a long time since I read something as math-heavy as this reprint of a collection of lectures on computer science and engineering, but it came with the sort of glowing reviews you normally associate with religious texts, and after finishing it I can see why. Hamming gave these lectures at the Naval Postgraduate School in his golden years. They cover computer hardware and programming, error correction, information theory, filters, simulations, and even quantum mechanics, but math per se is not really his focus. Really what he's trying to get across over the course of these intensely intelligent and provocative lectures is that a mix of curiosity and determination is essential for someone to do something great in the world, over and above raw intellectual horsepower. We're not all as smart as Hamming (anyone who has as many mathematical techniques named after them as he does is definitely on a higher plane of IQ), but what he tries to impart to the reader while he's walking them through higher-dimensional sphere-packing and error-correction matrices and so on is that "Learning to Learn", the book's subtitle, is a skill that can be acquired. It's hard to overstate how valuable that kind of reassurance can be, no matter the domain.
. As a committed new liberal/neoliberal I don't generally tend to see government and business as fundamentally at odds - often they're merely different means to the same end, and it doesn't matter so much what label you put on a service provider as long as something gets done. But there is almost always a major tradeoff between the flexibility and responsiveness of the market against the stability and accountability of the government, and it is worth exploring the points in American history where we made deliberate choices to have the government provide services directly to see what worked and why. Konczal reviews the moments in American history where the government directly provided land for settlement, health care, childcare, education, social insurance, and more, making a powerful case that our post-Reagan (really post-Carter) deregulatory environment may have brought vast wealth but left us less in control in some important ways. Interestingly he doesn't even mention public utilities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Lower Colorado River Authority, even though those efforts were and are crucial to their states and would have made excellent examples of how little we have to fear from government-operated enterprises, but the rest of the book is a very useful history, and possibly a useful guide to the future as well, even if you are a little less bothered by market forces than he is.
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