My Nerdy Friend

Religion for Athiests, Alain de Botton

Way back when my niece was being baptised, the minister kindly offered to baptise my son as well, even though we were not members of his church. I politely declined due to my lack of religious beliefs (to say the least), and he and I went on to have the beginnings of a very intriguing conversation about the unfortunate loss of community that attending a local church used to provide.

A friend’s recent tragedy got me thinking about how the non-religious can find ways to support and comfort our friends as they search for higher meaning in tragic events, and be open to the possibility of spiritual explanations for those things that are unknowable in both religious and secular beliefs.

Alain de Botton doesn’t tackle the problem of finding common ground between religious and secular beliefs in the search for what happens after death. Instead, he talks about what society stands to lose as we become more secular, and how we might incorporate religious ways of thinking and living as a means to make our lives more considerate, empathetic and hopeful.

He first talks about community, which immediately won me over. This has always seemed to me to be our greatest loss as the community church has faded away. Spending time with your neighbours as part of some kind of regular ritual makes it awfully hard to be a dick and pick a fight over a tree or fence line, or to hold a grudge the next time you have to hang out with them at the weekly social.

This leads to kindness, which in religion is arguably brought about through repetition and role models promoting forgiveness, patience and charity. I don’t believe there is an over-abundance of these traits in today’s world, although attempts are made through initiatives like the “Random Acts of Kindness”. The trouble is that we need to be more patient and forgiving people we know through specific and non-random kindnesses, and the question is how do we elevate these characteristics in a world that idolizes the wealthy and famous over the thoughtful and kind?

De Botton has several other interesting perspectives. In the areas of Education and Art, he promotes a concept of shifting the focus of curriculums and exhibits from pillars (“math”, “humanities”, “18th century masters”) to horizontal abstractions around life-needs such as “forgiveness”, “death”, “love” and so on. I actually love this idea! Imagine what an art gallery would be like if you could learn how artists across time dealt with depression, or, in another gallery, joy?

The book continues with thought-provoking insights around tenderness and the need for comfort, perspective and the relief of accepting our insignificance, and pessimism which brings expectations more in line with reality. (He does drift up against the adage that if you expect the worst you are never disappointed, and on this point I disagree because, hey! What kind of life is that? A little optimism seems like an okay thing to me.)

Am I more religious for having read this book? No. Am I less dismissive of the potential benefits of religious rituals? Yes. Do I have a new way of thinking about what happens after death? Unfortunately no, but I’m still looking.

Rating: Buy it. There’s lots here worth revisiting.

Life Sentence: Stories from four decades of court reporting — or, how I fell out of love with the Canadian Justice system. (Especially Judges). by Christie Blatchford

Christie Blatchford is fired up about the state of the Canadian Justice system, and she wants you to be as well. The trouble is that I already have a pretty full plate right now, wondering what is going to kill us all first: a world war that Donald Trump starts so as to us distract from his criminal activities or global warming (it’s anthropological GLOBAL WARMING, people, it’s not “climate change”.) Unfortunately for Christie’s cause, I just don’t think we are all going to die from a bad case of Justice System corruption.

Apart from being personally off-board about the target of her outrage, I did find that the book offered some interesting, and in some cases horrifying, details on some significant Canadian criminal cases. The most heinous trip down memory lane is the detailed recounting of the trials of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Ultimately, this is to make a point about power gained by the French and Mahaffy families allowing them to influence policy and demand the destruction of key evidence, which in turn lead to career-ending side effects for one true-crime writer. But it’s difficult to get enraged about this particular thing when you realize that Homolka is living free and clear somewhere in Quebec with three children of her own.

A quick aside about Bernardo:

He was recently up for parole review, having served the requisite time on his life sentence for murder. At that time, a provocatively-worded news headline resulted in a slew of misplaced outrage on social media, from people demanding to know how he was “allowed out” and criticising the justice system. Of course, a ten second google search would have revealed the truth, but that’s not really how our world works these days.  Seriously, people. Ten seconds! And if you have a mobile phone, you literally don’t even have to move from where you are to do this. Ok, rant over.

Christie’s book had one funny bit:

…playing Trivial Pursuit with some considerably younger friends, the fellow read aloud  a question about Malcolm X. We nearly fell off our chairs when he pronounced it as “Malcolm the Tenth…

Our collective ignorance is endlessly entertaining!

Ultimately, the lesson here is that spending 2 or 3 decades as a reporting observing the trials and court proceedings of some of the most heinous criminals in modern Canadian history can make you jaded. Probably not that surprising, really …

Rating: Skip it, unless you really want to read about the various trial details or you have an above-average interest in the internal workings of the criminal justice system.

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron

For much of this book, I thought Nora Ephron and my friend Chrystal had very similar styles of writing, but in fact Chrystal is much funnier. Judge for yourself.

Chrystal:

The next big challenge is the sopa pearlas con cerdos, or “pearls for swine” soup. I made a big pot of lentil and vegetable soup last Friday that “he who travels with a personal chef” simply refuses to eat. Every time I say “we can have some soup for lunch…..” Geoff says “let’s go out to eat”. I refuse to throw it out. We are at a soup impass.

(you can find her whole post here)

Nora:

It’s served with soup, or with a main course like pot roast or roast pheasant (not that I’ve ever made roast pheasant, but no question cabbage strudel would be delicious with it). It has a buttery, flaky, crispy strudel crust made of phyllo (the art of which I plan to master in my next life, when I will also read Proust past the first chapter), the a moist filling of sauteed cabbage that’s simultaneously sweet, savory, and completely unexpected, like all good things.

Her book (Nora’s, not Chrystal’s. Chrystal doesn’t have a book (but she should)) is enjoyable but not uproariously hilarious, which is what I was looking for at the particular moment when I selected it. To be totally fair, it’s possible that some extremely bad recent events made it hard for me to see the humour in it. But wait, that’s not it! Other things have made me laugh, so I am sticking with my first instinct.  Mildly funny in parts, at best.

It also get less funny as she goes along. The second last chapter contains a rueful list of things she wished she’d known, some of which are just plain wrong. Such as:

Take more pictures. Wrong! Please, people, take fewer pictures! Especially in art galleries, for god’s sake. In fact, let me clear something up for you right now. That picture you are taking of the Da Vinci is going to look like crap, and there’s probably a better looking postcard of it in the gift shop. So just quit it.

There’s no point in making piecrust from scratch. If you think this is true, then you are invited to my house for pie.

Her last chapter, the most melancholy, talks about facing death and simultaneously avoiding facing it. She talks about her friend who died horribly at 66 and wonders how she should be living her life, being 64 herself. I read that and thought 64 is not that old and maybe she’s being melodramatic. Then I turn to the last page of the book, the “about the author” section, and was shocked to read that she died in 2012, when she was 71. I am saddened by that. And now if you’ll excuse me I’m just going to pop into the kitchen and make some pie.

Rating: This is still just a borrow book for me. I have no plans to read it again.

Good to a Fault, Marina Endicott

I have been procrastinating like mad on this post. I think it’s because I accidentally revealed to a mutual friend of the author that I was going to write it, and now I live in abject fear of her finding out I did and, worse (eek), reading it. Lesson learned, my friends!

How did this accidental reveal occur? For some reason, I always read the acknowledgements when I finish a book. It’s possible I just like to peer into the lives of authors to see who knows whom, or it could be I’m hoping to find any interesting cross-overs the way that musicians pop up in unexpected places as members of lesser-known bands or guest-participants in other bands’ albums. Honestly, this rarely pays off with books like it does with music, but in this case I was surprised! It turns out Marina thanked a friend whose name I recognized as an actress from wayyy back when I lived in Peterborough, Ontario. In my teens, I volunteered as an usher at Peterborough’s Arbor Theatre (this was also where my mother worked as the office manager, and where this mutual friend worked as an actor).  Marina also acted in the Peterborough Theatre scene, albeit after my time there. I loved volunteering at Arbor, and I know my mom loved working there, so this was a pretty cool connection.

Given all the back-story, I wish I could say that I chose this book, but it was actually selected for our book club by one of the other members, thinking it would be a nice, light read for spring (we’ve been leaning a little on the heavy side lately). As it turns out, not so light a read, but an excellent book club choice!

Marina is a wonderful writer, weaving together a considered and thoughtful character-driven story that explores the fine line between selflessness and selfishness.. My favourite fiction books feature excellent character development, and Good to a Fault was no exception. It’s possible to dislike many of her characters, but it’s difficult to not find them all immensely interesting. Every one of them seems to walk this line, drifting between genuine generosity and self-interest.

The book club had a healthy debate on this point. In the book, after getting into a minor car accident with them, Clara takes care of Lorraine’s family for months while she (Lorraine) is hospitalized, but is she doing it to out of guilt or kindness? Does she continue to care for the family out of generosity, or because it makes her feel important? Is Mrs. Zenko, who voluntarily steps in whenever Clara is over her head, truly selfless, or does this give her a new sense of purpose? As a group, we thought maybe Lorraine’s brother Darwin was the most selfless, but he disappears the minute he’s no longer needed, as if being needed is it’s own reward and once it’s gone, so too is he.

The question remains, is anyone truly selfless? I really don’t think so.

The subject reminded me (for real) of the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, in particular an episode titled Jennifer and Johnny’s Charity. Through a 70’s- sitcom-style set of misunderstandings, a group of homeless people end up crashing the party of several wealthy philanthropists who are holding a gala to raise money for the homeless. At some point (and I forget the exact circumstances), one of the homeless men tells them “You don’t give money to help us, you give money because it makes you feel good. But we’ll still take it!” The TV show Friends explored a similar theme with an entertaining episode that saw Phoebe setting out to prove she could perform a selfless good deed and accidentally ending up benefiting from each attempt. (Note to self: I may watch too much TV….)

To bring it back around to the book, Marina explores this theme with a level of sophistication and subtlety that one would never associate with network television sitcoms, and it’s absolutely worth the read. She throws in some clever humour as well, in case that’s your TV raison d’etre.

Rating: I bought it. I think you should, too.

PS: A really nice thing happened since my last post. My mother told me she read some of my posts and thought I was a really good writer. That meant a lot, Mom. Thanks!

The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher

Once in a while a person comes along who you discover too late was awesome and you wish you’d known that during their life. You know, so you could stalk them at a convention or follow them on Instagram or heart their tweets, if only so that some part of you could think that some part of them knew that you liked them. Carrie Fisher seems like she just became that for a lot of people, with her sudden death following the latest instalment of Star Wars in which we were treated to the return of Princess (pardon me … General) Leia Organa.

At the very least, her book confirms that Carrie is this person for me. She is witty, entertaining, poignant, brutally honest, occasionally unfocused, and unapologetic – my kinda gal. I wish she’d had more time. The Princess Diarist is her last book, published shortly before her death.

The book is basically divided into three parts. Part One recounts the details of her affair with Harrison Ford during the filming of Star Wars. Or A New Hope. Or Episode IV. Whatever lights your saber. (Although the correct answer is “Star Wars”.) This recounting doesn’t do Harrison Ford any favours. He comes out looking like a brooding, morose philanderer who, at 33 years old and married, hooks up with a naive 19-year-old in order to have a little remote-location fling. This was unfortunate for me, as a huge HF fan. I mean, he’s so rugged and so bad-ass!! Doing his own stunts, filming scenes while deathly ill with flu, stapling his Indiana Jones hat to his head (so the rumour goes), and even in real life crashing his airplane onto a golf course and walking away with just a scratch!! But apparently he is also a big-ass jerk. Rats. (This being said, Carrie grants him a sort of reprieve in Part Three, suggesting that he was already unhappy in his marriage, given his separation shortly after filming, and that this may have been the only affair he ever had, and that he may actually have really liked her.)

In Part Two, Carrie publishes excerpts of diaries that she kept during that time. This is easily a skip-able part of the book, unless first-hand reading of teenage angst is your thing. I did find two exceptional bits, however.

We often assume that when the surface offers so little the depth must be unfathomable. Whatever is inaccessible must be worthwhile.

I’m just going to say that I totally, 100%, get that.

I am always disappointed with someone who loves me – how perfect can he be if he can’t see through me?

If I changed that last part to read “how perfect can he be if he chooses me”, then that was me, at the age Carrie was when she wrote it. What a freaking waste. We’re so stupid when we’re young! Actually, I’m probably still stupid, just in different ways 🙂

Part Three, my favourite of the book, is a collection of anecdotes about Carrie’s re-entry to fame following the release of the first two “Chapter Three” movies featuring the return of our beloved Leia. She hilariously recounts stories of interactions with fans during what she calls “Lap Dances” (autograph-signing events for which she gets paid) and puzzles over the disappointment of many that she’s had the nerve to “age”, no longer resembling her past metal-bikini-clad self. It’s totally worth the insight into craziness of stardom.

Rating: Buy it, so that you can enjoy Part Three over again.

PS: Today is May 4, 2018, so let me just add (say it with me) “May the Fourth Be With You”.

Arrows of the Queen, Mercedes Lackey

It has been far, FAR too long since I read a fantasy book.  I suspect book clubs are getting in the way. Not many books selected by my fellow book clubees are fantasy books. And by “not many” I mean “zero”.

Arrows of the Queen has  a real origins-story feel to it, which makes sense because not only is it the first book in a trilogy but the trilogy itself is also the first of several serialized trilogies all set in the same world. Laying the foundation for this multitude of books demands a lot of world-building in fairly short order, and this, the first book, ultimately ends up feeling just a bit rushed.

Arrows also feels like a first book, which once again makes sense because it is, in fact, Lackey’s first book. I don’t mean that it’s bad. In fact, it has some strong writing and thoughtful details about how this fantasy world has been imagined. What I mean by a first-book feel is that it seems like the author is still feeling her way around how best to write her story, sometimes spending too much time on a less interesting subject and often not spending enough time on a compelling one. It’s also short – just 300 or so pages – and I can imagine that if Lackey returned to rewrite it, she’d land closer to 500. All this just means Arrows is “cute” and “fun”, rather than potentially “breathtaking” and “illustrious”.

I feel like I should disclose that my favourite (and by that I mean !!FAVOURITE!!) fantasy author is Guy Gavriel Kay. I can’t adequately articulate how much I love his books, his writing, his characters. And it’s against this, the Kay-Scale, that I measure all other fantasy novels, so anything I say about Arrows should be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt.

Honestly, I thought this book had lots of potential, and is definitely on its way to becoming a great trilogy. I look forward to reading the rest of it.

Rating: I elect to withhold my buy/borrow rating until I’ve read the entire series. I think Mercedes Lackey can easily go from a 2 on the Kay-Scale to a 6 (and to be fair, the Summer Tree, Kay’s first book, was itself only about a 5 or 6, suffering from much of that same first-book syndrome. The rest of Kay’s books are all 10s. Well, okay, there might be one 9. And I dare you to find it).

My Life as a White Trash Zombie, by  Diana Rowland

You might reasonably be tempted to assume this is a zombie book, but you might also be pleasantly surprised to discover that it is technically a mystery novel. Sure, one of the mysteries is how the lead character, Angel, was turned into a zombie but there is also a nice little serial-killer mystery backdrop to keep things light and entertaining.

Waking up in the hospital after a car accident, Angel finds out that she has been zombified by a benevolent sire (wait, that’s the term for vampire turners, isn’t it?) who has also conveniently arranged a job for her at the local morgue. This turns out to be extremely handy because she soon discovers that if she eats brains at least once every other day she becomes super-charged. But, if she misses a meal or two, she quickly decomposes into a more traditional Walking-Dead-type zombie with alarmingly little control over her brain-consumption needs.

During the course of settling into her new “life” style and working hard to avoid the Walking-Dead problem, she encounters cute cops, cocky morgue-workers, and a mafia-like zombie who is attempting to control the brains-market for personal profit. She also stumbles onto the mystery of who has been murdering and beheading local residents of her hometown.

The book is charming and fun, if not extraordinarily well-written. It’s a great little beach-read – don’t be scared off by the zombie theme. There are 5 or possibly 6 additional books in the series, but a scan through Goodreads suggests that this one is really the best of the bunch, so I think I will give the rest a pass.

Rating: Borrow it if you need something light to read on the plane. Trust me on the zombie thing.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff

Is Michael Wolff a daring, insightful journalist or a water-cooler gossip? Is Fire and Fury an illuminating exposé of the Trump White House or a trashy retelling of stories we already know? Is the writing eloquent and astute or is it condescending and convoluted?

Spoiler alert: gossip, trashy,  and condescending.

It’s hard to pinpoint what is the most annoying thing about Michael Wolff’s book (from the many, many choices), but my money is on his excessive overuse of the hyphen. He uses this punctuational diversion to insert random “clarifying” content into the middle of sentences, on average about once every paragraph. Here is one of the most nauseating examples of this writing “style”:

During a dinner of Dover sole, haricots verts, and thumbelina carrots — Kushner, seated with the Chinese first couple, Bannon at the end of the table — the attack on Al Shayrat airfield was launched.

For the love of god.

Wolff also has a not-very-endearing habit of insinuating things that might be going on without really ever telling you what the details of those things are. For instance, he went on the talk-show book tour and stated that Trump was having an affair with one of his staffers. He insinuated that the book would revealed who the affair was with, but to find out the details, you would have to buy the book and then “read between the lines”.  When asked out-right by the talk-show hosts to say who it was (since he brought it up, after all), he would just smirk and repeat that the answer was “in the book”. He is literally a child. No wonder he was overlooked for so long while he lurked about in the White House … Trump probably thought they were on a play date.

I imagine a conversation with Wolff in high school going something like this:

Michael Wolff: I was in Mr. Taylor’s closet  and I heard him talking to Mrs. Stephens.

Classmate Who Foolishly Engaged: Really? What did they say? Wait, why were you in the closet?

MW: I was …er …. doing homework. They were talking about the students in their classes! It was so mean that I’m going to write about it in the school newspaper!

CWFE: What did they say?

MW: Mean things! It will be in the newspaper.

CWFE: But, what mean things did they say?

MW: You will never believe it! It was so shocking and mean! It will all be in the story.

CWFE: Why can’t you just tell me now?

MW: I did just tell you. I told you it will be in the story. Probably in the form of an indecipherable puzzle.

CWFE: What?

MW: Yeah, that way nobody can say I said anything, even though I’m saying everything! I am so amazingly smart and you are all so stupid!

CWFE:

MW: … so there …

Rating: Please, just skip it. Your best bet is to just walk away now. Don’t make the mistake of engaging.

Additional note to exposé authors: I have yet to read a unauthorized exposé that hasn’t made me lose more respect for the author than the person they are trying to expose. Just sayin’.

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is a very weird book, but it doesn’t start out that way. It starts out just everyday-weird, like a kind of scifi mystery leading you to mildly wonder what could be causing the unusual things that are happening? Is it alien? Human experimentation? Evolution gone awry? But instead of drawing you closer to an answer, it just exponentially ramps up the weirdness. This is what the graph of weirdness looks like as you read further along in the book:

Eventually you feel like you know less about what’s going on that you did when you started. I wasn’t worried, though, because I was going to see the movie which I figured would help. It didn’t. If anything, the movie was even weirder than the book. It also wasn’t so much based on the book as (very) loosely inspired by it. Again, it starts out promising, doing an interesting job of translating a very cerebral book into a very visual movie while managing to maintain some of the mood and suspense. But before long it, too, soon falls off the edge into crazy-land. The only clarifying the movie seems to do is to confirm that the weirdness is of alien origin. Don’t get me wrong, apart from one Revenant-channeling scene the movie wasn’t un-enjoyable, it was just … weird. Really freaking weird.

But I do have to give kudos to Alex Garland, the screenwriter/director. He manages to take random snippets from the book and create a whole new, equally but differently, strange movie. There are still the women scientists (5 instead of 4, and with names in the movie which they are not given in the book), there is still the village of people-shaped plants, there’s a lighthouse (which, in keeping with the oddities, is never actually ascended), and there are animal/human(?) hybrids. There’s also the creature which in the book is referred to as the Crawler and in the movie is … god only knows. Some kind of kaleidoscope, or a Mendlebrot set, that might also be a person? Or a copy of a person? Or maybe a refraction?

You get the idea. Or rather, you don’t get the idea even at all, which I think might be the point.

Rating: If you are a fan of scifi, then totally read it. There are two other books in the series which I plan to read, at the risk of becoming even more baffled, in the hopes of having even one thing explained.

Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari

In keeping with the argumentation style of this book, let’s jump straight to the conclusion.

Rating: Skip it.

I can only presume that Harari bases Homo Deus on a solid foundation of clearly articulated arguments laid out in his earlier book, Sapiens, and that he assumes this justifies his sweeping generalizations and excessive conclusion-jumping in this most recent one. Or, it’s just a badly written book. Regardless, if you want to be scared shitless about our future amongst the artificially intelligent robot nation, then read these two blog entries instead. They are lengthy, but much shorter – and much better – than Harari. If “scared shitless” is not your personal goal, then just read the first one and do not, under any circumstances, read part II.

The AI Revolution Part I: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

The AI Revolution Part II: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction