My Nerdy Friend

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

I don’t want to review this book per se. There is a LOT to say, but I’m not really qualified, and there are George Eliot scholars out there who can do a much better job. In fact, one of them – an actual George Eliot scholar – is coming to our book club meeting …. SQUEEE!! Instead, with the help of a few mocked-up timelines, I want to talk about things that surprised me, several of which were things that maybe shouldn’t have.

ASIDE: I just want to say how much I love timelines. I love way they provide visual representations of events in relation to each other in a way that my brain seems incapable of doing. I wish high school history had been taught this way, instead of memorising a list of events related to Napoleon’s rise and fall (what year did he get exiled to Elba, again? I have no freaking clue!) My favourite timeline ever was found in the Star Trek: Experience attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton, although I’m sure that’s a surprise to exactly no one. /aside

One surprise for me was how knowledgeable George Eliot was on current directions in medical science, particularly in the treatment of specific illnesses such as fevers. She was also well versed in a trend towards what I will call the Separation of Diagnosis and Dispensation. But, then again, Mary Shelley was extremely well informed on the topic of medical science, and Frankenstein was published the year after George Eliot was born. So perhaps it was not uncommon to be so learned.

It also surprised me that in the time of the early 1830’s they would be building a railway across the country, but as the timeline reveals, the first railway actually opened in the mid-1820’s. In the 1830’s, it appears a bit of a publicity stunt was held, where a race horse was pitted against a steam locomotive (the horse won). Apparently we humans have a strange and long-standing tradition of racing incongruous things – during Shark Week 2017, Discovery held a race between Michael Phelps and a great white shark (sort of).

And then there is George Eliot’s knowledge and awareness of the political situations in Great Britain, and how she weaves these into her story. During the time frame of the book, Britain passed a parliamentary reform bill that addressed several inequalities in the voting structure and enfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters. But again, many interesting political events were happening during her life that may have contributed to her interest, including Catholic emancipation, Napoleon declaring himself emperor and anti-slavery movements, including the American civil war.

Finally, I am curious as to why George Eliot felt it necessary to publish her books under a male pseudonym, when so many important books by women were published during her life, like Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Little Women to name just a few. Maybe it’s because her book shows such depth of knowledge on topics women were not expected to know or understand? I am hoping our honoured book club guest can speak to this.

Rating: Buy it! Fair warning, it’s 800 pages of Victorian-style writing, and if you are going to read it, you are best advised to set yourself a modest daily goal. But it’s absolutely worth it in the end.

What Happened is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s account of the 2016 Presidential campaign and the events leading up to her shocking election-day loss to a complete idiot.

Personally, I believe what happened was the result of a 40 year campaign of misogyny and sexism, starting with her original decision to keep her own name (where she eventually relented because it was considered damaging to her husband’s career) through her efforts in 1993 to create a healthcare reform package as First Lady (when she was told to keep her place and stay out of public policy matters), to her current run for president (when anti-Hillary sentiment included t-shirts that read Trump That Bitch). This campaign went to such extremes as accusations that she arranged the assassination of people who interfered with her ambitions.

What is amazing (a sentiment that for some reason gets very little airplay) is that Hillary has been under insane scrutiny for 4 decades and the worst thing anyone has been able to find is a fairly common, albeit misguided, use of a home email server used for government correspondence. Even a trumped-up  (pardon the pun) Benghazi scandal failed to produce anything of import, despite the best efforts of Republican dissenters during an 11 hour hearing before the Select Committee. She has not been found to murder people, steal money from her family’s Foundation or even lie excessively, despite the very best attempts of her enemies to prove otherwise. And if someone with that much relentless dirt-digging still comes through fairly clean, then what is wrong with the world? She should be sainted, for crying out loud! She’s certainly more sincerely devout than most of public figures on the religious right. So what are we left with? We hate her because she’s a “Clinton” and we hate her because she’s a woman. What else is there?

Meanwhile in her book, in her usual gracious way, Hillary is thoughtful and introspective, addressing a myriad of additional factors that contributed to her defeat, including several for which she takes personal responsibility (such as being a poor campaigner and underestimating the effect of a reality-TV election). A lot of her personal stories brought back vivid memories of similar stories in my life and career.

Suddenly one of the men reached across the table, grabbed me by my turtleneck, and yanked me toward him. He hissed in my face, “Just shut up.”

When I was fairly young and new to my engineering career, I was in a meeting with a male colleague (an MBA graduate – not particularly relevant except it put me off MBA grads more or less for good). I don’t remember the conversation we were having exactly, except that I was objecting to much of what he was saying because it didn’t make sense for the company and suddenly, during one of my objections, he thrust his finger into my face and said “You just shut up. Just. Shut. Up!”  At the time, I was shocked and livid, and sat in stone-cold silence until the meeting was over at which point I basically got up and stomped away. Of course, today I would have told him where he could shove his stupid finger if he didn’t get it the hell out of my face and it bugs the crap out of me that I didn’t do that back then. However, by telling her own story, maybe Hillary will enable some other young woman to stand up and demand to be heard, no matter who is trying to silence her.

And that’s really the point. I know Hillary lost the election. But it’s possible that this loss, to the worst kind of person imaginable, has rallied women to work together and to say “enough” and to finally realize that our voices have power. In the days following the election, a movement began that ultimately became the 2017 Women’s March, held the day after the inauguration. 500,000 people marched in Washington with 4 million more across the United States and 5 million world wide. The March, while intentionally not naming the new president as its target, was very definitely protesting the policies of the new government. This March has now become an annual,  global event.

And that wasn’t all. Within the wave of protests and demands to be heard, we also saw the scientific community come together under the threat of false science doctrine, global warming denial, and “clean coal”. They launched the March for Science on Earth Day, April 22, 2017, which has also become an annual event. Additional protests took place throughout the 2017 year to speak out against detainment of refugees, travel bans, immigrant deportation, US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and so on.

Then, in October of 2017, following the revelations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement began, and once again women were rallying together and demanding to not only be heard, but to be believed. Women were speaking about rampant sexual misconduct in industries ranging from entertainment to government to academia. It didn’t stop there. #MeToo lead directly to #TimesUp, which embraced taking a stand for acknowledgement and recognition and adding a pointed call for action. Individual women defied misogynist strongholds by running for public office and winning. And in just the most recent example of public outcry and protest, the student survivors of the Stone Douglas school shooting have started a movement to defy the NRA and demand measures for gun control. These teenagers, in just two weeks, have held rallies, travelled to town hall meetings in an effort to hold politicians accountable, organised school walkout protests across the US, influenced at least 15 companies to sever ties with the NRA and motivated 2 retail outlets to voluntarily stop selling assault rifles and to require a minimum age of 18 to buy any gun. There is a growing feeling, along with a body of recent evidence, to suggest that these protests are working and this, in turn, may be inspiring even more people to join the fight.

Resist, Insist, Persist, Enlist

I don’t necessarily believe that the current swell of activism started just because Hillary lost the election. But I do believe that the extenuating circumstances of her loss played a major role. Because, despite whether you are one of those people who fall on the “hate her” or “love her” side of the coin, most of us can relate to the shitty ways she was treated during the campaign:

• Losing a job for which you are the most qualified candidate by far to a completely unqualified buffoon
• Being intimidated by a man who lurks menacingly behind us while we are simply trying to complete a task
• Struggling to maintain a professional discourse while a man makes jokes about your height, weight, hair, looks or clothing.
• Constantly being interrupted in the midst of a logical argument about which you are highly educated by man yelling “you’re wrong!”

Maybe Hillary’s battle and her loss resonated a little more deeply with us than anyone expected. I admire Hillary immensely for her resilience in the face of forces that I couldn’t imagine having to bear. But watching her face the onslaught with such dignity and stoicism made me think that yes,  I could do it too, and maybe that’s what has inspired everyone else as well. History will look back on these days and try to attribute a catalyst to the sudden uprising of movements working to change the world and I think it’s possible that the catalyst they find will be Hillary Clinton. Her quest to become the first woman president of the most powerful country on Earth may well alter the course of history, and this is what will be her legacy.

And for this, Hillary, we owe you our thanks.

David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell

I’m a bit done with Malcolm Gladwell. I really enjoyed Outliers (still do) but each subsequent book as been less and less enjoyable. I suspect it’s how he tends to play a bit loose and fancy free with the data he collects.

In this book, he explains the story of David and Goliath not as an underdog victory so much as a victory due to incorrect assumptions as to how the battle will be met. In the D&G case, Goliath assumes David will meet him in close combat where he, Goliath, has the obvious advantage. In fact, David chooses to battle using his sling shot from a distance where the advantage is reversed. However, Gladwell also claims David won this fight because Goliath was suffering from a pituitary tumour. His point seems to be that we often get these kinds of stories wrong.

Gladwell then proceeds argue that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Not exactly a revolutionary idea, there, Malcolm. He supports this claim by making much of the inverted U curve, but it’s really a simple idea that’s even told to children in the Goldilocks fairy tale: too little of something = bad, just enough of something = good, too much of something = bad.

Gladwell almost tricked me into being impressed with his thesis when he makes the argument that when deciding which school to attend for your post-secondary education, you should pick the one where you have the best chance at being at the top of your class, and not the school with the best reputation. In other words, a second-tier school where you might get 80% is better than attending Harvard where you might get 60%. However, if you take this argument to it’s next extreme, you quickly see that this is not that brilliant a deduction. Would you be better attending a school where you might get 70% in your degree program, or a school where you might fail? Suddenly, the answer seems pretty obvious, even without Gladwell’s help.

Rating: Skip it.

The Culture Map, Erin Meyer

The Culture Map is a non-fiction book that attempts to explain cultural differences between societies (mostly countries) based on 8 separate measures. Meyer convincingly argues that every society falls somewhere on a continuum and how people interact and perceive each other is dependent on where they fall on the continuum relative to each other. For example, on the disagreeing scale, Americans tend to see Germans and Italians as confrontational, and Italians see Germans as also confrontational, however Germans would tend to see Italians as confrontation-avoiders. This is because their relative positions on the scale are:

[confrontational end]   German —— Italian —– American   [non-confrontational end]

The measures that Meyer explores are:

• Communication
• Performance evaluation and negative feedback
• Persuasion
• Leadership and Hierarachy
• Decision Making (Big D versus Little D)
• Trust
• Disagreeing
• Scheduling and Time Management

The book provides some good guidelines for “getting along” with people from various cultures, or at least understanding why they behave the way they do. It does presume a certain amount of desire to understand and work effectively with different people, which not everyone possesses. If you’ve ever heard someone say “why can’t they learn to just do things our way”, then you know someone who might not appreciate being given this book as a gift.

My one selfish complaint is that Canada doesn’t appear among the list of countries on enough of the measures. I can pretty much pretend that Canada falls somewhere between the UK and USA, is that really always the case? There is a surprising mismatch between countries that are emotionally expressive yet simultaneously non-confrontational (such as Mexico or India), so could a similar mismatch exist for some of the measures for Canada? Disappointingly, the book doesn’t say.

Rating: If you work in a multicultural environment of any kind, buy a copy.

The Curve of Time, by M. Wylie Blanchet

After her husband passed away, “Capi” Blanchet packed her 5 young children up onto their 25 foot motor boat and embarked on a series of travels in and around the inside passage of western British Columbia, in search of old Indian villages and other bits of Canadian history. The amazing part of this story is that this was in the late 1920’s!

The individual essays in this book were remarkable, interesting, daring and unbelievable. Capi and her children had close encounters with wildlife (bears and cougars), treacherous tides, and poor weather but at the same time met kind strangers living in the remote forests of BC’s west coast and followed in the footsteps of some of Canada’s earliest explorers and settlers.

The book, however, is really not much more than a personal travel diary. It lacks the benefit of an insightful editor who might have been able to suggest an overarching theme to tie all of the stories together and provide some kind of denouement. Reflecting on my own travel diaries, of which I have many, I can see they really serve more as personal memoirs than essays for public consumption. That said, I believe there is enjoyment to be found in reading a travel diary as it happens if you have a vested interest in the person travelling or the places being travelled to. As stories of past events, however, aren’t they just a little ponderous? Maybe the trick with Blanchett’s book is to read one entry per day, and pretend events are playing out in real time.

Rating: If you are an overachieving outdoors-person or lover of the wilds of the BC west coast then buy yourself a copy. Otherwise borrow it, or even give it a pass.

Last year my goal was to read a book a week, and made it to 49 or 51 (depending on how you count). You can read about it here. This year I decided to read at my leisure and see where I landed. The answer is 37 books, or about 3 per month. Admittedly, this is better than I expected – I would have guessed closer to 24 books for the year.

A quick summary: 10 Book Club books, 8 mysteries, 4 nonfiction, 4 pure science, 8 scifi (2 of which were dystopian) and 1 spy novel. Some surprises:

• I thought I would read more science books, but I am happy that I fit more in than last year.
• My scifi count is WAY higher than I expected, since I consider myself more of a fantasy reader than scifi. Which leads me to ….
• ZERO fantasy! Damn.
• It appears that my guilty pleasure is mystery novels.

I’m doing it again this year, but I plan to set a few goals this time. I will read fewer book club books (which are, in a sense, books you read for other people), I will increase my science books to at least 6 (one every other month), and I WILL find a fantasy series that I love!

1. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene (blog entry pending)
2. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
3. Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson
4. All The Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda
5. The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells
6. The Girls, Emma Cline
7. The Travelers, Chris Pavone
8. Persons Unknown, Susie Steiner
9. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown
10. Missing, Presumed, Susie Steiner
11. The Gene, An Intimate History; Siddhartha Mukherjee
12. Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery: Even More of the World’s Most Outrageous Scams, by Andreas Schroeder
13. The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton
14. The Perfect Stranger, Megan Miranda
15. Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission, Andrew Mishkin
16. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
17. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
18. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
19. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
20. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
21. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
22. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, Jane Christmas
23. The Likeness, Tana French
24. Passion on the Vine, by Sergio Esposito
25. Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
26. The Daily Show (the book), by Chris Smith
27. The Particle at the End of the Universe, Sean Carroll
28. The Murder Wall, by Mari Hannah
29. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
30. I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh
31. Foreigner, Robert J. Sawyer
32. The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood
33. Fossil Hunter, Robert J. Sawyer
34. Far-Seer, Robert J. Sawyer
35. The Widow, Fiona Barton
36. No Time for Goodbye, Linwood Barclay
37. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two, Jack Thorne

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This is my second time reading Good Omens and it’s just as good as the first. I decided to re-read it because some actual genius decided to make a TV mini-series and cast David Tennant (Dr Who) and Michael Sheen (Passengers) as Crowley and Aziraphale, respectively. I mean, just take a look at this picture I stole from the web! Was there ever a more perfect casting? No. The answer is definitely no.

It’s almost too perfect

If you haven’t read this book, it’s about the Apocalypse. The biblical one, foretold (“foretold”) in the Book of Revelations, everyone’s favourite pick-me-up chapter of the Bible. A baby has been born, known affectionately in the book as “the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness”, and it is up to a Satanic order of nuns to switch this baby out with another newborn at the local hospital in order to place him with a family who will raise him to be properly evil and ultimately bring out the End Times on or around his 11th birthday. In a baby-switching mix-up, however, the Adversary winds up with the wrong family, who name him Adam and raise him to be a normal little boy.

Meanwhile, the demon Crowely and the angel Aziraphale have been left to roam the earth with their own orders, from below and above, to facilitate the coming Apocalypse but have second thoughts at the idea of losing their second home. Over the course of the 11 year countdown to destruction, we encounter the four horsemen bikers of the Apocalypse, witches, prophets and a cast of semi-ordinary characters in a narrative that’s chock-full of British wit and humour.

I loved this book. It’s what introduced me to Neil Gaiman, of whom I’m now a big fan (if you want to read some great, funny book, pick this guy up!). I unfortunately didn’t end up reading any Terry Pratchett, but his books seem to be very lengthy fantasy series of books (one, the Discworld series, is comprised of FORTY ONE books!! This is WELL over my limit of five.) However, I believe Pratchett is renowned for writing brilliant and funny fantasy, so maybe I’ve been too dismissive, and perhaps my friend Erin can recommend a starting point?

Rating: Buy it and take it with you to the next Neil Gaiman book tour. (Sadly, to our great loss, Terry Pratchett has since passed away.)

Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson

Monkey Beach tells the story of a girl growing up in the small First Nations community of Kitimaat on the west coast of British Columbia. The story is told in a series of flashbacks while the protagonist, Lisa, waits for news of her brother, whose fishing boat has disappeared.

During the flashbacks, you get a sense of what life was like growing up in a First Nations community as a backdrop to Lisa’s everyday life which isn’t that different from stories we’re all familiar with. She struggles to give school appropriate attention, she wants to be noticed by boys, she loves the outdoors and she bickers with her parents. However, some things stand out that differentiate her experiences:

• she is date-raped by a boy within her circle of friends and seems to accept it as a matter of course (unless I missed something here)
• her uncle (who’s “not quite right”) and one of her aunts were sent to residential school and suffer some kind of PTSD symptoms as a result
• another uncle won’t accept government assistance when times are particularly tough because it would require him to give up his status, and presumably any benefits that they are getting for that.
• Lisa is threatened with physical violence by a car load of “white boys” who obviously believe their behaviour will go unpunished because she is native
• there are several references to the spiritual beliefs of her family, particularly her grandmother

Again, this is not the heart of the story, it’s merely a framework. Because of this, it adds a sense of relate-ability to what life for this community is like, since it gives us familiar paths to navigate while exposing us to unfamiliar.

My only complaint is that the last 1-2 chapters seems to very suddenly dive very deeply in the spiritual world in a way that I found difficult to follow. It was also inconsistent with the amount to which this played a part in the rest of the book, without any clear reason as to why.

Rating: Borrow it. It’s an easy and enjoyable read, and will open doors to other First Nations writers, who I believe are highly under-represented in Canadian Literature.

All The Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda

All the missing girls is yet another book in the genre of “girls gone crazy” which has been sweeping the bookstores lately (think Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, Perfect Stranger – by the same author – and even Big Little Lies to some degree…). Admittedly the genre is getting a little tiresome, but this particular book has a unique approach – the author channels the movie Memento and tells the story in reverse. After setting the stage for the mystery of the titular Missing Girls, the author jumps two weeks into the future and writes each subsequent chapter one day earlier. My impression is that she very cleverly manages to uncover the mystery in this way, even though you realize at the end  that the characters in the book already knew the answer from day 1. (To truly judge her skill, I would actually have to read the book again, but I’m not giving out any grade here so I’ll just stick with impressions.)

I am very impressed with Megan Miranda as a mystery writer. She has (so far) managed to avoid my dislike of LARGE PLOT TWISTS in favour of subtle inferences and slow reveals that keep you guessing about at least some plot points right to the end. The thing is, what I like about mysteries is not knowing what’s going to happen, and to be honest, I don’t try very hard to figure things out because I’m actually in it for the surprise. I treat magic shows the same way. I’ll do whatever I can to avoid seeing anything that might give away the trick because, to quote Fox Mulder, “I want to believe”!

This reminds me of a story. Once upon a time, when part of my job was to (wo)man the corporate booth at trade shows, a popular “draw” was to have a magician perform in order to attract an audience to your booth. I loved this, and would cruise the trade show floor looking for the magic shows. I once stumbled across a man performing one of my favourite tricks (large metal rings that would appear to spontaneously interlink and separate upon intoning a magic phrase). Unfortunately for the child in me, this man was a poor magician and it was ridiculously easy to figure out how the trick was done. I have felt cheated and disappointed ever since. This was 25 years ago.

Mystery books are the same for me. First, if there is a LARGE PLOT TWIST, this invariably becomes a selling feature (“you’ll never see the plot twist coming!”) and this in and of itself is a huge spoiler! When I know there is a plot twist, I spend entire potentially enjoyable reading moments keeping an eye out for it. Plus, if you happen to figure out the twist, the book is basically ruined. Same for movies, BTW. But when the book uses slow reveals, there is no big plot twist distraction and even if you figure one thing out, there’s another reveal coming that still has the chance of surprise. I find this approach so much more satisfying. I hope Megan keeps this style up!

Rating: I am borderline between borrow and buy. I would have gone with borrow it, but I am considering starting a Megan Miranda collection.

PS My all-time favourite Seinfeld episode is the one where the characters all travel to India to attend a friend’s wedding and guess what? The whole episode is told in reverse! I think I have a “type”.