My Nerdy Friend

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow

I’ve heard about Cory Doctorow, but never really knew what he did. Turns out he’s a writer! And a Canadian, and a computer geek and a proponent of free sharing of all digital media. In some ways, I am very sheltered.

Needless to say, Little Brother is the first of Cory’s books that I’ve read. For context, I want to point out that this book was written in 2008, which was the year of the US subprime mortgage crash and subsequent global economic collapse, Stephen Harper formally apologized to Canada’s First Nations People, CERN comes to life and SpaceX makes orbit with the Falcon 1, and Barack Obama is elected 44th President of the United States.

Within this backdrop, Little Brother is a terrifying account of how easily the USA (or a part of it) could become a police state in the aftermath of a terrorist event and how quickly, in turn, it becomes a matter of course to monitor and track the activities of every single citizen looking for anomalies in order to identify and arrest potential terrorists. In the book, the police are the Department of Homeland Security, and, they whittle down the freedoms of San Franciscans in the name of “national security”. This is a Young Adult book, so of course it takes the precocious computer talents of a 17 year old high schooler to find the cracks in the armour of the DHS’s high tech security and eventually bring the system to it’s knees.

The terrifying part is how 9 years later, under the 45th President, Donald Trump, we are closer than ever to that becoming a reality. Donald Trump is gas-lighting America, and they don’t even know it. He’s already managed to convince people to believe whatever “truth” they want and to disregard the rest as “alternative facts” or “fake news” and NRA has eluded to the idea that using their precious guns to shoot democrats and “liberal elites” would be good for the country.  In Little Brother, they find a way out of the insanity. I hope we will be as lucky…

Rating; READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW! Buy many copies and give them away. In fact, if you asked, Cory Doctorow might even let you have electronic copies for free. Just tell him M1k3y thought it was a good idea.

My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem

The last Gloria Steinem book i read was Revolution From Within, at the age of 27, when I thought a was having a crisis of existentialism and aging. Hahahahahhaha!!! [sigh]

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that our society doesn’t stop to learn enough from our own elders. I wonder why that is? Gloria, who has spent her entire life traveling the road, talking to people, and learning from them, shares vignettes of her life and experience with us in this book. It’s an interesting approach, and the result is a mix of tidbits ranging from things I have little interest in to things I wish she’d write an entire book about on it’s own. What it does do is take us traveling with her through her tales of life on the road.

We had a wonderful book club discussion about this book, even though at the time of our meeting not one of us had managed to finish it. Our club is an interesting mix of vibrant and intelligent women. One is becoming a wine connoisseur, one is an engineer, one holds multiple degrees including one in theology and one is a senior sales executive. Or, to look at it a different way, one is a young millennial and 3 are in or about their fifties. And yet another: one has children and three do not (soon to be two and two).

There have been many ways in which our lives and experiences have separated us (and joined us), all of which have lead to more enriching book club discussions, but one that never before occurred to me was my experience of growing up privileged versus their childhoods. In my case, I had the good fortune of parents who stayed married at least until I left home for university, a single home for my entire childhood, enough (although not an excess of) money to do and have more or less anything we wanted. In their case, they had to struggle through broken families rebuilt with step-parents and siblings, financial difficulties, frequent moving from place to place, immigrating to a new country and struggling to find a home. The struggles faced in their respective childhoods have lead to survivalism and determination to accomplish what perhaps felt out of reach at one time. In my case, with a seemingly solid family base remained intact until after I left home, I was very fortunate to have a pretty easy life. Our discussion was a good reminder to me of that.

I wasn’t without difficulties of my own difficulties, but they were a bit different. When I started high school, my childhood best friend suddenly “unfriended” me and became the ringleader of a group of students who picked on me for the next 5 years. I navigated through the bullying, made new friends and was pretty happy, and then my high school best friend got a ride home from grade 12 prom with my date and got all make-out-y with him in the car. Now, this is a kind of high school right-of-passage thing that’s probably happened to everyone, but to my mind I had two best friends in my life to that point and I was betrayed by both of them. Today, I realize, I have acquired a fair number of behaviours that are all tactics designed to protect myself from that kind of betrayal again. It’s survivalism, in a way, but it’s protectionism, not determination, and I admire that determination in my book club friends. They are such strong women and they should be proud of who they have become.

No matter what you might think of Gloria Steinem and her politics and activism, it can’t be denied that she has a great power to listen to people and cause them to reflect on their own lives and choices. I love that.

Rating: Buy it. You’ll want to read bits of this again.

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is not a very nice man, in the nicest way of putting it, or is a raging homophobe and racist, in the less nice but more accurate way of putting it. After having read his book, I’d hazard a guess that he’s also a wee bit of a misogynist.

Reading Ender’s Game, it was very difficult to separate the man from the book, especially with delightful  quotes such as “A few girls. They don’t often pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them.” And OSC doesn’t make it easy. The books starts out kind of child abuse-y, with Ender, at 6 years of age, being whisked away to an off-world Battle School where he is trained to be a military soldier. Turns out he’s one of many young prodigies, one of whom must rise to become Commander of an invasion fleet sent to do battle against an alien enemy. The young children learn to fight through battle simulations and some unhealthy isolation and competition where teenagers beat the crap out of 7 and 8 year olds. Charming.

Eventually, Ender gets a bit older (let’s say 11 or 12) and the book gets easier to read and more enjoyable as a result. I think it’s because it’s less creepy and disturbing to envision a 12 year old prodigy learning to fight space battles than a kid who should just be learning rhyming words. It’s a bit of a shame because the story itself is clever and engaging otherwse. There are two more books in the series, but the first one wraps things up well enough that there’s no particular or compelling need to read the others, and I doubt I will. But I don’t regret reading this one at all.

Rating: Borrow it. Be very careful to borrow it, and if it’s gifted to you then pass it on to the next person you see who hints they might buy it. Let’s keep the money out of OSC’s pockets and donate it to an LGBTQ organization instead.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

A group of oppressed black maids join forces with a quirky, ostracized white woman in Mississippi to write a tell-all book about the families for whom they work. [Before I go further, in this post I do not mean to undermine or minimize in any way the obstacles and dangers that these women faced by putting their stories down on paper and I fully understand and am aware of my own privilege. And with that said ….]

OMG this is a DREAM! To find like-minded people working for assholes who push them aside, take credit for their work, make sexist remarks in front of them and their peers, don’t listen, interrupt them, undermine or ignore their promotion opportunities, and bad-mouth them to coworkers (not to mention steal, bully, lie and threaten) and to be able to put all of these stories anonymously into a book would be so liberating and therapeutic!!! I SHOULD TOTALLY MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

The Help (specifically, the actual maids from the book) faced, and possibly still face, challenges for which my contemporaries have no parallels, ranging from being fired, to being framed and arrested for theft, to murder. What we potentially face is backlash in terms of limited future job prospects through damaged reputations within our chosen industries because most people’s bosses have more powerful connections that we ourselves to. This is a big difference, but it’s still not nothing. I suspect many, many people not only have stories to tell, but stories they WANT to tell. God knows I do!

I loved this book. I loved how a group of black maids rose above the racism and fear, and how a group of women rose above sexism and exclusion, to create something wonderful.

Rating: Buy it.

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi was on his way to becoming a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his last year of residency, at the age of 36. The book was written after his diagnosis, and describes his personal journey to find meaning in his life in the face of imminent death.

I feel strongly that anything but glowing praise for this book is somehow blasphemous but to be totally honest, I didn’t love it. Kalanithi gets a little too metaphysical for my taste, and his writing is a little too awkward. Obviously the basic story is sad, and the pain he has to endure is real. And there are little anecdotes which reveal aspects of end-of-life thinking that were unexpected (for example, he and his wife decide to have a baby using sperm frozen prior to his chemotherapy, and they have to clarify with the clinic that they don’t want any extra embryos created during the insemination process in order to spare his wife from having to decide what to do with the last of his living DNA … gawd!!). But then there are other stories that make you ask yourself “what was he thinking??” (for example, weak with stage IV terminal cancer he makes the decision to resume his residency, doing gruelling 14-16 hour days of work during which he can barely stay on his feet which cannot have added to his extremely limited lifespan). But then, who am I to judge the choices one makes in such a situation?

Ultimately, Kalanithi’s writing is just not that inspired, which is almost more sad than anything, since that was one of his life goals. Surprisingly, there is an epilogue written by his wife Lucy that is actually lovely, and the best and most moving part of the book.

Rating: Skip it. Unless you love metaphysics, then I suppose you could consider it …

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

I read this book before reading What The Psychic told the Pilgrim and it may be partly why my judgement of Pilgrim was so harsh, because Into Thin Air is a breathtaking book of the life and death challenges of facing a completely different kind of hike. Jon Krakauer shares his story of joining a world-renowned mountaineering expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1996, a tragic year that saw more people die on the mountain than any other.

Similarly to the way people are attracted to the Camino by the thousands, by 1996 Everest had become a mecca for many barely qualified people with a spirit of adventure (and a lot of money). Aas a result, Everest had become not just uncomfortably busy but dangerously so. Long lineups of people waiting in freezing temperatures with limited oxygen, desperate to make the last push to the summit, meant more opportunity for people to get caught out in unexpected storms or make bad, high-risk decisions. As well, the desire to summit after having paid lots of money, having made several failed attempts or wanting to make a name for your adventure company may also contribute to poor decisions and greater risk-taking on a mountain trek that is ultimately unforgiving.

Krakauer is more self-aware than Jane Christmas, acknowledging in one (short) section that he, as a journalist climbing Mount Everest to write about the trek in a popular outdoor magazine, probably also contributed to the ego-based, poor decision making on his ill-fated trip. However I don’t believe his presence alone could fully explain everything that went wrong that day. Just like with an airline crash (as I have learned from watching numerous episodes of Mayday), accidents like this almost never result from a single malfunction or wrong decision. This May 9-10 tragedy, being no exception, was an accumulation of bad choices, preparation failures, lack of adherence to pre-established plans and some very unfortunate weather. Any single mistake would likely have been recoverable, but as the mistakes compounded, so did the danger and, ultimately, the death toll.

The Everest climb was Krakauer’s personal pilgrimage and his spiritual growth is in the retelling of an event for which he still carries great degree of guilt. It compels the reader to appreciate and respect the enormity of what an Everest hike entails. 1 of every 4 people who attempt to climb Mount Everest die in the attempt, almost a third of whom are Sherpas hired to lead expeditions, carry load and break trail. When I started at University, we held an assembly where we were told to look to the person on our left and the person on our right and know that one of the 3 of us would not make it to graduation. I don’t know if people who are about to climb mount Everest are given the same speech (with the slight change from “won’t graduate” to “will die”) and I wonder, if they are, how many people would still do it? I have to wonder – aren’t there safer but still spiritually or physically rewarding things to do? Why yes! Yes there are! The Camino, for one! I, for one, would choose that.

Rating: Read it.

What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, Jane Christmas

I thought I was going to dislike this book simply because the author, Jane, visits a psychic before embarking on a pilgrimage across the Camino do Santiago de Compostela in order to be foretold of things that might befall her on her journey. Good god. A psychic? I thought the book title was symbolic but apparently it was literal. Sheesh.

But it turns out my dislike goes much deeper than that.

I borrowed the book from my very good friend CP and was invited to make comments in the margins, as she had already done. CP is one of the funniest people I know, particularly in written form, so discovering she had annotated the book was a dream!

By page 5, I already knew Jane Christmas was going to bug the crap out of me (I texted as much to CP). By page 64, I knew I was right. But as is the case with any hiking book I read, I was also captivated by the idea of hiking this path with none other than CP, who had already written on page 5 that she was “never doing this ever”. This is the thing about me and hiking books. I love them for the hiking parts no matter how good/bad they are, and seem to just mentally skip the other parts. Not this one though. Jane the Pilgrim was bugging me just a bit too much and was also neglecting to report enough on the hike itself to win me over to her narrative.

Page 74: She is bemoaning her aloneness, after just having bad-mouthed almost every single person in her 15-woman group, and is relishing the companionship of her only friend, her walking stick. She is complaining about all the mud, having to use her sleeve to wipe her nose, the cold and feeling homesick. The hike is hard, and it wears people down. I get that. Except it’s DAY TWO. She has TWENTY EIGHT more days to go!

Page 76: She complains for several paragraphs about what she has to endure, when facing constant low-grade persecution as a Christian. Lord have mercy. I invite Jane the Pilgrim to enjoy life as an outed atheist for a couple of days. Or maybe don a hajib and waltz around Quebec or France for a few days. Or be a muslim and try to cross the border into the US.

Page 117: Jane believes that “what scares women the most is the thought of being shunned.” I would actually hazard a guess that what scares women the most is the thought of being raped or murdered, but what do I know.

Page 129: After organizing 15 women to come together on a trip to hike the Camino, Jane can’t figure out why they are looking to her to lead them and are then disappointed when she fails to rise to the occasion. In what may be the peak of her self-delusion, Jane can’t understand why she has trouble bonding with women. Perhaps now that she’s done writing this book she’ll take a moment to read it…

Page 163: Jane the Pilgrim waxes on about her refusal to buy/wear a rain poncho because it is orange and lacks style. I think I’ve hit on one of the reasons why the other women in her group don’t like her very much. Her vanity is almost too much to tolerate.

By the end of the book, Jane manages to make a couple of female friends and even acquires a damaged boyfriend who lasts beyond the end of the book. So maybe she did manage to mellow a little during her pilgrimage and, with luck, she found something of what she was looking for. But there was nothing really in this book to offer other than her own un-self-aware journey of failing to meet people, over-generalizing about women, and forgetting to talk about the spiritual nature of the hike itself.

Rating: skip it.

The Likeness, Tana French

Tana French writes with such intensity, this is one of those rare books that is hard for me to separate from. Her characters are so present in their world, and with each other, that inanimate things feel alive to them, as though they are absorbing energy from the characters themselves. As the main character, detective Cassie Maddox, infiltrates a circle of friends (although “friends” doesn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe their relationship), going undercover as one of their own in order to solve a murder, she too finds herself drawn into their power and intimacy.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s very long, although google tells me it’s only 466 pages and should take about 6-7 hours to read, so maybe it just feels very long. But not long in a bad way.  The writing is vividly metaphorical that reading it takes more effort than just your typical weekend escape novel.

It’s interesting to see the level of intimacy that the 4 (or 5, depending on how you are counting) characters in the book have with one another. They comfortably share clothes and space and help themselves to each others’ food, drinks or cigarettes.  Thinking that this was a bit unusual, I started thinking about the intimacy level of various relationships that I see in my life and it was surprising.  My nieces are very comfortable with physical as well as emotional closeness, using each other, resting their legs or heads in each others’ laps and so on. Most of my close relationships do not extend to casual physical contact beyond hugging, however I do have a close group at work and we are extremely comfortable with physical contact, sharing food or drinking each other’s drinks. It just makes me wonder how this type of relationship evolves in some cases but not in others. If nothing else, I suspect this book will give you something to think about too.

Rating: borrow it. This probably won’t be a re-read for me.

Passion on the Vine, by Sergio Esposito

This is a book about wine and food. And then some. And then some more.

There can be little doubt that Esposito is a very good writer. He also loves wine and food – Italian wine and Italian food, to be precise. He wants to bring Italian wine to the world stage, and he wants to introduce the world to the Italian way of life, and I think he does a fine job of both.

If this book were set in Spain, I would immediately buy 10 copies for my friend CP, so that as she wore them out one by one, there would be replacements. As it is, I’ll buy her 1 copy and she will LOVE it. I liked it, but I didn’t really love it.

Confession #1: I’m not a “foodie”. I don’t like to cook, I don’t like to grocery shop, and I rarely know or care what kind of cheese I’m eating. when I read a medieval book like Game of Thrones, where the authors love to include entire paragraphs listing out the food dishes that are being served at big events, I literally skip right over to the next paragraph because I find long, description paragraphs about food tedious and kind of boring (Sorry GoT food fans!). By the 3rd or 4th chapter of Passion, I felt a bit the same way. I’ll wait a moment for the food lovers to pick themselves up off the floor …… By the end, every chapter seemed like just another repeat of the last chapter(s) and I had lost interest in the (beautifully written) descriptions of what they ate and how they cooked it.

Confession #2: I like to drink wine, I like the taste of wine, I like big earthy reds and crisp flavourful whites. But I am a very poor taster of wine, if I am judging myself by modern-day standards. I can never taste what other people taste (until someone says “there’s a note of black cherry” at which point I realize “yes, yes there IS a note of black cherry!). So a book that covers the assorted tasting notes of a couple dozen Italian wines is not the best fit for me. That said, I do have to give Esposito some credit for bringing wine tasting back to what we would call First Principles in math, which is to say experiencing the wine, savouring its complexity and connection to the land rather than reducing the wine to its individual flavours and aromas.

Rating: For foodies and wine connoisseurs, this is definitely a book for you! For everyone else, let’s order some pizza and open a nice bottle of Chianti.