Reading Roundup April - June 2013

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (4 stars) 

Wow. It's hard to know what to say about this book. There are unthinkably many people living in unthinkably squalid conditions. They are bright and ambitious and power hungry and hard working and scheming and pure-hearted and petty, like people are. They live on the precipice of disaster, where the slightest misstep spells death, or possibly worse, for their family. They are at the whim of corrupt officials on every rung of power above them, with no social or political or economic or legal recourse available to them. It is horrifying. Boo makes it all readable and engaging, balancing the humanity of these people with the reality of the sewage lake they live next to. This is a hard book, because the reality of it is hard. The privilege I swim in is hard to accept.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (4 stars) 

This is an interesting book about how we identify ourselves at a deep level; sometimes we don't really know our true tribe until circumstances force us to pick sides, as it were. The narrator is a Pakistani man living in New York when 9/11 occurs, and the fallout in his life is understandably difficult. It is quite a short book yet poses many questions, from the consequences of nostalgia to the role of the United States in the world to the complexities of crossing cultures.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (3 stars) 

This is a clever little book, much more clever than I expected based on the summary. It is a book for people who really love reading, and who are very well read. People much better read than I am, as I didn't understand many of the references to literary writers, and I read a fair amount. It is a quick read, and funny, and does a nice job of illustrating how reading simultaneously and paradoxically removes us from the real world and the people around us and connects us to the world and humanity.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (3 stars) 

It would be really nice if this book felt more dated, because it isn't a nice story. Morally bankrupt one-percenters squishing everyone else like bugs on the sidewalk then waltzing off into the sunset. Blerg. The drama plays out emotionally, not financially, of course, but winners always win, and those who try to bend the rules end up at their own poorly attended funerals. One hopes that Nick escapes it all.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (3 stars) 

This is a good post-apocalypse story. I haven't read much in that genre, but this still felt a little formulaic, although I didn't especially mind since it was a page turner and very moving and beautiful in parts. I thought the harsh language was mostly unnecessary and excessive and would definitely bother some people. A bonus for me was that some of the story happens in parts of Colorado very near to our home; I've hiked down some of the canyons referenced. I was sad when it ended. I hope I don't survive an apocalypse.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach (3 stars) 

This is guaranteed to be your favorite book about spit, farts, and poop that you read this year. It is inherently interesting that digestion - which happens not only nearby us but actually inside of us, and constantly, and miraculously - is so gross. It is also fascinating that so much is still not understood about how it all works. Most of the bacteria that are absolutely vital to our digestion, from mouth to the other end, can't even be cultured in a lab and so are relatively mysterious. We don't actually know much about what bacteria live in our colon because they are anaerobic, but without them we'd die. Also fascinating are the endless fads that have surrounded our digestion, from fiber obsessions to colon cleansing to the au courant gluten-phobia. But this really is a gross book, from contemplating saliva to animals who eat their poop (without doing so, they become malnourished because the bacteria in their colon create vitamins they get from no other source) to the wonders of repopulating someone's devastated colon biome with a poop enema... all gross. But interesting, too. Roach is funny, although the first half of the book it seemed like she was trying to hard and falling flat. By the end I was laughing out loud, and I can't tell if it's because she got funnier or I somehow adjusted or poop is just funnier that spit.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich (4 stars) 

This book was excellent on many levels - as a coming of age story, as a crime story, as a commentary on the many ways native people got screwed by the US government, and as a window into life on a reservation in the 1980s. It is a beautifully written, literary book that has a plot that really moves, a combination that is hard to find.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't by Nate Silver (4 stars) 

Reading Nate Silver is like exhaling after holding your breath for a really long time. I found FiveThirtyEight back in the primary days of 2008, when it was Hillary and Barack fighting it out, and it became apparent that not one of Hillary's advisers to whom she was presumably paying lots and lots of money were as smart or observant as Nate Silver (or Obama's advisers). One of my favorite tweets ever (I don't read many tweets) came from Ken Jennings on election morning of 2012, something along the lines of "Obama could still lose this thing if too many democrats write in Nate Silver with little hearts drawn around his name." He had Obama with a 90% chance of winning. And while you could find plenty of other people calling it for Romney or Obama, they are for the most part just talking heads that don't actually care about reality. When Nate Silver gives you a 90% chance of something, it means that nine times out of ten it is going to happen, and one time out of ten it won't, nothing more and nothing less. You don't have to spend energy paying attention to which station it is on and who he is catering to. He caters to reality, which is surprisingly novel. Finding someone who can do this feels like, as I said, exhaling.

Of course he has biases, etc, but his job is to be aware of them. This whole book is about why making accurate predictions is extraordinarily difficult. Sometimes apparently impossible, as in the cases of trying to beat the stock market over the long term or predict earthquakes. Sometimes made extremely difficult by humans' strong tendency to not accept the truth of things that don't serve our ends, as in the case of the financial collapse of 2008 (which first chapter in this book is the absolute best summary of that whole fiasco I have ever read). Sometimes the message of people willing and able to make careful, thoughtful predictions with honest margins of error, as is the case with many climate scientists in relation to global warming, is hijacked by politics and agendas. (The chapter on climate change was also exceptionally good, and the people who are criticizing Silver for being a climate change denier or for giving legitimacy to deniers' views have very poor reading comprehension and/or are so blinded by their own religious belief in their version of climate change that they cannot accept the reality of how hard it is to make accurate predictions.) The chapter on his era as a successful online poker player was very entertaining and reinforced why I do not have the stomach to be a gambler.

 All that being said, be forewarned that most people will find this book extremely boring. It is in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell, but about three times as long and dense (and therefore more substantial). Also, I sadly did not feel like I had gained a very deep understanding of Bayesian thinking by the end, which is unfortunate since that is one of the main points of the book. Surely that is partly my fault, but he could have been more clear about it.

 At any rate, I think the chapters on the financial collapse and global warming should be required reading for everyone, and the rest of it for those who are interested.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh (2 stars) 

I feel kind of like a jerk for not liking this book because most people love it and you might too. But I just didn't believe anything for one minute. The growth the characters experience was both predictable and unconvincing, and then a pivotal plot point turns on a completely bizarre, unexplained failure by one character. It just didn't work. But I do wish this many chances and this much support and redemption for every single person coming out of the foster care system.

The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman (3 stars) 

It's a love story and a story about the holocaust. There really can never be enough art created to try and make us feel how truly horrifying the holocaust was, because it really happened and there is just no way to actually believe and reconcile that in the not too distant past human beings actually did these things to other people. There can be nothing scarier and more harrowing and worthy of deep reflection than that. In the first few pages of the book the author allows us to know that this story is going to have a happy ending, so that is some small relief through the dark days of Terezin and Auschwitz. This wasn't my favorite book, and seemed a little superficial in some ways, but I did learn a lot about Terezin.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (4 stars) 

There is something beautiful about explicitly recognizing the way our lives prepare us perfectly for what we will be called upon to do. It can be kind of circular reasoning, of course; we respond to what we are called to do in the way that we do because of how our life has prepared us for that moment. But this book takes the possibility of circularity out of consideration. There is a death date literally engraved in stone and swaying palm trees to take that off the table. It is an interesting exercise to consider how certainty about one's fate influences one's life in the meantime. It is a gift and a burden, but in Irving's estimation mostly a liberating gift. 

It is hard for me to know how to take this story as more than a thought experiment, however. We do not know our fate with a certainty, and God does not generally reveal himself in a way that we can set in stone. It is a very entertaining story, however, and tender and wise and funny. I can't say it spoke to me much about faith or God or what those things mean, and I regretted that, but I enjoyed it very much.

The World According to Garp by John Irving (2 stars) 

(Vague spoilers alert.) For the first part of this book I thought it was a book about sex and the sexual revolution and what it all meant. If some Bible thumping super conservative person was warning young people about the evils of abandoning traditional sexual morality or else they might find themselves: raping an incapacitated hospital patient, taking advantage of the "easy" girl in high school, consorting with prostitutes, essentially molesting young adoring women over whom they have clear power, doing weird swingy things in their egalitarian and otherwise happy marriage, and even having a very significant parts of their anatomy bitten off... well, if someone very preachy were to warn of all those things, it would of course seem quite hysterical and over the top. But I don't think John Irving is preachy, and he has a way of humanizing even very unlikable characters, which made the crazy horrible things that happen in this book quite disturbing.

By the end of the book it didn't seem like it was about sex anymore, though. It seemed like it was about loss and fate and fear and lo, how even if one settles down and comes to truly love and value ones' family and children, the habits and weaknesses one gave in to when one was younger and a bit looser might still come back to haunt you. This went for me from being an irritating and disturbing book to a very sad book. Bad things happen, and truly so much could have been avoided. I wanted it over, and mostly for the characters to get it together and be decent people.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (4 stars)

This is a really well done collection of character sketches of people connected through a newspaper newsroom. Some of the sketches are exceptionally insightful and well done and will stay with me. It is a mark of good writing to me when an author can create an unlikable character that still generates empathy, and there is plenty of that here.

In fact, I could do with a few more likable characters, both in this book and in general. It's almost as if likable, decent people have completely evaporated from contemporary literary fiction. They seem to have disappeared about the same time that authors ceased to recognize that adults have the ability to actually keep their pants on. I think I just move in circles where this is still generally understood and expected, and I don't know exactly if it is me or the authors who are more out of touch with what is really going on.