#kavkareads

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My summary for reading for June 2022! 13 books this month.

Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure Folk Magic from Appalachia Jake Richards This was fine. It's played completely straight and I think the author actually does mostly believe what he is talking about (rather than making stuff up and just trying to sell a book to wiccans or whatever).The ethnographic parts of this are far and away the best, but it mostly devolves into 'list of things you can do that are spells' without much thought about the why of it. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions Valeria Luiselli America is a bad country! What the hell! I don't think this book says anything outright for open borders but it's a great argument for it. Into the Wild Erin Hunter I was a little too old to be the target demographic of Warrior Cats when it came out. There's still so many memes about it that I wondered if it was actually any good and.......it's okay. The book is not especially deep in plot or prose, but it would wildly appeal to a 4th or 5th grader who loves cats and wants to pretend to be a cat.I wonder how much this book influenced children to try to let their cat be an outside cat or not get the family pet spayed/neutered. The Arc Tory Henwood Hoen This was not a good book. I even wrote a review which I rarely do. I have a suspicion that the author had some sort of in to the publishing world since it's so sub-par. What would I have done to make this better? Make the protagonist not financially well off (she can like, work in the building the dating agency operates out of and gets an offer for the service as some sort of reward) and thus sympathetic. Also make the protagonist actually question the ethics of something that promises to get you your life partner for big $$$$. The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work Linda Babcock  Primarily a book for people in academic positions but some broader use as well. Applicable content to people also perceived as women/effeminate. Mostly the moral of the story here is just don't give into every stupid task your boss wants you to do. Hidden Figures Margot Lee Shetterly I'm like 10 years late to the party here but this was good. I get why it's one of the few nonfiction books that got a movie adaption. Illuminates an important history that not many people know about without being too bogged down in details or logistics. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World Riley Black I don't normally like phenomenological writing but I think it totally works when the subject is a turtle or a proto-mammal and not a Human Being. Very up-to-date with the modern science of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Bonus points, this book was written by a trans woman. An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk Allison Schrager I thought this was going to be mostly about the economics of a brothel but that was only in the first chapter and it doesn't come up again. That's what I wanted to read about! Not risk prevention. Talk about the brothel!! The Island of Sea Women Lisa See This was *shaky hand motion* fine? It's extremely Okay. It seems accurate historically, but I couldn't really care about our protagonist. She's super resentful of her childhood friend her whole life and it's only when she's an old woman that she realizes maybe her friend was suffering too? I just can't really by that she could Not She That for so long.This book has a lot of traumatic things happen to the characters. They don't suffer 100% of the time so it's not outright misery porn, but should a non-Korean author really tell this narrative? I don't know. I don't think it was thoughtlessly done or exploitative, but it's just not really her story to tell. Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside The Lebensborn Ingrid von Oelhafen The more you learn about Nazi Germany the worst it gets. Not to make everything about current events, but it is an even worse look to learn that abortion was made illegal in Nazi Germany. Also learned about how the same thing happened in Communist Romania. Well, at least the people in charge of that died agonizing and traumatic deaths! The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage Cathi Hanauer  I think I found this book by trying to find audiobooks on 'sex work.' This was about 'sex' and 'word' but not sex work. It also had the fatal flaw of the stories being written mostly by white women who seemed all to be upper middle class if not outright upper class. Oh - woe is me - I may have to hire a nanny to watch my children in our New York City household while I write my book! Who cares? I wish they had gotten some writers who had some real problems. The worst story was the lady who talks about her affair with a black married man as having 'jungle fever'. This book was written in 2002 but I still don't see how the editor didn't ask her to drop that part. It doesn't come up again and it's not relevant. The author of that story's primary insecurity is that she thinks people will judge her for having a married man's baby. Like, just don't tell them that part. It's fine. No one cares. The only redeemable story in here is the woman who talks about raising her little children while her parents are having serious, end-of-life medical issues. An actual struggle, you know? The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life Katy Butler This was super good. Targeted at older (60+) people who have started to have their own medical problems or their immediate caregivers/relatives (their adult children). Could be good for younger people diagnosed with a terminal illness, not as useful for dying children but could still help. I'm very much in the boat of 'if you're approaching death very soon, ease up on some of the heroic medical measures' and this pretty much captures that in concrete, actionable ways. Empire of Silence Christopher Ruocchio Hey I read a book that was actually on paper - not an ebook! It took me two years, goddamn! This book is a bop. Long without being overlong, good economy and variety of scenes. Good sense of the cultures and beliefs of the characters without having them spelled out to the reader. Of recent SF that I've read this book does a much better job at handling an ancient, sophisticated alien culture. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars gets too bogged down with one million plot points for me to care/puzzle about our ancient aliens. Iron Widow was so damn hokey with the reveal I actually laughed at that point in the audiobook. I want to read the other books in the series (there are some unresolved issues that I'm hoping have a good set up/pay off) but it's so hard to force myself to Read A Book instead of just the audiobook. 

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Okay so I’m going to try out writing my reactions/feelings for everything I read in a month. Some of the stuff I read isn’t captured by Goodreads, and some of it I have opinions on that I want to get out but don’t want to post on GR for all the world to see A note that for this month I mostly worked from home post surgery. I do my of my book consumption via audiobook in the car so this is a relatively light month.

So here we go for April!

FICTION

The Body Without Organs @Natsinator (AO3) I first saw Space Odyssey 2001 in 8th grade and I had two takeaways: 1) I would like to do LSD 2) HAL 9000 is kinda hot Once a robotfucker, always a robotfucker I guess. Anyway, this is good! Solid exploration of the ship mind concept. Some quality homosexual subtext. Better writing than the Arthur C. Clarke novel (truly I think he is overrated - his best work is definitely Childhood’s End which is usually not discussed when people bring up his work). The Last Shadow Orson Scott Card OSC is unambiguously a bad person. I have never paid money for any of his work (I use the library) but I understand that even just reading his work is tacit support. It sucks that Ender’s Game was so damn good. Even Ender’s Shadow and I would say up to even Children of the Mind are pretty solid work. Everything after that goes further and further downhill. Last Shadow is supposedly (HOPEFULLY!) the final book. And oh boy does it suck! Freaky plot point that goes on and on about the butt and associated bodily functions of a little boy character. Why does OSC talk about little boy butts so much? What’s up with that?? Racist about Asian women. He really draws upon the harmful stereotype of Asian women being the perfect wives/mothers/homekeepers. They really have no meaningful agency beyond that. Building on the last point, OSC definitely sees it as the greatest good in life to have children. Thus women who don’t want children don’t exist in his books. There’s even a fucking hyper intelligent bird that talks about having children. Even if there wasn’t all that shit mentioned above - it was a badly assembled book. Plot threads that were set up in books prior never go anywhere. There are too many new tertiary characters we don’t care about because we hardly know anything about them. The main conflict of the book is solved quickly and easily with little pay off. Was there anything good in this book? Hiram is now and immortal holographic AI. That’s kind of a cool concept but it doesn’t go anywhere at all. But the best things is that I am finally free of this series. Finally fucking free!!

Bonus - I didn’t actually read Empire of the Ants by Bernard Werber but I ordered it via ILL for 98 to read. 98 gave me the summary and I read a bit of it out loud for them. I thought it was going to be a middle grades book like Redwall or Watership down but I don’t think this book’s intended target audience was children. I think it’s supposed to be more in the Michael Crichton sphere of ‘thriller pop science.’ Some of the stuff from the ants perspective is really clever (like how they view the mini golf course). The author definitely has some views that would be considered ecofascist.  There’s a weird spiritual? metaphysical? twist at the end that isn’t really pulled off.

NONFICTION

Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging Alex Wagner The investigation of the DNA testing kit industry is really good. She had a good exploration on how such companies advertise themselves (learn how global you are!), vs the companies original intent (help Mormons find and baptize their dead ancestors), vs how the general public really interprets the tests (latching onto one or two unique/special things). I like her discussion of the flaws of the industries (most of the sample pops are European bc those descendant populations are whos paying for this kits, the ethnicities reported are based off of contemporary boundaries which are not what you own ancestors would have necessarily known or understood). I think if she had put that section in the front half of the book and centered it it would have been a much more solid work. Her more traditional genealogical research is probably too personal in-the-weeds for a lot of people to care about. The stuff about the Burmese political climate was good though. Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age Cory Doctorow Suffers from ‘could have been an article’ disease. Way too fucking long for something that just hammers the same point over and over and over. His argument that current copyright law doesn’t really work in the modern world is something I largely agree with but unless you are a copyright scholar this book is just too long for what it’s accomplishing. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right Angela Nagle This is bad. Don’t read this. I think I found it by searching for ‘anthropology’ in the library catalog. That’s pretty slim pickings so I got this without reading too much about it. It’s not an ethnography, that’s for sure. I thought it would be about how the internet can be a force of isolation and hyper insular communities that drive things like Qanon and deaths of despair. It's not about that. Nagle has a weird juxtaposition between the altright and tumblr culture, as if those things are somehow comparable. Jan 6ers really have nothing in common with 14 year olds using faeself pronouns but she gives them both the same treatment. There’s also a bizarre snub about video game journalism in here. Nothing is cited in this book. Apparently in the print addition there are a lot of typos. No idea how this got an audiobook produced. Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy Christopher Mims Supply chain step by step investigation. Would have loved for this book to come out like 2 or 3 years down the line to actually properly see what a post-covid supply chain looks like once things settle more. Good discussion on automation. Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners Therese Oneill Weird fucking book. I’ve never seen a history book written in second person before. I get that this is supposed to appeal to women who read Victorian romance, but it is off putting to almost anyone else in the tone. The book puts you in the place as if you were an upper class, white, Victorian Era woman in England. A very hard book to enjoy for me because of that for my own personal Gender reasons. I think the second person POV also stymies the book in that it limits the scope of who can be talked about and what life was like for women during the era who were not white, well to do, etc. Do we really need a deep drive on the women we already have the most information on? It does seem to be comprehensively researched. Nothing factual in the book seems incorrect as far as I know.

Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age Dennis Duncan Amazed that a book this specific got an audiobook made and a library system that I’m in bought a license to it. But, I supposed if anyone is going to be interested in this book it’s going to be someone with a library sciences degree. Even for being so hyper-specific, I think this book is good for what it is. Interesting investigation of how the way of organizing information has changed over time and how people perceive how information should be sorted. The author casually mentions that in the medieval era that it was way more common for people to read while moving their lips which is something that people are made fun of for doing now! Interesting that seems to be the default way of reading back then and it has since shifted towards silent reading. What factors played into that? More legible books? Capitalism driving focus on the individual vs community (if you read out loud it could be sharing with the people around you)? Would love to know when that shift happened temporally.

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Here I am doing this the second month in a row! Enjoy!

 Fiction The Intestine of the Basilisk @natsinator (AO3) Oh to be a little robot stuck in a time loop partially of your own creation. The best part of this is the tiny bit where the mining operation machine assumes the body of the boss' sex robot and kills everyone. Catching Fire Suzanne Collins I read Hunger Games around 2014ish? I think Collins has compelling writing if nothing else, and sometimes you just want to read something that you know will be gripping in the moment even if it may not be ultimately satisfying so I returned to the series. I sort of love the fucked up glimpses of the culture of the Capitol we get? It's over the top in a YA way, but not so much so that you can't believe that at least maybe it could happen like that in this universe. Mockingjay Suzanne Collins Collins' is trying to say something about media in this one and it doesn't completely work for me. It's just a little too silly to imagine them making cool action war videos that are all style and no substance with their top fighters when there is an actual war going on. Though the US military puts a lot of money into movies and video games that achieve some of the same purposes of the glorification of war, so it's not like something similar doesn't happen in real life. Kind of wish that the book had managed to pull off Katniss getting with both Peeta and Gale. I think it could've worked without it being too forced and it would have been fucking awesome. Does this series suffer from the 'happily ever babies' trope? Somewhat, yeah. But it does a much better job at it than the HP series does at least. I read The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes last year and I thought that was really good. Thought it was supremely quality to write a novel from the POV of the villain who does not get any real comeuppance within the novel.  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe Charles Yu Starts out strong, if not at least intriguing and then goes nowhere at all, just like the character stuck in his little time travel machine. There are some glimmers of brilliance here (the depressed mother being given a one hour memory time loop to live in over and over again as some sort of elder care is bonkers) but ultimately it suffers from 'extremely sad man continues to be sad' disease. The protagonist has a holographic AI assistant who he admits to having feelings for and it doesn't go anywhere! I think that he should've at least been able to consummate that relationship in whatever way he could. Like can we give this man one W?

Gregor the Overlander Suzanne Collins This was Collins’ debut novel. It does exactly what it needs to do in terms of being an unlikely hero’s call to action story for middle grade readers. It doesn’t really do much beyond what you expect it to do, but I can see the appeal to the voracious fifth grader.

Nonfiction Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 Margaret Atwood I like getting a look at someone who has had a pretty long career in the writing world. It's pretty hilarious to me that some of the first reviews for Handmaid's Tale were so critical. Makes me think about how there probably are a lot of really quality books out there that didn't get very far because they got a few bad reviewers in the beginning. Likewise, I think there are a lot of lousy books that end up as best sellers because someone pens a particularly good review. Some of these essays probably could have been cut for having low substance, but when you're Margaret Atwood you can have anything you write published. Kind of drove me a little nuts how many narrators this audiobook had. I understand that it's easier to have almost every essay read by a different person (saves time) but I think I would have preferred if the accent of the various readers was always the same since I have to readjust to listening to a new narrator each time. The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing Alfie Kohn The main argument of the book is homework is bad, actually. And really, he's probably right. I think there are some valid use cases for homework (mostly essay writing because imo it's too hard to write when there are other people around you) but so much homework is absolute bullshit. Especially projects assigned to elementary schoolers that the success of mostly depends on how much effort the parents put into them. Instead of homework for homework's sake it would be better to just let children do something they actually kind of enjoy after school rather than busywork.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire I feel like I am simply Too Stupid to understand this book. Anything that is mostly theory I clock out too fast. I understand the Point being conveyed here is that the system of education is typically designed to keep people who are already down, down in a systematic fashion. But so much of this book just washed over me. Probably would be more productive of me to process this book in a graduate seminar, but that's not the sort of thing I can waltz right into these days. Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing and Hope in My Life As an Animal Surgeon Nick Trout I'm really into day in the life as x occupation books, as well as books on the field of medicine. This book checks both those boxes. There's some clever prose and funny stories but it's not wildly funny - but it does do everything that it needs to do. Surviving Death: Evidence of the Afterlife Leslie Kean Do I believe in these recounts of reincarnation, talking with ghosts, supernatural experiences etc.? Not really? I think I'm agnostic about it in that I could perhaps be compelled to believe, but am skeptical of it generally. I do like the idea that you as a mortal human could get a chance to come back in one form or another, so I guess I am primed to hope that these things could be true at the very least. The opening section with the toddler recounting his life as a WWII fighter pilot is, if not true, at least a very compelling story. If you want to construct a narrative that really works, this one really *feels* like it could be convincing. "I want to believe," as they say. The other examples get progressively less convincing as the book goes on. The people who have had loved ones die and then experience some unexplained phenomenon well, I mean, that could happen. Who am I to take that away from them? Though the book becomes very weak as it gets further into spirit mediums and seances. Mediums I could buy that maybe they could have some psychic link to something. I can rule out that there's a few people who could perhaps do this in a way that is meaningful. Sort of wish the author talked more about her dud experiences with mediums to round it out. Writing only your most compelling evidence just screams bias. The seance section at the end is too goofy. It's too hokey for anyone other than the most ardent believer to buy into. I just don't see how little ghost hands manifesting in paraffin wax is anything other than the continuation of outright fake seances of the Victorian era. Wish the book had ended before it got to this part.