The Dawn of Everything

This is a big dense book packed full of crazy ideas. The effort to read it is definitely worth the pay off.

Unlike many grand narratives of society that assume that the endpoint of social evolution is the modern democratic/humanist nation state and work backwards to tell a story about what conditions gave rise to this glorious present, The Dawn of Everything assumes nothing. It simply lays out the evidence and shows how many different paths were possible and how many endpoints are still possible.

It discusses how domestication of grains didn’t necessarily lead all early societies to create large settlements where specialization and class hierarchies quickly developed. It discusses how power structures can emerge and how some early societies eventually rejected them.

It gave me some hope for the future because it leaves the door open for society to morph into something more just and equatable for everyone.

The Circle

I only read this book because I heard that the movie was pretty good, so my expectations were not high. In general, I find that books that are turned into good movies are terrible books. There are some where the movie and the book are great, but that is typically because the people making the movie morph the book in such a way that the narrative skeleton remains, but little else; the movie and the book are distinct works of art.

Dave Eggers is considered a solid writer and a deep thinker, so there was a chance the book would be a good commentary on our modern social media, tech ruled world.

I did not find that to be the case.

The main character’s transformation throughout the book didn’t work for me. She does come into the story as your typical techo-utopian idealist, but she has enough sense of individuality that her turn doesn’t feel right. There is nothing in the plot that warrants her change and I just did not buy that the nice Wise Man had enough charisma to convince a smart, mostly undamaged person to give up everything for what is so transparently terrible.

The plot, in the beginning, is stiflingly slow as it builds up the main character. That makes the laziness of the back half so much more frustrating.

There is some social commentary about the possible ills of straying down our current path too far. However, it is hard to tell where Eggers stands on the issue. There are certainly people who play for the side of not blindly going down the rabbit hole and have well thought out ideas about why it is a patently bad idea. Yet, in the end the techno-utopian and the rampant capitalist win the day.

Perhaps the message is that society is just a bunch of sheeple blindly following a wolf dressed up in robes…

The Circle from which the book takes its title, is also just too over the top for my tastes. It’s is like someone took Google, Facebook, and Apple and mashed them into one company and then put Darth Vader and Mr. Rodgers in change.

At least I crossed it off the list…. 

The Buried Giant

 A great take on the Arthurian legend and a complex accounting of man's ability to live peacefully.

The storytelling is superb. As the author lifts the mist off of his protagonists, we believe in them and feel for them.

Also as the mist in the story lifts, the players must contend with a past that has been hidden from them.

Can true love survive the memory of guilt and petty betrayals? Can a peace be sustained by the erasure of tragedy? Are legends remembered incorrectly worthy of their glory?

Must we all travel into that good night alone?

The book offers no answers, but it does weave a good tale while asking them.

Reading in 2021

 I have been doing a very bad job of keeping a reading log or commenting on the books I have read…

Partially this is a function of depression and partially a function of just not wanting to spend more time on my screen…

Regardless, I have done a surprising amount of reading this past year. It has been one of my main coping strategies during the never ending COVID scourge of WFH, masking, and general fear.

My book source of choice has been the Libby app by Overdrive. It is super convenient: it lets you check books out of the library; it has a good reading interface; it syncs across all of my iThings; it keeps track of all the books I’ve read.

In 2021 I have read:

• Oryx and Crake
• The Year of the Flood
• MaddAddam
• Childhood’s End
• Amatka
• 11/23/63
• Where Men Win Glory
• A Promised Land
• The Passage
• The Twelve
• The City of Mirrors
• Life After Life
• No One is Talking About This
• Exhalation
• Arrival
• The Gun
• Under the Dome
• Ready Player One
• Ready Player Two
• Klara and the Sun
• One Second After
• Annihilation
• The Years of Rice and Salt
• Forever Peace
• Forever Free
• Triplanetary

Not all of the books were good, but all were passable.

The best were probably the MaddAddam series, Klara and the Sun, and Annihilation.

The most disappointing were the “Ready Player” series. The writing was fine, but I just could not care about the narrator, nor did I by into the techno-utopian tone. Count me out of a world where big tech is the path to a better tomorrow.

I found One Second After disappointing as well. The writing was stiff and the story predictable. The fact that human beings are not prepared for a major disaster and will barely survive without our technology is not a call to arms, but the sad state of reality.

Triplanetary was a total throw back pleasure of swashbuckling, manly man writing.

The “Forever” books were good, but not nearly as good as the Forever War. I should amend that a bit; Forever Peace was a bit pants. It falls apart when the resolution to all problems is “computer enabled mind meld”. That is almost as lazy as using time travel to wrap up plot holes.

The biggest surprise for me was the series that started off with The Passage. I thought the short-lived Fox show was a good romp, but was bowled over by how good the source material turned out to be. I’m not sure how Fox could have filmed the rest of the series, but it would have been interesting to see how they tried.

In conclusion:

• Reading has kept me sort of sane
• Libby is great
• I should blog more