Humankind by Rutger Bregman is a book that attempts to overturn the prevailing view that people are inherently selfish and malevolent. From the oft-referenced stories of the Stanford Prison Experiment and Kitty Genovese, to the everyday news, we hear a lot about the sins of humankind. Bregman dismantles these stories, arguing that they only preserve existing power and economic structures. Instead, he aims to show that we’re motivated by kindness towards others.
The book is a breezy read, filled with snappy anecdotes and factoids. It worked on me: at the beginning, I read with skepticism, trying to poke holes in his arguments; but by the end, I found everything he was saying to be obvious. Run a school without classes and lesson plans, because the students will naturally find their own path to learning? Of course! Run a prison without cells, and where the guards play games and sing songs with the inmates? Sounds like a great idea!
It was as if the book had created a new intuition in me: take everything that is considered conventional in modern society, and do the opposite.
In terms of subject matter, Milkman is like the song “Zombie” in book form. There are bombs and bombs and guns. But where the Cranberries’ song is filled with anger, Anna Burns uses a more delicate touch.
The unnamed protagonist is a young woman who is being pestered “the milkman,” who is romantically interested in her and also happens to be a member of a paramilitary organization. The stalking alone makes for anxious reading, but the real tragedy is that she has nobody to turn to. Because they live in basically a warzone, the entire community is in a constant state of mistrust and paranoia, and her personal struggles are only seen in the context of which side of the political conflict she may or may not be on.
Despite the dark story, the writing style is quirky and playful, in a way that reminds of a bit of George Saunders. There’s a lot of absurdist humour, like how the parents of the protaganist’s “maybe-boyfriend” have abandoned their family to become internationally famous ballroom dancers. I enjoyed this read, even if it does feel little bit repetitive and long-winded at times.
A short novella that you can read in one sitting, but may be worth savouring over a few quiet evenings. The story tells of a young girl whose overwhelmed parents drop her off with another couple for the summer. The setup is inherently sad, and the feeling of being unwanted is always hanging there, even though it’s not spoken.
There’s also a sense of timelessness about the setting; there’s no specific mention of when the story occurs. There’s no obvious references to cellphones or present-day technology, but you could believe that it’s happening now.
I admit I found it a bit slow at times, but the devastating final lines really grabbed me and made me want to read it again someday.
Third book: Here’s a new character! A pastor, whose job it is to talk about the philosophical implications of discovering alien life. But she ends up saving the day in a drug-addled action scene.
I preferred the second book to this one. The attempts to bring more philosophical discussion into the mix felt underdeveloped, in favour of a final action sequence that lasts way too long, in my opinion.
I was sucked in for most of this novel, which tells the story of a middle-aged man who meets two mysterious women in the wake of his wife’s death. Each of the three characters have painful secrets in their past, and I was fascinated by how they each tried to hide themselves from the others, while still trying to grow closer.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think that the final revelations were very satisfying. The plot introduces one too many extramarital affairs, in my opinion. Even though it is meant to mirror another affair, it just felt like it came out of nowhere. Also, I found the prose style (or the translation) to be a bit repetitive (“It was the most unusual winter…“)
I don’t want to criticize this book too harshly. It’s well-written and readable, and my wife really loved it and got a lot out of it.
The author’s main argument can be summed up as: “Work sucks sometimes, but you are not your job, so don’t take it personally.” Each chapter is a mini-profile of someone who has experienced the suckage of work, and how they have learned the lesson that they shouldn’t have felt so bad about it, and that they should focus on what really matters.
But the things that suck about work still suck, whether you take it personally or not. It’s easy in hindsight to make the case that you should detach from the job, but it’s not so easy when it’s happening to you. I found myself wishing for justice from the employers who caused the suckage, but I suppose that would be another type of book.
My main takeaway from this book is to try to see social issues in terms of insecurity instead of inequality. It’s easy to blame inequality on greedy wealthy people, which amplifies the divisions between people, whereas insecurity is a function of the capitalist system, and affects everyone. The reason that greed is such a powerful force is because everyone is afraid is losing it all, no matter how much they have.
I’m not sure if the book really sticks to this idea, though. We get the historical background of the origins of capitalism, which is a story about barons and commoners, which brings us back around the division between haves and have-nots all over again.
While I appreciated the historical and especially the Canadian context in this book, it felt overall like preaching to the choir. (I’m already quite the socialist.) It’s also written in a somewhat academic style, which made it increasingly skimmable towards the end.
Things that are spirals in Uzumaki (lit. “Spiral”): dust devils, tongues, snails, water draining from bathtub, smoke, people who have turned into snails, people in general, hair, a hurricane, growths from a skin condition, staircases, etc.
This horror manga series was not the most narratively satisfying, but works great as a creative exploration of the visual motif of a spiral. So much in nature takes the form of spirals, so there’s nothing inherently scary about the shape, but when it invades and twists human bodies, the result is effectively stomach-churning.
I’m not going to pretend I know anything about the publishing industry, but I like to imagine myself as an author, and so as I read this book, I found myself constantly feeling indignant about the pressures and injustices that the industry puts artists through. I credit Kuang for making an outsider feel like an insider.
I’m a sucker for long, meandering sentences as a stylistic flourish, and this book contains plenty of those. Mohsin Hamid maybe overdoes it with this technique, but I’m cool with it.
(Spoilers follow)
I think the book can be divided roughly into two halves. The first is a realistic look at life in an unnamed city as it falls under civil war. I guess it’s meant to evoke Syria but there may be further references beyond my ken. I found myself missing the specificity of time and place, and was carried through mainly by the romance between the main characters.
The second half kind of explains the vagueness of the first. Forced to flee their home, the couple travels through “doors,” literal portals that lead to other parts of the world. Unlike their origin, their destinations are named: Mykonos, London, Marin. They find themselves living amongst other refugees from all over the world.
The book rolls to a heartbreaking end as the relationship of the couple deteriorates under the pressure that all of the refugees face as a group. Despite their diverse backgrounds, the citizens of the West just see them as a single mass of unwelcome intruders. Their city was unnamed, because their identity is irrelevant to their opponents: it doesn’t matter where they came from.
