The premise of this book tickled a morbid sense of fascination in me: it asks, what do we do with the art of monstrous men? (Think Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby.)
More on that later. I actually engaged most with the book when it took a slight digression to discuss a type of “monster” that we don’t talk about often: a mother who abandons her children to pursue art. The author wonders if parenthood is incompatible with creativity, and dares to ask if she would have been a better writer if she hadn’t become a mother. Even though there’s a distinct feminist slant to the book, I found myself identifying with this section as I follow my journey towards potentially becoming a father.
Back to the original question: what do we do with the art of monstrous men? I wasn’t sure that I really needed an answer, frankly. I’m of the opinion that there are no hard and fast rules for this kind of thing. Always strive to know the truth, and if it makes you uncomfortable, then you can choose to stop engaging with an artist’s work. But on the other hand, you should still enjoy what you enjoy, as long as you acknowledge the truth, however ugly it may be.
As summed up in Monsters:
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
Years ago, I took a work trip with my closest colleague and my girlfriend, who is now my wife. You might think that my colleague would be the third wheel, hanging out with a couple. Or, you might think that my wife would be the third wheel when my colleague and I talked shop. But somehow, I felt like the third wheel for most of the trip because the two of them were both much more talkative than me, and I sort of disappeared from the conversation.
Of course, they might have both felt like the third wheel, too.
The graphic novel Roaming perfectly captures this experience of spending a short, intense period of time as a trio. Set during a trip to New York City, the three characters each have moments of feeling like the outsider to the other two. Relationships are ultimately defined in pairs, but one can’t possess another fully, even though we sometimes want to.
It’s with great guilt that I must admit to not finishing this one. The forced exile and internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII was a shameful event, and deserves to be carved into the literary record. However, as a novel, I was not able to engage with it.
To me, the narrative voice feels both too distant and too close. It begins from the adult Naomi’s memory of her childhood, resulting in a lot of “I was a child then, and I don’t remember/didn’t understand what was going on.” Then it transitions to a long epistolary section, with Aunt Emily narrating the period leading up to their family’s relocation, which has a lot of “Everything is chaos, I don’t know what’s going on.” And when we shift to Naomi’s first-hand experiences in the Slocan encampment, it becomes overly descriptive, focussing on too many details of the surrounding forest.
I know all of this is meant to evoke Kogawa’s subjective experiences, but I felt that the story might have been better served with a more objective and consistent narrative style. It was too structurally fragmented for my tastes.
Not to toot my own horn, but most of the mathematical concepts covered in this book are things that I already knew. It’s enjoyable to read, but it felt like a superficial tour of the most famous ideas in math and physics. When we reach the latter topics (e.g. relativity, string theory), the connection to the original focus on zero becomes a bit tenuous.
I had one big problem with this book. It repeatedly insists that the West rejected the idea of zero for much of history, while the East accepted it much earlier. But then, most of the book is about Western mathematicians and philosophers, while the East only gets a few pages. If the book is supposed to be about zero, it needs to give us more details about the ideas that the East developed.
An improvement over the first entry, mostly because the cast of characters is more diverse. The core characters that span both books (the crew of the Rocinante) are growing on me, which is what you want in a spacefaring series. If you’re looking for more heady ideas, or a more thematically rich story, this isn’t it. This is more like an action thriller than an intellectual exploration.
In this book, you read short stories from legendary Russian writers, followed by an analysis of the story by George Saunders. What’s cool is that you get great writing from the stories, and then you get great writing about why it’s great, from Saunders.
I only hope that I’m able to apply the lessons learned here to my own writing. I think my biggest takeaway is the idea of ambiguity: inexperienced writers like myself have the tendency to try to make a clear point in their writing, whereas the strength of these stories is their openness to be interpreted in many ways. That’s probably a lesson that I knew before, but it comes through so much brighter here under Saunders’s guidance.
It’s been a while since I dove into a big series. I don’t think I’ve ever tackled a series of this length. After the first entry, I would say it’s not a home run, but it’s intriguing enough to continue. The plotting and action kept me hooked (except for a short detour into zombie territory that almost made me quit—I’m just really not into zombie stuff), but the characters were a bit bland. There are two point-of-view characters with alternating chapters, and when their paths inevitably cross, I had a hard time distinguishing the two.
I could only read short sections of this book at a time, because the account of life in a concentration camp is so harrowing. Frankl’s background as a psychiatrist allows him to effectively explain the psychology of incarceration and trauma, but I’m not sure what to make of logotherapy, the system of therapy that he invented. The second part of the book is a somewhat vague and jargon-y explanation of his theory. The core concept, that humans are motivated by finding meaning in their lives, seems almost tautological to me. Meaning is purpose, and purpose is motivation. Do we really need a formal theory to say that we’re motivated by motivation?
What I liked was how the portrait of David Starr Jordan progressed, from hero to villain, leading to the final posthumous dispensation of justice that leads to the title of this book. The weaker parts for me were the personal philosophical musings about how to place yourself in a nihilistic universe. The attempts to link Jordan’s disturbing worldview with the author’s relationship troubles were muddy, and felt like a stretch. But I still enjoyed the breezy writing style and murder-mystery-like structure, the latter of which might remind some of podcasts, which makes sense considering the Lulu Miller’s Radiolab credentials.
A courtroom drama/murder mystery with plenty of plot twists and revelations, so much so that it’s almost not believable. I mainly appreciated the honest depiction of the Korean-American immigrant experience, and the challenging lives of parents of children with disabilities. There’s a huge gulf between entertaining the thought that your life might be better without your afflicted child, and actually murdering the child, but in the logic of a high-pressure “parents-must-be-saints” society, the former makes you guilty of the latter. This book does a good job of exposing the flaws in that logic.
