Tell Me Everything (*****)
Strout, Elizabeth
I am so glad I ended the year with such a beautiful book. At this time of the year, with festivities all around, and when we all look back at the year that is about to end, we are bound to feel a bit melancholic. This book came to me at the right time and unexpectedly. I have never read anything by Elizabeth Strout, and I cannot recall why I picked it up, but I am glad I did. As I said many times before, good books ever so gently change who you are. I just finished it on a quiet Christmas morning, but the characters are still crowding my mind, and I know I have a slightly different perspective this morning.
This is a story of hundreds of ordinary characters that come together in a small Maine town. Many of these connections are extremely tenuous, almost inconsequential, and that's what makes it such a remarkable read. Throughout the book, one discovers that every life has an interesting story somewhere. We make futile attempts to understand these lives and, in the process, make sense of our own, but it rarely makes sense. All that remains is the love, warmth, and tenderness we can give and hope to receive.
My wife rarely throws anything away. Even after consuming the green onions she buys, she puts the root ends in a little glass jar and places them on the windowsill next to our kitchen table. Every day, I watch the green shoots growing, ready for another harvest, but I am drawn to the network of white roots that starts coming out. The tender tendrils touch each other, get tangled, and grow. In the end, it is a dense mass of entangled white strands holding tightly onto each other. That was the feeling I had watching all the characters in this novel.
I will certainly sound like an old man, but I still must say it: I would not have understood this book and its characters if I had read it a few decades ago. I think it is a book you should set aside until you feel you are no longer young. At what age that happens depends on your life, but everyone, at some point, realizes that they are broken individuals, and that's when one can start understanding other broken people.
Held (****-)
Michaels, Anne
After being disappointed by this year's winner of the Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey's Orbital, I wanted to read at least one other book from the shortlist just to better understand the thinking process of the judges. This was the book I chose.
After reading Held by Anne Michaels, I am even more confused. Compared to the reused observations and philosophy captured in Orbital, this book seems so much more original, innovative, deeply emotional, and thought-provoking.
I have one criterion to judge any creative work -- am I a slightly different person after the experience? Orbital failed to do so, not because what it had to say was unimportant but because it had been said so many times by others that it lost any novelty. However, this beautiful short novel explores passionate love, both romantic and familial, through a few moments scattered throughout the whole twentieth century compelled me to look back at my own life in new ways.
Structurally, it is not an easy book to absorb. Though compact in length, it has a majestic pace that takes us through generations, spread over a hundred years. It just focuses on a few moments in the lives of its four main characters, often taking place on snowy nights, river banks, on moving trains, and moonlit rooms. It talks about love, the inevitability of loss, and our longing to be loved. It is a series of loosely connected poems. The writing is gentle, a bit hallucinatory, and intensely moving.
Yellowface (****-)
Kuang, R.F.
It is a remarkably clever book that is at once gripping and thought-provoking. The recursive novel we read is the same one the protagonist plans to write at the end. The recursiveness also pops in through many references to goodreads, and the tremendous success of the book on the same platform.
None of the characters in the book are particularly likable, yet they are not villains. Almost everyone is either a writer or connected to the modern publishing world. It portrays not the romantic world of an editor in a dark office space with piles of manuscripts but a modern business world -- data-driven, calculative, strategic, and cutthroat.
On the surface, it is a book about a young author who steals another author's manuscript and makes it her own. This is the plot that keeps us turning pages. However, it is a lot more. The book plays with identity-based art, cultural appropriation, and racism, but it does not deal with these heavy issues pedantically. Instead, the author is playful and funny, which makes the ideas palpable rather than an academic debate. It is this playful approach that makes it such a unique experience.
The Bean Trees (**---)
Kingsolver, Barbara
I recently read another novel (Demon Copperhead) by Barbara Kingsolver and really liked it. That provoked my curiosity, and I wanted to read some of her other works. Now I see starting with her very first novel was a mistake. The book is not without some bright spots here and there, but the story is unconvincing, contrived, and not very well written. It is a forgettable novel.
Orbital (**---)
Harvey, Samantha
I have never been more let down by a Booker Prize-winning novel as this one. Not that I loved all of them, but in each case, I could see why the judges felt this was the best book of the year. However, their choice this year left me dumbfounded.
It is a short novel about a day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, going around the planet sixteen times. It describes the daily lives of these people, their thoughts as they watch the earth down below, and their thoughts about the life they have left behind.
The problem is that hardly anything in it is surprising or new. She cataloged what hundreds of astronauts said after looking at the planet as a whole- beautiful, no borders, vulnerable, and the only place in the universe we can call home. Anyone following the exploration of space has heard these profound observations many times, in many tongues. Granted, she said it more poetically, but so did many science and science fiction writers for the last seventy years. I didn't find anything that can be viewed as a novel observation or interpretation. There is nothing wrong in cataloging old stuff, but such work does not deserve the prize or even to be included in the long list.
I do not know the judges who made the decision, but my suspicion is they were literary people and, like many of them, were not paying attention to science in general and experiences and observations by people who had been in space and, therefore, found the little bits of basic science and the philosophies expressed in the novel as unique, surprising, and remarkable.
There is a cultural asymmetry between people of humanities and people of science. You will rarely come across a scientist or mathematician who would proclaim they have no appreciation of art. They would never say that the last time they read a novel or carefully listened to music was decades ago, even though that may be true. However, it is a little too easy to find someone from the humanities to say they left behind mathematics and science in their high school days and say it almost with pride. It is OK for a learned person to ignore science, but societally, we expect everyone to respect the arts. I guess that the juries, in this case, were of the variety who stayed too far from science and scientific anecdotes. If that were not the case, they would have seen that the author had nothing new to say.
I wonder if I would have been less harsh towards this book if it hadn't received one of the most significant literary prizes. Perhaps that is true. I may have set it aside as yet another philosophical novel about space and humanity -- not great, but not bad either.
Demon Copperhead (*****)
Kingsolver, Barbara
I only learned about this book or the writer when I heard it received numerous literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. The author is a veteran writer with many books under her name, but somehow she was not on my radar. Now that I have read this book, I will surely explore more of her earlier work.
Inspired by David Copperfield, it is the story of a young boy growing into adulthood amidst the mountains of southern Appalachia. This is where some of the poorest people in the country live and the butt of many hillbilly jokes.
Barbara Kingsolver is a brilliant storyteller. It is a long book, but once you start it, it will be hard to stop reading. The tension is not created by suspenseful plot twists as in a whodunit, but by creating a deep love for the characters, where you want to know what happens next to them. Most of the characters in the book face tough challenges just to stay alive, and in the process, make many mistakes that make things worse for them. Yet, the book treats them with respect and dignity.
We often read books where unfortunate characters make terrible mistakes, yet the author treats them respectfully. However, a little too often, you can smell the self-righteousness of a liberal, educated person making a conscious decision to treat the characters the right way. This book manages to avoid that tone, and the respect it shows seems more genuine and, therefore, more infectious.
As you read the book, the characters and the milieu they live in come out with extreme vividness. As a reader, I started feeling a sense of familiarity and closeness. It is this honesty and genuineness that makes the book work. There are a few predictable characters and predictable relationships, which I wish weren't there, but overall, the author shows unusual restraint in building up her story and making it believable.
Intermezzo (***--)
Rooney, Sally
This is my second book by Sally Rooney. I was lukewarm about the first (Normal People) when I did not even know who she was. She is far more well-known now, and her books create a certain buzz when they come out. Therefore, I wanted to read her again, hoping my assessment would shift this time. Unfortunately, it did not.
She is an excellent storyteller. Even though this novel does not have too many dramatic twists and turns, I simply could not put it down. I was utterly drawn into the lives of its five characters. Therefore, I must say I enjoyed the reading experience. However, all through, something else nagged at me, and every few pages, I wanted to stop reading.
What bothered me all through, especially in the book's first half, was the frequent philosophical comments made by the characters or about them. They were mostly obvious and juvenile. First, I thought the author was expressing the immaturity of the characters. After all, they are all relatively young. But then I realized it was the author's voice that was coming through. I cannot say if she herself lacks the sophistication of thoughts that come with experience and age or if she is diluting it intentionally to make it accessible to a broader audience. In either case, it is dissatisfying. I constantly felt I was listening to someone who believed she was saying something profound when she was not.
She is a sensitive writer who is very good at telling stories and writing natural dialogue. Therefore, I hope her thoughts will mature over time, and we will have more memorable novels from her.
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (****-)
Susskind, Leonard
Leonard Susskind tells the story of a well-known intellectual battle in modern physics from the perspective of the foremost soldier on one side of the divide. On the other side was none other than Stephen Hawking. A young Hawking shook the physics world when he claimed that information falling into a black hole is completely lost. This was a well-argued claim and was accepted by most physicists. Yet, a few realized that loss of information is something that can destroy some of our most fundamental understanding of nature and how the universe works. Thus started a thirty-year-long battle between Hawking and Susskind. In the end, towards the end of Hawking's life, he finally admitted that he was wrong and accepted the mathematical arguments that Susskind and his fellow physicists put up. However, this debate is not yet over, as theoretical Physics is treading through a crisis of ideas and testability.
The story is extremely well narrated. As a reader, I could feel the excitement and frustration of physicists waging this war. Yet, wars in theoretical physics play out at a uniquely slow pace. It takes years to solve a technical problem. However, the book makes it feel like a fast-paced series of events.
My only problem with this book, or for that matter, any popular book on modern physics, is the difficulty of explaining abstract ideas without using complex mathematics. These are ideas that can only be fully communicated using the language of mathematics. Since that is impossible, the author must explain it using simplified analogies. Susskind does as good a job as possible to explain these complex ideas, but it ultimately feels like magic. We, as readers, cannot, in the end, say we actually understood what is being said. It all feels like magic.
Hearing the names of some of my close friends and classmates who played pivotal roles in this intellectual journey was a sheer joy.
Savage Conversations (*****)
Howe, LeAnne
This is one of the most surprising and uncategorizable books I have read recently. It surprised me by its subject matter (part historical, part imagination), style (play in verse), characters (which include a rope used to hang people), and perspective (seeing a part of American history from the perspective of a native American).
The book is intensely disturbing. It is a conversation between Mary Todd Lincoln (wife of President Lincoln) and a Dakota man, one of the thirty-eight hung in a mass execution ordered by her husband, the rope that was used in the hanging, and a few others. Mary Todd Lincoln was court-ordered to be confined in a mental institution in Batavia, Illinois, just an hour's drive from where we live. During this period, she used to see a recurring dream of a native American person torturing her and cutting open her eyelids.
The book is written by a native American trying to look at this part of history from a different perspective -- from the perspective of those who lost their lives, rights, and dignity. Beyond that, it is hard for me to describe the book without destroying its magic.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (***--)
Harari, Yuval Noah
I enjoyed his previous books and was equally enthusiastic about this one. Upon finishing it, I am somewhat conflicted.
Starting with the positive, Harari can see historical events from an unusual perspective and communicate that convincingly. He can find deep underlying threads connecting isolated cultural phenomena. As in his previous book, he starts with the premise that most of human culture revolves around the creation of stories. These stories can result in religions, nations, money, companies, scientific doctrines, and other ideas.
He then connects this with information flow, as stories can be shared by larger and larger groups only when there are technologies to share them over large distances. It started with writing and printed books, followed by newspapers, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, satellites, and computers.
As our information networks expanded, he claims that two types of political forces took advantage of it. It gave birth to both democracies and totalitarian regimes. However, only one of them has a self-correcting mechanism. This mechanism, based on doubting the status quo, allows for staying in balance and avoids disasters. Totalitarian thoughts are too sure of their correctness, be it religious faith or political ideologies, and therefore use the power of information to surveil and enforce their views on everyone.
In both these mechanisms, the technology allowed information to flow, but human beings had to interpret this information somewhere. It could be the church, the government, or the dictator's inner circle. Good or bad, a human was always in the loop.
Now, we are at the threshold of a new technology, which, for the first time, can do the interpretation without human help. It is this technology Harari is trying to warn us about. For the rest of the book, he tries to establish that Artificial Intelligence is already causing significant changes in society, and he shows other ways it could have a profound impact on society and history in the coming decades.
I agree with the basic premise. Some people may find it too stretched based on where AI is today. Having watched how quickly this technology is moving, even being an insider, I cannot predict where it will be in just two years. Therefore, I cannot rule out most scenarios he is projecting. We have never dealt with alien intelligence, and we are at the threshold of facing one. We have little ability to predict the societal consequences of such a thing, and unless we are very cautious, we may not like the outcome. It is pointless to fight it, not only because we can't but also because it also promises tremendous benefits to humankind. Harari is trying to pinpoint where it could go wrong so we can use it more thoughtfully.
In that respect, this book is tremendously timely and essential. Every responsible person should start thinking about the issues he raised. It certainly opened my eyes to perils I did not imagine before.
However, in his attempt to convince us, I often felt he was taking some intellectual shortcuts and even presenting historical facts that were intentionally incomplete just to make a point. I expected more from a serious historian. I'll cite one such example. To make his case about the totalitarian regime's use of information technology, he used Hitler and Stalin. Talking about Stalin's role during the Second World War and beyond, he correctly brought forth all the dictatorial actions and the brutality of his administration. However, he surprisingly avoided the fact that the Soviet Union lost the most lives in this conflict, around 27 million, mainly because the Allied forces refused to open a western front when Germans massacred through the Soviet Union. Despite all his faults, Stalin played a crucial role during that war when the Western allies executed a cynical plan to kill two birds with one stone. Even to vilify a villain, we should not alter history conveniently.
Many similar examples of benign distortions and oversimplifications make the book significantly weaker. However, in the end, I would recommend this book to everyone, especially if you are not intimately aware of the potential power of Artificial intelligence. An AI does not need to possess human-level intelligence or be conscious to impact our society. Even simple AI-based algorithms regularly used by social media companies can tremendously impact politics and history.
RSS Feed