book reports, or, "what I read on my vacation"

[joshua0]

I think I promised a few people a summary of what I read while I was in Nepal. Here's a selection of what I took on my Kindle with me, with the stuff I liked the best highlighted in red:

• Not Without Peril: 150 Years of Misadventure on the Presidental Range of New Hampshire, by Nicholas S. Howe. Suggested by hvincent. I liked this, though the episodic recounting meant that I did not tear through it terribly quickly, and I found myself losing steam every now and again; I'll probably give it a solid three stars.

  If you had thought, like I, that people being idiots in the mountains is, somehow, a modern creation, made possible by Instagram and Facebook, Not Without Peril will rapidly disabuse you of that notion, with tales of absolutely mindboggling stupidity and unforced errors for really quite some time. The author's commentary on an 1855 incident starts off with a quote that I think is exemplary of the sort of gems of writing you'll find throughout: "Poor judgment tends to multiply; once an outing begins to go wrong, the participants make one mistake after another in a sort of fatal contagion." It is very much my style of commentary, and especially for those who have spent enough time outdoors to see parties on a mountain that simply have no business being there, I rather recommend this as a lighthearted understanding of what thought processes lead them to make those choices.

• The Secret of the Yoga Sutra: Samadhi Pada, by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait. I rather disliked the writing in it. Panditji badly needs an editor. One star.

  I think there's a lot to what Panditji has to say, and it's clear that he's spent a whole lot of time studying, and more than that, practicing. But, my goodness, he just repeats the same concepts over and over, sutra after sutra, commentary after commentary. It seems insufficient to explain something clearly once, and then refer to it afterwards, but instead he seems to prefer to explain something without a whole lot of clarity, and repeat it over and over.

  On the upside, he really seems to like using the word 'stupified' to discuss a state of mind. And that became a meme between me and Kempy for most of the trip. Our minds were often stupified by the cold and the early mornings, we found.

  Anyway, I think Panditji needs an editor -- and in the mean time, maybe most of us would be well served by Sri Swami Satchidananda's commentary instead.

• The Slow Farm, by Tarn Wilson. Recommended by Diane Ichikawa. Heartrending and beautiful. I cannot say enough good about this. Five stars.

  After I spent a few days slowly slogging through what Panditji had to say, it was refreshing to just have someone tell me a story, and The Slow Farm is a story indeed. On the first page, it lays out everything you need to know: it's a book about Tarn's (and her younger sister's) early childhood being raised by two hippies as free-range children on Texada Island in British Columbia, and everything she remembers right up to the point where her parents divorced. One of the things I find powerful about the way Tarn writes is that she writes through the eyes of herself as a child, giving the reader the opportunity to experience the dramatic irony of watching her parents' relationship fray at the seams, with the young eyes of Tarn unaware until the very end.

  I wrote in my note book that it "tickle[d] a lot of sensitive spots around feelings and feelings about families and just kind of fucked-up relationships". The thing that tore me apart about it is that despite the book describing a world of brokenness, it portrays characters of unimaginable strength -- including Tarn, in ways that become more awe-inspiring as the book goes on.

  I think a lot of people ought to read this. Or at least -- with the acknowledgement that that isn't everybody -- people shaped like me certainly ought to.

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union (P.S.), by Michael Chabon. Recommended by Dave Eckhardt. I liked the world that was built, and the absolute dedication to the art of insult. I thought the plot -- and the relationships between the characters -- got a little too complex for its own good. Three stars.

  The premise here is an alternate reality, in which the State of Israel failed shortly after its birth, and there was another resultant diaspora, wherein Jews emigrated en masse to Alaska, forming the Yiddish-speaking city of Sitka. I love the setting, to be honest: the concept of a Jewish home with the trappings of American life, and the exploration of what that would form as, was just an amazing world to immerse myself in. The protagonist-like character that we follow, Meyer Landsman, is something of a Jimmy McNulty character, too; he, like many of the characters in the book, and like the narrator, has an extremely sharp wit, which I find quite to my taste indeed.

  Where the book falls down is that, after the world is built and the characters are set, the second half of the book seems to strain my ability to suspend disbelief, as every character seems to know each other character that gets introduced every thirty pages, and where characters start to make daring deus-ex-machina escapes after getting themselves into trouble that very well has the potential to be the end of the book. I found that all a little heavyhanded, anyway.

  But the mediocre second half of the book, I think, doesn't really diminish my love for the first half of it. If you like that kind of world-building, it's probably worth putting up with rolling your eyes at the mostly-unsatisfying ending, as just an extra moment through the keyhole of that universe. And if that kind of world-building isn't your thing, well, I guess this one will be a pass for you.

• Marooned in Realtime (Peace War Book 2), by Vernor Vinge. Recommended by Dave Eckhardt. This one is some good old classic hard sci-fi -- complete with an interesting gimmick, an exploration of the consequences, and vague libertarian leanings. Two stars.

  I liked this in general just a little bit less than Yiddish Policemen's Union, on most axes. I thought the main characters were a little less compelling than Chabon's (they perhaps were somewhat more useful, but a fair bit less complex); the gimmick (stasis fields, drones, and immortality) to be less immersive; the plot (a murder mystery, with a genius-detective finale) to be a little more straightforward; and the politics (a post-scarcity society finding itself in a time of human capital scarcity, and a questioning of what conditions would make it morally acceptable to revert from libertarianism to statism) to be a little more heavyhanded.

  Now, that all is not to say that it's not worth reading! If you haven't spent a long time around "the sci-fi style", there's something to this; it definitely will tickle your brain in a way that feels, at least, novel. But sometimes you may, in fact, find yourself wondering if there's a less heavy-handed way to accomplish the same goals.

• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker. Recommended by ... many people. A man gives you the D.A.R.E. scare-straight approach to sleep, complete with at least some hokey science and a lot of extremely hokey analogies. Two stars one star.

  This book bothered me a lot. It felt like it was 30% longer than it really needed to be. The author was prone to abjectly awful analogies, and irritating hyperbole; in some cases, the hyperbole suggested things that were plausible, making it hard to tell what was science and what was hyperbole. He didn't seem to really universally get the direction of implication behind causation, and made a lot of statements of the form "nobody has proven this yet, but I'm pretty sure studies will soon", neither of which feel like great science. The text oscillates between technical and elementary in level, making the reader feel unsure as to the depth of the author's actual knowledge. The best way I can summarize that is what I call "the hackernews effect" -- when someone says smart-sounding things about a lot of different fields, but as soon as he says something about your domain of expertise, you quickly realize that he has no idea, and you have the sudden feeling of dread that he doesn't know more than a hasty skim of Wikipedia about anything else, either. And then there's the sensation that this guy is just yelling at you and trying to make you feel bad about your approach to sleep.

  But here's the thing: if only 75% of what he says accurately reflects the evidence, the author still has a compelling case that sleep is way more important than we give priority to. My two main takeaways from this are as follows: One, the way we treat kids in terms of sleep is nothing short of unconscionable, and really ought to be criminal. The "Results" paragraph of this study ought stop you dead in your tracks; reducing car crashes in high school students by 17% as a result of delaying a school start time by one hour? What else are we depriving our future selves of by starving elementary, middle, and high school kids of sleep?

  Two, getting 7.5 hours of sleep opportunity a night is probably fine for me, as long as I actually do it. That means no reading in bed after I have set the alarm for 7.5 hours later, and no 'well, 7 is enough': actual, honest-to-God, 7.5 hours, largely at the same time, with plenty of REM opportunity at the end.

  Anyway, read it, then be mad at the author. Or at least just set a regular bedtime-ish and stick to it.

  Update: I have since read this article, which is a very effective takedown of Why We Sleep, and mirrors many of my own objections. I thought it seemed like pseudoscience and that, as it turns out, was because it may well have been. I stand by my recommendation of "do sleep", but I now reduce my recommendation to the strength of Will Gadd's post on nutrition: just get really good at listening to your body.

• Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. Recommended by Kempy. There's so much of this book I didn't "get", because I didn't have the context. And even still, I am enamored with the way the author tells about her life. Four stars.

  The book starts with a story of a samizdat reading group in Iran, run by a former professor who could no longer profess, since the books she loved the most were considered to be contrary to the beliefs of the ruling Islamic Republic. It skips around to tales from all around the author's life, in a way that I found hard to put down; the times when she taught, the times when she could no longer teach, the transitions between, her clandestine classes, and her exit from Iran. The picture that's painted is slow, and only really comes into recognizable form at the end -- or, perhaps, for me, a few weeks after I had finished with the book.

  That's kind of off-putting, and I confess that I had a lot of difficulty telling the characters that she introduces apart. (That might be intentional; they're a mish-mash of many different humans, she says.) I also found some of the discussion of the books they read to be kind of dry, since I never had much of a taste for classic English-language literature, and so I'd never been exposed to much of it. But even without those things, the stories of the people in Nafisi's world are very powerful. I complained some in some of the fiction that I read that the characters felt shallow and predictable, without real backstories; I can guarantee that this is not a feature of the lives in Nafisi's book.

  I guess it's becoming clear that I'm a sucker for the stories of people, rather than the stories of... stories. Which is good, because the stories of stories in this are all kind of the same, but the people are just so incredibly engaging to me. If that's your thing, I really do recommend Reading Lolita in Tehran -- even if, like me, you've never read Lolita, even not in Tehran.

I suppose this almost entirely omits the most important book I brought with me -- a blank one, and a pen. I wrote about sixty pages worth of ink while I was away. Some of those will be making an appearance here soon too, I think.

(photo captured on Ilford HP5 Plus, pushed to ISO 800.)

December 20th, 2019: This post has been recently updated to reflect new information about Matthew Walker's book, "Why We Sleep".