In which our hero returns to take possession of her ancestral castle.
This book is sort of a ultracompressed summary of the author's undergrad political philosophy class at Harvard. The fact that it's a political philosophy class, rather than an ethics class, is significant: justice is certainly related to ethics, and this book does discuss theories like utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, but the focus is different. This isn't (despite the subtitle) a question of what the right thing is for an individual to do in a given situation, but of how society should be organized.
The weakest part of this book, in my opinion, is its discussion of utilitarianism, which I take much more seriously than the author. He doesn't mention rule utilitarianism, and he doesn't mention any of the many potential answers that people have proposed to the standard arguments against consequentialism. The most interesting part of the book is the discussion of loyalty and patriotism. It's hard to account for those things as virtues under most of the usual theories, including those of Kant and Mill and Rawls. You can take that as an argument against patriotism and loyalty, or you can take it as an argument against the mainstream of metaethical thinking for the last couple centuries. Sandel chooses the latter. That's really the heart of this book: trying to understand what justice can mean in terms of communities. It's a goal that Plato, who originated this whole line of inquiry, would have sympathized with.
Midnight's Children is the book that made Salman Rushdie a famous writer, and The Satanic Verses is the book that made him a famous public figure even among people who don't read novels. My memory (I wonder if anyone has written a careful history) is that the whole affair was incredibly contingent, starting with a minor Pakistani election campaign. But in any case, nowadays it's impossible to read this book without thinking about the riots, the death threats, Ayatollah Khomeini, the years of police protection.
The odd thing is that associating this book with terrorism isn't completely wrong. It begins with terrorists blowing up an airplane, it includes riots and bombings, it mentions the Iranian Revolution, and it even mentions Khomeini by name. But by and large that's not what the book is about. The sections of the book that made people angriest are dream sequences, fantasies by someone who is losing his mind. The interesting (and complicated) question is why he is going mad, and what his hallucinations say about his madness and its causes.
When Rushdie spoke at Google, one of my Indian coworkers asked: given how many references to Indian culture you make in your books, do you expect anyone who isn't Indian to understand them? Rushdie's first response, I think semiserious, was: I don't care. He expanded on that: there's enough in his books that any reader will understand, and there are also some extras that will mean more to some people than others. What he didn't say, but might have, is that not all of those extras have to do with India — I noticed references to Shakespeare, Dickens, and Joyce, among others, and presumably there were many equally obvious things I failed to notice. I'm sure I would have gotten more out of this book if I'd known more about Bollywood movies or Bengali poetry or the early history of Islam, but it's also true that I would have gotten more out of it if I'd known more about some aspects of English culture. Much more of this book takes place in London than in Mumbai. (Or Bombay, as it was called when The Satanic Verses was published.) And, very specifically, Thatcher era London. In large part it's a book about the English immigrant experience, and the inner struggles of the main characters are largely about gaining and renouncing communal identity.
The first Aud Torvingen book — a crime novel (one where the detective has an unusually high body count), not science fiction.
One interesting characteristic of this book, which I'm pretty sure was a deliberate choice rather than just realism, is that the main character is lesbian, a Norwegian/US dual citizen, and a former Atlanta cop, and she's still on good terms with her former colleagues and there's no sign that anyone on the force or elsewhere has the slightest problem with her sex, sexual orientation, or national origin.
This is also the kind of suspense novel whose plot only works because two people, in a first world country, are unable to get in touch with each other. This was just barely plausible at the time the book was written, when you might imagine that a couple might have just one cell phone between them, but nowadays it would require more explanation and contrivance.
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means,” says Miss Prism. Well, not in Sense and Sensibility. The good end happily enough, but most of the bad characters end at least as happily and considerably richer — as Austen says, “a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.”
The one thing I thought was imperfect about this book was the character of Edward. He hardly was a character! We know him almost entirely by Elinor's view of him, and he comes across mostly as an object to be desired. The contrast to other more fully developed characters, most obviously Elinor and Marianne, but also Lucy, and Colonel Brandon, and Mrs. Jennings, and Willoughby, and even relatively minor characters like Fanny, is striking.
The Father Brown stories are probably what Chesterton is best known for nowadays. I find them a comfort read. Some of the mysteries are ingenious, some are unfair and not completely self consistent, but they're always fun to read — in large part because of, not despite, the conservative ideology they're steeped in.
The “dilemma” of the title is a simple one: out of the vast array of choices, what should I eat today? For some species it's simple, because they're adapted to eat a single kind of food. It's more complicated for humans. Our choices changed ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture, and changed again over the last sixty years with the invention of radically new forms of industrial agriculture and processed foods.
The four meals of the title, an organizing principle for the book's exploration of our various food chains, are a processed industrial corn-based meal (bought at McDonalds, eaten in a moving car—what else?); a dinner made from industrial organic food bought at Whole Foods; “beyond organic” food from Polyface Farm; and a dinner that the author cooked from meat and plants and mushrooms that he hunted and gathered and grew himself.
I knew much of the material on big industrial food chains already, partly from reading other things by Michael Pollan, but it's still amazing stuff: the vast monoculture fields of inedible corn, processed in chemical plants to become sodas and oils and snack foods and (indirectly) beef and chicken. Most of the processed food in our supermarkets is corn, although it might not look like it. Even the disposable containers and utensils for our food are sometimes made of corn—undoubtedly a new invention in the few years since this book came out, or I'm sure Pollan would have mentioned it.
The most entertaining part of the book is the brief glimpse of the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts, and the way that the gourmet wild mushroom economy works. The most enlightening, though, is the section on the two very different kinds of “organic” food: what the organic food movement meant when it started 40 or 50 years ago, and the ways in which it's evolved so that today's large-scale organic food is grown in ways that are barely distinguishible from any other agribusiness operation. A real improvement, yes, but a much smaller improvement than one might think at first.
If you look at images of farms, whether the marketing material that Pollan calls “supermarket pastoral” (he's good at coining memorable phrases) or something like the coloring book Alice was playing with this morning, you'll see a kind of farm that was common a hundred years ago and rare today: a big red barn, a family working a few hundred acres, a variety of plants and animals. Even if we intellectually know that that has nothing to do with the world of commodity grains and CAFOs, it's still the idea of farming that most of us have and that the food industry wants us to have. It's odd to realize that something so seemingly traditional and familiar is actually quite rare and almost part of the counterculture.
Set in the same world as Lady of Mazes, some centuries later. It's a different book, with almost no characters in common, but it asks a similar question: if there are no limits to our options, how can we construct a meaningful life? One possible answer that this book proposes is thalience.
Winner of the 2007 Carl Brandon Parallax Award! It's an interesting blend of science fiction and fantasy, set mostly in a late 21st century West Africa. It's also a YA novel: a coming of age story, and a story about overcoming internalized oppression.
I realized while reading it that I've probably read more books set on Mars than anywhere in Africa, which is a shame.
Liar's Poker was published in 1989, but interest in it has revived in the last year or so: it's the story of the author's experience working as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the mid 80s, and, even though the book was written long before the 21st century mortgage crisis, it has an unusually clear explanation of how some of the financial innovations associated with the crisis began. I think I might finally understand CDOs. (Although I'm still fuzzy about CDO2s, and completly baffled by synthetic CDOs.) I hadn't realized that securitized mortgages and CDOs had such a long history, and I hadn't realized their connection with the S&L crisis of the 80s.
That's really a side issue, though, just two chapters of the book. The book is about the author's own Wall Street story. He wrote it in part as a cautionary tale, but, as he wrote ten years later in a piece called "The End", lots of college students read the book as an instruction manual and an inspiration. I suppose that was inevitable.
I read part of this as a standalone novella in Asimov's. I liked the novel, but thought the shorter form version worked a little better.
Longinus famously wrote that the Odyssey was “nothing but an epilogue of the Iliad,” that it betrayed “the special mark of age,” that “in the Odyssey one might liken Homer to a setting sun.” My impression is that most ancient critics and scholars would have agreed with him that the Iliad was the greater work. Like most moderns, however, I like the Odyssey better. Its narrative structure is more sophisticated, and I find its characters more interesting. Obviously we prize different things today than readers did two thousand years ago!
The Odyssey is often described as the story of Odysseus's wanderings in his return from Troy. That's true in a sense, but misleading. The stories that everyone remembers — the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, and so on — are really a small part of the poem: four books (9–12), out of 24. For the most part the Odyssey is the story of what happened when Odysseus returned to Ithaca, his triumph over the suitors and the eventual reconciliation and restoration of order. We hear several versions of the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, a warning about what another hero's return was like.