August 2019 books read

  • Fall, or Dodge in Hell – Neal Stephenson, 2019. I love most Stephenson, but this was a snore. The VR Paradise Lost is an interesting idea but dragged out way way too long, and the elevated diction was clumsy.
  • The Liar’s Club – Mary Karr, 1995.
  • The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water – Charles Fishman, 2011.
  • The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck, 1939
  • Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle, 1993. Irish Writers book group selection. Most of us got kind of tired of the 10-year old’s voice and found it a slog, but we had a great discussion. We wondered why it won the Booker! It re-pointed me to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village“: ” And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew / That one small head could carry all he knew,” and I looked up Clarnico Iced Caramels.
  • Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying – Sallie Tisdale, 2018. Wonderful and yes, very practical, if you’re ready to think about such things. A great companion to Being Mortal (Atul Gawande, 2014).
  • Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over – Nell Irvin Painter, 2018. Enthralling and thought-provoking. I identified in many ways, as I’m slowly working my way towards a second bachelor’s in CS.
  • Estranged – Ethan M. Aldridge, 2018

Wow, no re-reads this month! Pretty unusual for me—but that’s one of the advantages of belonging to so many book groups, keeping me focused on new stuff (or purposeful re-reads, not just comfort reading).

Estranged – Ethan M. Aldridge, 2018

Fantasy is my favorite genre, but my bar for good fantasy is so high (and gets higher as I get older) that I very seldom find anything new to like, and only even try if the reviews are stellar. So when I say I loved loved loved this graphic novel, I mean it. Thank you Twitter, since it was a re-tweet of Aldridge’s amazing sketch of Lloyd Alexander’s Taran holding Hen Wen that led me to his work. Estranged is about a human child kidnapped by fairies and his changeling twin. They meet and team up, which seems like an obvious idea but which I’ve never seen done before, and Aldridge subtly shows the similarities and differences in their personalities and how their different environments shaped them. The art, pen-and-ink and watercolor, is gorgeous, but the writing is equally strong. There are great sibling and love relationships, themes of belonging and being yourself, a non-binary character who’s an enchanted living candle (another very cool idea!), strong female characters, a dragon in subway tunnels…. and hurray, a sequel is coming out in October!

Average Rating:

4.0 rating based on 3,469 ratings (all editions)

ISBN-10:
ISBN-13:
Goodreads: 31193404

Author(s): Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 8/7/2018

Edmund and the Childe were swapped at birth. Now Edmund lives in secret as a changeling in the World Above, with fae powers that make him different from everyone else—even his unwitting parents and older sister, Alexis. The Childe lives among the fae in the World Below, where being human makes him an oddity at the royal palace, and where his only friend is a wax golem named Whick.

But when the cruel sorceress Hawthorne takes the throne, the Childe and Edmund realize that the fate of both worlds may be in their hands—even if they’re not sure which world they belong to.
 

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck, 1939

To my surprise, most of us in the Great Books group had never read this before. I particularly loved the amazing descriptions and the poetic interstitial chapters.

In this book I learned

  • anlage – “the foundation of a subsequent development”
  • Rochester lamp

Short quotes

  • “all the various purposes of a cap—carrying sack, towel, handkerchief.”
  • Half-car/half-truck “this was the new hearth, the living center of the family”
  • “You’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it”
  • Poor boys staring at a candy case: “not with craving or with hope or even with desire, but just with a kind of wonder that such things could be”
  • “a furrow four miles long that ain’t stoppin’ or goin’ aroun’ Jesus Christ Hisself”
  • “I never seen nobody that’s busy as a prairie dog collectin’ stuff that wasn’t disappointed”
  • “A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re payin’ twenty-five!”
  • “the on’y thing you got to look at is that ever’ time they’s a little step fo’ward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back”
  • “Ruthie looked fiercely about, but she went to a corner of the car and put her back in the corner. Her shame and fierceness were blended.”
  • “Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can’t keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go- off somewheres.”
  • Tenant says: “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”
  • “The nickel, which has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play- this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. The nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction.”
  • “‘We pay sales tax an’ gas tax an’ tobacco tax,’ this little guy says. An’ he say, ‘Farmers get four cents a cotton poun’ from the gov’ment- ain’t that relief?’ An’ he says, ‘Railroads an’ shippin’ companies draw subsidies- ain’t that relief?'”

Jim Casy quotes:

“I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit- the human sperit- the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent- I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

“I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus,” the preacher went on. “But I got tired like Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin’ stuff. Nighttime I’d lay on my back an’ look up at the stars; morning I’d set an’ watch the sun come up; midday I’d look out from a hill at the rollin’ dry country; evenin’ I’d foller the sun down. Sometimes I’d pray like I always done. On’y I couldn’ figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”

“This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ jus’ died out of it. I don’t know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters. An’ now he’s dead, an’ that don’t matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an’ he says, ‘All that lives is holy.’ Got to thinkin’, an’ purty soon it means more than the words says. An’ I wouldn’ pray for a ol’ fella that’s dead. He’s awright. He got a job to do, but it’s all laid out for ‘im an’ there’s on’y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an’ they’s a thousan’ ways, an’ we don’ know which one to take. An’ if I was to pray, it’d be for the folks that don’ know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An’ now cover ‘im up and let ‘im get to his work.”

Tom Joad quoting Casy:

Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’t even think I was listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.”

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then —”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.

Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

Selling horses:

You’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek. You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk. But watch it, mister. There’s a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses- so beautiful- a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower, some day. We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.

“Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much- livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but- it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me.

Little pot-bellied men in light suits and panama hats; clean, pink men with puzzled, worried eyes, with restless eyes. Worried because formulas do not work out; hungry for security and yet sensing its disappearance from the earth. In their lapels the insignia of lodges and service clubs, places where they can go and, by a weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.

They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water – Charles Fishman, 2011

Nature and Enviro selection. Fishman reached out to Forbes and we had a very enjoyable Skype session with him at the end of the meeting. We asked about what’s changed since 2011 and he shared a few more great win-win stories. He plugged his new book, One Giant Leap, with a compelling tie-in to climate change.

There are a lot of numbers – audio book listeners complained – and it was a bit repetitive, but overall I really liked it and it made an interesting comparison to When the Rivers Run Dry, which we read in 2018.

In this book I learned

  • “Fit-for-purpose water” – just clean enough (e.g., use gray water on golf courses)
  • It’s a location problem – we don’t have less water, it’s in different places, and saving it here doesn’t necessarily help over there
  • Lots of success stories and win-win: “Americans in 2005 used less water per person than they did in 1955” (of how many other resources is that true?) “Business is actually ahead of politics, and ahead of popular awareness” – so much money to be saved
  • “Caustics” – the wonderful word for “the shapes of shifting light water makes on the bottom of a swimming pool”
  • Space water! Space is full of it! “There is enough water being formed [in the Orion Molecular Cloud] sufficient to fill all of the Earth’s oceans every twenty-four minutes.”
  • The fourth state of water! Incorporated in hydrous minerals like serpentine – of 200 lbs of serpentine, 22 is H2O
  • Ultra-pure water, used to clean semiconductors, is “not just regarded as an industrial solvent, but … considered akin to a poison. … UPW is ‘hungry’ – it will leach molecules right out of your body tissues.”
  • OMG the crazy situation of Atlanta’s water supply from Lake Lanier. At publication time (2011) it wasn’t resolved, so I flagged it to look up. Summer 2019: still not resolved!!! Revisiting this to finish and publish in January 2025: the case was dismissed in August 2021. Only 11 years…
  • Water service levels have gone backwards in India – most major cities had 24/7 water in 1947, but now “That level of service, and more important, the expectation of that level of service, has slipped away”
  • Lack of water means girls are more likely to stop going to school once menstruation begins!
  • Insane amount of pollution in the Yamuna river: “One eyedropper of Yamuna River water is enough to make six bathtubs of water unsafe to sit in. Says the CSE report, ‘The river is unfit for any human purpose.'”
  • I want to see a WET fountain, like the one at the Bellagio!

Things I’d already thought about that he expressed really well:

  • the ridiculousness of paying for bottled water. “Ten gallons of tap water, at home, costs on average 3 pennies. … We happily pay three thousand times that price at the convenience store … But when the water bill goes from $30 to $34 a month, customers react as if they’ll have to choose between their prescription drugs and their water service.” “Bottled water undermines our financial and civic commitment to a reliable public water system.” “It is easier for the typical American living in Beverly Hills or Miami or Manhattan to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fijian water than it is for most people in Fiji.” Many of us in the group didn’t realize it was more than just marketing, that the water actually comes from freakin’ Fiji. WTF!

Given that water is both the most familiar substance in our lives, and the most important substance in our lives, the really astonishing thing is that most of us don’t think of ourselves as having a relationship to water. It’s perfectly natural to talk about our relationship to our car or our relationship to food, our relationship to alcohol, or money, or God.

But water has achieved an invisibility in our lives that is only more remarkable given how central it is. Water used to be part of the rhythm and motivation of daily life, and there are plenty of places, including farms and whole swaths of the developing world, where it still is.

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap.

Water is tirelessly resilient. Water participates in a mind-bending array of physical, chemical, biochemical, geological, and human-created processes every minute of the day—water is essential to creating soup and computer servers, it drives both hurricanes and erosion, it is the essential element in human beings maintaining our body temperature at 98.6 degrees—and yet water emerges from every one of those processes intact, undamaged, unchanged, ready to make a fresh cloud or a fresh drop of sweat, an iceberg or a jellyfish, as the occasion requires.

Water’s indestructibility, its reusability, will be vital as we confront an era where water scarcity becomes more common. Water itself isn’t becoming more scare, it’s simply disappearing from places where people have become accustomed to finding it—where they have built communities assuming a certain availability of water—and reappearing somewhere else.

We want a comforting mental and physical distance between the last time our water was dirty and the moment we use it to stir up a pitcher of ice tea. It’s easy for water professionals who live every day of their careers with the reality that while there is plenty of pure water, there is no fresh water—our water was Tyrannosaurus rex pee and dirty snow at some point, because there is no other water. For ordinary people, though, our consciousness of water doesn’t even include a willful forgetting about its source, as it does with the hamburger. We really don’t know where our water comes from, just that it needs to be “fresh” when we fill the ice cube tray.s

In any meaningful measure of reality, there was nothing in the purified water but water. In scientific terms, there were some molecules of other stuff.

But the difference between “nothing” and “virtually nothing” is the difference between security and anxiety. In a heated political campaign, it’s the difference between trust and suspicion.

One of the legacies of scaling an economy to abundant water is that when the abundance disappears, it turns out we not only don’t have the water, we don’t have a water system that can adapt to scarcity.

One of the interesting things about water is that it is one of those rare areas where the gold standard of service and the basic level of service are the same thing: Water should be provided twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in pipes that keep it clean and safe.

Water poverty doesn’t just mean your hands are dirty, or you can’t wash your clothes, or you are often thirsty. Water poverty may mean you never learn to read, it means you get sick more often than you should, it means you and your children are hungry. Water poverty traps you in a primitive day-to-day struggle. Water poverty is, quite literally, de-civilizing.

Water issues, in particular, are often made worse when everyone operates independently—all those pumps sucking water from mains in Delhi and Hyderabad and Bangalore make everyone’s water dirty. The collective solution is usually cheaper, more efficient, less wasteful, and better for the fate of the water itself. Money and technology are often not the best solutions to water issues—rainwater harvesting is simple, low-tech, and it’s a lot easier and less expensive than finding new sources of water.

When you think about the qualities of water that are so appealing—the energy, the playfulness, the adaptability, the variety of mood, the artistry, and also the sheer everyday usefulness—what’s striking is how much the personality of water mirrors our own personality as people.

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir – Mary Karr, 1995

Second Monday book group selection. I led the discussion and adapted some questions from the online reader’s guide. One of my big points was that this was the vanguard of the whole miserabilia memoir genre.

  • Sheriff goes up to neighbor women “setting in motion a series of robe-tightening and sweater-buttonings.”
  • “Like most people, he lied best by omission…”
  • Oil-storage tanks “like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.”
  • “It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement of all was taken as progress in my family.”
  • “The four of use tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our back together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs.”
  • a penis: “it felt like a wet bone encased in something”
  • “Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen and the drinking actually staved it off a while.”
  • ““Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it.”
  • Kids trying to navigate their own fate “when we wanted a straight-thinking adult but couldn’t find one”
  • “bench-pressing boxes up” into an attic

I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.

It is a sad commentary on the women of my family that we can recite whole wardrobe assemblages from the most minor event in detail, but often forget almost everything else. In fact, the more important the occasion—funeral, wedding, divorce court—the more detailed the wardrobe memory and the dimmer the hope of dredging up anything that happened.)

The school had taken up something called self-paced learning, which meant kids worked independently through a progression of reading folders and math folders. Student monitors oversaw the classes. The teachers stayed in the lounge all day smoking and eating from big Tupperware containers they took turns bringing in—brownies and cupcakes and cookies by the boatload.

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.