by Andrew O’Hagan

This book was long, confusing, and long. I did get a hang of who all the characters were by the end, but it’s the kind of book that gives you a “cast of characters” list up front. I NEVER use such lists. I refuse to do that kind of work for a novel. If I can’t keep track of who’s who, you’re doing a bad job as a novelist.

Reading it on Kindle I had no realistic idea how long it was going to be. If I’d picked it up in real life, I probably would have put it down again.

I can appreciate it as a pretty well-written piece of lit. But it was kind of a downer. Not many good things happen.

by Lucy Grealy

So much pain.

This is a childhood cancer memoir, though the wonderful afterword by Ann Patchett does not want you to think of it as a cancer memoir, but as a beautiful piece of writing. OK, but it’s about a girl who went to chemo every single week for two years.

And SPOILER alert. I found myself thinking, “I can’t believe they killed her father and both her horses!!!” I don’t know why my mind phrased it that way, “they”, as if it were a movie, rather than a true story. But yeah. It’s not bad enough she has bone cancer and disfigurement.

I was planning to go on to Ann Patchett’s TRUTH AND BEAUTY next, which is about the adult friendship between Patchett and Grealy, but I just felt like I’d had enough. So much pain.

by Chris Van Tulleken

(Re-Read)

I read this just last year, but re-read because I am newly resolved to stop eating UPF, no little exceptions here and there which then let the big exceptions sneak in. No more diet juice, sugar-free hard candies, weird bottled drinks.

by Bill Maher

Laughed out loud super-frequently. What great therapy.

by Cixin Liu

(As far as I can tell, it’s pronounced “Tsih shin loo”.)

I don’t usually read science fiction, and I have no recollection what brought me to this story. I do enjoy reading Chinese authors; so I probably came across some tempting description, like “futuristic Chinese Lord of the Flies.”

The premise is – well, a futuristic, Chinese “Lord of the Flies”, caused by a supernova that destroys the chromosomes of everyone over 13, gradually killing them, leaving Earth in the hands of children.

I was most swept up in the first third or so of the book that focused on China, and the immediate aftermath of leaving the children in charge. An extremely brief period of normalcy, followed by chaos, more normalcy, then laziness, rebellion, and giving up… just when the 13-year-old leaders think they’ve hit upon a way out, we switch focus from China to the global arena.

Then things get nightmarish and violent. I thought the book gave short shrift to the role of girls in the Supernova Era. They would be half the population and I can’t see them going along with the war games and such. I also didn’t get how the ending jumped from Point A to Point B.

(re-read)

This book was already chock-full of post-its, and I added a few more.

“[W]hat you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much… the universe absolutely could not care less.”

by Nellie Bowles

About the excesses of the progressives, from someone who was one. Extremely valuable, important, gripping, convincing, and depressing. The reviews are unfair. And I need to stop reading about cancel culture.

by Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott

Greg Lukianoff did a great job with Jonathan Haidt in THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, so let’s give him a shot with the analogous CANCELING. Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer who is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that defends free speech rights equally for all comers, “left” or “right.” And I do believe, as Haidt says in his forward, that he has “a big heart.” Unfortunately, the facts of today’s Cancel Culture mean he has to spend a lot more time documenting the abuses today by activists on the “left.”

Why do our young people behave like this? Nowadays, it seems everyone is a Nazi. Talk about your black & white thinking. Every speaker with any non-liberal affiliation has to be shouted down as if he were Hitler himself. I mean, if Hitler were invited to participate in a talk on your campus, would you protest in a respectful manner? Or would you shout, “My god, people this is HITLER!” That’s where we are. Since everyone is Hitler, there’s no responsible action to take other than screaming, disrupting, or preventing the event from ever taking place in the first place.

Here near my own home turf, at UVM, this year, the planned commencement speaker was canceled (literally). US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, protested for her vote against a Gaza cease-fire, was called by activists a “genocidal” “war criminal.”

She’s not a genocidal war criminal. She voted against a cease-fire in a complicated war. She’s not Hitler.

So it’s all come to this. Sometimes I think about the sweep of generations, each of us more self-centered and ‘coddled’ than the previous, and feel the inevitability of it all.

by Johann Hari

The idea is that depression and anxiety are over-medicalized, and that they should be solved culturally rather than with pills. His heart’s in the right place, but it seemed like the examples all involved people with quite obvious problems, and lo and behold, they felt better once they’d solved their problems. That’s not “depression.” That’s having a problem.

I bookmarked this for personal reasons:

“When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment…. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless – that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself that it’s your fault… If it’s your fault, then it’s under your control.”

by Thomas Cahill

I just couldn’t stay focused on hardly any of this.