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.

Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

I was really caught up in this story; I found myself thinking about it constantly whenever I was away from it. The backstory, that is, with the young Lara. The realtime story about the older Lara with the three daughters was OK for framing, but otherwise a bit of an annoying interruption. Also, I admit I have Issues and hate reading about happy families, lovey-dovey sister relationships, mother-daughter relationships – I know this and I cut the book a lot of slack, but the Nelson family was just so smarmily perfectly loving. The word “smothering” came to mind towards the end. She didn’t need to draw them that way to get the contrast across.

Back to the positives. I loved the young Lara. I loved her independence and quick straightforward snappy approach to everything. Ann Pratchett is really wonderful. The setup got me hooked. I loved high school Lara and her friend Veronica. She knows how to make characters likeable but not too cardboard cut-out. I loved that Lara was obviously smart and liked books but wasn’t totally precocious nor a stereotypical bookish nerd. I liked that Lara was kind of naive but not totally stupid about the adult world.

I’m saying nothing about the plot. You can get a plot summary anywhere.

A couple of things about the ending could have been better but it’s not worth spoiling anything.

by Stephen King

The movie was better.

by Susy Atkins et al

IT’S SO EASY!

by Ted Kaufman & Bruce Hiland

When I was heavily into weaving school, I thought, I want to retire and do this intensively. The barriers were going to be the just-slightly-too-far distance, and the money. But I would do thought experiments on it – fully cognizant that when the time came to actually retire, my head would be in some other space and I wouldn’t want to do it anymore – but the point of thought experiments is to have fun. I came up with ways I could do it while driving less (buy a crappy car that I kept parked in Montpelier! buy a caravan to live in onsite at the school during sessions!). Now weaving school is moving and likely isn’t going to be in Marshfield anymore, if it continues to exist at all. And it’s being run by different people, naturally. And yes, my head’s moved on. Need new thought experiments.

by Lauren Oyler

This book was nearly insufferable. It starts out with a strong plot, and I was drawn into the documentary-level detail, but I didn’t foresee how off the rails it would go. After part 1, where heroine discovered her boyfriend is a secret conspiracy theorist, and part 2, which flashes back to their meet-cute, super plot twist comes along and twists the plot so severely there is no longer any plot. Then we get an absolutely interminable section where heroine just wanders around. At one point she decides to go on a series of 12 fake dates, during each of which she pretends to be a different stereotyped sign of the zodiac. I felt like I was reading some Japanese fiction where any random thing might happen next, and when things get like that, I just get like WHY!?!?!

And yes, you can totally convince me that I’m reading it on entirely the wrong level, and that all my complaints are “the point.” Nevertheless, complaints they are.

by Darrin Bell

I really enjoyed this book and did not expect to. I did not expect to because I’m a bad person who’s really tired of reading about racism. I also tend to think graphic novels are gimmicky. But this was wonderful, and I wished there was more of it.

by Carys Davies

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I can’t review this short little novel without giving it all away. I was just so thrilled she pulled off a happy ending! Because I saw tragedy on every other page, until things started to escalate; then I saw tragedy in every paragraph. Thank you, thank you Carys Davies.