Not a great way to kick off the reading year. It was a Xmas gift.

by Bonnie Garmus

Plot: Elizabeth is a woman trying to make it as a chemist circa 1960. She faces brutal sexual harassment. Her fellow-genius-chemist lover suddenly dies in a freak accident after impregnating her. She struggles to raise her baby and continue doing chemistry in her kitchen. In another freak turn of events, she lands a job hosting a chemistry cooking show. Finally, a series of unlikely events lead to the explanations behind her dead lover’s horrendous childhood.

Books that don’t feel true to the period drive me up a wall. I grew weary picking up my phone to fact-check all the anachronisms. A sampling:

• Someone who allegedly saw the Beatles already in 1960, and they already had long hair.
• Reference to “libertarian bullshit”. The word “libertarian” goes back a ways but wasn’t common in American discourse till the 70s.
• Reference to Swedish subsidized childcare. Sweden nominally began providing such directly after WWII, but it was ineffectual and didn’t really take off until, again, the 70s. People wouldn’t be throwing around Sweden as an example of workable socialism in 1960.

Second annoyance: one of my favorite tropes, the Bratty Kid. Granted I mostly liked Madeline, Elizabeth’s bastard child who is a 4-year-old kindergartener through most of the book. I’ll buy that she’s precocious and accept some over-the-top examples for comic effect. But I didn’t buy how everyone treated this 4-year-old as a tiny adult, not just her mom.

Thirdly, when we got glimpses into how Elizabeth actually conducted her inexplicably wildly popular cooking show, I wished the author would have left it up to our imaginations. Her explanation of the difference between ionic, covalent, and hydrogen bonds, trying to compare them to relationships, was not only ridiculous, but bore only the flimsiest relationship to cooking.

Finally, eh. It just wasn’t a serious book and had too much parenty crap for my taste – I don’t mean the Elizabeth-Madeline relationship, more all the crap about Elizabeth and Calvin’s parentage and pasts. The most common chick-lit climax of all… “And the mother/father really WAS…. [drumroll]” This is a book to toss.

Yes, I squeezed one last book into 2022 making for 58.

by Luke Rhinehart (pseudonym)

The fantastic premise and story is overshadowed entirely by the raunch and ugliness in this 1971 novel. I’ve read CATCH-22 and CUCKOO’S NEST which bear some similarity, but the level of misogyny here was disgusting, and I can overlook a lot. I quit halfway through – but changed my mind and decided to see what would happen.

Psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart is bored with his life, so one night he decides to roll some dice to tell him whether to rape Arlene, family friend, colleague’s wife, and upstairs neighbor. The dice say to do it. So he “rapes” her (she wants it).

Exhilarated, he starts applying dice throws to other decisions in his life. Things go crazy quick. He feels he has stumbled upon a deep psychological discovery:

“It was the goddam sense of having a self. What if – at the time it seemed like an original thought – what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side?” Soon he has given up control of his entire life to the dice.

After he’s done this for some period of time, the thought of going back to pre-dice life frightens him. “I thought of writing that from then on all dice decisions would be recommendations and not commands. In effect, I would be changing the role of dice from commander-in-chief to advisory council. The threat of having ‘free will’ again paralyzed me; I never wrote the option.”

His wife at first has no idea what’s going on, only sees him going crazy; feels she’s going crazy herself seeing him swing from loving to distant seemingly on random whim (actually on random dice throws). One day the dice tell him to leave her and the children forever. It’s the hardest thing they have ever told him to do (worse than rape and murder) but he does it.

Another woman he takes up with demands, “How am I supposed to enjoy being with you if I feel you can go ‘poof’ at any minute from some random fall of a die?” “Everything may evaporate at any instant,” he retorts. “Everything! You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calvin Coolidge: death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity.”

I kept reading for the insights like this. And I went back to it after I quit because it really was a gripping story. At once point, when the dice tell him to murder someone he knows, he makes a list of 36 people and asks the dice to tell him who. His wife and kids are on the list. (Why does he put these horrible things on the lists in the first place!?!) I found myself actually covering the end of the chapter with my fingers so that I couldn’t accidentally see the name of the victim in advance. That’s a gripping story.

Another book it reminded me of, and maybe was trying to emulate, was LOLITA, in its first-person unapologetic wacko humor in the midst of disgusting subject matter – but in no way shape or form does it ever approach the literary quality of that classic.

Full disclosure, I am someone who has used random number generators to decide things like what to eat. NOT whom to murder, though.

by Kieran Setiya

Felt a bit like a bait-and-switch. I was expecting a book with a focus on the hardships of life, perhaps with lessons about acceptance. But while the chapter titles lead us off with the various types of “hard” we’re likely to encounter through life, the conversation quickly shifts to general philosophy and pop psychology. And little of that conversation was genuinely compelling or enlightening. I did bookmark this interesting tidbit, though – Setiya is quoting somebody else, a historian named Keith Thomas, on the topic of friendship in early modern England – “friends were valued because they were useful. One did not necessarily have to LIKE them.” Ha! I never heard such an analysis; I guess it makes sense, if you think about how marriage used to be much more of a social contract based on utility rather than a way for fulfilling love matches. Maybe friendship was similar… not based on any bosom-buddy kind of feeling, but more of a mutual aid society.

by Louise Perry

Provocative! Contrarian! Convincing? Partially.

Let’s put it in a nutshell: women lost something when we gained the Pill and the ability, nay expectation, to go around fornicating without repercussions (or so it seemed). Because contraception fails, and is not always used, women risk ending up with the life-changing experience of pregnancy without the societally ensured expectation of an ensuing marriage or means of support on the part of her paramour. Because men are bigger and stronger than women, women end up in situations where they can be overpowered and assaulted when they attempt to exercise their sexual freedom. Because (more controversially now) biology has built women to invest their emotions in sex more than men do, we just plain don’t reap the same rewards as men do from promiscuity. We have gained freedom, eliminated the stigma of out-of-wedlock birth and divorce, and these are no small things. But were they worth it?

The chapter titles give you a flavor:

• Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
• Men and Women Are Different
• Some Desires Are Bad
• Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering
• Consent Is Not Enough (this chapter about Porn Is Bad I ended up mostly skipping; wasn’t interested)
• Violence Is Not Love (anti-BDSM; again, I skimmed)
• People Are Not Products
• Marriage Is Good

This last chapter I thought would have and should have formed more of the meat of the book, because it was the strongest argument. The parts I skimmed or skipped just read like a monotonous litany of case studies, the kind of non-fiction I don’t like.

by Sam Harris

You know I have to have a very high regard for Mr. Harris to read a whole book exhorting me to consider Buddhism and meditation. And I do. He presents an empiricist’s take throughout.

I still really need to sit down with somebody who practices these things and ask all my questions.

I guess first off, WHY. Why do you want to transcend the self in the first place? The self is all we have. Harris’ main claim however is that the self is an illusion. Well, so is free will; but do you wake up every morning and lay there doing nothing, saying, let’s see what I do today?

And if you can alter your consciousness and see that the self is an illusion, if this is a way to mitigate anxiety and bad feelings, doesn’t it get rid of the good feelings too? Why would you want to live that way?

It’s sold as a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. We are constantly chasing pleasure, avoiding pain, bounced around among our emotions, seeking something that can never be permanent. Yup. That’s called the HUMAN CONDITION. The pursuit of happiness… it’s what life is ABOUT. I don’t get why you’d want to spend the effort fighting human nature, eliminating the joy that comes from achieving goals and looking forward to the future and looking back at happy times, in exchange for some steady state of emotion-free selflessness.

I know I’m not getting it entirely. That’s why I need to sit down with somebody.

I really do appreciate Harris’ efforts here. He is against every form of faith-based religion and claims nothing that is not empirically testable. My readings here and elsewhere about meditation and psychedelic use have ‘opened my mind’ a bit – to the extent I actually can read about Buddhism and meditation without running away screaming (much).

One exercise I did enjoy much was about “having no head.” You can’t see your head. Try pretending you don’t have one. Just pretend for a moment, don’t dwell on it. Look around. How does the world look? Douglas Harding: “This hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing… It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything: room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills…” Trippy. Drawing of headlessness by Ernst Mach:

by Sam Harris

Sam Harris’ Making Sense is my podcast discovery of the year. He talks about the coolest shit, has the most awesome “slow talker” delivery, puts no time limit on his rambling introductory monologues or interviews… and always makes me laugh by timing how long it takes him in any podcast to ask his guest, whosoever the guest may be, “Ever tried psychedelics?” and/or “Do you do meditation?” You know he has to be a real quality thinker and talker for me to put up with smugness about meditation, and envy of psychedelic use.

This book is a transcript of a bunch of his podcast interviews. The topics include consciousness, a bit of current events circa 2017, AI, and tangential general psychology. It was all interesting. I have no jump-out quotes to share, though.

by Cal Newport

Go a month without apps and phones, then bring things back gradually to see what you really need. Use apps only for certain purposes and at certain times. He says he’s not into hacks because they don’t work; you need to really go without, and then go minimalist; but I don’t see how his advice differs from hacks. I don’t think I came away with any new insight. I already use apps only for targeted purposes and particular times. Oh! I did like the metaphor of Facebook and its ilk being like a slot machine – pull the lever, what will I get? How many likes, loves, comments? Cherry, cherry… mule. But that wasn’t even his metaphor; someone said it on 60 Minutes.

by Jennifer Worth

This is categorized as non-fiction/memoir. But I would have enjoyed it more if it had been told in a more true-to-memory fashion, without all the manufactured dialog that makes it feel so “ready for TV serialization”.

I also would have liked just a little more backstory on the writer, the doomed relationship she occasionally alludes to, and how she got into nursing and midwifery. Not a ton of backstory, just a little. For the most part I appreciate her letting her own character recede into the background so often.

There is honesty in her multi-chapter remembrances of befriending an innocent Irish girl led into prostitution – she admits her interest bordered on voyeuristic. And the stealing of said girl’s child to be put up for adoption in a good Catholic home was dealt with in a refreshingly open-eyed manner. The writer is righteously and rightfully indignant, but accepts that the real evil is that there is no other course available.

Somehow the story of the non-English-speaking Spanish lady who prematurely gave birth to her 25th child (yeah, right…) made me feel ticked off. A one-pound baby and she raises it to at least six pounds (we only assume he lived a full life – her story ends when he is six pounds) simply by swaddling him close to her and feeding him colostrum and milk drop by drop. Hell, why do we have NICU’s, after all? What a waste, when it’s so easy! I don’t know why this story out of all the stories in the book annoyed me the most, but I just wanted to smack that woman when she refused to let go of her one-pound baby. I knew he would survive, given the type of book this is and how the story was set up, but I wished the poor infant ill, through no fault of his own.

by Harley Rustad

I thought I’d like this better. I thought I’d admire the protagonist like I did Chris McCandless of INTO THE WILD. But Chris went off and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Justin Alexander was an Instragram star who seemed very troubled.

by Bob Dylan

You have to read this book like you would listen to a Bob Dylan song. Don’t study it and wait for brilliance and look for the nuggets of awesomeness, although they will be there. Because doing it that way you will struggle through a lot of, “Is this brilliance or nonsense?” Just let it wash over you.

At first I was puzzled, but I just had to get into the groove. Then I felt like I was listening to “Theme Time Radio Hour”. I could hear his one-of-a-kind voice rambling through it all.

I think my favorite line is, this being a close paraphrase – people always ask the songwriter what the song is about. If we had had more words to explain it, we would have put them in the song.

While I wish for the purposes of this review that I had bookmarked more great one-liners, that would have interfered with my experience.