by Louise Erdrich

I liked it OK, but I think it was slow to start; and the part with her dressing as Babe the blue ox in a rubber suit and doing tricks underwater? I though that was ridiculous. A mermaid I would understand, but not an ox.

That turned out not to be a pivotal plot development.

I did like Patrice. I like that when a rape was attempted upon her, she escaped, and immediately told her mother everything, and cursed the guy who did it.

I liked the character of Millie Cloud even better. A studio room, a hot plate and electric kettle, and a space heater, and she was set. That’s the life for me.

I like this quote: “You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.”

Did I do any reading on vacation?

by Matthew Hennessey

The title & subtitle (“How the Last Adult Generation Can Save American from Millennials”) say it all. Naturally, I ate it up.

by Zachary Lazar

A historically accurate novel about the early Rolling Stones, the Manson family, and avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Guess which plotline was the only one I cared about.

The author retells her experience obtaining an illegal abortion in France in 1963. She can’t get straight information from anyone. She literally goes to a back alley, where a woman painfully inserts a “probe” into her, which she walks around with for days before it has an effect. She delivers a 3-month-old fetus. It frankly sounds as harrowing as giving birth to a full-term baby.

by Philip Bump

Hope you like charts and graphs – there’s one on almost literally every page. Frankly I found them harder to read and understand than the text most of the time. This book was too much about politics for me, and not enough about generations. Sometimes pages would go by without him even trying to tie what he was saying to the aging of the Baby Boomers. Since I am averse to politics as of the past decade, and only picked up the book because I’m on a “generations” kick, it was disappointing.

by Jean M. Twenge

This was fantastic.

Birthdate and generation:
1901-1924: Greatest
1925-1945: Silent
1946-1964: Boomers*
1965-1979: X
1980-1994: Millennials
1995-2012: Z

*Note one exception: my husband, born in 1964, is insistently, definitively, indubitably, NOT a Boomer. Just ask him.

I’ll cut right to the chase – Generation X, if not the “Greatest,” then easily the “least annoying” of any generation that has ever lived (as per Chuck Klosterman).

“Gen X is the last generation to have had a mostly analog childhood.” Then follows a list of experiences for which we were the Last Generation Standing: rotary phones, childhood without cable TV or videotapes, no internet, typewriters, bound encyclopedias, cameras with film, radios with dials, cassette tapes. Very sad.

“Gen X and later-born Boomers grew up in a unique time in media history, when TV was ubiquitous but had not yet splintered into the millions of viewing options that would come later… Gen X kids watched what was on TV because it was there… The result was a more unified pop culture experience than has existed since, and a trove of pop culture touchstones experienced by most Gen X’ers. A striking number of Gen X childhood memories revolve around TV.”

You said it. I remember in the early 90s a staging of “The Brady Bunch Live” where some actors would simply act out an episode of said TV series verbatim with over-the-top acting. It was mind-blowing. Understand that in the early 90s my generation wasn’t a thing yet. We weren’t in charge. We were just getting jobs. And then suddenly our TV references were out there. Being staged. Being mentioned in movies (“I just don’t understand why things can’t go back to normal at the end of the half hour like on the Brady Bunch” – Reality Bites). Now it’s old hat but I can’t describe how funny it all was at first – like YES! You remember that too??

Of course all the descriptions of Gen X talk about how we were ‘children of divorce.’ I lived in a conservative Catholic subculture where this was decidedly NOT the case. Same goes for ‘latchkey kids’ – Moms in my neighborhood didn’t work. I had one friend with divorced parents, one – and it was WEIRD.

The Silents can speak for themselves (or could – they tend to be dead now), and nothing need be said about the Boomers. So let’s switch focus to the next generations, Millennials and Z. These kids tend to be politically and socially active, which is typical of young people and great; but it’s worrisome how divorced from reality some of their perceptions are. It’s true many Millennials suffered the 2008 Great Recession at a bad time, but the economy did rebound, and the general pessimistic attitude about what a bad hand they’ve been dealt is not warranted. As for Z, they seem to believe some bizarre things, like that discrimination against women in higher ed is still rampant (women are solidly beating men in number of degrees earned); so their tendency to believe that society needs to be totally destroyed and rebuilt is scary.

Kids today.

by David Auerbach

Meganets are those systems which have evolved beyond the reach of human control. Facebook. Blockchains (by design). Google. AI, of course, and soon. We cannot control or contain them.

But we can monkey with them! That’s Auerbach’s suggestion. Poison the data. Slow down the virality. Make everything less efficient on purpose.

by Dr. Carl Hart

I read Drug Use for Grownups before reading this; if I had read this first, I think I would have been surprised to read the second. This is Dr. Hart’s memoir. Throughout his youth and young adulthood, we feel him just floating above the surface of drug use – just a little marijuana and alcohol, very little, with his athletic performance as an excuse. And a little cocaine later. He doesn’t seem really into any of it. So what a surprise to find him an unapologetic heroin hobbyist in the second book. His overall message is the same – drugs don’t ruin lives, people ruin lives; it’s just that I really wouldn’t have pegged him for a user.

I do love a life story and I enjoyed his memoir. It did give an interesting perspective on life and problems in “the hood”. Hart grew up with five older sisters and two younger brothers; an alcoholic father, eventually separated parents. He witnessed crime, addiction, abuse; he shoplifted, he fathered a child he didn’t know about for 16 years. He also played basketball and joined the military, and from there it’s a story of life turned around.

That’s right, 2021.51 – for some reason I never posted a review of this. It’s pertinent to my next Book Corner.

by Dr. Carl L. Hart

To describe this book in one word, I’d maybe choose “scandalous.” Dr. Hart uses heroin & has no intention of stopping. It’s a harmless hobby, like having a drink. “Grown-ups” can responsibly take heroin, and opioids, and meth – there is no drug that should be off limits. Now there’s the general libertarian argument for that, which Dr. Hart espouses; but as a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia specializing in neuropharmacology, he’ll also argue authoritatively that none of these drugs will necessarily harm you, if used responsibly – so it’s not simply a matter of “you should be able to legally destroy your life if you choose”. It’s also that, if you’re a “grown-up” about it, you won’t.

Dr. Hart wrote this risky book to come out of the closet, in the hopes others would follow. I think he will likely find himself forever in the minority. I’ve never read any account of someone in such a prestigious station in life coming clean about so much casual, ongoing drug use (he’s tried everything). But now I have – & I guess he’d say that’s the point of the book.

And I know he’ll say that this is more evidence of how badly the book is needed, but hearing him justify his heroin use and explain how NOT an addict he is made me wonder how long it might take for the inevitable shoe to drop – where will Dr. Hart be a year or more from now? Still a happy user insisting he’s not an addict? Will it be true? I believe it to be true of him now. I do believe his accounts and all the evidence he presents; but being brainwashed by our anti-drug society I just can’t help but wonder…

One constant point of his that I appreciate is this: drugs feel good, and that’s reason enough to take them. He gets really uptight around LSD users because they tend to try to justify their drug use as “different” from others – they’re doing it for mind-expanding reasons or whatever, not to get high. “What’s wrong with getting high?” he cuts one guy off mid-sentence. I love that. The right to pleasure… not currently enshrined in the Constitution, but should be, as Tom Lehrer put it decades ago. He was talking about pornography, not drugs, but the principle’s the same –

“Obscenity. I’m for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on – but we know what’s really involved: dirty books are fun. That’s all there is to it. But you can’t get up in a court and say that I suppose. it’s simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the constitution unfortunately.”

by Sheila Liming

I felt like this was a bait-and-switch. It just didn’t seem to be about “hanging out” at all. It was just a bunch of stories about the author’s oh-so-interesting life. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound resentful just because I’m boring, but it’s like she had nine lives, none of which I could relate to. She was an accordion player in a successful jam band in Pittsburgh! She was a bartender in an isolated Washington state bar! She was a professor in North Dakota! She was pals with a Food Network star and appeared in her reality TV show! She was a guest at a dinner party with famous physicist-author Brian Greene! Enough already! No, wait, she also almost got killed ice-climbing tied to three other people, one of whom was 84 years old! I expected every next chapter to find her performing as a rodeo clown or clerking for a Supreme Court justice.

by Nejib

A hardcover graphic novel about the period of Bowie’s life when he was making MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD and HUNKY DORY. He lived in a rambling old house called Haddon Hall with his wife Angie, soon to birth their son Zowie, and a bunch of friends and fellow artists (and apparently Sid Barret).

I knew a bit, not a ton, about Bowie’s life; but I didn’t always know who key characters were (Marc Bolan of T Rex, for example) or exactly what was going on. It was cool though.

The parts about David’s schizophrenic older brother, Terry; and about his father’s death, were VERY touching.

Silly, but you just don’t tend to think about David Bowie as having a “Mum and Dad.” But of course, he did.

by J. B. MacKinnon

Kind of rambling, to be honest.

by Tim Urban

Really brilliant analysis of “what our problem” is – it’s neither right nor left but “low-rung thinking.”

But it takes a long time to get to the point; and then ends up feeling a bit like a screed against “Social Justice Fundamentalism.”

At first I was feeling like Urban wanted to be a cross between the guy who writes the Xkcd comic and Yuval Noah Harari, and coming up way short in both departments. Finally though he hit his stride with his depiction of the “genies” of “high-rung thinking” and the “golems” of “low-rung thinking.” The former is when we use our rational capacities, when we steelman rather than strawman our opponents, and question our biases. The latter is when we devolve into tribalism.

His drawings sometimes made me laugh out loud; I wish I could copy some here. I tended to like the ones where the stick figures had open-mouthed frowns, such as the depiction of “probably you” when Trump was elected, and the depiction of the defendant in court while his lawyer says “My opponent makes some good points, I guess my client is guilty after all.”

After Urban has laid out his definitions of high-rung thinking, and its opposite, the “golems” of low-rung thinking (it’s a golem on the book cover), he turns to some examples. He has Republican examples to lead us off. Another laugh-out-loud was the strip explaining what exactly is going on when the R’s stage one of their ridiculous stand-offs about the debt celing.

Then he turns to the big golem in the room – he terms it Social Justice Fundamentalism. I appreciate how he avoids the term “woke”, and uses “progressive” rather than “liberal” – but to understand what he means by SJF, substitute “woke.” I agree wholeheartedly that this is often a golem, and his examples were as sobering and scary as he meant them to be. But they went on too long (despite his insistence that he really didn’t want to have so many examples, just felt it was really, really necessary). I got the idea. I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want to read a book against wokeness. I wanted to read a book against low-rung thinking. He stayed too long on this bugaboo.