Rating: 🌕🌗🌑🌑🌑

I was reading this out in the sun on a Friday afternoon when I noticed a stickiness on my hands; warm and watery, oozing out of the book and onto my lap.

Yes, like jizz.

Bear with me.

To use the language of the book, Pure Colour is an ejaculation of Sheila Heti’s soul into the body of anyone who dares read it.

There are many books out there that are masturbatory in nature — War and Peace is an example of that, and so is Dune (you’re welcome to hate me), and so are many autobiographies. Unfortunately, the nature of such a work means that it often misses the mark, and ends up being no more than a big sticky mess all over the goddamn carpet.

This book here is one such addition to the global and ever growing library of self-fellating works.

Some authors, feeling a kind of obligation, will bring the reader a warm, wet cloth of a closing chapter to wipe the slime off your face. Some won’t. Either way, the act is the same.

I was not bothered by the incestuous overtones, even though this is a somewhat autobiographical work of fiction, and Sheila herself, in an interview, said that the moment of her father’s death truly felt like the universe ejaculated his spirit into her, “then spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels spreading inside, that warm and tangy feeling”, and that there was no better way to describe it in the book. Her words. I’m not here to pass judgment based on one paragraph — that’s your job. I respect her sincerity.

What’s troubling me is that at the end of this author-reader jizzfest I find myself severely dissatisfied. Sheila is out and on her way to write another book, and I’m left all alone, staring at my face in the mirror while I dip a towel in warm water to wipe myself clean. Later, in my journal, I put down the date and write one word — “Why?"

Fine. Here it is in plain, cum-free words: this book is two hundred and sixteen pages of pseudo-profound bullshit. It is described as a “galaxy of a novel, a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great and terrible things about being alive”. Aside from a few thought-provoking sentences, it is none of those things. It’s an atlas of confusion and repetitive, meaningless drivel.

Should you think I’m being too harsh, take this paragraph from early in the book (chapter 1):

“Over the next few weeks, any time Mira and Annie ran into each other, something widened inside of them.

Something was opening in Mira’s chest, a portal to Annie and her open chest, which was widening in the direction of Mira. This widening was something that Mira had never felt before, or even known could be.

It was like a vagina was stretching for a very large cock, but it was in her chest that this stretching was happening, in the part of her that usually kept love out, that firmly preserved her insides. This was how she normally lived—with that part of her sealed shut.

But now it was opening almost too wide, and a similar thing was happening in Annie."

That’s just the warm up. I suggest (but do not recommend) that you read the rest of the book for the full experience. I’ll grant it one thing — it’s light, and took me about 4 hours to finish.

I must reveal to you, hesitantly, that Pure Colour won one of Canada’s most prestigious awards — the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language fiction. This award was also given to Margaret Atwood in 1985 for The Handmaid’s Tale, a slightly less hollow piece of work.

I feel some guilt speaking of the book in this way, especially when I’ve published exactly 0 books myself. I tend to reserve my most honest (and meanest) self for authors that are dead and deprived of access to the internet. In this case, however, I think the 10,000 five star reviews Sheila Heti has earned will more than make up for the inconsequential words of a nobody like me.

I’ll nip off to widen my chest and be a lemon now. Perhaps if I open myself up enough, the universe will ejaculate warm wisdom into my soul, and I’ll finally get it.

Some tidbits (including bits I liked):

They just didn’t consider the fact that one day they would be walking around with phones in the future, out of which people who had far more charisma than they did would let flow an endless stream of images and words. They just had no idea that the world would become so big, or the competition so stiff.

They never saw a video of how another girl fixed her hair. They didn’t even know that other girls fixed their hair. Everything, other lives, and the thoughts of people who were not themselves, were all so equally far away. All that touched them was each other, and the books they read, and the music. Did any other kids exist? They certainly didn’t think so.

Over the next few weeks, any time Mira and Annie ran into each other, something widened inside of them. Something was opening in Mira’s chest, a portal to Annie and her open chest, which was widening in the direction of Mira. This widening was something that Mira had never felt before, or even known could be. It was like a vagina was stretching for a very large cock, but it was in her chest that this stretching was happening, in the part of her that usually kept love out, that firmly preserved her insides. This was how she normally lived—with that part of her sealed shut. But now it was opening almost too wide, and a similar thing was happening in Annie.

Later, walking in the garden out behind his house, another hour deep into the middle of the night, she knew that the universe had ejaculated his spirit into her—and was it still in her?

When the spirit of her father came into her, it paused a moment in the air between them where it was purified, and then what entered her was the purest love and elation. This is what the universe ejaculated into the deepest cells of her, or into what is deeper than cells.

She had felt his spirit ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body, then spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels spreading inside, that warm and tangy feeling. But this feeling was even warmer, and even more spreading all the way through her, and the peace after an orgasm was nothing compared to the peace that fell over her after his death.

The gods sometimes take the form of a bacteria or virus, and often that’s what an illness is—just a swarm of invading gods. Then part of what’s so exhausting about being ill is that you have been invaded by the gods. They are using your body to watch someone near you, to see what humans are like in this draft of the world, so they can make them better in the next one.

Perhaps now that he is dead, she can marry her father. Mira spontaneously had this thought, then she went into a leaf.

We are ultimately, inevitably short term, and in the grand scheme of things, neither of us matters. Here’s my attempt at not caring what you think. Please enjoy, or don’t.

This collection will be updated as often as I care to update it, with either old or new writing.

2023-10-17 A little to the left

A little to the left, please. Thank you. Click.
Now a little to the right. Click.
Up. Down.
Straight down the middle. Click click click.
Good, you’re doing well.
Okay, now turn around; a little bit to the side.
Excellent. Click.
Could you contort yourself for me? More.
More please — twist out of existence if you can. Very good.
Thank you.
A good day’s work, general.
I don’t know why the poor child died, though, sir.
I told her exactly
where I was shooting.

2021-10-02 Soothing suit

How soothing, serene
The sound of your sweet song
I, sombre, still, stare at the stars and
See, these suns, so steady,
Surrounded by a suite of silent, salient
Stones, spinning, some in sacrifice
Some in surrender
Sacred servants
Smooth in step
Sharp to the sight
And still, I am, I stare, at the stars
Spill my sorrow
Stitch my story
Spell my sadness
Spread my shame
Seek the shine of your sailing, sapient substance
So that I too
Can someday
Suit the sky

2021-09-14 I bought a new grinder

As a kid, a teenager, and a young man
I dreamed of my happy thirties
And imagined a boy in a space suit
An actor on the silver screen
A singer, my voice roaring through the radio
An explorer of the grand oceans
A role model for children
A scientist
Curing diseases
Penning the mysteries of the universe
A writer; my novels “required reading”
A revolutionary
My name forever in history
An inventor
A sailor
A sportsman
A president
A dictator
A hero
I dreamed of it all
Until last week
Last week I bought a new coffee grinder
Took a sip
And that is all the happiness I need

2021-09-03 For comfort

Let’s pretend that this matters
My words
Yours
An exercise in self obsession
Self importance
In a universe that does not care
Or see who walks upon this speck of dust
But we
Slaves to economy
Pretend that this matters
That this cosmos is in our name
A desperate people on a falling rock
If a planet dies in space does it make a sound?
Maybe
But still we
Pretend
That someone will save us
From ourselves
As we wrap a rope around our own necks
For comfort, of course
Suffocation is liberation, said the elders
Liberating me from my sanity
The dirt beneath me does not care as we
You
Me
And us pretend that this matters

2021-09-04 Dance with me

Dance with me
And tell me truly in whose hands or feet
Does power lie
With the feeble, fragile, few
In their boats and castles and fancy shoes
Or in your toes and mine
The innumerable multitude of individual wills
Polishing the dance floor with
Filthy, worn out sandals
Fingers, toes, hands, and feet
Grinding, tapping, spinning
Is that not the sound of the free?
Why then do we give it up and leave
When the music starts
And the fancy walk in
And you and me, say this with dignity and a bow,
“I would dance if only I knew how."

2021-09-08 Take me back to where I was / my mother’s warm embrace

2021-12-12 It’s in the cards

2021-09-05 Bring me back a token

2021-08-11 Into the land of the living

Rating: 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑

There’s a tale in my family of a great-granduncle who went sailing one day and never returned. We had a photo of him in the family home, and I assumed he died at sea. They say he came upon riches in a faraway land and decided to stay. They also say he was the captain of the ship. That is not true; we like to exaggerate. Everyone I know who has ever sailed on anything was, I’m told, the captain of the ship, and every soldier the commander of the army.

This book reminded me of him. It is a book within a book. A few sailors find a manuscript in a cylinder at sea and begin to read it. The manuscript tells the fantastical story of Adam More, a lost sailor who comes upon strange lands and strange people, full of bizarre animals and customs. It’s hard to tell if any bad writing in the manuscript (making up about 90% of the book) is intentional, or if James De Mille is just a bad writer.

Let’s first bear in mind that this was written in 1888. It is full of racist, sexist ideas, but I will not judge it based on that. I was completely and perfectly bored for the entire first half. Things get mildly interesting in the second half, but that’s it. It’s a wonderful concept poorly executed, and I feel free to criticize the book in this way because the author is very dead.

James explains things in childish detail, not in a way that helps you build the world in your head, but often as an attempt to explain possible plot holes. It comes off as condescending, and assumes the reader has no ability to think through the ideas on their own.

At some point in the story, the sailors comment on how poorly written the manuscript is, implying that Adam More is a terrible writer. Some might think that James De Mille is a genius for pulling that off, but the fact that he had to spell it out tells me otherwise. Adam More isn’t a bad writer, because Adam More doesn’t exist in this story. James failed to bring him to life. I think that this bit of commentary shows De Mille’s lack of confidence in himself, and feeling the need to tell us ‘Don’t you see? He writes bad because he’s a sailor and this book was written by him, not by me’. It is at that point that the entire illusion crumbles, and I see the author standing in front of me once again, worried that I might misunderstand a line or fail to see his genius.

This is an excerpt from page 222, where one of the sailors speaks of the manuscript they found:

His plan is one thing, and his execution quite another. His plan is not bad, but he fails utterly in his execution. The style is detestable. If he had written in the style of a plain seaman, and told a simple unvarnished tale, it would have been all right. In order to carry out properly such a plan as this the writer should have taken Defoe as his model, or, still better, Dean Swift. […] But this writer is tawdry, he has the worst vices of the sensational school—he shows everywhere marks of haste, gross carelessness, and universal feebleness. [..] He is a gross plagiarist, and over and over again violates in the most glaring manner all the ordinary properties of style."

Am I supposed to think that clever? Maybe, but I think the opposite.

I of course enjoyed some parts of the story, and still think the concept is intriguing; but I’m not in a mood today to talk about nice things.

As for my strange granduncle who went sailing over a century ago, I think he survived. A few years ago, while digging through some library records, I found a few Egyptians in the United States with the family name Elbedwihy. Someday I’ll chase them down and ask them of their great granduncle who was the captain of the ship that sailed off the coast of Egypt in the 1800s, of his adventures along the way, and whether they found among his belongings a strange manuscript in a slimy, mossy copper cylinder.

Some tidbits:

“Do you not understand,” said I, “that death is abhorrent to humanity.”

“Abhorrent!” said the Kohen; “that is impossible. Is it not the highest blessing? Who is there that does not long for death? Death is the greatest blessing, the chief desire of man—the highest aim. And you—are you not to be envied in having your felicity so near? above all, in having such a death as that which is appointed for you—so noble, so sublime? You must be mad; your happiness has turned your head.”

“I—I help you!” said the Kohen, in new amazement. “Why do you come to me—to me, of all men? Why, I am nothing here. And help you to live—to live! Who ever heard of such a thing?” […] “Such a request,” said he, “is revolting; you must be mad. Such a request outrages all the instincts of humanity. And even if I could do such violence to my own nature as to help you to such a thing, how do you think I could face my fellow-men, or how could I endure the terrible punishment which would fall upon me?”

“Punishment!” said I. “What! would you be punished?”

“Punished!” said the Kohen. “That, of course, would be inevitable. I should be esteemed an unnatural monster and the chief of criminals. My lot in life now is painful enough; but in this case my punishment would involve me in evils without end. Riches would be poured upon me; I should be raised to the rank of Kohen Gadol; I should be removed farther away than ever from the pauper class—so far, indeed, that all hope in life would be over. I should be made the first and noblest and richest in all the land.”

“Death is near—it is almost certain. Why should we do anything to distract our minds and mar our joy? For oh, dear friend, the glorious time has come when we can give up life—life, with all its toils, its burdens, its endless bitternesses, its perpetual evils. Now we shall have no more suffering from vexatious and oppressive riches, from troublesome honors, from a surplus of food, from luxuries and delicacies, and all the ills of life.”

“ ‘Not to be born surpasses every lot;
And the next best lot by far, when one is born,
Is to go back whence he came as soon as possible;
For while youth is present bringing vain follies,
What woes does it not have, what ills does it not bear—
Murders, factions, strife, war, envy,
But the extreme of misery is attained by loathsome old age—
Old age, strengthless, unsociable, friendless,
Where all evils upon evils dwell together.’ ”

“I’ll give you the words of a later poet,” said Melick, “who takes a different view of the case. I think I’ll sing them with your permission.”

Melick swallowed a glass of wine and then sang the following:
“ ‘They may rail at this life: from the hour I began it
    I found it a life full of kindness and bliss,
  And until they can show me some happier planet,
    More social and bright, I’ll content me with this.
  As long as the world has such lips and such eyes
    As before me this moment enraptured I see,
  They may say what they will of their orbs in the skies,
    But this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.’

Do you see? We’re all fucked. When we experience difficulty we sometimes want people to know of it — we tell friends, family, the internet. None of it works. We know that words are terrible at conveying thoughts and emotions. We speak anyway, because it’s all we’ve got. We try to do more. We hug, we kiss, we cry, we fuck; all in an effort to know the other, and to have the other know us.

We’ve invented faces and physical movements to tell other people how we’re feeling. We laugh out loud. We cry. We jump up and down, throw our arms around and make sounds. “Look!”

And yet we’re stuck, still, in our own bodies, and we know that no one will ever know what’s in there, and that they too are locked up. Joy or pain, our feelings are ours alone, although we sometimes assume that when joy is felt it is felt in the same way, and that pain is relative and personal. We compete for pain; for the position of who among us is hurting the most. We want to be recognized for our suffering, and for the fact that we’ve suffered more than anyone else; or at least more than a great many others.

We’re stuck, still, in our own bodies. We write songs and make art and tell stories in an attempt to get a thought across the barrier that is flesh and bone. When we describe our hearts and someone says “me too” we feel a sense of connection and comfort; we take a moment to rest from the endless work of translating thought into words, sounds, pictures, movement.

And yet we find that we’re stuck, still, and we get right back to work, in search of more understanding and deeper connection. We long for the thing that instead of facing us and pretending to understand, will reach out and touch our beating heart, lay a hand on our mind; as close to us as anything or anyone can get.

And it comes. Maybe once, maybe a few times, maybe never in a lifetime, but we know it. When we’re touched in that way we have an urge to rest and rest forever; and we do for a little while, but we then have an urge greater; the urge to tell the world of how it feels to feel this way, and we get back to making words, sounds, pictures, movement.

How painful and beautiful that is, for a brief moment.

This, too, will be brief. I am stuck in my own body, and so are you. I want to tell you how I feel, and what I think, and for you to tell me the same, but I know, as do you, that there’s no way out, and that it is only in death that either of us can truly rest.

Inarticulate Grief by Richard Aldington, 1892 - 1962

Let the sea beat its thin torn hands
In anguish against the shore,
Let it moan
Between headland and cliff;
Let the sea shriek out its agony
Across waste sands and marshes,
And clutch great ships,
Tearing them plate from steel plate
In reckless anger;
Let it break the white bulwarks
Of harbour and city;
Let it sob and scream and laugh
In a sharp fury,
With white salt tears
Wet on its writhen face;
Ah! let the sea still be mad
And crash in madness among the shaking rocks—
For the sea is the cry of our sorrow.

On my First Son by Ben Jonson 1572 - 1637

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

The Suicide by Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

“Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
And now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow
Of tardy kindness can avail thee now
With me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;
Lonely I came, and I depart alone,
And know not where nor unto whom I go;
But that thou canst not follow me I know.”

Dead by Winifred M. Letts, 1882 - 1972

In misty cerements they wrapped the word
My heart had feared so long: dead… dead… I heard
But marvelled they could think the thing was true
Because death cannot be for such as you.
So while they spoke kind words to suit my need
Of foolish idle things my heart took heed,
Your racquet and worn-out tennis shoe,
Your pipe upon the mantel,—then a bird
Upon the wind-tossed larch began to sing
And I remembered how one day in Spring
You found the wren’s nest in the wall and said
“Hush!… listen! I can hear them quarrelling…”
The tennis court is marked, the wrens are fled,
But you are dead, beloved, you are dead

Into the land of the living by Mohamed, 2021

Darling
For you
I swam through solid rock
Slept on a bed of air
And built you a house out of water
I walked a mile in the shoes of time
Dove into the depths of the ocean
And took Poseidon’s chariot for a spin

For you I slowed down light
Spun the Earth the other way
Moved the Moon a little closer
And brought the sky to my cheeks
I crushed a planet between my fingers
Took a sip of the glowing Sun
Travelled back in time
And swallowed a galaxy whole

I had tea with Adam and Eve
Took a photo of the Big Bang
Played catch with a dinosaur
And split the atom with my teeth

For you that I’ve done and more
Would you now do one thing for me —
Come back into the land of the living

You are flying high by Mohamed, 2021

Bring me back a token
From your trip to the mountains

Pack me a bag of martian soil
To remind me of you

Bring me a token
From your journeys beyond the planet

Take me a picture
Of the moons of Saturn
The rings of Jupiter
Bring me a taste of the Titan seas

A small keychain will do
From your trips around the Milky Way

Bring back a memory
At least
From your dive into the Sun
Your whirl inside a black hole

Your flesh turned into light
Out of reach, but not of sight

You as a human, a woman,
A particle
Traversing the skies, the galaxies,
Riding a cosmic wave

You, my dear, are flying high
And not lying in your grave.

Question by May Swenson, 1913 - 1989

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

I was absent from my daughter’s life for most of it. Her mother wanted nothing to do with the irresponsible, dumb, and young man that was me (I make no claim to be any different now), and left the country, pregnant. I wasn’t aware that she was carrying, but I had my suspicions.

We had known each other for only a few months. I was a student, she a working professional. She did not return from her trip.

In the years to follow, I searched for her; for “them”. A family member responded to one of my mails and asked me to stay away; “you’ve ruined her life”. I learned that she suffered from total memory loss, and could no longer remember me, or our relationship, or anything at all.

I made it a ritual to send mail every year.

“I have so much to tell you." came a response a few years later, followed by silence.

A few more years, and: “Who are you? How do you know that about me? What do you want?"

Memory loss is hard. Over time, she determined that I was who I said I was, and that I was the father of her child. She had no memories prior to waking up with a baby in her hands, a baby she doesn’t remember carrying.

We connected. Spoke on the phone. She recognized my voice, my laugh, but not me. One day, she sent me a picture of our daughter - and the world stopped. I knew of her, but seeing a photograph was something else; it shook me. This is real, and she exists.

“She has your eyes. And your lips."

I didn’t know what to do.

“You don’t have to be involved if you don’t want to."

I could not bear the thought of a 20 year old human being knocking on my door and asking where I was all those years. No. I wanted to know my daughter.

“I told her she has a father, like her friends. She’s excited."

“She’s going to her best friend’s house to make a father’s day card."

“Mom, what does he sound like?”
“Mom, is he nice?”
“Mom, is he tall?"

“What did you say?"

Trust is difficult. Her mother kept her as far from me as possible in the early months, and for good reason.

The weeks went by.

I googled “How to father” and similar phrases. A previous lover had bought me a book called “World’s Best Dad”—for fun. I read it for the first time.

Back then, I was depressed; suicidal. Learning of and connecting with my daughter filled me with life. I had before then decided that children were not for me, and yet the image of my child gave me hope, and fear, and feelings. Feelings. I felt things again. My life would now be for and about her; who or what else have I got to live for?

Joy. Terror. Doubt. Panic.

I was still unstable. Jobless. Placeless. I didn’t know if I could continue to live where I was; my country was calling me back for military service, but I had no interest in firing guns for disgusting politicians.

None of it mattered.

I am here for my child.

Names. Sara (mother) and Miriam (child). Sara was planning a trip to visit town, and to meet me. What I didn’t know was that my daughter would be tagging along as a surprise.

On the road to a mall in my city on their first day, Sara and Miriam were hit by a car. They were in the hospital for close to a month. Mild injuries. A broken arm and some scratches. Sara was unreachable during that month, and I learned of the accident only after they had left the country and returned home.

“I’m just worried about her headache. She’s getting it constantly."

A few weeks later, Miriam dropped to the ground at school. She was rushed to the hospital. A clot in the brain. Small. Undetected by early scans. Stupid, careless scanners. Under the knife, immediately. She will survive this. I was on the phone with Sara for the duration. 15 hours later, our child was dead. Too much bleeding, they said.

“She’s gone.” - 11:37pm

Chaos. Tears. Funeral arrangements. I was mostly useless, as I was for most of her little life. I felt guilty for the pain deep in my body, in my ribs, for someone I did not know very well, and yet, it hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts. If it hurts me this deeply, how does Sara feel? She who raised her into the wonderful human being that she was.

“I can’t sleep. I keep hearing Miriam’s voice."

Sara did not last much longer. A year after Miriam’s death, she died, too, suffering from heartbreak and complications related to her memory loss. We met a few months before, and talked about our daughter. Her memory would come and go — she remembers me, and then she doesn’t. A day on, a day off. She wanted to say goodbye before she died, but her family refused. There will be no goodbyes for you, stranger.

Miriam was the most captivating child I’d ever known. We shared some hobbies, which was less a result of genetic transference than of unmotivated coincidence. She wanted to become an astronaut, as did I, and I knew she’d make it before me. She was articulate, kind, intelligent, lovely. She was treated as an equal at home and had a maturity that many adults in my life lack. She looked like me. She had a hunger for learning and creating. Yes, these are things we all say about the dead, and about children. These are things I felt then, and still feel.

Tell me again that there is a god. A god who would rob a child of a life, a mother of her daughter, and a little girl of her best friend. How cruel is it that the person who saves my life loses theirs, and I am left to grieve and wallow in self pity.

I think of my child every day. Death was not meant for one as kind and as wonderful as she.

Before their deaths, Miriam and Sara wrote me letters. There is a firm belief in their family that Sara’s life would not have been so tragic had I not met her. That is true. With cursed hands I had touched their lives again, so I understand their anger. Please spare me the hogwash about how it is not my fault. I am aware of the custom.

I share this with you in memory of my child and her mother. Miriam did not get to live past the age of seven, but if you think and speak of her, she will live. Today is the 4th anniversary of her death. I regret nothing in life but this — that I was not there for my daughter, and that I did not share a world with her. Deep in my ribs she rests and plays. I struggle to find meaning in her absence, and yet I do, in beautiful things and delightful people.

I share this with you because you too have lost or will lose a loved one. Death is a thing we all share. Tell the people you love that you love them, every day, every minute if you can, and show up for them. Do it now. Go.

[…] Ah, Life, I would have been a pleasant thing
To have about the house when I was grown
If thou hadst left my little joys alone!
I asked of thee no favor save this one:
That thou wouldst leave me playing in the sun!
And this thou didst deny, calling my name
Insistently, until I rose and came. […]

Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Once you’ve embraced failure, you no longer fear it.”

There are things that sound good in theory, but are complete bullshit in practice, and that statement is one of them. For the past decade or so, I’ve held on to the notion (and very strongly) that any person or group working on a project of any kind should not only accept failure, but embrace it, and sometimes encourage it.

That’s the rallying cry of the startup world. Failure only means you’ve disqualified a certain path as a road to success and now have a better shot. “I have not failed; I’ve only found a thousand ways that don’t work.” Someone said that once; supposedly, probably. It’s all good in theory. Today I am part of that world, and I believe(d) deep in my core that I’ve accepted and embraced failure as part of my journey.

Until I didn’t. I failed people this year. It hurts.

It’s great — okay, that’s a stretch — to fail as a team, or to watch someone else fail. You sit in a circle and talk about why that happened and how you can do better next time. Then, you give each other a hug, and if it’s not a crushing, debilitating failure, you pick yourselves back up and keep moving. Failing alone doesn’t feel the same. Failing alone, and failing those around you alone, is a soul wrenching feeling, because you know it was you, and only you, who’s responsible. Coming to terms with that is hard. It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating. It’s disappointing to those you trust, and those who trust you (yourself included). “I trust you, but you’ve failed us.” I see their eyes saying, and on occasion their lips move and I hear the words.

There’s no amount of “embrace it” that’s going to fix that. And in that moment you have no excuse. Yes, you might’ve been in a little over your head, but why didn’t you ask for help? That’s on you. You might’ve lacked this, or that, but why didn’t you ask for help? That’s on you. That’s on you. That too, is on you. And then you’re faced with the inevitable question, screaming, howling at you — “Am I incompetent?”

I object to your thought about how this is impostor syndrome, and that we all suffer from it. I object. Violently. Impostor syndrome, while painful, is an illusion. Knowing that you suffer from some level of general incompetence is not that. When you’ve failed, and I mean that in the literal sense of the word, and in its simplest form is making a promise and not meeting it, while having the illusion in your mind that you’re doing your best, and doing your best, and doing your best, until you realize that your best isn’t great. There is no escape. It shrinks you, and makes you feel like a little mouse; a mouse with one little job they’ve no idea how to do.

As I ponder upon this, I ask myself — Have I truly failed everyone, or have I merely found ways that do not work? I don’t know. What I do know, clearly, and thoroughly, is that I don’t like this feeling, and I am ashamed to face it.

When you fail alone, you fail alone. No one’s eager to sit with or join you. “It is you who fucked up, why should I partake in that? I’m good.” These feelings may be pathetic, or childish, or immature, but they’re there, and I wish that when I, in that moment, turned my head to the left, and to the right, that I saw familiar faces, and not furniture.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

Eleven years ago I was momentarily consumed—as a young man gets when life isn’t actively kicking him in the groin—with impressing a love interest. My obsession led me to my first copy of War and Peace, a scary-looking $3 paperback that had somehow managed to squash Tolstoy’s monster down to the size of a fist. A big fist. The book sat untouched for years, establishing its place as the prime member of the resident book club “Honorary Furniture”. My then lover was not impressed. War and Peace has haunted my nights since, and so has, occasionally, my dear one.

And here we are. I read it. And I am impressed. Is it the greatest novel ever written? Yes, but only if by ‘great’ you mean ‘big’. So, no, it is not. I hesitate in writing this review because I worry that, owing to my complete lack of qualifications for the job, I may not be able to do the book justice. I wouldn’t be the first idiot to publish something on the internet, though, so I’m deciding not to care. You should also know that Tolstoy disliked the term ‘novel’, saying that War and Peace “is not a novel, and even less is it a poem”.

Let us return to my dearly departed, who may or may not be fictional. I informed her of my recent accomplishment, but “I finished that book from when we were” turned out to be a poor conversation starter. She said “cool” (quietly, and in her head), and that was that. I have an urge to tell you about how she was War and how she was Peace, and that without reading the book I have intimate knowledge of the meaning of these two opposites, but I’m not going to. Those thoughts are mine, and mine alone.

Now that I have shared some of my misery with you, let me tell you about this book. If you’re expecting a synopsis, please forgive me for dragging you this far—you may need to look elsewhere. I’m only here to tell you about the hilarity of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who one day decided to sit down and write a 1500 page novel on the most boring subject in the universe: Peace. Everything was quiet, and his pages empty, until War came along and did its war-y thing. This book, to me, is a laugh in the face (disguised as a novel) of every single human military enterprise. It makes a mockery of the entire affair, and presents with utmost clarity the stupid fragility of the rich and powerful. Historians were not spared, either. Tolstoy drags them through the mud and ridicules the whole business with a sense of humor that I’ve grown fond of.

Imagine with me for a minute the following scenario — You are an infantry soldier marching towards destination X in 1812, without the convenience of GPS, airplanes, or text messaging. You arrive at what really is a best-guess; you have no way of knowing that it’s where you need to be, and neither do the other infantries. Something unexpected happens at your destination, and now you need new orders. Your commander sends a message up the ranks, all the way to the great leader of the army. It takes 3 days to arrive. Your emperor, steak-in-mouth, takes great care in thinking through the order he’s about to give, and sends the messenger off, horse and all, on his way back to you. In the 6 days you’ve been waiting, a lot has changed, and the new order, while still executable, leads you to your doom. And now tell me this—is that not hilarious?

Let me interrupt your laughter (are you not laughing?) with one of my favorite passages:

“Houses are being set on fire in your presence and you stand still! What is the meaning of it? You will answer for it!” shouted Berg, who was now assistant to the head of the staff of the assistant of the chief officer of the staff of the commander of the left flank of the infantry of the first army, a very agreeable and prominent position, so Berg said."

Perhaps the most striking pages within War and Peace are those exploring the true meaning of power, where it lies, and how it comes about. If the feeble and isolated Napoleon (as he is referred to on occasion) were to give an order, what compels the millions of people under his “command” to carry out that order? Does power not lie, in reality, in the hands of the multitude, the ones with legs to move and weapons to shoot? Was he in command of his army, or was the army operating on its own, with Napoleon a mere symbol?

Is it not profoundly puzzling how the many continue to fulfill the maniacal desires of the few? When sanctioned by the state, mass murder and genocide are deemed heroic (or at least ‘necessary’) acts. On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 AM, pilots Paul Tibbets and Robert Lewis dropped the first nuclear bomb ever used in a war. Stop for a second, place yourself in that time and space, and think about what you might’ve been doing at 8:15 in the morning, seconds before you were turned to dust. Till the day they died, Paul and Robert maintained their belief that they were heroes, and that they did the right thing by wiping out 100,000 Hiroshima residents. After the war, and with great pride, they made money off the incinerated bodies of their victims, writing a book here, selling a manuscript there, and gleaming as they recounted their ‘adventure’ aboard that destructive warbird the Enola Gay. I am, of course, oversimplifying the matter, and nothing in the world is ever so simple. Before you point the following out to me, as I’m sure you are eager to: Yes, I know that those two bombs are tiny blips compared to other acts of genocide from recent history, some of which are still ongoing. Anyway—I will not pretend that I understand war, so I shall leave you to do with these thoughts what you will.

But first, this passage:

“At the end of the eighteenth century there were some two dozen men in Paris who began to talk all about men being equal and free. This led people all over France to fall to hewing and hacking at each other. These people killed the king and a great many more. At that time there was in France a man of genius—Napoleon. He conquered every one everywhere, that is, he killed a great many people, because he was a very great genius. And for some reason he went to kill the Africans; and killed them so well, and was so cunning and clever, that on returning to France he bade every one obey him. And they all did obey him. After being made Emperor he went to kill people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. And there, too, he killed a great many."

I fear you may be losing patience with me, so now let me tell you about this book. Aside from the commentary on war and the patheticism (sue me) of emperors, the book talks about the lives of five elite Russian families in intimate, boring, long-winded detail. I hope you don’t misunderstand me—yes, it is a tedious read at times, but that’s a reasonable price to pay for a world so real, and characters so vivid that you could hear their hearts beating through the page. On regular days I don’t care much for drama, but in War and Peace I tolerated it, and even enjoyed it on occasion. In this moment, of course, I am grateful that the author is dead and cannot talk back, and I hope that his biggest fans will pardon me, a mere nobody, for my words.

It’s worth noting that Tolstoy himself came from an aristocratic Russian family. His participation in the Crimean War lead to his conviction that governments are nothing but violent enterprises built to exploit their citizens. He also believed that the rich were a burden on the poor, and is said to have renounced his own wealth as a result. When, exactly, this happened, is unclear. What is evident is that War and Peace contains much of the author’s own life and philosophical beliefs, and in that light, it is not difficult to imagine how this gargantuan was birthed.

You may now be wondering about my dear one, mentioned earlier, who may or may not be fictional, and may or may not read this. I urge you to stop right there—the less you and I dwell on this subject, the better a chance there is for peace. Instead, distract yourself with the following tidbit:

“When a man finds himself in movement, he always invents a goal of that movement. In order to walk a thousand versts, a man must believe that there is some good beyond those thousand versts. He needs a vision of a promised land to have the strength to go on moving."

As we head, as a species and in conclusion, towards our inevitable doom, I would like you to think, for a moment, of the one book that you might wish to bring with you into your underground bunker when the maniacs of the world go nuclear and the climate collapses on our soft, squishy little heads. It may not be War and Peace, but at least if you read it, you wouldn’t have to wonder if you made the wrong choice, and we can all, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, scream “huzzah” before the end of times.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

While I disagree with Chris (he hated this nickname) on some things, I feel like I owe him a review. He bored me with the first half of his book, and so it is only fair that I do my best to carry that punishment forward.

Let us begin with a butt story. Margaret Thatcher once slapped Christopher Hitchens on the butt, calling him a “naughty boy” as she did so. There were many witnesses to the event, according to Hitchens, and to everyone in the room this public bum-whacking came as a shock. In a column some days prior, Christopher had briefly mentioned that he thought Mrs Thatcher was ‘sexy’. She was clearly aware of his literary transgression, and decided to put him in his place. Different times.

I’ve always had a hard time understanding the person who Christopher was, and now that I know more about him, I understand him slightly less. Hitch-22 reads like a long, drawn-out conversation over drinks and cigarettes. Some parts were fast paced and highly enjoyable, such as his days as a school kid or his spectrum-surfing sexual adventures as a vigorous young man. It’s clear that Hitchens cared more about telling his story than he did about keeping it concise. I felt a sense of urgency in his writing, which is not a surprise, knowing that he succumbed to cancer only a year after this memoir was published. That’s perhaps what kept me going when the going got boring. I felt that it would be impolite to leave in the middle of such an outpouring of memories and emotions; from a dying man, no less.

And what memories they were! As a journalist and an early member of the International Socialists, Hitchens travelled recklessly from one war zone to another. Where there was genocide, there he was. In 1977, for instance, he interviewed the former Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. Of that experience, Hitchens said he was “swallowing vomit” as he shook hands with the vile man. Videla, a former president of Argentina, was imprisoned for — among other things — selling the children of the rape victims that he had been keeping in his private prison.

Christopher had opinions about everything, in a way that pissed you off and nourished your ignorant brain. What I admire most about the man is that there’s no way you could stick him in any political box and say “well, that fits nicely”. He supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (in “Mesopotamia from Both Sides”), for example, but was against the illegal land theft and genocide in Israel and occupied Palestine (in “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question”; thrice presumably because he himself is of Jewish descent). This is undoubtedly what his critics hated the most — they just couldn’t pin him down to any well defined group. To some of these topics he has dedicated several chapters in the book.

Most adorable, for certain, were Christopher’s stories of friendship. Some of his closest friends are people you might recognize, and what a life that is, to be surrounded by such masters of language: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and James Fenton, to name a few. Hitchens speaks of them with delightful intimacy in the chapters “Martin”, “Salman”, and “The Fenton Factor”. These are but tiny glimpses of what Hitch-22 has to offer.

Hitchens died on December 15, 2011. During his memorial, his friend Stephen Fry said “One of the great pleasures of knowing Christopher was having him disagree with you”, and I think that is a lovely photograph of the man.

A few months before he died, Christopher Hitchens wrote several essays that would later be published in a book called “Mortality”, wherein he reflects on his imminent death, his fears, and on his voice in the world. I remember watching a debate of his that took place only a few weeks before his passing — he crushed his opponent, as usual, even as the cancer in his body was clearly and visibly crushing him. To reject the sympathies of his friends and enemies and face death with such courage and vulnerability is something I aspire to.

Christopher writes: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

He’ll be missed.

Some tidbits:

“Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell’s matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one’s own weaknesses instead of those of other people."

“The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.)"

“Later in life I came up with the term “micro-megalomaniac” to describe those who are content to maintain absolute domination of a small sphere. I know what the germ of the idea was, all right. “Hitchens, take that look off your face!” Near-instant panic. I hadn’t realized I was wearing a “look.” (Face-crime!) “Hitchens, report yourself at once to the study!” “Report myself for what, sir?” “Don’t make it worse for yourself, Hitchens, you know perfectly well.” But I didn’t."

“Most boys decided quite early on that, since their penises would evidently give them no rest at all, they would repay the favour by giving their penises no respite in return. The night was loud with the boasts and groans that resulted from this endless, and fairly even-matched contest between chaps and their cocks."

“So there it was: Cuban socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another."

“Martin never let friendship take precedence over his first love, which was and is the English language. If one employed a lazy or stale phrase, it would be rubbed in—no, it would be incisively *emphasized—*with a curl of that mighty lip and an ironic gesture. If one committed the offense in print—I remember once writing “no mean achievement” in an article—the rebuke might come in note form, or by one’s being handed a copy of the article with a penciled underlining. He could take this vigilance to almost parodic lengths. The words “ruggedly handsome features” appear on the first page of 1984, and for a while Martin declined to go any further into the book. (“The man can’t write worth a damn.”) He was later to admit that the novel did improve a trifle after that."

“Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled. That Catholic chaplain of ESMA, father Christian von Wernich, was three decades later convinced of direct complicity in murder, torture, and abduction."

“Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the man of all men who could make one feel embarrassed to be employing the same language (English being only his third), detested music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds… The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones.”"

Rating: 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑

When I was about 15, I contemplated “turning into” an alien (or a robot, or a robot alien) forever. I would act like one for the rest of my days, and people would either believe me and leave me alone, or they would not believe me and leave me alone. I practiced my speech and movements in front of a mirror—it was all about removing the emotions from my personhood and not having to deal with anything human. I’m not sure why I didn’t go through with it, although some of my previous partners might tell you that I, in fact, did.

And that brings us to this book. It was a light, fun, read. It’s about an alien who visits Earth on a mission, takes the place of another human being, and tries to figure out its way around human personality and culture. I was reminded, at least briefly, of the introduction to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A good start.

I’ve always enjoyed the exploration of human behavior and customs from an alien perspective, and so I was quick to finish the book. I was also deeply disappointed. There were great bits, but overall it came off as a book that was trying too hard to be cute and profound, without accomplishing either of those things very well. There were beautiful moments in this story, but that’s all they were—beautiful moments.

In some places, the writing came off as a little lazy. For instance, the alien at times struggled with carrying out simple human tasks, and in the next moment was able to ride a bicycle as if their home planet was filled with them. I know this sounds trivial, but this is just one example, and I’m bothered by science fiction stories that are inconsistent about such core elements.

In another instance, one of the characters references evolutionary biology in making a point, and then gets the science wrong. Five minutes on Google would’ve helped prevent this blunder; The Selfish Gene may be unfortunately named, but it is about the selfishness of individual genes, not genes for selfishness, or genes that give rise to selfish organisms.

Do I sound like a bitter gatekeeper now? I truly hope not, but if I do, well; this is a pile of rubber tires and genetic material I’m willing to die next to.

The section I found most discomforting, however, was a list of 100 statements in a chapter called “Advice for a human”. I highlighted the first 10 of them, which I suppose means they were noteworthy, but a large part of it felt forced, and ended up sounding like pseudo-profound nonsense. Some of it veered into Deepak Chopra territory, which is troubling.

I’m not sure why, as I write this, I feel an increasing sense of resentment towards this book, even though I enjoyed reading it. (I hope this isn’t how I sound when I talk about my relationships.) I had high expectations, that’s for sure, and I constantly compared it to other stories I’ve read, which I know isn’t fair. Part of me feels like this is the book I’ve always wanted to write, and I’m angry that this author did not do a very good job. That, too, is unfair.

I respect Matt Haig, and I know he’s brought a lot of hope to plenty of people. I admire the fact that he’s put himself out there, scars and all, and I have a lot to learn from humans like him.

And I think that is partly the issue with The Humans. It’s a somewhat autobiographical self help book pretending to be a science fiction novel, and that’s just not my cup of Bahgol.

Some tidbits:

“Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them.”

“Also, orgasms, I realized, were an incredibly big deal. It seemed orgasms were the central tenet of life here. Maybe this was the only meaning humans had on this planet. Their purpose was simply to pursue the enlightenment of orgasm. A few seconds of relief from the surrounding dark.”

“I do not like wearing clothes,” I said, with quite delicate precision. “They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals.” And then, remembering all I had learned from Cosmopolitan magazine, I leaned in toward them and added what I thought would be the clincher. “They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving a tantric full-body orgasm.”

“Where we are from there are no comforting delusions, no religions, no impossible fiction. Where we are from there is no love and no hate. There is the purity of reason.”

“A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.”

“This was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was ‘if only I had more time’. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have to write ‘the day after’ thirty thousand times before a final ‘tomorrow’ in order to illustrate the amount of time on a humans hands.”

Rating: 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑

The sexism is strong with this one, and so is the casual racism. “You can’t judge an old book by the standards of today”, and I agree. If you enjoy reading books from years past like I do, you know that they’re often accompanied by a heavy load of outdated ideas, stereotypes, and social norms. Science fiction is not immune to that, even though you can often find highly progressive and forward-thinking books in the genre that were written at a time where such ideas were inexistent.

Having to imagine a different world means you get a license (and are often expected) to rewrite the rules, include those that define the culture of your time. I don’t hold writers to this standard, and I don’t hold Mr Gregory Benford here to that, either. This book was published in 1980, however, and that is shocking. Had it been published 50 years earlier, I could perhaps understand the unnecessary racist remarks or the proud portrayal of women throughout the book as being of no more use than to please husbands or satisfy the sexual desires of men who cross their paths. It wasn’t just the characters who behaved this way, it was the narrator, too.

This is a time travel story, and with every story of the kind, you have the opportunity to build more than one world, and to convey progress. Benford went back and forth between 1963 and 1998 (the two main points of time in his book), which was nice. Somehow he managed to teleport, intact, the cultural norms of his 1963 into 1998. Everything else changed, except the culture of the people. That, to me, is shortsighted and unimaginative. How this won so many awards is beyond me.

I had hopes, still, that the plot would be great. It had some promise, and that I will admit. The concept is excellent, and the build up was exciting. The ending, however, was a letdown. I think Benford took the easy way out with this one (I’d say that, though, wouldn’t I? After everything else I said up there!) Having read many time travel stories, this one felt like it was on a trajectory for greatness. I’d like to say that it crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, but even that it didn’t. It just wilted, deflated, and died.

Tidbits, for without these, I am nothing:

“When did you start feeling so inadequate?” “At ten."

“When is ‘now’? Saying that ‘now’ is ‘this instant’ is going around in circles. Every instant is ‘now’ when it `happens.’ The point is, how do you measure the rate of moving from one instant to the next? And the answer is, you can’t. What’s the rate of the passage of time?" Well, it’s”—Peterson stopped, thinking. “How can time move? The rate is one second of movement per second! There’s no conceivable coordinate systern in physics from which we can measure time passing. So there isn’t any. Time is frozen, as far as the universe is concerned."

People stressed differences, in order to keep alive their sense of self-worth. Us against Them stirred the blood. Better to play that distracting, antique game than to face the gray grip of closing future.

Inside, a jumble of terms elbowed each other for room in sentences that led nowhere. Equations appeared by sleight of hand, festooned with new symbols like fresh Christmas tree decorations. The theories, when Gordon took the time to listen, would begin and end in midair; they had no connection with anything else known in physics, and always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable. Most of the cranks seemed to think constructing a new theory involved only the invention of new terms. Along with “energy,” “field,” “neutrino,” and other common terms would appear “macron,” “superon,” and “fluxforce”–all undefined, all surrounded with the magic aura of the Believer.

“There’s only one electron in the universe, see. An electron traveling backwards in time looks like it’s antiparticle, the positron. So you bounce one electron back and forth through time. Make everything out of that one particle; dogs and dinosaurs, stones and stars."

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌖🌑

There’s Hard Science Fiction, and then there’s Greg Egan Hard. I had never heard of the honorable Mr Egan before a friend spoke to me of him many oscillations ago, some time in late 2018. This friend I here mention had never failed me with book recommendations (science fiction ones in particular), and so I, with some hesitation, took the plunge.

This is what I mean by Greg Egan Hard:

“Now imagine a new set of vectors that consist of equal amounts of all these dynamic-law vectors, and that are all orthogonal to each other. These vectors represent definite values of a variable that’s complementary to the law vectors. Branco calls them law-momenta–which is a bit sloppy, because they’re not true Lagrangian conjugates, but never mind."

And:

The amounts of the original vectors you combined were just a series of complex numbers that moved around a circle in the complex plane; to get different vectors, all orthogonal to each other, you just moved around the circle at different rates.

Mr Greg is, as you can see, a serious man. I have to mention that I read 20% of this book back in 2018, and only read the rest of it in December of 2020. Evidently, Schild’s Ladder was too hard for me to climb at the time. I did give up on all forms of reading for over a year, though, so I’m not sure I can blame this book.

It was hard to read. The first 25% aren’t the greatest I’ve come across. I was confused at various parts of the book; either not knowing what was happening, or just being lost in the weird world where this story takes place. I struggled with some of the science; both the real and the imaginary, and I commend Mr Egan over his unique world-building. Between the highly-advanced “classical” (in the physical sense) world, the quirky digital, and the vast, mind-boggling quantum universe, I could almost feel the goo in my brain struggling to keep up.

So, you’ve come this far, and you still have no idea what this book is about. I will pretend this was intentional—I’m merely giving you an idea of how you’ll feel reading the book. Schild’s Ladder, the book, gets its name from Schild’s ladder, the mathematical concept. The latter ladder is a “first order method for approximating parallel transport of a vector along a curve using only affinely parametrized geodesics”. I understand as much of that as you do.

This story is set 20,000 years into the future, where humans no longer have a need for physical bodies, and are therefore not constrained by space or time. They can travel vast distances as streams of data, and can choose to either live in a body or in the digital realm. Dr Cass, a scientist, stumbles upon a curious theoretical discovery that challenges everything she and her fellow physicists know about the laws of the universe.

In testing these findings, the scientists inadvertently create a novo-vacuum; a new kind of vacuum that expands in all directions at half the speed of light, devouring everything in sight. And that’s where the story begins. How will people deal with a threat they do not understand? Is it a threat at all? And what of the planets, worlds, and cultures that have been or are at risk of being annihilated? Also, how do digital bodies have sex? These are all important questions, each addressed in the book.

While this was a great read for me (I draw plenty of joy out of things I don’t understand), I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s not prepared to be frustrated, bored, annoyed, and puzzled at least a hundred times over. I suppose that makes it both an excellent and a terrible book—a superposition of sorts. Will you measure it? :)

Quantum tidbits:

“At the Planck scale, that was no small achievement; a tightrope-walker who managed to circumnavigate the Earth a few billion times before toppling to the ground might be described as having similarly imperfect balance.”

“I think everyone lives in at least two time scales: one of them fast and immediate, and too detailed to retain in anything but outline; the other slow enough to be absorbed completely. We think our memory has no gaps, we think we carry our entire past inside us, because we’re accustomed to looking back and seeing only sketches and highlights. But we all experience more than we remember.”

“There’s nothing worse than a label to cement people’s loyalties.”

“You’ll never stop changing, but that doesn’t mean you have to drift in the wind. Every day, you can take the person you’ve been, and the new things you’ve witnessed, and make your own, honest choice as to who you should become. Whatever happens, you can always be true to yourself. But don’t expect to end up with the same inner compass as anyone else. Not unless they started beside you, and climbed beside you every step of the way.”

“You didn’t need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently.”

“But when you have a malleable mental structure, intensifying pleasure for its own sake is a very uninteresting cul-de-sac. We worked that out a long time ago.” “Fair enough. But what do you do instead?” Yann sat up and leaned against the side of the bed.” .. [Cut so I don’t spoil this too much ;)]

About 7 years ago, I woke up to discover that one of my birds, Melody, had died. Her partner, Birdie, was next to her body. He was in distress; chirping as loud as he could, circling her, and pushing different parts of her body with his beak in an attempt to get her to respond.

It was a heartbreaking sight.

A once happy and cheerful bird, Birdie lost interest in everything after that day. He refused to eat, play, sing, or even move. For the next few weeks, he would hide in a quiet corner, doing his bare minimum. Rather than rest in their birdhouse, he sat on top of it, not falling asleep until the late hours of the night. I worried he might die.

Some birds mate for life, and Birdie had just lost his mate. He was lonely.

I didn’t quite know how to comfort him. He didn’t want to be touched. He either pretended I didn’t exist or got violent when I approached. (Birds, even tiny ones, can get extremely violent. They bite for fun, but they can also bite to pierce your skin.)

One night, I caught him sneaking around his food bowl, eating and drinking a little. His hunger finally got to him. Over the next few weeks, I observed as he dealt with this loss, and came to terms with it. A month later, he was eating better, and one day he hopped onto my shoulder for a cuddle. I’m ashamed to admit that it was only during that period that I developed a deep appreciation for the intelligence and emotional complexity of other animals. (Yes, we are animals, too.)

Anyway, this post isn’t about Birdie, bless his soul. I, like Bird (his nickname), feel lonely at times, and there’s hardly much I can do about it. You feel lonely too.

Why do I feel lonely? Why do you feel lonely? I don’t know. Do you? I moved to Canada on my own a year ago, and it has been a good, but unbelievably lonely experience. Am I lonely because I moved to Canada? I don’t think so. I was lonely before moving. Okay, Mister Lonely, why don’t you go out and meet some people? Well, I don’t want to. Being lonely does not mean I don’t have enough people around me, or enough friends. We all know this, and we’ve all felt lonely with our loved ones sitting right next to us. I think—and this is a personal opinion—that being lonely is a fundamental part of being human.

Ponder upon the following: You, me, a stranger on the street, Barack Obama. We’re each a body; a body and a mind. I—like you, the stranger, and Barack—woke up one day to find myself aware. I’m aware of me, my surroundings, and I’m aware of people. 7 Billion other people. My brain, like yours, is astoundingly complex. It runs my body, keeps me alive, and is a house of endless wonder (mostly a house of grilled chicken and hummus, but hummus is endlessly wonderful, so my point stands.) The rest of my body is my brain’s interface with the world.

This interface is mind-numbingly limited. It’s great in many ways, but otherwise terrible. This is why we often think we understand people better than they understand us. (“Oh, I completely understand your point of view, now if you’d just listen and understand mine, you’d realize that it makes more sense!”)

With our minds locked up, why would we not feel lonely?

Okay—I don’t think loneliness is a bad thing, a sad thing, or a negative thing. It can have a negative impact on someone, but being lonely is no more than a state. “The water is warm today.” “My mind is lonely today.”

Same thing. Maybe. Let’s talk about it.

I grew up in a family and an environment where being alone was frowned upon. The complete human unit was a family, not a person. Not married? Not complete. No kids? Not. Complete. And until you had your own family, you were not to be left alone. I became dependent on other people for comfort; for validation; for my sense of value and self worth. That’s the only way I knew how to ‘live’. That, of course, became toxic when carried over to other relationships. Multiple years and social blunders later, I have somewhat learned to be alone: To accept myself as a complete human unit. (And now The Unit has a blog.)

I still struggle with some of these insecurities today, but I no longer feel incomplete. I value being alone, and I promise I’m not delusional when I say that. I strongly suggest that you do not take pity on me! I’ve come to the point where my goal is to have as much time to myself as possible, so that I can do (or not do)… well, anything! While I enjoy the occasional human company, being a full-time family man, for instance, would be out of the question.

Isn’t that sad?

– No.

Do I feel sad sometimes?

– Yes, but this is not a post about sadness.

Wait! Loneliness and being alone are different things! Why are you using them interchangeably?

– Oops. I realized this a little too late, and I don’t like the idea of rewriting this entire thing.

They are indeed different things. We can be lonely with people, or lonely without them. We can be alone without feeling lonely. We can be lonely and sad, lonely and happy, or lonely and depressed. Or is it alone and sad, alone and happy, alone and depressed? As I write this, I can’t help but associate the words ‘lonely’ and ‘alone’ with sadness, and that seems to be the most common interpretation.

Why should that be the case?

I used to work at a large corporation, and I’d often go for lunch alone. I was always looking forward to it—I got to cool down from the intensity of the morning, read a book, and watch that video my friend sent me. Some of my colleagues thought that was pitiful, and would either give me sad looks or an ‘awww hey you should come join us’ as they passed by my table. I appreciated the good intentions (and sometimes enjoyed their company), but I did not understand (or need) their sympathy.

I don’t deny that we’re social creatures, and that we need to connect with others to feel alive. However, the shape, form, and magnitude of that need is different for different people. Perhaps my emotional ultra-dependence early on in life has lead to my desire for ultra-independence at this stage. (I wonder what sort of mid-life crisis I’m going to have.)

“Independence.” That is a tricky thing to balance. How much independence is too much isolation? Is this unhealthy? I don’t know. Some scientists say that the feeling of ‘loneliness’ is a mechanism for survival; a signal that tells us that we need to get out there and bond with other humans. Is it an effective signal? Sometimes. At other times, it only deepens our feeling of being misunderstood, unwanted, or incapable of forming meaningful connections. Those feelings are painful. Evidence shows that there’s plenty of overlap between how our brains process physical and emotional pain, but only one of those is visible. With the latter, you feel the pain, but you can’t quite point to where it hurts.

Birdie couldn’t point to where it hurt, either, and I can’t believe we’re talking about him again. He took his time; processed his feelings in the best way a little bird could, and didn’t pretend that he wasn’t suffering. When he was ready to reach out and connect with someone else, he did, and he did it on his own terms. I don’t think he ever returned to being his old self after that incident, but he didn’t have to be. We each have a few incidents in our lives that have defined us in more ways than we like to admit. We learn from them, we grow, and we take our time to reflect.

And I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately. I’m not quite sure what to do with those reflections. Some have been helpful, a few didn’t go so well, and some are a work in progress. This right here is a reflection in progress. I didn’t know how it would turn out, or that it would come to this somewhat abrupt end.

It is as it is, and birds are as they are. There’s plenty we can learn from them.

I shall leave you, once again, with a poem (from Birdie, to his beloved Melody):

In misty cerements they wrapped the word
My heart had feared so long: dead… dead… I heard
But marvelled they could think the thing was true
Because death cannot be for such as you.
So while they spoke kind words to suit my need
Of foolish idle things my heart took heed,
Your racquet and worn-out tennis shoe,
Your pipe upon the mantel,—then a bird
Upon the wind-tossed larch began to sing
And I remembered how one day in Spring
You found the wren’s nest in the wall and said
“Hush!… listen! I can hear them quarrelling…”
The tennis court is marked, the wrens are fled,
But you are dead, beloved, you are dead

Winifred M. Letts, 1882 - 1972

What is ghosting?

For those unacquainted with the term, ghosting is the practice of ceasing all communications with an individual, on purpose, and without an explanation. I had heard of the phenomenon before, but I didn’t quite know how widespread it was. There are various reasons why people do this, such as:

1. They are afraid of confrontation
2. They are afraid of you/feel unsafe
3. They are not feeling well and are taking time off from social interactions (This could be a sign of depression. If that is the case, be a dear and lend them an ear.)
4. They forgot to respond to you but it’s been a month and so it’ll be awkward if they do now, now being five months later and oh that was three years ago perhaps now is the right moment?
5. Online dating (Who’s got time to tell their stranger-on-the-app that they’re not interested in a second date?)
6. They are dead

This isn’t a modern-day phenomenon, as some might think. We humans have been ghosting each other for a long time. It’s just that in the past, without social media or mobile phones, it was easier to cut someone off. They couldn’t reach out to you by email or browse your Instagram account to see if you’ve still got a pulse. Today, vanishing from someone’s life involves a lot more than just not showing up at their house for that thing they invited you to 3 months ago.

I ghosted an acquaintance once. I regret it, and I don’t know why I did it. I like to think that those days are now behind me. No one enjoys being ghosted. I certainly don’t. After all, how difficult is it to tell someone you’re no longer interested in keeping the relationship going? I admit it’s not easy, but if it’s someone you’ve had a long history with, don’t you owe them at least that much? Yes, yes you do.

Professional Ghosting

What bothers me more than personal ghosting, however, is professional ghosting. That’s what prompted me to write this post, although it is evident that it took me a while to arrive at the point. Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with a few professionals and business owners, in the ever-beautiful process of job hunting. In one case, I went through three interview stages, a salary negotiation, and a criminal background check. I was told that it was almost a done deal, and that I should expect a final decision within a day.

One day passes, and I don’t hear back. A week passes; complete silence, so I decide to call. “We’ll let you know within one hour”, and indeed I did hear back in an hour—I was told that they needed more time, that my patience is appreciated, and that a final decision will be made in three weeks. That was the last I heard from them. They did not respond to any calls or emails I sent from then on, whereas at one point they were calling me up to three times a day.

This is an all too common occurrence for job seekers. Why do professionals do this? There is no personal bond of any kind in the relationship, so what’s holding them back from being upfront and telling an individual that they’re no longer interested? Why set expectations by making statements such as “I’ll call you tomorrow” or “We’ll get in touch on Monday for next steps” when a non-committal utterance such as “Thank you for coming” will do?

It’s demoralizing for someone on a job search, and says a lot about the organization involved. To me, such behavior is outright rude, and shows a lack of respect.

One might argue that recruiters are too busy to inform their shortlisted candidates that they’re no longer under consideration, or that they failed the final interview. That does not make much sense, however. If you had time to reach out to someone for an interview and walk them through a lengthy hiring process, you certainly have 5 minutes to email them your decision, or give them a quick call.

Perhaps I’m too naive, and this is just the way business is done. I don’t know. Lest you think this is purely a rant, here’s some interesting information I came across while investigating this topic. Put your science hats on! 👩‍🔬

Relationship Dissolution

Human beings, it seems, have a multitude of “relationship dissolution” (a.k.a. breakup) strategies at their disposal, according to a research paper titled “Strategies for Ending Relationships” by a Dr Leslie Baxter (1982)¹. This list of strategies was updated in 2012 by Tara Collins and Omri Gillath to account for technological change². The final list consists of 43 strategies divided into 7 main categories. These are specific to romantic alliances, but as you’ll see, they apply to all kinds of human relationships, with ease:

1. Avoidance/withdrawal
   • Semi-ghosting. Slowly pulling yourself away.
2. Positive tone/self-blame
   • The immortal “it’s not you, it’s me”.
   • Trying not to blame the other person and showing concern for their feelings.
3. Open confrontation
   • Honest expression of the desire to breakup.
4. Cost escalation
   • Making the relationship so unpleasant that the other person will want to breakup.
5. Manipulation
   • Telling someone else about the desire to breakup, hoping that they’ll spread the word to your partner.
6. Distant/mediated communication
   • Specific to social media and instant messaging apps.
   • Breaking up via text, email, changing your relationship status online without informing your partner, or simply blocking the individual.
7. De-escalation
   • Ending the relationship in a slow and steady manner.
   • Waiting things out, taking a break, finding other reasons for the breakup (“I got a job offer at NASA and my office is on the Moon!”)

You might’ve noticed that none of these breakup strategies equal ghosting. Well, that’s because back in 1982, people had manners. I’m kidding. According to a thesis on ghosting (yes, a Master’s thesis!), the above strategies are considered “breakup tactics”, leading to either a direct breakup (a conversation), or an indirect breakup (ghosting). It was written by Rebecca Koessler, who I know is a genius, because her chosen title was “When Your Boo Becomes a Ghost”.³

Out of 332 participants in Koessler’s research, 72% reported being ghosted in the past, and 64.5% said they’ve previously ghosted a partner. These are disturbingly large numbers. For the ghosters, there were a few main motivations to their actions:

1. Losing interest (23%)
2. Their partner had negative qualities—rude, annoying, etc. (22%)
3. The relationship wasn’t going anywhere (20%)
4. Their partner had severe negative qualities—aggressive, controlling, etc. (16%)
5. They wanted to avoid the drama of breaking up (12%)
6. They believed no explanation was necessary or deserved (8%)

The ghostees, understandably, did not take this well. About 45% of them reported having negative perceptions of their ghosters afterwards, with 20% having severe negative perceptions. One of the participants said “They’re a piece of human garbage and I hope they rot in hell”.

Koessler’s thesis goes into more detail, investigating differences in the processes and outcomes of breaking up as a function of breakup strategy and role. I won’t get into that, however, because it’s a little beyond my understanding.

The majority of research out there on this subject—whether it’s on ghosting in particular or “relationship dissolution” in general—seems to be focused on romantic relationships. What about professional relationships? Although the strategies employed appear to be similar, can the same be assumed for the motivations behind them? I wouldn’t be surprised if that was found to be the case. It’s worth investigating.

Now what?

I wasn’t quite sure where I was headed with this, or how to end it. What I’ve learned from my brief peek into ghosting culture is that ending a relationship directly (as Dr Rebecca Koessler puts it) takes effort; something we mammals don’t particularly enjoy.

Here’s another thing I learned: ghosting sucks. If you’ve ever been ghosted, it’s okay to grieve. A breakup is a breakup, no matter the method or the nature of the relationship. While it can be infuriating to be treated in such a manner, there is no way to prevent it from happening, and no way out of the feelings that come as a result.

Now, for you, friendly ghosters:

Assuming the other person did nothing wrong, please consider not vanishing. Talk to them. Give them a call. Send an email. A text. Keep some templates ready if it helps. Any form of communication will do. It doesn’t take long, and would mean a lot to the thinking, feeling human being on the other end of the line.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems. Incidentally, it is about a ghost:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

by Hughes Mearns

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

I wouldn’t have picked up this book were it not for the recommendation of a friendly stranger whom I got to know over a cup of coffee in a cozy café in Ho Chi Minh City, a little less than a year ago. I never met her again, but the way she spoke of Michelle Obama stuck with me for days to come. Who is this “Michelle”, I thought, and what made her so godlike in the eyes of my brief afternoon companion?

It’s easy to dismiss political figures as other-wordly beings, entities that are not quite human; cold, arrogant, rich, full of power and devoid of emotions or a sense of how it’s like to be a commoner. It’s even easier to dismiss the spouses of political figures. I’ve always had a fondness for the Obamas, but to me, at the end of the day, they were politicians—Barack was the president, and Michelle the first lady. Extraordinary people, for sure, but politicians, still.

Becoming was, therefore, a big, heartwarming slap in the face for me. Nothing I knew or assumed about Michelle and her husband was true. I was delighted, for instance, to learn in the first quarter of the book that Michelle was Barack Obama’s mentor at a law firm (that is how they first met), and that he showed up late on his first day.

I was surprised to find out that Michelle was an active participant in Obama’s election campaigns. While he was giving a speech in one city, she was giving one in another. He had a team of organizers, and so did she. It was almost as if they were running for president as a team, rather than an individual. Their partnership is one to admire.

Being the first lady of the United States doesn’t exactly come with a job description, and it was up to, well, the first lady, to do whatever she wanted to do, and to shape that role in whichever way she deemed fit. In the book, Michelle details the different initiatives she established, why she established them, and the impact those programs have had since. She speaks in depth about the people she worked with, and how they often turned from coworkers to lifelong friends.

Perhaps my favorite parts of the book, however, are where she talks about her childhood, her personal relationships, her dreams and insecurities, her teenage years, and her family. The way she describes her relationship with Barack is both admirable and hilarious. Through those paragraphs is where it becomes clear that she, and many other public figures out there are, in fact, human. She didn’t come from a privileged background. Both Michelle and Barack had a “conventional”, if not difficult, upbringing. She had regular teenage thoughts, and cared about regular teenage things. Coming to think of it, why wouldn’t she? She’s an ordinary, hardworking member of common society who happened to get involved with someone who ended up becoming the president of the United States.

Overall, this was an enlightening read for me. I hope that you, kind reader, will understand that this is not a review of American politics, or of the Obama administration’s policies. This is a review of a book written by a one Michelle Robinson, a person we can all look up to in some way or another, regardless of our political beliefs.

As usual, some tidbits from the book (possibly containing spoilers):

I’ve heard about the swampy parts of the internet that question everything about me, right down to whether I’m a woman or a man.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.

Being around boys, I was slowly coming to realize, was fun. […] Because what was a basketball game if not a showcase of boys? I’d wear my snuggest jeans and lay on some extra bracelets and sometimes bring one of the Gore sisters along to boost my visibility in the stands. And then I’d enjoy every minute of the sweaty spectacle before me—the leaping and charging, the rippling and roaring, the pulse of maleness and all its mysteries on full display.

But my first months at Whitney Young gave me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible—the apparatus of privilege and connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.

I see now that she provoked me in a good way, introducing me to the idea that not everyone needs to have their file folders labeled and alphabetized, or even to have files at all. Years later, I’d fall in love with a guy who, like Suzanne, stored his belongings in heaps and felt no compunction, really ever, to fold his clothes. […] I am still coexisting with that guy to this day. This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of being.

He [Barack Obama] was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant. Not once, though, did I think about him as someone I’d want to date. For one thing, I was his mentor at the firm. I’d also recently sworn off dating altogether, too consumed with work to put any effort into it. And finally, appallingly, at the end of lunch Barack lit a cigarette, which would have been enough to snuff any interest, if I’d had any to begin with. He would be, I thought to myself, a good summer mentee.

I’d been Mrs. Obama for the last twelve years, but it was starting to mean something different. At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a missus defined by her mister. I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the only black person in the Senate—the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance so poignantly and forcefully that he now had a hornet buzz of expectation following him.

“You’ve become a force in the campaign, which means people are going to come after you a little. This is just the nature of things.”

I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to “angry.” It was another damaging cliché, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say.

Regardless of what I chose to do, I knew I was bound to disappoint someone. The campaign had taught me that my every move and facial expression would be read a dozen different ways. I was either hard-driving and angry or, with my garden and messages about healthy eating, I was a disappointment to feminists, lacking a certain stridency.

It seemed that my clothes mattered more to people than anything I had to say. In London, I’d stepped offstage after having been moved to tears while speaking to the girls at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, only to learn that the first question directed to one of my staffers by a reporter covering the event had been “Who made her dress?”

One of them then gave me a candid look. “It’s nice that you’re here and all,” he said with a shrug. “But what’re you actually going to do about any of this?”

I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey. In sharing my story, I hope to help create space for other stories and other voices, to widen the pathway for who belongs and why.

And a few longer bits:

If you wanted to work as an electrician (or as a steelworker, carpenter, or plumber, for that matter) on any of the big job sites in Chicago, you needed a union card. And if you were black, the overwhelming odds were that you weren’t going to get one. This particular form of discrimination altered the destinies of generations of African Americans, including many of the men in my family, limiting their income, their opportunity, and, eventually, their aspirations. As a carpenter, Southside wasn’t allowed to work for the larger construction firms that offered steady pay on long-term projects, given that he couldn’t join a labor union.

Like any newish couple, we were learning how to fight. We didn’t fight often, and when we did, it was typically over petty things, a string of pent-up aggravations that surfaced usually when one or both of us got overly fatigued or stressed. But we did fight. And for better or worse, I tend to yell when I’m angry. When something sets me off, the feeling can be intensely physical, a kind of fireball running up my spine and exploding with such force that I sometimes later don’t remember what I said in the moment. Barack, meanwhile, tends to remain cool and rational, his words coming in an eloquent (and therefore irritating) cascade. It’s taken us time—years—to understand that this is just how each of us is built, that we are each the sum total of our respective genetic codes as well as everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them. Over time, we have figured out how to express and overcome our irritations and occasional rage. When we fight now, it’s far less dramatic, often more efficient, and always with our love for each other, no matter how strained, still in sight.

I didn’t think it was a great idea for Barack to run for office. My specific reasoning might have varied slightly each time the question came back around, but my larger stance would hold, like a sequoia rooted in the ground, though clearly you can see that it stopped absolutely nothing. In the case of the Illinois senate in 1996, my reasoning went like this: I didn’t much appreciate politicians and therefore didn’t relish the idea of my husband becoming one. Most of what I knew about state politics came from what I read in the newspaper, and none of it seemed especially good or productive. My friendship with Santita Jackson had given me a sense that politicians were often required to be away from home. In general, I thought of lawmakers almost like armored tortoises, leather-skinned, slow moving, thick with self-interest. Barack was too earnest, too full of valiant plans, in my opinion, to abide by the hardscrabble, drag-it-out rancor that went on inside the domed capitol downstate in Springfield. In my heart, I just believed there were better ways for a good person to have an impact. Quite honestly, I thought he’d get eaten alive.

The last bit of work he did, usually at some hour past midnight, was to read letters from American citizens. Since the start of his presidency, Barack had asked his correspondence staff to include ten letters or messages from constituents inside his briefing book, selected from the roughly fifteen thousand letters and emails that poured in daily. He read each one carefully, jotting responses in the margins so that a staffer could prepare a reply or forward a concern on to a cabinet secretary. He read letters from soldiers. From prison inmates. From cancer patients struggling to pay health-care premiums and from people who’d lost their homes to foreclosure. From gay people who hoped to be able to legally marry and from Republicans who felt he was ruining the country. From moms, grandfathers, and young children. He read letters from people who appreciated what he did and from others who wanted to let him know he was an idiot.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑

“Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do."

There’s one question that’s baffled us for as long as we’ve been around, and that is: How did life—complex life, in particular—begin? This book is Nick Lane’s attempt at answering that question.

If not for Bill Gates, I would’ve probably not picked this up. He makes such a good case for it on his personal blog (www.gatesnotes.com), that I was tempted to give it a try. There are very few books that have changed our understanding of biology, and it turns out The Vital Question has the potential of becoming one of them, up there with Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Having read both of those, it seemed only natural for me to attempt this one. I promised myself to finish it, no matter how challenging it turned out to be. That was, of course, foolish.

As ground-breaking as the ideas in this book are, the writing is dry, except for a few wonderful passages (I’ve shared some below). I had a hard time comprehending major parts of the book. I understood the overall idea, and a few individual concepts, but as a whole, The Vital Question is highly technical, and sort of textbooky. I’m surprised it’s classified as Popular Science. Nick Lane, to his credit, tries his best to simplify things, but the subject itself is so complex that it could hardly be made any simpler by any other writer.

It’s clear, of course, that the problem here lies with me, the reader. I don’t possess a deep enough understanding of biology and chemistry to fully appreciate this book; someone else might. One thing’s for sure, though—I know a little bit more about the origin of life today than I did yesterday, and that’s good enough for me.

Tidbits:

Life, as biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi observed, is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.

Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do. Amphibians such as frogs and salamanders have genome sizes that range over two orders of magnitude, with some salamander genomes being 40 times larger than our own, and some frogs being less than a third of our size. If we had to sum up the architectural constraints on genomes in a single phrase, it would have to be ‘anything goes’.

“The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.” - Jacques Monod, 1970

We use about 2 milliwatts of energy per gram – or some 130 watts for an average person weighing 65 kg, a bit more than a standard 100 watt light bulb. That may not sound like a lot, but per gram it is a factor of 10,000 more than the sun (only a tiny fraction of which, at any one moment, is undergoing nuclear fusion). Life is not much like a candle; more of a rocket launcher.

Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields. Their job is to pump protons, and together they pump more than 1021 of them – nearly as many as there are stars in the known universe – every second.

…sex introduces the problem of finding a mate, with all its emotional (and financial) costs. And there’s the cost of males. Clone yourself and there’s no need for all those aggressive, prancing males, locking horns, fanning tails or dominating boardrooms.

If totally unconstrained, a single E. coli bacterium, doubling every 30 minutes, would produce a colony with the mass of the earth in three days flat.

These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 1021 protons per second, every second, without pause. Your mitochondria were passed on from your mother, in her egg cell, her most precious gift, the gift of living that goes back unbroken, unceasing, generation on generation, to the first stirrings of life in hydrothermal vents, 4 billion years ago.

How lucky that our minds, the most improbable biological machines in the universe, are now a conduit for this restless flow of energy, that we can think about why life is the way it is.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌖🌑

I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.

One of the things I enjoy most about Sci-Fi is how it makes you think about—and question—the present state of the world in ways you might have not considered before. I read The Forever War about 6 months ago, but it’s taken me this long to write about it due to laziness on my part. You can say it…. took me forever.

The Forever War is about the experiences of soldiers in an interstellar war that lasts for more than a thousand years. The story follows one soldier, William Mandella, who, with luck and time dilation on his side, manages to stay alive for the entire duration of the war. Due to the nature of interstellar travel at near light-speed, a few years for the soldiers can be equivalent to a few decades, or centuries, of elapsed time on Earth.

The author himself is a Vietnam veteran, and in a way this book is also about his time in Vietnam.

It got me thinking about the ridiculousness of war, and about how we’re terrible at communicating with each other as a species.

Tidbits:

I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so…Well, there was always brain-wipe.

We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, “Fuck you, sir.” Idiotic custom.

But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government,….

Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF. I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.

The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

“You don’t have to be 7 feet tall, as quick as Carl Lewis, or as strong as Mike Tyson to play chess. All you have to do is think."

As a kid, I thought I played good chess. In reality, I only knew how the pieces moved, and I came to this realization last year, when a chess set gifted to me by my brother rekindled my love for the game. Playing a few online games convinced me that a blind pigeon could probably score better than I did, and so I set out to improve my skills.

I first discovered Yasser Seirawan through a series of lectures on YouTube. He’s an excellent chess player and educator. Born in Syria, he moved to the US as a kid, and picked up chess around the age of 12. He won the World Junior Chess Championship at 19, and went on to win the US Chess Championship 4 times.

(Sidenote: 9 out of the top 10 US Chess players are immigrants. How cool is that?)

I had little knowledge of how chess works when I picked up this book. It’s meant for the absolute beginner, so Yasser and his co-author Jeremy begin with some fascinating bits of chess history, and then go on to describe how the board works, and how the pieces move. There are four principles that are the focus of Play Winning Chess: Force, Time, Space, and Pawn Structure. Those terms meant nothing to me at the time, and Yasser does a great job of taking the reader through each principle.

There are many annotated games and examples in the book, and aside from a few illustrations, most are described in Standard Algebraic Notation (a system used to write down chess moves). Since I can’t play blind chess, I had to have a chess board near me the entire time to be able to visualize the positions being described by the authors. I used an app for this, which made the process easier. That was my only issue with the book. There’s not much the authors could’ve done about it, though!

At the end of each chapter is a test section, which I found to be very helpful. Bearing in mind that this is Book #1 out of 7 in the series, it was an excellent read.

Some tidbits:

I play chess because it enables me to engage in a physically safe but psychologically strenuous battle in which I pit my wits against those of my opponent. Complex strategies that include vicious attacks and subtle defenses take me beyond the thrill of competition and into the realms of the creative process, of art. Each game demands an ordered mind and deep concentration, and can result not only in a deeply satisfying victory on the chessboard, but also in an improvement in my daily life due to the mental focus that playing chess develops in me.

Young or old, black or white, male or female, jock or couch potato, cook or computer programmer—everyone can learn how to play chess and know the satisfaction of unleashing their creative and combative potential at the chessboard. Chess is in many ways a great equalizer. Having said that, I have to acknowledge that, perplexingly, chess is a great bastion of male chauvinism.

His opponent, Louis Paulsen, has been deliberating over his move for 9 hours. Morphy, usually the epitome of politeness and certainly one of the quickest players around, finally feels the need to ask, “Excuse me, why aren’t you making a move?” Paulsen comes to life with a jerk: “Oh, I thought it was your move!” Incidents such as this one prompted the idea that games should be timed, and in 1861 […] introduced the concept of timed games to the world by timing the match with an hourglass for each player.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

Every time I read an Arthur C. Clarke story (I’ve read four so far), I’m left with an intense desire to leave Earth and explore space, followed by a period of sadness at the realization that I will likely take this fantasy to the grave.

Arthur Clarke isn’t the most gifted of writers, but what a wonderful storyteller he is! The City and the Stars is set a billion years in the future, a time when everything on Earth is dead, save for a city called Diaspar. Once a space-faring Empire, the people of Earth no longer leave the planet; not even the city. The Central Computer, an artificial intelligence put in place by the founders of Diaspar, has kept the city alive, and everyone in it happy (well, except for one dude), for hundreds of millions of years.

It’s hard to say more without spoiling the story. I hope this is just enough to pique your interest.

Oh yes, a bonus bit about the future of male reproductive organs—

It was merely that his equipment was now more neatly packaged when not required; internal stowage had vastly improved upon Nature’s original inelegant and indeed downright hazardous arrangements.

And now for tidbits that are not penis-related:

“Are you going to sleep?”
“I’d like to,” he confessed, “but I’m not sure I can. It still seems a strange custom to me.”

Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the Universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions that survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.

Perhaps he was no more of a coward than anyone else in Diaspar, but he had the additional misfortune of possessing a powerful imagination.

Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

“Go in a direction others do not go.”

I’m ashamed to say that I’d never heard of Robert Forward before being introduced to this wonderful book. A huge thank you to my friend Cassy for dragging me out of that hole of ignorance!

Dragon’s Egg is the story of the cheela, a civilization of tiny beings that evolved on the surface of Egg, a neutron star.

The 67-billion-g surface gravity of Egg and its spin rate of over 1000 revolutions per second pose unique difficulties for the inhabitants of the star. Weighing as much as the average human, cheela bodies are only about 5 millimeters in length, and half a millimeter in height. The extreme gravity makes it almost impossible for them to climb a ‘mountain’ that is only a few millimeters high, and anything that drops onto the surface of the star disintegrates in an instant.

The compounds in cheela bodies (and in everything else on Egg) are held together by nuclear forces, unlike the electromagnetic forces that keep our atoms together here on Earth. As a result, chemical processes on the star occur 1 million times faster than they do on Earth. An entire lifetime for a cheela is a mere 15 human minutes!

Despite all of these complications, Robert Forward somehow manages to make this a Hard Sci-Fi story, and for that I give him 5 million (neutron) stars.

The characters in this book, tiny as they are, are extremely well crafted. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about how the cheela evolved to solve basic problems, such as learning how to count beyond the number three; something that they had no concept of for the longest time!

The cheela eventually make contact with the human race; a guaranteed break-your-heart experience. If you’ve never cried reading Sci-Fi before (you monster), good luck not weeping with this one.

Some tidbits:

“Go in a direction others do not go.”

Then, in a flash of inspiration, one of the greatest mathematical minds ever hatched in the past of future history of the cheela made a great leap of abstract thought. “I took one seed from each pod that I ate,” Great-Crack said to herself. “So I have as many seeds as pods.”
Her mind faltered for a moment. “But seeds are not pods!”
It recovered, “But there are as many seeds as there were pods, so the number is the same.”

“Intelligent beings!” Seiko exclaimed. “That is impossible! The surface gravity of that star is 67 billion gees and the temperature is 8200 degrees! Any being that existed on that star would be a flat glowing pancake of solid neutrons.”

A few years ago, I was giving a talk at work on “fun presentations”, as part of an inter-departmental information sharing program. In a corporate environment, fun can be rare, and some of us took every opportunity we could to inject more of it in our work.

At the time, I was new to chess (sort of), and while preparing for one of the above sessions, it dawned on me that I could incorporate chess principles into my talk, to make it more memorable. Below is a summary of that.

What’s Chess?

Chess is a fascinating board game of strategy and resilience, the origins of which are unclear. Some claim it originated in Persia in the form of Shatranj; others say it was Ancient Egypt, in what might’ve been an early version of the game, called Senet. Some say it was born in China, referring to the game Liubo. Evidence, however, suggests that India was its birthplace, where it was known as Chaturanga. One thing is for sure—it’s at least 1500 years old.

There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. In fact, after only the fifth move, the game can unfold in about five million different ways. If that doesn’t blow you away, I’m not sure what will!

Principles

In chess, the objective of the game is to win—ideally by checkmate (‘capturing’ the enemy ♚King.) It’s important in a presentation, as it is in chess, to know one’s objective before doing anything else. What is it that you wish to achieve?

1. The Opening

Openings are important, because they set the context for everything else that happens next. It tells your opponent, or in this case your audience, what to expect. This may sound like common sense, but it’s surprising how we often neglect working on our opening lines.

One of the opening principles in chess is to control the center. A move such as the one in the following image would be considered weak; irrelevant to the game. No one will take you seriously. “You’re not playing in the center”, they would say, and not addressing the core of what you’re going to talk about.

An opening should be:

• Powerful: Grasping, and even demanding, attention
• Relevant to the rest of your presentation

A good opening is not, of course, made up of a single move or sentence. It’s a sequence of moves or things you say that build up to a good, relevant story—something that paints a clear picture for your audience.

2. Knowing your Opponent/Audience

“Play the person, not the position” is a common saying in chess, where one player attempts to use to their advantage the psychology of their opponent. For a successful presentation, it’s vital to know who you’re going up against. Who are your stakeholders? Know them, what they want, what makes them tick, and what doesn’t. This will help you address what they care about, and anticipate questions or concerns they might raise.

Garry Kasparov (shown above), who was the world’s number one player for 20 consecutive years, studied and prepared for his opponents diligently. You should, too.

3. Preparation and Practice

In chess, there’s a lot of theory. No matter how well you know it, you’re useless on the board if you’ve not actually played, and practiced. So, here’s my advice to you:

• Grab a friend (or a chimp), and rehearse your presentation with them.
• Think about what possible moves your opponent might make, or questions they might ask, and how you would respond to them.
• Practice your time. If you have five minutes to present, make sure you deliver in five minutes. If you have fifty, adjust your content in accordance, and make it engaging.
  
  

Last words

I hope you found the above useful, and if you haven’t, at least you’ve learned something new about chess!

And remember—in life, as in this ancient game, failure and defeat are inevitable. Don’t give up.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

In 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, forever changing our understanding of life. As revolutionary as it was, parts of it were wrong, and for a good reason. Darwin, 150 years ago, was ignorant of the existence of DNA, and of genes. Had he been alive today, his theory of Natural Selection—which took 20 years to develop!—might’ve looked very different. Darwin’s dead, though, so thank nature for Dawkins.

The title of this book has caused Richard Dawkins a great deal of unwanted trouble. He has, on many occasions, expressed regret over not calling it by a different name, such as “The Immortal Gene”. If you haven’t read the book, I’d suggest that you avoid coming to conclusions based on the title alone.

Dawkins postulates that the basic unit of selection in nature is the (immortal) gene, not the organism. Genes in your body need to survive and propagate themselves, for the benefit of themselves, not for the benefit of you. It doesn’t matter if you live or die; although it’s best if you die after you reproduce, so your genes get a chance to move along. In essence, we are all just disposable vehicles for gene survival. I’m OK with that. And also a little flabbergasted.

Richard Dawkins is one of my favorite authors, and I cannot speak enough about how much of an amazing writer he is. I owe much of my understanding of the world to this incredible scientist, and I’d recommend anything written by him in a heartbeat.

Some tidbits:

Let me begin with some second thoughts about the title.

It was created inside one of your father’s testicles.

‘A chicken is the egg’s way of making another egg.’ – Peter Medawar, Review

Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.

‘The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.’ My colleague John Krebs and I have dubbed this the ‘life/dinner principle’.

One of the dominant messages of The Selfish Gene (reinforced by the title essay of A Devil’s Chaplain) is that we should not derive our values from Darwinism, unless it is with a negative sign. Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale.

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. […] Let us try to teach generosity and altruism […..] it is a fallacy—incidentally a very common one—to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable.

The feeling that members of one’s own species deserve special moral consideration as compared with members of other species is old and deep. Killing people outside war is the most seriously-regarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however. Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and—according to recent experimental evidence—may even be capable of learning a form of human language. The foetus belongs to our own species, and is instantly accorded special privileges and rights because of it.

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes’ way of preserving the genes unaltered.

The gadget that animals evolved to achieve rapid movement was the muscle. Muscles are engines which, like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, use energy stored in chemical fuel to generate mechanical movement.

Fireflies (which are really beetles) attract their mates by flashing lights at them. Each species has its own particular dot-dash flashing pattern, which prevents confusion between species, and consequent harmful hybridization. Just as sailors look out for the flash patterns of particular lighthouses, so fireflies seek the coded flash patterns of their own species. Females of the genus Photuris have ‘discovered’ that they can lure males of the genus Photinus if they imitate the flashing code of a Photinus female. This they do, and when a Photinus male is fooled by the lie into approaching, he is summarily eaten by the Photuris female.

There are honeyguides who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nests of other species. The baby honeyguide is equipped with a sharp, hooked beak. As soon as he hatches out, while he is still blind, naked, and otherwise helpless, he scythes and slashes his foster brothers and sisters to death: dead brothers do not compete for food! The familiar British cuckoo achieves the same result in a slightly different way.

I have already suggested that a female might refuse to copulate with a male who has not already built her a nest, or at least helped her to build a nest. It is indeed the case that in many monogamous birds copulation does not take place until after the nest is built. The effect of this is that at the moment of conception the male has invested a good deal more in the child than just his cheap sperms.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

This is, by far, one of the most epic Sci-Fi stories I’ve ever read. I found it a little tedious to get through at times, but Frank Herbert’s extraordinary world-building skills made it worth the effort. (The missing half-star is for the slight tediousness.)

Contrary to many science fiction stories out there, Dune feels like a painstakingly sculpted piece of art. The level of detail and complexity blew me away. I love Herbert’s embedding of Arabic and Islamic words—and Middle Eastern culture in general—into the fabric of Dune. Understanding what these words mean brought a special kind of joy to my heart. And just as the story is set thousands of years in the future, so does the borrowed language appear to have gone through centuries of linguistic evolution. Such mastery is hard to come by.

Now that I think of it, there’s an interesting blend of Islamo-Christian concepts in Dune. I hear there is a bit of Persian and Hebrew influence as well, but since I don’t speak either of those two languages, I can’t confirm.

Another aspect I love is how precious water is on the planet Arrakis, and how deeply that has influenced the people’s culture. To provide an example from the book, spitting in front of someone is seen as a sign of respect. That is because you are “letting go of your body’s moisture”. How creative!

I know I haven’t said much to hint on what the story is about. In simple terms, it’s about some spice, a prophet, interplanetary politics, super-humans, giant worms, culture, sand-people, philosophy, religion, war, and a thousand other things. But it’s also about so much more, and I fear I can’t do it justice, so I’ll stop here.

Some notable ayat:

“What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.”
“I’m sorry, Gurney.” “You’re not sorry enough!”

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”

“Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd! Do it or I’ll help her dismember you! Can’t you see the worth of this woman?”

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.”

“We thank you, Stilgar, for the gift of your body’s moisture. We accept it in the spirit with which it is given.” And Idaho spat on the table in front of the Duke. Aside to the Duke, he said: “Remember how precious water is here, Sire. That was a token of respect.”

“My son displays a general garment and you claim it’s cut to your fit?” Jessica asked. “What a fascinating revelation.”

“..Here are the ayat and burhan of Life. […]” It reads like the Azhar Book […] Has a Manipulator of Religions been on Arrakis?

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen”—which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

The Republic of Gilead (formerly known as the USA) is a hardcore Christian Saudi Arabia with the batshit cranked all the way up. It might also be Mike Pence’s American Dream. May the lord open. Or not.

I love this book. The story is told from the point of view of Offred, a Handmaid. Due to war and radiation and the lack of babies and so on, young fertile women in Gilead are treated as nothing more than baby-making machines, known as Handmaids. Gilead is a fairly new republic, and Offred remembers a time when life was free and pants were legal, which makes this story a little more painful.

It isn’t just painful, though. It’s dull, dark, and depressing. Offred often seems lifeless, or dead, which might be a turn off for some readers; but what else would you expect from someone living in a fucked up society like that?

Blessed be the tidbits:

“Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits."

“My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated. Did I really wear bathing suits, at the beach? I did, without thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display, could be seen. Shameful, immodest. I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely."

“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes."

“We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice."

-“Give me children, or else I die. There’s more than one meaning to it."_

“We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices."

“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the President and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time."

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze."

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

“According to the history books—though no one could really believe it—there had been a time when the old United Nations had 172 members. The United planets had only seven; and that was sometimes bad enough."

This is a wonderful first-contact story. There’s a giant asteroid (named Rama, after the Hindu god) that’s approaching the Solar System. The UP (United Planets) soon discovers that it isn’t an asteroid, but a giant alien vessel, and decides to send a crew to check it out. All of this happens at the beginning. The rest of the book is a captivating exploration of Rama itself.

My favorite thing about this story is that, for once, we (humans) don’t get to figure everything out. The crew of Endeavor had a hundred million more questions at the end of their mission than they did when they first approached Rama. This book might leave you unsatisfied at the end, as it did me, but it’ll also leave you fascinated.

Some tidbits:

“Even in the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved."

“As indeed he was, being a devout member of the Fifth Church of Christ Cosmonaut. Norton had never been able to discover what had happened to the earlier four, and he was equally in the dark about the Church’s rituals and ceremonies. But the main tenet of its faith was well known: it believed that Jesus Christ was a visitor from space, and had constructed an entire theology on that assumption."

“One of the nicest things about weightlessness, he often thought, was that you could really hold someone all night, without cutting off the circulation."

Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌖🌑

David Selig is a lonely man. He has the ability to see into other people’s minds; to hear their every thought. He keeps a low profile, and makes his living by writing term papers for students. As he gets older, he begins to lose his gift—or is it a curse? He’s not sure. Either way, it’s his entire identity.

Written in first-person, this is an intimate read. David is painfully honest, and lets the reader crawl deep into his disturbed mind. There is no climax to this story. It’s downhill from page 1. In many ways, it’s about the struggle of being human. It’s about feeling out of place; about loneliness, insecurity, and failure.

I wasn’t sure how to rate this. It isn’t the most exciting book to read, but it does drag you in, and at the end of it David feels like someone you know and deeply care for. If you’re looking for action or adventure, don’t read this. It’ll bore you to death. Otherwise, David, pitying himself, says hello :)

Tidbits:

Wouldn’t you like to know the story of how that happened? Anybody’s first time has an irresistible fascination. Well, fuck you: I don’t feel like discussing it.

That isn’t intended as a grab for your pity, just as a simple statement of fact, objective and cool. The nature of my condition diminishes my capacity to love and be loved. A man in my circumstances, wide open to everyone’s innermost thoughts, really isn’t going to experience a great deal of love. He is poor at giving love because he doesn’t much trust his fellow human beings: he knows too many of their dirty little secrets, and that kills his feelings for them. Unable to give, he cannot get. His soul, hardened by isolation and ungivingness, becomes inaccessible, and so it is not easy for others to love him. The loop closes upon itself and he is trapped within.

He was, I realized, already dead, although in fact his heart would beat for another decade. He had stopped responding. The world had defeated him.

Hey, God? God? Are you listening, God? I don’t think you are. I don’t think you give a crap. God, I think you’ve been fucking me. Dee-dah-de-doo-dah-dee-da. The music is ending.

Every sound shall end in silence, but the silence never dies.” [Samuel Miller Hageman]