Grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost

I picked up Us by David Nicholls as part of a book club with a few other friends. I've never read anything of his before but he's sort of been on my periphery and One Day is still something I think I'd like to pick up. I feel like that "still" suggests that I didn't like this book and that's not quite true. It's not a favorite, sure, but I think I'd like his writing applied to a different premise.

It's not even that the premise here is bad. It just falls into my "middle aged white guy problems" shelf, which is far too crowded as is and something that I'm just less interested in at this point. But let's back up and get into what this book is about.

Douglas, the aforementioned middle-aged white guy, is at a bit of a turning point in his life. His teenage son is just about ready to graduate and he and his wife have planned a monthlong tour through Europe to visit various art museums and other cultural touchstones and things seem to be going swell until Doug's wife Connie tells him she's thinking they should get divorced. But she still wants to go through with the trip. Obviously. Be silly to cancel it now. Douglas is devastated by the thought of divorce but thinks perhaps love can be rekindled during this vacation.

Spoiler: things don't go well for Douglas. Sometimes it's funny, a lot of the time it's embarrassing and several times I wanted to hit the characters. This book kept making me think, what if the guy actually marries the manic-pixie dream girl? Well, to start with, they have a kid, who grows up to be an asshole. And then everyone is miserable. Not because of the kid. Well not just because of the kid. Mostly cos they're all sort of assholes.

At this start of this, when Connie tells Douglas in the middle of the night she's thinking of leaving him, I spent the time hoping that he'd be able to convince her that they should stay together, they're better together.

Then they went on this trip across Europe (her idea) and I saw the whole family actually interacting with each other, and I thought "You know what? I know you're all family and everything but you should probably spend as much time away from each other as possible. Cos you're all TERRIBLE together. You all, and this includes you kid, seem like you'd be far happier if you just didn't spend time together. Ever. Maybe just around the holidays."

Some of the son's problem is that he's a teenager and in general, they are just the worst. Some of it is also that he's inconsiderate and an asshole, beyond normal teenager bounds. He has his father don't get along, it seems mostly because the son is suuuuch a brooding artist, and the dad is a know-it-all scientist type. The mom is also the artistic type and is fully on board with her son's behavior, including when they're all staying in France and said teenage son brings a bunch of people back to his adjoining hotel room to play loud music and then have (loud) sex with this girl he just met right on the other side of the wall his parents are staying at and STOP THAT NOW.

No matter how much Douglas wants to be the perfect family and to patch things up, nothing is going his way and again, I was sort of rooting for everyone to realize they'd all be better off if they just wandered off and maybe just called once in awhile to let everyone know they were fine. And I think cos I was hoping that would be the case, the book didn't quite work for me. There were funny parts and even a few poignant moments but overall I just wanted everyone to go their own way cos getting along seemed impossible.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 264-265

Nicholls, David. Us. Harper, 2014.

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer

When I found out The Martian movie was going to be released this fall I got super excited and immediately started re-reading the book because of course I did. It's great. Then I decided I needed another themed book to prepare me for the movie and what's this? Mary Roach's Packing for Mars is for sale? SIGN ME UP.

Mary Roach is great. I love her.

As with Bonk and Stiff, Roach approaches a topic, this time space travel, with curiosity and humor. I'm sure it's no surprise that sending things and people into space is a lot of work, but I don't think I quite appreciated all of the details. There's a delicate balance of making sure things actually work in zero gravity, but also don't kill the astronauts. Surprise, it is not all that easy to keep people alive up in space. Roach opens with:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconsistent. You take weeks to fix.

Ugh, humans. Space travel would be so easy without you but you insist on going up there. Pain the ass.

Roach goes into the history of sending people up into the void and all of the issues that have come with that, tackling issues such as toilets and hygiene (fact, people were stinky) and even gets to take a ride in the vomit comet, which sounds equal parts terrifying and super fun. She talks about space programs in the US, Russia, and Japan. Fun fact, Japan uses forensic origami as part of their astronaut training/interview process. "Deterioration [in origami crane folding, as they have to fold 1,000 cranes] in accuracy shows impatience under stress."

Overall this was super fun, as are all of her books, so not too much of a surprise. If you wanted to know way-too-much about bodily functions in space, this is most definitely a book to check out.

Gif rating:

Title quote from location 2866

Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. Kindle

Imagine how much happier we would be...if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations

"We Should All Be Feminists" is an essay version of Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDx and it is great. It's also super short (about 60 pages) so there really isn't much of an excuse for people to not read this.

It is, as the title suggests, her reasons why everyone should be a feminist and how gendered expectations can hurt both men and women and wouldn't it be swell if things were actually equal? And of course it's done with Adichie's skill.

I'm not particularly concerned if feminist writing is a bit angry towards dudes, but I understand that being nice is a far better strategy and Adichie takes the route of not blaming people or an entire gender but focusing on the way society has set up the divide. She calls herself the "Happy Feminist" after a journalist told her she should "never call [herself] a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands." This was later expanded to "Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lipgloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men" which is a mouthful but maybe if people did have such (stupid) notions on what a feminist needs, it wouldn't be needed.

She illustrates her points with stories from her life, such as the time in school she had the highest score on a test, which was supposed to come with an award of class monitor. Except the teacher decided that the class monitor had to be a boy and so the person with the second-highest score was put in charge.

If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitoring, then at some point we will all think, even if unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy.

I should point out that while this essay does not come off as angry, this does not mean that Adichie is not angry or that being angry about injustice is a bad thing. She does talk about how women expressing anger is typically seen as a bad thing and how women are conditioned to be so concerned with being "likeable" that they're punished when they're angry or aggressive, or other traits that boys are praised for. Of course, expectations on boys to be tough and strong and that weakness and vulnerability are the worst possible things are hurting them as well.

She makes the argument about why "human rights" or "equalist" or whatever other term people have come up with to avoid "feminist" is ridiculous.

Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general - but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. The problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.

 Take that.

This is wonderful and a quick read so everyone, get on that.

Gif rating:

Title quote from location 202

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "We Should All Be Feminists." Vintage, 2014.

Chronological living is a kind of lie. That's why I don't do it anymore

I was wandering around The Strand one day, failing to talk myself into a few graphic novels, but one one of the many themed tables (which PS I loooooooove) I found this book How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. It's the first book in awhile that I've picked up without really knowing anything about it other than what the back of the book told me. But it seemed interesting enough so I went with it.

The book features protagonist Charles Yu (yes, same as the author) living in the future as a time machine mechanic. Sort of like AAA for time machines. He also lives in his time machine with his dog-that-doesn't-exist Ed and the machine's onboard depressed computer TAMMY. Between assignments, he visits his mother, who's retired to a time loop, reliving the same hour forever, and searches for his father who invented the time machine and then disappeared.

One day he gets stuck in a time loop himself. He rushes back to headquarters to pick up his machine, which was being serviced, when he sees his future self stepping out of a machine. He shoots his future self and as he's dying, future self gives present self a book telling him the book is the key. Present self jumps in the machine and now is doomed where he'll eventually have to travel back in time to get shot so he can give future self the book.

Wendig talks about mistakes new writers make and one of those struck a nerve when it came to this book. Get to the Fucking Story Already. I appreciate there's world building but I got to page 80 and the story hadn't really begun yet. Foundations were still being laid and I was losing interest. And then I started to zone out while reading and this book is so meta, you need to pay attention. By the end I couldn't really remember anything about the book, just that I was so bored while reading it.

Maybe at some point I'll revisit it. I feel like there's an interesting story hidden in here. Maybe I just need to be in a different frame of mind for it.

Gif rating:

Title quote from page 22

Yu, Charles. How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Vintage, 2010.

October Reading Wrap-Up

Everyone have a good October? Lots of Halloween fun, and whatnot? I was all excited thinking we'd get a TON of trick-or-treaters since we're in a neighborhoody area, but apparently kids all trick-or-treat at stores now? So thanks for making me feel old and also I have a giant bowl of candy and only one kid came by. I would have dumped more candy into his bowl but his mom was giving me a look like she wouldn't like that so I restrained. Plus I thought maybe he'd be the first in a run of kids showing up, but NOPE. Anyway, another month down. First time in awhile I was very aware of the month coming to an end. Not like the beginning of October, which totally snuck up on me. Maybe it's cos there's a holiday at the end. Maybe it's because the first week in November is going to be insane (as was the last week of Oct) for work, so I've been paying close attention to getting through these days. Maybe it's because we had a readalong this week, which forced me to pay more attention to a calendar than I normally do.

Let's see those stats

Total books read
7
The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
The Shining by Stephen King
Working Stiff:Two Years, 262 Bodies and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Dr. Judy Melinek
Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (except I listened to it instead of read so I didn't actually see the pictures...)
Think Like A Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Total pages read
2,777 (cos graphic novels make up a lot of pages, even when listened audio style)

Percentage of fiction read
71%

Percentage of female authors
14%...I think that's the lowest in awhile

Percentage of white authors
100%

(again, since I didn't actually see the illustrations for L&K it feels like cheating to include him)

Percentage of US authors
57%

Book formats
ebook - 71%
audiobook - 14%
paperback - 14%

Rereads
29%

Review books
0% - again

Books by decade
1790s - 14%
1970s - 14%
2000s - 29%
2010s - 43%

Books by genre
Economics (kinda) - 14%
Fantasy - 14%
Gothic - 14%
Horror - 33%
Science - 43%

Resolution books
57% - which sounds pretty impressive but probably shouldn't. It's only because The Monk and The Shining were written prior to 2000, and then The Last Dragonslayer, The Monk, and Coraline were by authors not from the US.

Is the radio play dead?

Writing radio plays, it seems to me, is a lost art.

Stephen King says that in his intro to the collection of short stories Everything's Eventual. He talks about how he was trying to write a radio play, something along the lines of of Orson Welles' treatment of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, starting the play as fake news announcements. But he couldn't do it. It was reading more like an audiobook. Which is what lead him to make the above comment. Or in full:

Writing radio plays, it seems to me, is a lost art. We have lost the ability to see with our ears, although we had it once. I remember listening to some radio Foley guy tapping a hollow block of wood with his knuckles...and seeing Matt Dillon walking to the bar of the Long Branch Saloon in his dusty boots, clear as day. No more. Those days are gone.

It seems true. The only time I listen to the radio is the few times I'm in the car (I train it to work and try to walk as much as possible rather than take the car out) and then I tend to listen to music.

So radio no, but I do listen to some podcasts. Serial. Freakonomics. Welcome to Night Vale. Night Vale is probably the closest to a radio play, the type King is talking about, but it still isn't quite the same.

But then I found something that is like King's lost radio play. And oddly enough, it came from his son, Joe Hill.

Kayleigh over at Nylon Admiral posted about how Hill's Locke & Key was currently available as an audiobook for free. For those who don't know, L&K is a graphic novel, so my first reaction to a GRAPHIC novel being made into an audiobook was a confused Britney

but I went with it cos I like free. And it's treated like an audioplay. There are multiple actors playing the different parts. There are sound effects. We're not hearing them tell a story, like the World War Z audiobook does. The characters aren't narrating. It is what I imagine King's radio plays were.

When I first read the Everything's Eventual intro, I was thinking that King is probably right, that the radio play is dead because who's going to sit around listening to the radio again? I'm glad I was wrong.

And seriously, go download Locke & Key because it is FREE until November 4th so you have a few more days.