Big Ideas, Best Books

I love Shephard.com, a site devoted to discovering books. They do it like one of your friends might, but they are not using an algorithm, they're using real people, with original opinions. So you can get recommendations that might be a off-center, a bit of a stretch, things never dreamt of by math or machine.

Check out my first post, on books with big ideas.

Harris and Walz: A rich, gooey middle

Cusp babies are a little different. I’m a Cancer sign, but only a couple of hours from being a Leo. At a party several years ago, an astrologer refused to do my chart. Beliefs aside, it made me feel special. Odd but special. In a good way. I have felt that way all my life. On the edge, leaning on the door jamb. Living in liminal space.

By birthyear exacerbates the effect. 1965 is the shadowy year between the baby boomers and generation x. A transition period. I feel – as I bet many of my graduating class does – affiliations to both groups. I am as likely to listen to Simon and Garfunkel as I am to Jay Z. Liminal time.

While I don’t think about it all the time, I can’t say it’s infrequent either. Dwelling in misty time/space gives you a different angle from which to view the other, fixed time/spaces. I have always felt more like an umpire than a player. An observer. It could be just me, but I don’t think so. Working with others in my cohort, I’ve noticed the subtle differences in values and temperaments. A small, alien effect. Mork reporting to Orsen. Alf calling Melmac. Trevor Noah or John Oliver commenting on what we too are seeing, but from farther back. It’s not that we tweeners are not invested, were just a little careful.

Kamala Harris was born within six months of me, Tim Walz a little more. They do not share my particular cuspiness, but they are from Sesame Street. Regardless of how you feel they feel about variety of issues, I am quite certain they bring measured perspective with them wherever they go. They are of the middle and that is a great place to start.

The Downloaded. A review.

All story is rooted conflict. By that measure, there is more story per page in Robert J. Sawyer’s The Downloaded than just about anything else I’ve read. At first, the novel presents a clever fictionalization of science – a mechanism for preserving a whole person, mind and body. The solution is separation, with, of course, the promise of recombination. You can probably see, in that sentence, the tendrils of conflict already sprouting from the tap root of the book. Sawyer follows more shoots that I would have thought possible, and the result is incessantly thought-provoking, sometimes moving, and often super fun. More fun than a book with this much conflict should allow.

Sawyer brings several sciences together to create an entirely plausible future. Quantum physics, astrophysics, computer architecture, biology – the usual. The real gift of the book, however, is slow titration of soft sciences into the hard: sociology, phycology, political science (the one that pulls so far from the others we put ‘science’ in the name as a kind of dog chain.) This will not surprise long-time Sawyer fans. What might is the literary composition all this chemistry concocts. The Downloaded covers so much ground it grows into something full and rich. Sawyer attempts to show so many of the directions the main story’s roots can take that he succeeds in creating a very real world.

As an off-shoot, he also creates a hybrid rose of a novel. Fragrant, pretty, and robust. All the various literary conflicts are here: Person vs. others, person vs. environment, person vs. self. My students would be so happy if I assigned this book, because it would take the place of three. And they would enjoy the read, which in the end, is what we really want from whatever novel we pick from the big garden of books.

The Divine Donald Trump

Trump has led me to doubt monotheism. Hopping over every obstacle like a blondish Mario, Donald Trump missed Viet Nam, legal prosecution, death by COVID-19 and a bullet. He reminds me  of Odysseus or Perseus. Pawns in the disagreements of the gods. It is easier to believe in a spat between deities than the reality I have watched. It starts with his name. Trump. Same root as trumpet, as in heralding, celebrating, and the sound that raises above all else. That’s why they used trumpets in battle and why the trump card comes to defeat all other cards in your game. The brash name – which the family took on once they landed in the brashy brash America – tells us this is all mythic.

A new myth. The kind in which we’ve been so lacking that the gods need to poke us again. Perhaps Hera decided Trump took his gifts for granted and had to be punished. Zeus thinks Trump is doing a fine job of carrying on Zeus-like traditions. He waves his hand to counter each of Hera’s wars, laws, viruses, and projectiles. They will continue their spat until, per the legends, there is a moral for us. No idea what that could possibly look like.

The only thing I know for certainly is that the gods always win. 

I'm already starting to miss my old God, inscrutability and all.

More than 30 years in the making

The Tongue Trade is out. 

As one might imagine, I'm quite proud of the novel. It's science fiction, but not the ray gun and robot type. This book speculates a world in which language adds thickness to the walls of our personal silos. Individual preferences have become entrenching tools. So much so that one needs an interpreter to talk to someone outside of their profession. In the space between those walls lies plenty of room for mischief and murder. 

I got the idea in the last century, while helping to write a manual - making engineers understandable - and now, finally, it's a book.

And it's only a buck. That's less than you should tip your ice cream server but for more than 30 years of work. The best deal of your life. 

The Tongue Trade

In a future so divided you need an interpreter to talk to people outside your profession there is plenty of room for murder. I am pretty proud of this book - a little science-fiction, a little neo-noir, lots of wordy, wordy words.

Watch this space

 This is going to be the best book of the last three and a half years.