The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin
Early on in Gretchen Rubin’s year spent practicing habits aimed at her own happiness (and writing about it), an acquaintance tells her, “I just don’t think you’re going to have insights that other people would find useful.” The author’s response is essentially that she thinks people can learn a lot from the examples of others, and she carries on with her project. Ultimately, though, her book about the experience falls somewhere in between these two viewpoints, a strange blend of self-help book and memoir. I think I liked it, but I often found myself struggling to apply Rubin’s conclusions to my own life.
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
A People’s History of the United States is really two books, and one of them is significantly better than the other. Author Howard Zinn’s thesis is that any telling of history is inherently political, and his stated goal is to present perspectives on American history that have often been left out of our popular narratives. And in pursuing that goal, this book is both educational and necessary, focusing on the Native Americans, African Americans, women, and others who were abused in the name of American progress as well as the popular movements that have striven to make our country live more fully by its ideals.
Unfortunately, Zinn’s dedication to that mission falters around the time his retelling reaches World War I, and the last century or so of his history is concerned less with presenting forgotten people and events and more with arguing for a leftist, socialist agenda. Even for a reader who largely agrees with Zinn’s politics, this section of the book was tiresome and unconvincing. I respect the author’s goal in crafting a people’s history, but I wish he had followed through on that goal for the entire volume instead of branching off into a Bernie Sanders campaign speech at the end.
It seems like every time I convince myself that zombies are played out, some new property comes along and shows just how much rich material there still can be in the concept. In this case, it’s a laugh-out-loud half-hour sitcom about a middle-class suburban mom turning undead, losing her inhibitions, and eating the neighbors. The writing is really sharp, and the plot kept zigging every time I expected it to zag. I also loved how zombieism is really mined here primarily as a metaphor for the subtext in any marriage, especially as a mid-life crisis looms. There’s only ten episodes in this season, but it was smart and funny and I really hope Netflix renews it for a second round.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
A brutal firsthand study of eviction, emphasizing both its high frequency and the devastating toll it takes on families. Matthew Desmond, an ethnographer who spent years living in low-income neighborhoods and trailer parks to research this book, shows how precarious the living situation is for people in poverty, and how easily they can be abused by the housing system. Sudden upsets like job loss or hospital bills can lead to eviction when families fall behind on their rent, but even renters who are up-to-date can be kicked out of their home for the flimsiest of reasons when they cannot afford to contest the order in court.
(For instance, Desmond writes of women who have been evicted after calling the police to report domestic violence, because their landlords don’t want to have their properties in the system as nuisance addresses – which also leads to a severe under-reporting of abuse among renters who don’t want to risk eviction over it. Despite such factors making eviction a common occurrence, landlords can lawfully discriminate against potential renters on the basis of previous evictions, and many government assistance programs explicitly rule out candidates who have been evicted in the past.)
Property-owners are not all conniving slumlords – just as evicted people are not all blameless innocents – and Desmond spends some time showing eviction from the landlords’ perspective as they seek to pay their own bills and hold tenants responsible for rent and damages to their property. But his primary focus is on the evicted people themselves, on how their lives are completely disrupted by every forced move, and on the policies we might put in place to mitigate these circumstances and lower the overall rate of eviction. It’s an important message that I hope spreads far and wide.
This political satire from 1935 imagines a blustering American politician ascending to the presidency on a nationalistic campaign, aggressively insisting on anti-immigrant falsehoods and demonizing the media for disputing them. Although many citizens are opposed to his politics, they blithely reassure themselves that fascism could never take hold in America, and they proceed to ignore each new warning sign until it is far too late for any effective resistance. Thus went Germany under the Nazis in real life, and author Sinclair Lewis convincingly illustrates how a similar process could unfold here at home.
The elephant in the room for a 2017 reader is the striking resemblance between President Buzz Windrip and our own Donald Trump, which has helped fuel a renewed modern interest in this novel. But honestly, that parallel struck me as more of a surface-level distraction, because a fascist movement in America isn’t necessarily going to come from someone who resembles these men. (And Windrip is, after all, a Democrat in the era of FDR whose campaign promises include a guaranteed basic income for all citizens.) The strength of It Can’t Happen Here is as a cautionary tale against the pull of authoritarianism and willful ignorance, no matter which side of the political aisle is presenting that threat.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought #1)
A neat space opera, overflowing with intelligent alien lifeforms at various stages of development – think Star Trek or Mass Effect for a rough idea of the setting, but with the added wrinkle that approaching the galactic center makes one’s technology and one’s own mental processes gradually lose all functionality, and approaching the periphery brings one into the domain of ascended god-beings. I especially loved the main alien species, a dog-like people whose individual members have the intelligence of animals but who coalesce into a higher consciousness when clustered in groups. The main plot moves in fits and starts, but author Vernor Vinge does some cool stuff with identity and gender (a good 20 years before Ann Leckie would tackle the same issues in her Ancillary Justice books), and A Fire Upon the Deep is worth the read just to see how such concepts play out.
The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #6)
An overall solid Hercule Poirot mystery, although definitely one that leans a bit hard on coincidences and on the detective knowing facts that aren’t made available to the reader. Not Poirot’s best outing, but still a far cry from his worst.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (St. Leibowitz #1)
A slow-paced but intriguing vision of the Catholic church in the centuries after the fall of western civilization and the loss of most earthly knowledge, where monks painstakingly copy manuscripts of electronic blueprints out of faith that one day God will again reveal their meaning to the world. If there had been an order of priests living quietly in the background of the Mad Max movies, this would be their story. It’s a story of the inability of our species to rise above our destructive human nature, but also of the divine spark that keeps our dreams alive through the darkness.
A rare fresh take on vampires, as original as Octavia Butler’s Fledgling but without that novel’s uncomfortable issues of age and consent. I loved this novel’s characters and its Mexico City setting almost as much as I loved that its vampires were clearly drawn from indigenous Mexican folklore rather than the stock figures of western culture. Certain Dark Things tells a complete story on its own, but it introduces such a rich setting that I hope author Silvia Moreno-Garcia returns to this universe again.
Well, the Underwoods’ continual victories get harder to believe with every passing season, and I’m getting mighty tired of this revolving door of characters opposing them. (Opposition and setbacks are great, but it’s always somebody new picking up the mantle, because the writers don’t know what to do with most of their characters.) This season had kind of a wonky structure too, but the opening episodes with Frank and Claire at war with one another were pretty great. On the other hand, nearly everything about presidential politics and campaigning on this show looks downright quaint given how the election of 2016 ended up going down in real life.
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