Eduardo Santiago

Not what I was expecting. The preface and the scholarly essay appendix are suitable for adults but the main text and artwork seem incongruously targeted toward grade schoolers. Simple declarative sentences. Illustrations that feel like they came out of a Chamber of Commerce brochure. Unrated, because I am not the target audience.

Exquisite writing, both in terms of language and emotional power. Many sentences I had to pause to savor. Peters is a gifted writer and empath.

It is impossible to say much about this book without revealing spoilers, so here's a quick safe rundown of key points. First, Peters got the tone right. There were many angles she could've taken: misery porn, rage, handwringing. The way she crafted it was moving and effective. And second, I really want to talk about some aspects of the book, so please just read it and let's chat over coffee or a walk?

Charming and sweet and fun. A little dated in places, cringey even, and that got me wondering if Juster saw those as cop-outs at the time, or if he did later in his life, and lots more tangents on the shortcuts we take in life and regret later. But I digress.

This is my first reading, and I enjoyed it. Very smart: sparkling wordplay, whimsy, randomness, and Dodgsonian absurdity. Unfortunately, it's hard to sustain freshness with that type of witty banter, so the last two thirds dragged a little. That's okay, there were other redeeming qualities. Thank you, K., for the recommendation.

Third reading, January 2025, obviously much different circumstances: there is no longer any time to spare. My first readings I found this inspiring; now I find it more poignant, reflective, and in some senses clearer. Le Guin did not live to see the 2024 election but oh, how she predicted it, how it all went so wrong, every step of the way. With her gentle voice she addresses corporatism, toxic masculinity, overpopulation; with hope and rage and calm strength.

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard.

and:

When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good?

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2nd reading, Jan 2024. Sometimes I just need to hear her voice; much like with Terry Pratchett.

A welcome addition to the canon. Much more readable than Supercommunicators and less dated than Nonviolent Communication. Well organized and referenced. Written with compassion, sensitivity, and humor.

This is probably going to become my first-choice recommendation for people waking up to the importance of listening. Even though it was published in 2019, it's well tuned to the problems of 2025: loneliness, attachment theory, cell phones, identity politics, and the importance of silence (both ambient noise and not speaking). I lurrrrved the opening of the last chapter, When to Stop Listening: a pompous blowhard professor mansplains humor to her. I'm quite sure that person is by now aware of this book and his presence in it, and I wonder: is he cringing in shame now, striving to become a better person? Or is he digging his heels in defensively? Because that's really the root of the problem: those who most need this book are the least likely to read it.

She has a Recommended Reading list at the end, books she considers masterpieces of the art of listening, and War and Peace is first on it—a choice that delights me, because I thought the same thing when I read it. Unfortunately, Middlemarch, a book I found insufferable, is also on that list. I will have to grit my teeth and give it another try.

More a collection of amuse-bouches, some WTFs, and a few genuine delights, and I would expect nothing less from someone who acknowledges Montaigne within the first ten pages and concludes with a tip of the hat to Galeano. These are, after all, essais, and even the masters didn't putt 1000. It is, on the whole, an uplifting way to end this year. (Aside: Gay wrote the essays between August 1, 2016, and August 1, 2017. The careful reader may note some uncomfortable parallels between that timeline and today.)

This is a book to read slowly, and I did. Gay is obviously a poet first and foremost and second and third too. Even at a gentle pace, a good number of essays needed a reread: some because of Gay's circumloquaciousness, some because his cultural references are just too obscure for me. I found myself enjoying even the rereadings. And the delights, those were mostly simple reminders to observe and be present as we go about our days.

And with that, farewell 2024!

I'm not quite sure what this was. Elements of generational trauma; the violence chronically inflicted on Turtle Islanders; addiction; hopelessness; searching for meaning; with occasional didactic history lessons wedged in. Characters (and chapters) had unique voices, mostly third person, occasionally first, and once second, most of them too rambling or stream-of-consciousness for me to follow clearly. It felt experimental, avant-garde, intended for people much smarter than me. The first half covered many characters over a long time span, with not enough exposure to get to know any of them. The second half was contemporary, fewer characters, tighter focus, but most of that focus was on two teenage males who were ... uninteresting.

Exceptional. This is the relationship manual for thinking adults. Equal parts stuff I've long known (be kind; recognize other people; listen), stuff I've learned the hard way (listen even more; talk, too; set boundaries), and stuff I didn't yet know (on rules; on even better communication). The fact that Veaux and Rickert get the first two-thirds perfectly right assures me that they know what they're talking about in the other third. They are deeply moral and highly intelligent, a combination I'm fond of. They've lived and felt and thought, and I'm grateful to them for sharing their wisdom.

Written in a no-bullshit yet deeply compassionate voice, More Than Two is a pleasure to read. I wish I'd had it twenty years ago but am ecstatic to have it today.

The first book was fresh and intriguing; this one felt much too long. It dragged on. The side plots felt forced. The romance angle got to where it just felt tedious. The cutesy oppressed creatures were depicted in a way that seemed cringily Samboish. The lookism was awkward. Yes, I will read Kingfisher again, her heart is huge and loving. Just not for a while.

Kinda wish I'd DNF'ed. The first half was intense, with Many Valuable Elements crammed in: Plucky Young Woman Gets Rude Awakening, check. Horrors Of War, check. Despair Over Senseless Tragedy, check check check. Sexism Racism comma Suitable Outrage Expressed, check. The second half changed focus, more toward reintegration and Meaning and PTSD, all crafted with Sensitivity And Tact, all of it carefully engineered to manipulate your ire and sympathy and tears.

This could've been a knockout. A lighter touch, a little less bathos; sometimes less is more. Maybe the protagonist could've been a tad less rich talented beautiful privileged. Or the romance angles less predictable, the plot elements less formulaic. the auxiliary characters more real. And that's the word I was looking for: Real. There's not enough of it. This just felt like it was assembled from a kit. The pieces are all there, they snap together right where and when they should but the life is missing.

Please disregard anything I say, though: I'm a crotchety old insensitive male jerk.

Strong start, and the momentum persisted: tension, discomfort, wonder, tenderness, loss, discovery. Pritchett has a knack for understanding that end-of-life despair where we realize our life has been mostly wasted, and we can never fix it, but we might have a small chance to give meaning to the little that's left. Ammalie—her protagonist—is intensely figuring out how to do so. Her decisions are not ones I would make, nor (I hope) would you, but even so I get it. I could relate and deeply empathize and even love her. Love everyone, actually, because that's the sort of book this is: All the characters are kind and wise and wonderful; all the conversations are Real; all the vistas are breathtaking and are mindfully appreciated. (If you're getting a Lake Wobegon vibe, you're not too far off). Gently antiracist and ecoconscious without being heavyhanded. Emotionally powerful and sensitive. Satisfying conclusion.

Once again I'm impressed and moved by how huge a heart Pritchett has and how effectively she paints the kind of world I want to live in. Or, if I'm very lucky, to help shape, in the company of the kind wise wonderful loved ones in my life.

(Can't quite justify five stars because the dialog is so stilted and cringey. Plus the dei ex machina, eyeroll. Please don't let that put you off from reading this. Just have a grain of salt on hand.)

2024-12-20 Abandoned, p.96. Just isn't working for me.

Beautiful and moving and heartbreaking. If you listened to the podcast you remember the tension and the fascinating, disturbing history of greed, abuse, pillage and murder. It's all in here, and much more: photos, extra history, updates.

Nagle is a great storyteller, in both podcast and book mediums. Her prose kept me on edge and engaged. She is honest. She sticks to facts; and those facts are damning.

One month from now, greedy white predatory lawbreaking immigrant cockroaches will begin looting and pillaging the U.S., destroying an entire country and killing millions of people. Possibly including you and me. We will all get to find out first hand what it's like to be hunted and crushed and slaughtered. Some will survive and, perhaps, get to write stories like this one.

Charming! Not a whole lot of new material for anyone who's been cooking a while, but enough to read (not skim) the whole way through... and worth doing so for the sense of joy that infuses the book. Nosrat is a storyteller, an ebullient one; all of her lessons are illustrated via memorable tales of her experiences and mishaps and successes. She uses humor judiciously: as a seasoning, if you will. Every page is filled with delight.

Well written and organized. Informative and engaging. Much of what she wrote in 2016, it's not that it's "still relevant" today, it's that it's worse. Chapter 5, on corruption, was chilling. The next pandemics will hit a U.S. whose medical and clinical institutions have been decimated; a U.S. with subhumans in charge of all national offices and with an economic depression or possibly full collapse. Information gathering and sharing, research, prevention, treatment, will all be up to states or isolated universities. And, as Shah clearly describes, violent mobs will likely strike at the latter. Interesting times. I feel sorry for the few who might survive.

All I felt was dismay that a book like this would even need to be written: nothing in it is new or even unusual. It's simply how a human being lives day to day, with integrity and decency.

Then I started thinking about two books I read in the past week, [book:Mountain Time|201358084] and [book:Thunder Song|185767242], both dealing in part with the Turtle Island genocide, and in particular illustrating historical interactions between individuals. Both books reinforced a belief I've long held: inferiors are <i>incapable</i> of understanding honor. It's not that they scorn it or use it selectively, it's that their brains genuinely don't have the ability to register it. Sort of a corollary to Jonathan Haidt's work. Anyhow, that makes it challenging to reach them... and impossible for a book like this. So who is Snyder's target audience then?

A little too breezy for my taste but taken in small doses, such as one chapter per night, it was enjoyable and informative. The most distinctive element—something I’ve never seen before—is a blurb covering the history and evolution of each mark. Also useful are notes detailing the differences in opinion between Chicago, AP, and other style guides, and why those matter.

About the best I can say is that it won’t get tagged wish-I’d-DNF’ed. Although by about page 50 I was considering it. Like Firekeeper’s Daughter, this one too was way over the top and high drama; and hyperprecocious protagonist; and wildly improbable twists; and did I mention the DRAMA? This protagonist is sixteen, and even as first-person narrator she comes off as unlikable: dishonest, irresponsible, borderline delinquent... and that’s just the first fifty pages. Boulley focuses on story, not characters, and she packs a lot: her goal clearly seems to be educating the world about anthropological crimes and MMIW, but this was too heavyhanded to accomplish much of either.

UPDATE, two months later: I tried again and finished it. Thank goodness that’s over. It was tiresome, heavyhanded; the dialog blathery and often unreadable. The only reason I kept at it was to better read and understand Demon Copperhead, so I ended up just skimming the second half. It often helped to fantasize about Copperfield stabbing a rusty knife in this-or-that evil person’s throat and watching them slowly drown in their own blood. The hope that “next page he’ll do it, for sure!” kept me going more than once.

Ten years separate this from [book:A Tale of Two Cities|1953] and it really shows: although this one shows hints of Dickens’s compassion and sense of justice, he grew up a lot in that time.

Now I eagerly go forward to Kingsolver!

There is a lot packed into this short work. Not all of it worked for me, but the ninety percent that did, wow. And the rest, it's probably a failing in me: one gift-slash-curse of mediocrity is being able to recognize genius but only myopically, where you know it's there and if you squint you can almost make it out but you know there's much more to it.

Like, Sokal Hoax. Chapter 2 is obviously a riff on pompous postmodernist windbags, with lovely echoes throughout the rest of the book. Or is it? And Heller: I thought I saw hat tips to Catch-22 several times, particularly the absurdist exchange between de Kooning and Rauschenberg. But what am I really seeing? I can tell that's the central focusing point in the book, but I lack the ability to see it in its fullness.

Erasure is much more than satire. I'd say the main theme is loneliness, with Everett tackling it from an impressive number of perspectives. Loss, too, and racism, code switching, integrity (artistic and personal), and our human need to be seen. Plus much, much more.

2024-12-07 Abandoned, p.148. Friends of mine who are smart, literate, and compassionate love this book; I just find it tedious. The Russian Master stories are meh. Saunders's over-over-overanalysis of each one is navelgazing to extremes I never imagined possible. But shrug, I'm not a writer or a literary critic nor do I GAF about the art of writing nor am I smart literate compassionate, and life is short.