Erica Simmons

Evelyn Waugh is my guilty pleasure. His books are like candy, they are so easy to read. But if they are candy, they are lemon drops coated with arsenic. Waugh's bitter, sarcastic, and completely devastating portraits of humanity warm my heart. His characters destroy each other's lives so casually, and I love it.

In The Loved One, Waugh takes on L.A. British neocolonial snobbery in post-war Southern California, set in a Disneyesque funeral home (actually a “memorial park”) and a much less classy pet cemetery (“The Happier Hunting Ground”): how much better can life be?

I have such mixed feelings about this book. Mainly, I kept being confused: is this really a book extolling the progress of modern (19th century) life, or a satire of self-satisfied Victorians who think they've figured everything out, when really they're only a few decades away from owning slaves themselves, and will also appear deeply flawed in the long view of history? Or both? I think both, but really I found the narrator so much of an arrogant boor that it was a slog to get through.

I listened to the audiobook, which was very skillfully narrated by Nick Offerman, so I'm giving him an extra star.

I blame my book club for this one. I didn't love this book, but it was fun to listen to on my morning walk to work. (I listened to the audiobook.) Lena Dunham has a great ability to describe her experiences in a way that seem to provide more generalizable insights on what it's like to grow up as an awkward, anxious, and privileged young woman in our culture. The scope of her insights may be narrow, but it is nonetheless informative, and parts of the book made me chuckle or cringe as I remembered the similarly dumb ways that have I navigated similar social and professional pressures.

This book is a powerful critique and warning about the dangers of big data: how use of algorithms at a broad scale throughout or society to inform hiring decisions, financial offerings, policing, etc. can increase inequality and ruin the lives of vulnerable individuals. As big data becomes more ubiquitous, this book provides a compelling argument for creating accountability and applying analyses in a thoughtful way to harness their potential for good and challenge their threat to do harm.

I loved this book. A gold-rush-era New Zealand epic, but with a voice that reminded me of George Eliot.