CROSSETTCOPIA

I’ve never seen the movie version of Contact, so I’m not sure how much of the book tracks with the movie. Which is to say that if you didn’t like the movie, don’t prejudge the book as I’m guessing that they’ve dropped a lot of the deeper dialogue that made Contact fantastic.

I think the most analogous book I’ve read would be Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, although Carl Sagan doesn’t ascribe to the satire that Vonnegut excels in. Rather the book well traverses the intersection between Science and Religion, particularly in the grandness of the universe. Halloway’s excursions to meet with the religious leaders Billy Jo Raskin and Palmer Joss, and then her individual conversations with Joss and Hadden really allow Sagan to transform the novel out of the bounds of “science fiction” and make the whole greater than its parts.

Frequently when I read books I’m looking for plot development, and Contact certainly had some of that, even being listed as a Top 100 Thrillers for the ending. But while the ending was satisfying, I again have to identify the various conversations that Halloway has with the other luminaries as the highlights of the book. I think those could be separately clipped and, without any knowledge of the broader book, be studied as entities unto themselves as guideposts for the continued clash between science and religion.

We Need Librarians More Than Ever by John Spencer

Source [x]

This book was a little bit of a mixed bag. I found the overall storyline to be relatively captivating* with some interesting passages discussing the ramifications of time travel - affect on the present, diverging time streams, etc. However I frequently felt, this being the 29th book in the Discworld series, that I was missing broader storylines. While the two main characters were somewhat fleshed out, there were a lot of details that felt glossed over. The beginning of the book references lilacs, which through the passage of the book left me unsure if it was a reference to another part of the Discworld series, before making a callback appearance at the end. But that sorta set the tone for the entire book - you feel like you’re enjoying it, but aren’t sure how much you’re supposed to understand or not understand about the various characters. For instance there are a group of monks, for lack of a better term, and they seem like icebergs in the book - you get 10% and it seems like 90% is hidden. I’m not sure if that was purposeful by Pratchett, or whether their storyline has already been explored in one of the first 28 books.

Starting off this book, I really was worried I’d have cavities from how sugary sweet it would be. I mean, popular teenage girl dies and then relives that same last day over and over trying to undo her wrongs? I’d expect to see that plot description as an after-school special.

However, it actually turned out to be a pretty good book! The main character was better developed than I expected. There were good reveals about the surrounding characters that also provided depth but still felt true to life. And the final chapter, appreciating the small bits of life and saying goodbye to family and friends who don’t know it’s the final goodbye - it was some real heartbreaking writing.

In American vernacular architecture, a witch window (also known as a Vermont window, among other names) is a window (usually a double-hung sash window, occasionally a single-sided casement window) placed in the gable-end wall of a house and rotated approximately 1/8 of a turn (45 degrees) from the vertical, leaving it diagonal, with its long edge parallel to the roof slope.

Witch windows are found almost exclusively in or near the U.S. state of Vermont, generally in the central and northern parts of the state.They are principally installed in farmhouses from the 19th century.

Source: [x]

There are some books that just seem written for a Reader. I purposefully capitalize Reader because I’m not just talking run of the mill book readers, but those whose world revolves around the books they’ve read, are reading, and are waiting to read. The people who define different epochs of their lives by the books or genre they were reading at a time. People whose memory of events are jogged by what book they read at the time, or the reverse, reading a passage immediately brings them back to the where and when they first read it.

Books that fall into this category include: If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino; Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón; S. by Doug Dorst (and JJ Abrams); and now The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers.

I had experienced Moers before when I read, almost a decade ago, The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear. I don’t remember any of the plot details but I do remember being pleasantly surprised by the experience. And while I can’t be sure it’s for the same reason, I thoroughly enjoyed The City of Dreaming Books! 

I think what Moers does best is he makes the reading experience so immersive. Rather than just mention that the world of the novel is filled with books, he gives titles and authors. He writes passages from their works, delineates them into different writing “eras”, describes each library he encounters, how so many of the homes are built out of books.

Helen Phillips best works are all about isolation. Take a character, place them in an otherwise unremarkable life, and then remove all the connections to the world around us we take for granted. Strip away the small talk at the grocery store, bumping into co-workers at work, and make the setting of the character their entire universe. She did that extraordinarily well in The Beautiful Bureaucrat, and did it well (albeit slightly less so) in The Need.

The Need focuses on a mother, Molly, and her two children, with her husband away on a work trip for a week. There is some opening of the universe when Molly goes to work and interacts with her two co-workers, but even there the relationships seem at arm’s length. Molly is primarily defined by her role as a mother, and so even at work she seems unconnected.

I read this book on a week that my own partner was gone for a week, and so it gave me a better glimpse of that sense of isolation and separation. You talk to your partner, try and share the stories of the day, but it’s hard to capture it all and you feel pulled in two different directions - sharing your partner’s world while attending to the needs of home.

Honestly, I thought heading into this book that it’d be a dry academic reading on trans issues and the trans community. I worried about how well I’d be able to identify or follow along the author’s narrative, if one even existed. Instead, I was blown away.

Serano does an excellent job exploring how the many issues of the trans community derive from the cisgender/cissexual societal setup. For instance, and one of my favorite examples, society has a much bigger problem handling femininity in males than masculinity in females. Serano draws a line from there to: the mistaken belief that male-to-female transitions are much more prevalent than female-t0-male; the predominant focus on male-to-female transitioning process - both on sexual transitions as well as the physical aesthetic (watching makeup being applied and jewelry added) even though many male-to-female trans don’t choose to lean into femininity; and the persistent question of why someone would “choose” to give up their male privilege.

From a certain angle, Saturn’s moon Mimas looks like the Death Star and has a Pac-Man-shaped heat signature. 

Growing up in the U.S., we are taught the primacy of the Western medical system, usually subliminally. As children, we receive shots “because the doctor said so,” go through all the various tests as we grow, and have our statistics charted and compared. Television shows glamorize the medical system. And this isn’t just a U.S. modus operandi. Throughout the western world, we’re brought up to believe the medical profession has our best interests in mind. But.

It’s interesting we almost never hear a But when it comes to the knowledge of Western medicine. So here goes - but what happens when two competing systems of care come into conflict? When the Western style of reliance on pharmaceuticals encounters a style that encompasses a much larger universe of interrelation, e.g. a banging door allows a spirit to escape which causes a seizure? Fadiman uses the case of Lia Lee, a Hmong child in California suffering from epilepsy, to explore the breakdown when Western medicine can’t see any path but its own. More broadly, the book explores the history and the culture of the Hmongs, and how a lack of cultural appreciation, even at a minimum cultural understanding, can have disastrous results in the life of a child.