David G. Cookson's Blog, page 4

Funny, You Don't Look Autistic

Funny, You Don't Look Autistic: A Comedian's Guide to Life on the Spectrum by Michael McCreary

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Oh, this is a tall drink of water for all the misinformation and bs out there…an honest look at what it was like for this young man to grow up wired differently, to find his path through life and on the stage. This book appealed to me both as a neurotypical man and as a human…as a performer and as a person who may not have known very much about autism.

(Forgive me if I get some things wrong, I am just trying to convey how I read it.)

The book is aimed at a younger audience. But basically, there are many myths about autism that he dispels. It is not the same set of circumstances for every person. It’s not a disease. It isn’t caused by vaccines or bad parenting…it is simply a term to cover the many ways in which a brain may be wired differently. It may cause someone to be overly fixated on order, or obsessive about researching something arcane and weird…or it may manifest itself in something he called “stimming,” which may consist of actions that are meant to calm or stimulate a person…

Michael is Canadian and as of this writing he was barely in his early twenties. And yet already his experience has given him so much insight into human nature and the many ways in which autism is mischaracterized. There is so much bs out there and he corrects the record in a funny way.

From the Back cover:
“Autism isn’t real”
Stop Reading the YouTube Comments section.
“People with autism have no sense of humor.”
“Maybe the joke just wasn’t that funny.”

(People who claim that nobody has a sense of humor need to hear this. Humor is sooooooooo democratizing. There isn’t really any way to fake it. If people laugh, if you can make people laugh, you are funny. If you can consistently make people laugh, you are probably funny. If you are consistently whining that nobody can laugh at anything anymore, maybe the jokes just aren’t that good.)
But the best line in this book that is full of good lines and great insights is one that could apply to anyone:

“It finally clicked that I can’t live my life getting hung up on the thoughts of a select few.”

Because we all do that. The person at the traffic light who is honking their horn because you are not making that illegal right on red? He is not paying your traffic ticket.
The person making fun of you because you are still wearing a mask in 2024?
They are not paying your medical bills. And they have no idea what your situation is at home. Maybe you have an immune-compromised person who cannot get sick from whatever you may pick up out there in the world. Maybe you are just getting over getting sick.
Either way, this person does not care about you and will more than likely never be seen again.
I’m sorry…I just found that seeing the world through the eyes of someone who sees the world through this lens is liberating…

But the memoir is about how McCreary was diagnosed at 5 and found his calling as a standup comedian. It is divided into three parts and is chock full of lines that are highlighted for clarity and repeated for…more clarity. It is a breezy little book that is a great place to get to that nebulous concept of empathy (a quality humanity is sorely lacking sometimes) and…wait for it…
Understanding.
Clarity.
Patience…
I believe knowledge is the first step toward these things. And to that end, Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic is a great place to start.







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That Was Then, This is Now

That Was Then, This Is Now by S.E. Hinton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I believe that the last time I read this, I was a teenager myself. A fan of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, TWTTIN was a logical follow up. I was prompted to re-read this via a tweet from a young man who had finished it and really identified with it. For it is about loss and growing up and growing apart and I can attest as the 48-year-old man I am, that you will grow up and grow old and grow apart a lot in a life. It was for this reason that I picked this back up off the shelf and gave it another read.

TWT, TIN is about Bryon and Mark, 2 teenagers who are born to different families but are raised as brothers. They do everything together. And in typical Hinton fashion, they live on the fringes, just trying to get by and trying to make their way in the world. Bryon meets Cathy and it forms a little wedge in their brotherhood. Cathy is sister to M&M, a sweet trusting kid that Bryon and Mark look out for. They spend their days hustling pool games at Charlie’s pool hall, hanging out, cruising the strip on weekends. They get into fights, they get into trouble, but that’s just the way it is. But Bryon begins to question the life he has…and runs into the stone-cold fact that in order to grow up, sometimes you have to lose the things that hold you back.

Writing about it at this point in my life, I see the simple wisdom of it. It will happen again and again and again. People will drop in and drop out of your life and you stop worrying about it after a while. Bryon and Mark may have been raised as brothers, but in the end, Mark is the one who doesn’t want to change, who doesn’t want to grow up.

And it’s heartbreaking to see it unfold. There is a lot of understated violence in Hinton’s novels, as well as themes of isolation and teenage angst but the type of angst you feel when you are poor and desperate and from a broken home.

Maybe this sort of book feels dated now, maybe it is just as accurate today but with different problems. This is a 154-page quick read, maybe not as good as The Outsiders but definitely in a similar vein (hey, Ponyboy Curtis is a character in this one!) and worth a read.





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The Librarianist

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Bob Comet (a fanciful name for a main character) has led a life of relative quiet and simplicity, or so it seems. He lives in the same house in which he grew up. The life of an introvert, he has gravitated toward the profession of librarian…he marries a woman who winds up running off with his best friend…

But this tale begins at the latter stage of Bob Comet’s life, when he finds an old woman staring into a milk cooler at a convenience store…she is lost…she needs assistance.

Which brings him to the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, where he begins volunteering, finding friendship and community with the older folks.

The story then flashes back to Bob’s earlier life…how as a child he ran away and joined up with theater folk…how he became a librarian…then how he met his best friend, Ethan…the one who will run off with his wife and then die within a year…

I wanted to like this more than I did.
I admit, there was a twist that came fairly early in the novel that I just skimmed right over and forgot about. It is well-written and tidily plotted, but the way it cuts off after a bombshell to go back to a childhood memory kind of takes the wind out of the story taking place in the present. I was interested in Bob’s life now, but that is not the story the author wanted to focus on.

It might have actually been too tidy for what it appears to be going for…a journey through a life that is shaped by books and stories but that is in and of itself not a great story, for the ineffable reasons I can’t seem to quantify. It’s a three and a half for me, but as Goodreads doesn’t do that, I’m just giving it 4.





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1984: Julia

Julia by Sandra Newman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


George Orwell’s “1984,” about a totalitarian society which stamps out freedom so effectively (“a boot stomping on a human face forever”) is a classic of English literature. The Phrase “Big Brother” and “Ministry of Truth”, ironically named for its role in spewing out lies and misinformation, as well as War is Strength and maybe a lesser-known classic is Winston Smith’s plea that “we are the Dead” …all paint the picture and if you’ve read the story you know what happens…he falls in love with a mysterious woman who slips him a note that says, simply “I LOVE YOU.”

The woman is Julia and this book is her version of the story.

Julia is a mechanic who works in the Ministry of Truth, and for a while we see her before the fateful meeting with Winston…she has no ideology, no morals, she is a survivor, doing whatever she has to…but when she sees this scrappy little man, she is intrigued…
Julia then is a story about how such a regime would treat its women…think like the realization of Project 2025 but done in a series of Two Minutes Hates…Hate Week, Hate Month, Hate all the time, War all the Time. And an enemy that changes with the wind but also is told to be the same enemy it always was… A Big Brother would want to use women to progress the State. To give the State workers and productive little people to keep the boot firmly stamped on the face of humanity…Julia winds up being one of the lucky winners to be the mothers of the regime.

How this is achieved is one of the harder parts of the book.

It is a familiar story that takes us in a different direction from the original while also steering us back to the ending of that story…and then going beyond it.

You may ask yourself…is this necessary?

I think it is. The tone and the pitch of the novel builds on a world that was created long ago by Orwell. But Julia of this book is a fully-formed character rather than a plot device. And her story is one of a woman being used by the State. And if some people get their way, Julia will be a blueprint for the future that has yet to be written.






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Ship of the Line

Ship of the Line by Diane Carey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ship of the Line is billed as “The First Voyage of the Starship Enterprise 1701-E.” This would put it right after the events of Star Trek: Generations where (uh…spoiler alert, I guess) Riker crashed the ship and Data was overcome with emotion after finding his cat, alive in the wreckage.

This cuts to the ensuing years when Picard is no longer the Captain and the Enterprise-E is commissioned for a shakedown voyage with her new skipper, Captain Morgan Bateson.

If you are a Trekker, you will understand how this book synthesizes small one-off characters from various episodes and puts them along long-timers, Next Generation (TNG) regulars and at least one character from The Original Series. (TOS)

You would recognize Captain Bateson from the one episode where the TNG crew had been trapped in a time loop. He is the unfortunate captain they find at the end of the episode who has been stuck in the loop for almost 90 years, played by none other than Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer. So, this is the image you have in your head and in fact his face is on the cover (I wonder if he gets royalties for that?) And that Star Trek has many avenues by which a person could be and have been displaced from their own time, we also see Scotty…who as fans know, had placed himself in a transporter loop to survive into the day of TNG…

Three years after Bateson’s rescue from the Expanse, or the Rift, or the Loop or whatever the hell we are calling it…he is more or less up to speed with TNG times….

But Bateson is old school, coming from a time when the Klingons were still the enemy. And in fact, before being lost in a time loop, he had battled Klingon commander, Kozara…who (due to the longer life spans of Klingons) is still alive in the TNG era…

Picard is commissioned on a secret mission to Cardassia (keep up) where we run into Madred (There are Five lights) and oh hey, Spock makes a cameo, too.

And away we go…

Tensions are laid bare as Bateson’s old school mind meets the more enlightened crew of the Next Generation. Nominally, this is a TNG story, but it is apparent that everyone is going to get a mention. Riker tries to appeal to Bateson’s sense of reason as he implores him to hold off on a hopeless attack on the Klingon commander who has spent the last 90 years living with his dishonor of losing in battle to Bateson. But as the Klingon proverb tells us, revenge is a dish best served cold…and it is very cold in space.

One of the small joys of reading something like this is that you imagine a writer seeking a challenge of using the smallest bits from many sources and many episodes and having fun with it. These are considered “Lost Years” because they do not have a movie between Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact (And why would they?). Thus…. we have these books.

Fun fiction for the casual as well as hardcore fan.







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Moby Dick

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Moby Dick

The challenge of reading the classic novel, one that was written before the invention of the typewriter…

624 pages of a story that can be broken down pretty simply. A young man goes on a whaling ship with a madman, Captain Ahab… who is hell bent of getting revenge for the injury given to him by a white whale they have named Moby-Dick. That Captain Ahab never gives up, and can never be talked out of this mission; that he will sacrifice his whole crew to get revenge on a creature who cannot have a rational understanding of his actions, speaks more about the folly of mankind than anything else. We are a small, petty people. And we are capable of blind rage and single-minded focus at the expense of everything. It is no wonder that Moby-Dick is a template for all themes of revenge and the futility of it…why Star Trek used it multiple times…and why the White Whale is a metaphor for a thing you seek that remains just outside your grasp.

But first you have to deal with the nuts and bolts of Melville’s prose. As a modern reader, and a reader of more modern books, I see a book that was not restrained by editing or flow. Melville writes whatever he thinks is important, even if it isn’t (trust me, you do not need to know this much about whales, maybe just watch Star Trek 4). Many short chapters are taken to explain some facet of whales or whaling or biblical stories. 100 pages in, and you still aren’t even in the water.

That’s just how the book is.

We follow the story of a young man, Ishmael, who becomes odd fast friends with a ‘savage’ named Queequeg, who shares a room and a bed with our narrator. Ishmael’s motive is to travel the world in the only way he can: as an employee, sailing on a whaling ship.

It is just his misfortune that the Captain of the whaling ship is the one-legged Captain Ahab. A man who makes no bones about what he wants. Following the writing dictum of Kurt Vonnegut (Who wasn’t born yet when this was written), your character has to want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.

Ahab wants the white whale. He is the originator of the white whale metaphor. And 100 or more chapters of varying length and nautical terms and old-timey language, we get there.

I won’t lie…it’s a slog. I skipped many of the footnotes, I groaned at some of the more egregious explanations (the one about the color white just kills me). It could benefit from a modern edit which would savagely take 200-300 pages out and distill it to something faster paced and exciting (I have the graphic novel of same story in my reading queue). But cutting some slack…this was 1851…and Melville was probably given leeway by the fact that he was a writer and people actually read books back then.

But the story is both timeless and a throwback to when whaling was a way of life and a ticket to see the world while living in cramped quarters with questionable people. Take what you want from it. It is both a difficult read and an easy one. The short chapters help. I skipped pages at times because they didn’t seem like they mattered. I skipped footnotes altogether. I am told that the writing style was more confessional than was common at the time.

But Moby Dick is a classic…who am I to say otherwise?

This book was written in my hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at a place called Arrowhead which I’ve never actually bothered to visit. Maybe I will now.





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Rest is Resistance.

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Rest is Resistance.

Every morning, I wake up and curse at the mirror. F------…what is this?
It’s 5 in the morning and some people are already at work.

My life is a little easier. I get up and I don’t have to be there until 6:30. I do my work and I leave and after a daily detox that culminates in a nap, I am free…

I work a job where the grind is real. Everyone is always grinding…doubles, triples, working your day off, working holidays, etc.…

I used to be like that…not to that extreme, but I would work my day off. I would pick up shifts, sign the book and do continuous service. Part of it seemed necessary, part of it was just because I was trying to pay off a credit card debt that had followed me since my early 20’s.

But it was a grind. I’d sleep for 4 hours and consider it a good sleep. And something about the grind...spending 20 hours a day for that money…just tore away at me. I fantasized about what it would be like to just work 8 hours and go home. All my worst days would be the days I was there for an extra shift.

Then one day in 2016 we got a new contract and a bonus that everyone was pissed about…it wasn’t enough. It was a slap in the face…

But I took that money, put it in a special account that I would use for covering expenses beyond my normal pay…

And I decided now was the time to stop the grind.

And now I nap every day…

And I’m happier.
For me, it is not revolutionary; it is something I take for granted. I have the time and I have the support.

But that is my privilege.
And that is the perspective of the book. That rest has been stolen from those in the margins. That exhaustion keeps people from the revolution. That Capitalism is inherently exploitative, built on the backs of slavery and genocide.

‘Rest is Resistance.’ Exhaustion is keeping us from seeing our divinity.
‘Grind culture is violence and violence creates trauma.'
‘We will rest. We will rest. We will rest…’

It is a call for the thing that people need the most.

I picked this up because I follow The Nap Ministry on Twitter.

In many ways Rest is Resistance could be my sign that I am on the right path, albeit via a different way. I cannot claim to identify with the perspective of any group other than my own. But I nod my head at words that call out capitalism as a brutal system that doesn’t care about your well-being.
This is a manifesto. It will be repetitive. It doesn’t always make for the best reading. It might not make for a great book to read for pleasure. You might not even agree with everything. Or you might not be ready for it.

But if you are, then proceed. It will get you thinking and questioning why we feel the need to push ourselves and our bodies past the point of exhaustion.





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Overdue.

Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library by Amanda Oliver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reckoning with the public library.

Part memoir, part social commentary, part confessional…Overdue is a book written by a former librarian which addresses many of the issues of a misunderstood profession. A profession that training does not prepare a person for.

I worked in a library for a little over two years and in that time I saw many of the same people coming in and spending their days within the walls of this comfortable place with bathrooms and heat and newspapers.

Which serves as a bulwark against the cold New England winters. Homeless people spent their days there, along with high school students, solo travelers and the many varied people who make up the public. And this library was open late. And the librarian was always the first line of defense in an emergency, either medical or mental health related.

Oliver writes of things that seem familiar, while questioning the mission as stated by the institutions themselves, who declare there will be light for all…while in reality the library, like many other institutions, has a basis in white supremacy where black and brown voices are underrepresented.

Overdue can be a bit of a mess at times. But it all rings true. 4 stars.




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The Boy's Club

The Boys' Club by Erica Katz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Alex Vogel, fresh off graduation from Harvard, arrives at Manhattan’s prestigious Klasko & Fitch. She is low on the totem pole, and finds herself looking for an “in.” Soon she falls in with the hyper competitive and ultra stressful world of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A).

Soon she is working her way up while realizing that more than half the job is entertaining clients with parties and non-stop drinking. There are many late-night meetings: securing deals and making the big money that pulls her out of the normal and into a whole new tax bracket, replete with sophisticated tastes in wine and food and clothes. It is seductive and exciting but takes its toll on her home life. It is a cutthroat world that demands late nights and sacrifices that simply make living an ordinary life impossible.

But as the title suggests, it is in fact a boy’s club, replete with all the sexual harassment and overtones.

The book is framed via the foreshadowing chapter headings where she is answering questions about an incident that will be revealed much later in the book. And what results is about as raw a condemnation of the corporate world that you may ever see.

Erica Katz’s first novel is a slow burn but it works.




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Making It So...

Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a delightful book that is like spending time with a good friend…telling all his stories and offering all his many insights on an acting career that spans 6 decades.

Patrick Stewart is most famous for being the Captain of the Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Professor Xavier in the X-Men series. At 400 plus pages, he will definitely hit a lot of the high points, as well as the low points. It may be tempting to want to skip to the Star Trek stuff…but I found his tales of his childhood fascinating as well. Comparisons to a Charles Dickens novel seem appropriate. How growing up poor in the north of England instilled him with a ‘poverty mentality’ deep into his life, and how even after years of being on stage he still learns and maintains a youthful playfulness.

The book dutifully chronicles his ascent from ‘Unknown Shakesperean Actor’ to one of the most recognized actors in the world. Along the way are many pitfalls and regrets and his humility in the face of all of it is refreshing. This was a wonderful journey and I was glad to be able to spend time with him on it…




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