C.A. Gray's Blog, page 73

Review of Jackaby

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I picked up this book because of the cover… I mean, come on. Isn’t that gorgeous?! It’s got the silhouette thing going, with an image inside the silhouette, and the font… wow. I always download the e-book free samples of books first, and if that hooks me, then I’ll buy the audio version. I went for this one because even though not a whole lot happened in the first few pages, the story did introduce title character R.F. Jackaby— and he’s basically Sherlock Holmes. I LOVE Sherlock. So no matter what the rest of the story was like, I was in. (If you’ve read Uncanny Valley, you might have noticed that Francis is very Holmesian, too. That’s totally intentional.)

Because Jackaby is SO much like Sherlock, I likened the story to the originals by Conan Doyle all the way through. The part of John Watson in this case is played by Ms. Abigail Rook, a teenager who ran away from home, eager for adventure. Jackaby hires her as his investigative assistant, and she helps him solve crimes. But there’s one original twist: Jackaby is a Seer. That is, he sees past the Mundane, and sees the truth—which may involve trolls, banshees, gremlins, werewolves, or any number of other supernatural creatures. He shares his flat with a ghost named Jenny. His last investigative assistant got turned into a duck—and while he could change back now, he refuses to do so because he’s “stubborn.” These little quirks made the story, I thought: for example, Abigail narrates the story in the first person, and she omits Chapter 13 “by request of her employer.” There’s another character whom Jackaby says sees the world topsy-turvy, and sometimes in opposites; it’s very hard to determine when she is describing a real or an imagined event. Abigail asks if she’s crazy, and Jackaby’s response is that she’s a hero: “she’s saved the world many times over. The fact that it was all in her mind does not lessen the bravery of it.” (Loved that line. It made me think, too… a simple task for one person might seem monumental to another with a different worldview. And from the outside, who would know?)

In every other respect, though, the story was a typical murder mystery, and I honestly got a little bored with it. The characters had potential, but I felt that they lacked any sense of internal conflict or arc from beginning to end. Jackaby is emotionless and totally unflappable, and his relationship with Abigail is strictly professional—they don’t otherwise seem to care about each other at all. Abigail is a player in the story, but she’s not really trying to learn anything new about herself. She’s not emotionally invested in any of the characters (aside from having a crush on a relatively peripheral one). She’s curious about the proceedings, but I didn’t feel like they had any real meaning to her except for when she found herself physically threatened. I think if the story held personal meaning for Abigail somehow, or perhaps if Jackaby had been flawed in an intriguing way, this could have been a five star book. As it was…

My rating: ***

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Review of Alexander Hamilton, Revolutionary

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I picked up this book at the same time as I started listening to “Hamilton: An American Musical”, alternating between them so that I’d listen to the musical rendition of the history I’d just heard. And… wow. I wish I was a history teacher, just so I could assign my students to do the same thing. The book alone makes the story come alive, but adding the music gives it a much more powerful emotional punch.

Hamilton is one of America’s Founding Fathers that I really never knew much about before, probably because he was never a president—yet from the beginning, Hamilton’s greatest obsession was for honor and glory. Born a “bastard” at a time when such a label could scar a person for life, Hamilton’s early life was a string of misfortunes. The only reason he ever became noteworthy at all was because he became a published poet, and his orphaned and penniless status attracted public sympathies. Strangers sent him from his home in the Caribbean to college in New York, where he became a lawyer. His natural talents for speaking and writing later earned the attention of George Washington, with whom he had a complicated relationship. Washington never had children of his own, and Hamilton never had a father, nor any family to care for him. Washington thought of Hamilton as the son he’d never had, but his manner was so gruff that Hamilton apparently didn’t know it, at least during the Revolutionary War period. He persisted in calling Washington “Your Excellency,” growing resentful that Washington kept him at his side rather than allowing him to lead a battalion. Eventually this led to a falling out between the two men, and while Washington would have apologized immediately, Hamilton was too stubborn.

Years went by. Hamilton essentially created the American banking system while merely trying to help out his brother-in-law, and the documents he wrote on their operation were so good that nearly every other bank copied his plans. After the war was over, he realized that the loose Articles of Confederation—mostly an economic document—would not be enough to hold the colonies together. Along with John Jay and James Madison, Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers, essentially birthing the Federalist Party and attempting to convince the nation that they required a strong central government in order to survive as a nation. From this, the Constitutional Convention followed—and when the new U.S. Constitution was finally ratified, parades in the streets called it Hamilton’s great achievement. His rift with Washington now mended, it was Hamilton who insisted that Washington alone must be the nation’s first president. Hamilton became one of his closest advisors, and Washington appointed Hamilton the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Using the banks he’d helped create as templates, Hamilton created the first National Bank.

Given all of his accomplishments, his fame, his hunger for glory, and his close ties with Washington, the fact that Hamilton never became a president—never even ran for president—seems incredibly strange. But it can be explained by a single indiscretion: Mariah Reynolds. While Alexander always had a bit of a reputation with the ladies (he married Elizabeth Schuyler, but had a very flirty relationship with his sister-in-law Angelica too), he slept with Mariah while his wife and children were out of town. Then he received a blackmail letter from Mariah’s husband, demanding payment for his silence on the matter. Hamilton paid Reynolds, and he and Mariah continued their affair for some time. But the payments later came to the attention of Hamilton’s political enemies, who construed the payments as thinly veiled embezzlement from the government treasury. He was forced to explain the real situation. Hamilton never ran for president for fear that his affair would be publicly exposed, but his caution was all for naught in the end: it came out anyway. Rather than let it go quietly, Hamilton published a 95 page pamphlet, establishing that he had committed adultery, but not treason. Once again, Hamilton’s honor came first. But the pamphlet humiliated Eliza and his family, and did little to improve Hamilton’s reputation.

And what of Aaron Burr? The two men met in 1776, and led parallel lives in many ways. Both were orphans, both accomplished lawyers with high ambitions, and they even practiced law down the street from one another. Naturally, they found themselves frequent rivals. Burr was the quintessential politician in Hamilton’s eyes, never standing for anything except his own advancement. Burr ran for the New York senate against Hamilton’s father-in-law and won, positioning himself to later run for the presidency against Thomas Jefferson when it was clear that John Adams would not win re-election. The race between the two was deadlocked, but Hamilton’s public support may well have thrown the election to Jefferson in the end—a man who, until then, had been Hamilton’s bitter enemy. His denouncement of Burr precipitated Burr’s challenge to a duel. Even though Hamilton’s eldest son Phillip had already been killed in a duel (defending Hamilton’s honor), Hamilton accepted Burr’s challenge. Dueling was illegal in New York, so they had to cross state lines into New Jersey to do it. Hamilton had no intention of shooting to kill, but he knew Burr might not be so generous, so he spent his last few days outlining his will. He left his wife and remaining children destitute, unable to pay back his debts without resorting to charity. As a public servant, he’d never earned enough to support a wife and eight children. Still, he could not let a challenge go unanswered.

Hamilton probably should have been one of our first presidents, all things considered. He was brilliant, and in many respects he was a great man. Yet his obviously flawed worldview on the subject of his own honor dogged him throughout his life, and ultimately killed him. It was a tragedy, but a fascinating read nonetheless, made all the more compelling by the accompanying “soundtrack” of “Hamilton: An American Musical.”

My rating: *****

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Review of Norse Mythology

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Mythology in general has always fascinated me—I actually studied it a decent amount for the Piercing the Veil trilogy—but it’s rare to find a volume of myths so entertainingly told. Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology is timely, too, considering its characters have been on the big screen quite a bit recently. As I listened, I pictured Thor, Loki, and Odin as Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, and Anthony Hopkins—particularly since Gaiman’s humor fits perfectly with the kind of witty repartee you might expect from a Marvel script. I did not realize when I saw Thor: Ragnarok that Ragnarok is the Norse version of Armageddon, though. (Here’s my review of the film version of Thor: Ragnarok, in case you care).

What struck me most about these tales was how very similar some of them are to biblical stories. I noticed this when studying mythology in general, too: certain archetypes and tales recur across many different cultures. One of these is the dying-and-reborn-god archetype, fulfilled by Odin in the Norse tradition. In order to gain wisdom, Odin sacrifices himself to himself, hanging for nine days on the World Tree, after which he comes back to life. (Sounds an awful lot like Jesus’ death on a cross: a sacrifice to God, with whom he is one, and subsequent resurrection.) Other examples of this archetype are Enlil, the Mesopotamian god, Tammuz, the Babylonian god, and Osiris, the Egyptian god. The Mayans, Incans, and Aztecs had similar stories.

Ragnarok also sounds remarkably like the biblical book of Revelation. In most of the Norse stories, Loki is a trickster, more wily than evil (and he’s actually my favorite character). But in the end, he becomes the archetype of Satan, bound for his crimes in the belly of the earth until the end of time (as Satan is to be bound in Revelation for a thousand years). After that he is released, and comes to wreak havoc upon the earth. There is a Midgard serpent (like the beast in Revelation); the sun and moon are stripped from the sky, and there is a great poetical battle described in metaphor. In Revelation, this becomes a new heaven and a new earth—and in Ragnarok, one man and one woman (Ask and Embla—which sounds a lot like Adam and Eve) seek refuge at the World Tree (the Garden of Eden?) and become the father and mother of all mankind once more.

The fact that so many cultures independently develop such similar tales intrigues me, and this is part of what I explored in the Piercing the Veil trilogy. Perhaps it’s merely that there was an original source text from which they all derive, but that seems unlikely if the stories predate inter-cultural communication. In the case of flood myths, it seems the most rational explanation is that there actually was a great flood, and unrelated cultures all recorded it in their own fashion. But the death and rebirth of a god, especially one who dies on a tree and sacrifices himself to himself? The similarities of the apocalyptic prophecies, and the creation stories? It just seems odd. Not likely a coincidence.

Anyway, Gaiman’s narrative voice remains one of my favorites. I can’t think of a better author to make ancient mythology come alive. Highly recommended.

Also, that cover: wow. Gorgeous!

My rating: *****

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Review of Wonder Woman: Warbringer

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Let me preface this with a very unpopular opinion, and just get it out of the way right now: I absolutely *hated* the most recent Wonder Woman film (my review of it is here, if you care). So I didn’t have super high expectations for this book. But I see it advertised on end caps every time I go to Barnes and Noble, and I loved Wonder Woman when I was three, so… I downloaded the sample. It was surprisingly engaging, and the ratings were super high, so I gave it a listen.

To my surprise, in the novel, Diana was a much more well-rounded and believable character—even an underdog among the Amazons. She had a good back story, and a need to prove herself which drove her choices to try to rid the humans of the curse of the Warbringer (carried by a girl named Aliyah, of Helen of Troy’s bloodline). While she’s incredibly strong, of course, the Diana of the novel was not the scantily babe kicking the crap out of hoards of armed men in slo-mo. She still had the fish-out-of-water sequence that she had in the film when she enters the human realm, but this time she is in modern day New York, not in historical WWII Britain. While I found the film’s sequence irritating because most of it centered on Diana shopping for clothes that emphasize her hotness and men ogling her, in the novel she is simply innocent and trying to understand the new world in which she suddenly finds herself. In the novel, her strength is believable. I actually root for her.

One surprise in this YA novel was the paucity of romance. There is some, but it’s very minor—and actually, for a novel about a superhuman immortal woman, I liked that. The idea of her falling in love with a normal guy just didn’t work for me. The story was largely a buddy novel, emphasizing the sisterly bond between Diana and Aliyah, and then also their friends Nim and Theo and Aliyah’s brother Jason. For the most part, I liked their dynamics, although I thought some of the snarky comments were a little forced. My biggest complaint about the story was the twist at the end—I won’t spoil it, but honestly, I didn’t see it coming because the story didn’t support it. It felt like it happened just because there needed to be a twist. But the story was still very entertaining, far more than I expected it to be… particularly considering the over-saturation of the American entertainment market with comic book retellings.

My rating: ****

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Review of The Body Electric

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I almost never read e-books because my attention span is too short (sad as that is to say). If I’m doing something else at the same time, I have far more patience—but if I’m a captive audience, a book has to be really good for me to make it past page 20 or so.

I got The Body Electric on sale, and I think I picked it up because of the title (and mostly the unexpected organization of the words—The Electric Body would have been far less intriguing than The Body Electric), and because of the cover. I love the silhouette look, and the collection of images outside the silhouette is great. I’ve seen other book covers do this too—it’s definitely a trend at the moment (though not yet quite as ubiquitous as zooming in on a character’s eye, or half their face, or the body without the head… or a girl in a ballgown. Love those trends too, but at this point I think they’re overdone. This is how my author marketing brain works, in case you care.)

ANYway, the futuristic world of The Body Electric actually felt a LOT like my world of Uncanny Valley: Artificial Intelligence, nanobots, retinal access to the internet, cyborg clones of humans, etc… and that was probably why I was so captivated by it. The main character, Ella (side note: that’s a very popular name for heroines these days. I bet there will be an explosion of baby girls named Ella in this generation) is the daughter of two brilliant scientists. Her mother created the Reverie mental spa, where people can relive their best memories in such a way that it feels like they are current (and this is a little like the film Total Recall). But she begins to suffer from the eventually fatal Hebb’s Disease, an illness that desensitizes her nerves so that she cannot feel pain. Nanobots can help her to repair from this, but only to a point, because there’s a threshold of the number of nanobots a person can have without developing the also fatal “bot brain.” Her father did research to try to save her mother, but Ella doesn’t understand much more about what he did than that. Her father is already dead when the story begins, supposedly killed by terrorists who didn’t like his work. The government approaches Ella to enlist her help in utilizing her parents’ research in their service, to work against the terrorists.

But a strange boy approaches Ella at her father’s grave, and seems to be familiar both with her and with her father. She has never seen him before, but in her dreams as well as her reveries, her father keeps appearing and telling her to “wake up,” and leading her to information about the boy, Jack. Since we are in Ella’s head, we follow the trail of clues along with her to discover who he is, and why she can’t remember him. If you’re guessing there will be a romance between Ella and Jack, you’re right—but while it is occasionally roll-your-eyes cheesy (they’re at one point hiding in a refrigerated morgue together, and all she can think about is the way his body feels against hers? Give me a break). But for all that, romance is actually a very small part of the story. Most of the plot is nonstop action, with twists and turns and revelations that kept me hooked. I also really appreciated how short her chapters were (again: short attention span. What can I say, I’m an American, and a millennial), and while I keep writing trilogies so I guess I can’t say much, it was actually refreshing that this book was a stand-alone. I didn’t have to get the next book to find out how the story ends. Definitely worth a read.

My rating: **** 1/2

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Review of Anansi Boys

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Neil Gaiman has one of the most distinctive narrative voices I’ve ever read. He seamlessly blends the real world, and even current pop culture, with fantasy, and in such a droll way–as if, Well, of course you can move between worlds and dimensions. Of course there’s a cave at the end/beginning of the world where the gods hang out. Why wouldn’t there be? Nobody is ever too surprised by the fantastical occurrences in his story, nor are any of the characters overly dramatic even about otherwise dramatic events. They take everything in stride, tongue-in-cheek, as if completely aware that they’re characters in a book written by a British author with a wry sense of humor. He is hysterical too: even in just the way he describes the simplest scenes, I often find myself laughing out loud. Gaiman has this way of putting into words exactly what everyone else thinks but can’t find the words to describe, which is precisely why he’s so funny. His humor has that sense of the understated, yet obvious. After reading his books, I feel like I have a fairly decent idea what it would be like to hang out with him.

Anansi Boys certainly encompasses all of this, and I’d say that even though the plot is intriguing, the narrative voice is the story’s most distinctive feature. Anansi is essentially the trickster god, which I’ve always heard portrayed as the Br’r Rabbit—but apparently in some cultures, he’s a spider. The story follows Fat Charlie Nancy, Anansi’s son (and Fat Charlie isn’t actually fat, but his father gave him that name when he was young, and the name stuck). Fat Charlie hates his father for all the jokes he’s played on him throughout the years, and they are estranged until Fat Charlie’s mother dies. Anansi makes one last grand appearance at her deathbed, and then he dies too. Through rumor, essentially, Fat Charlie learns that Anansi is a god, and that he, Fat Charlie, has a brother whom he can summon if he tells a spider he wants to see him. Drunk and half kidding, Fat Charlie tries it–and his brother Spider appears the next morning. Spider is in every way what Fat Charlie wishes he could be: where Fat Charlie is bashful, Spider is confident. Where Fat Charlie is backwards, Spider is smooth. He seems to just make things happen. People give him things for free. Women fall all over him. He, apparently, got all the ‘god’ genes while Fat Charlie got all the ‘ordinary’ ones. Spider decides he likes Fat Charlie’s apartment, and he likes Fat Charlie’s fiancé Rosie, and he’s going to stay for awhile. So Fat Charlie seeks help in a land of mythical gods, willing to make a deal—any deal—to get his brother to go away. Mayhem of epic proportions ensues, of course.

The biggest negative I’ve found to Gaiman stories in general is that his fantasy is distinctively “adult”—while fantasy usually seems to be geared towards kids, for him nothing is really off-limits. Some of the stories I’ve read in the past have been quite gruesome at times (I can still recall one particularly awful torture scene, yet described with Gaiman’s characteristic nonchalance and even humor). Anansi Boys had a bit of that, but nothing over-the-top. This one was mostly light-hearted, funny, and (as always) incredibly creative.

My review: **** 1/2

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Review of Light Falls: Space, Time, and An Obsession of Einstein

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I generally don’t listen to non-fiction audiobooks, because I have a hard time absorbing the information. This book was an exception, mostly because it was on sale in Audible… but also because it was a dramatization of history more than anything else. Narrated by physicist Brian Greene (I’ve read other books he’s written, and they’re usually a lot heavier than this), it’s also “performed” by a full cast, with Paul Rudd playing Einstein and several other actors playing scientists with whom he worked and studied. I’ve read biographies of Einstein before, but this really brought it to life, and Greene manages to take very complex concepts and boil them down to their essence in word pictures. Not an easy task! For example: I knew that Einstein’s cosmological constant was a mathematical value he added in to his equations in order to render the universe static (which it wasn’t). I did not realize (though it retrospect I suppose it should have been obvious) that the “constant” was the exact amount necessary to cancel out the force of gravity. Later this inclusion was shown to be false–the universe is in fact expanding–and Einstein admitted that he was in error. (I’d also heard the apparent rumor that he’d called it the “biggest blunder of his life,” though apparently a reporter said this for him.)

You wouldn’t think the narrative of scientific discovery would necessarily seem gripping, but particularly because Greene manages to help the reader understand the nature of the quandaries with which Einstein was grappling, we can feel his frustration as he tries time and again to solve the problem. His moments of insight, and the triggers that led to them, help the reader to understand just how “outside the box” a thinker Einstein really was: for instance, the “happiest thought of his life” was the moment when he realized that if a man jumps off a roof, he will, during his descent, be weightless. This insight allowed Einstein to recognize that he could treat gravity as a kind of acceleration. He had no idea how to approach gravity as a heretofore unknown entity, but the equations for acceleration were well characterized and understood. Those equations allowed him to push past that particular road block in pursuit of General Relativity.

Most of Einstein’s discoveries came as flashes of insight, as he sat alone, pondering thought experiments. While the widely circulated tale that Einstein failed math is false (what actually happened was they changed the grading scales, but according to both scales he was at the top of the class), he did enlist the assistance of other scientists in mathematically describing his insights as equations. I also didn’t know that there was any debate that Einstein alone came up with General Relativity—but apparently David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) raced him to the finish line after Einstein explained the problem to him, actually publishing five days before Einstein did (though whether his insights were truly his own or borrowed from Einstein is unclear). Einstein was so nervous Hilbert would beat him that when Hilbert offered to have him over for dinner to explain what he’d come up with, Einstein wouldn’t go, for fear that he’d have to admit that after a decade of toil, he’d been “scooped” in the end. It humanizes him.

The book was quite short: probably only an hour or so, since the second half of it was an interview between Greene and Paul Rudd as they discussed Einstein. That was also entertaining, since Rudd asks the questions that any non-scientist might ask. It’s a nice blend of history and astrophysics, told in a way that most people will both understand and enjoy. Also: great title and cover!!!

My rating: ****

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Review of Julie

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My mom read this book to me when I was little—probably in elementary school sometime. (I’d all but forgotten about Catherine Marshall until my husband mentioned a book by Peter Marshall, her husband, that we ought to read together sometime.) It’s always interesting to revisit a story I only knew as a child to see how it hits me differently as an adult. In this case I remembered nearly nothing about it, except for really one spectacular scene at the end, and a vague recollection of a love triangle (which turned out to be a love square: one girl, three guys).

The story follows 18-year old Julie Wallace during the Great Depression. Her family moves to the small town of Alderton after her father abandons his post as a pastor and instead buys the struggling Alderton newspaper. To make ends meet, her father has only one employee, and Julie eventually becomes one of the primary reporters on the paper, even though she is still in high school. The primary conflict is the fact that the low elevation Alderton community is only protected from the massive Kissawa River by a dam which is in sad need of repairs. But because of where it is situated, the dam is the sole property of the wealthy Tom MacKeever Senior, who owns a country club. MacKeever refuses to perform the needed repairs, because doing so would bankrupt him. Every time there is a heavy rain, the Alderton community tends to flood, in part because the waters of the lake are only a few feet below the top of the dam. The Wallace family’s fight against the MacKeevers is reminiscent of George Bailey’s fight against Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life”: it’s David vs Goliath, and as the Wallaces resist, things only go from bad to worse. But the more impossible things look, the more spectacular the victory from unexpected quarters. I definitely teared up a few times.

Overall impressions: first, I’m impressed that Catherine Marshall manages to write overtly Christian fiction without making it cheesy or heavy-handed. I almost never read Christian fiction  for this reason, because ‘cheese’ almost invariably seems to be the result. I wish I knew why. Yet unlike most such stories, Julie comes off more like a tale that just happens to involve a young girl’s faith journey, but not because the author is necessarily trying to beat the reader over the head with her evangelistic message. It just is what it is, and she can’t tell the story without including that aspect of it. God is essentially both a character and an indispensable part of the story’s context. (I also happened to agree with the author’s theology, which helps.)

Also, I was surprised (and amused) by the culture Marshall describes: I guess I expected that a pastor’s wife writing about the 1930s would have a very old fashioned idea of courtship. But Julie dates and makes out with multiple men at a time (behavior that would earn her the title of “player” today), and even goes to drinking parties, though sort of on accident. But she’s far more honest and forthright with her feelings than teenagers (or really, people of nearly any age) are today. At times I thought she was so direct for an 18-year old that her character stretched belief… she should have been a little more guarded with her own feelings. But it was also sort of refreshing, and for her culture, it seemed to fit.

Julie did get off to a slower start, and while I enjoyed the story, it wasn’t extraordinarily memorable. It was uplifting, though, in a way that felt authentic. It’s the sort of book I might read again someday.

My rating: ****

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Review of A Court of Thorns and Roses

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I had tried Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass series a few years ago and couldn’t get into it. But this series is everywhere, and everyone gushes about how great it is, so finally I decided to give it a try. Let me preface the rest of what I have to say with the fact that I stop reading books that don’t hold my attention, and I don’t review those I don’t finish—so the fact that I finished this one at all means something. However…

The plot, until about 2/3 through the book, is basically a blend of Beauty and the Beast (it reminded me quite a bit of Hunted, a good retelling of the classic), Cinderella, and Twilight: Feyre is born to a wealthy merchant who loses all his money and becomes poor. She has two sisters, one of whom is cruel and the other is sweet but selfish. Her mother dies, her father doesn’t really try to help them survive, and so Feyre learns to hunt and keeps them alive. One day she kills a wolf that turns out to be a fairy (they live just near the wall that separates them from the fairy realm.) The fairy law demands a life for a life: but instead of taking Feyre’s life, the fairy who claims her instead takes her back to his realm and allows her to live with him in unimaginable luxury, as a guest at his table and with leisure time to do whatever her heart desires, while he also promises to care for her family far better than she ever was able to do herself. (So wait…how is this supposed to be a punishment? It’s sort of explained at the end of the book, but for the majority it made no sense at all, and I don’t know why Feyre never wondered this herself.)

Turns out that the fairy whom she goes to live with is a cursed High Fae Lord, called Tamlin. Like Belle, Feyre is locked in the castle with the cursed beast—Tamlin even has a beast form—whose curse can only be broken by falling in love with a human and earning her love in return. Like Bella in Twilight, the majority of the book involves Feyre checking out Tamlin’s rippling muscles, and thinking of herself as clumsy and unattractive by comparison—though he of course finds her irresistible. (I always wondered about mortal/immortal romances. She’s 19. He’s been alive for at least centuries. Age isn’t JUST how you look, so shouldn’t he find a human 19-year-old unbearably immature? Particularly because she is: she’s constantly getting offended at the slightest perceived insult, just for the sake of conflict during all those chapters when nothing else happens, I’m sure. But he describes her frequent, barely provoked outbursts as “passionate.”) Also, there are some pretty descriptive sex scenes. I thought that was reserved for adult novels… but I guess it’s happening in YA now too, sadly. 

As in Twilight, the last third of the book is a rescue operation, and here it became more a blend of The Hunger Games (forced glamour on parade, in between deadly tasks) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the tasks themselves). The rules of the world changed depending on what the author needed to happen, and the end was very, very Twilight. But I guess it couldn’t have ended any other way. 

Overall, I did a lot of eye-rolling, and yet for some reason, I kept listening. I had a hard time putting my finger on why: I mean, I didn’t particularly like Feyre, and Tamlin was basically just Edward from Twilight: your perfect, gorgeous immortal, hopelessly in love with an otherwise unremarkable human teenager. I think the reason I kept going had to do with the world, more than anything else: I loved Maas’s description of the fairy realm—the glamour, the clothes, the impossibly beautiful gardens and forest glens and countryside. And I liked all the stories mentioned above that she emulated, even though I thought this version was a much poorer rendition of all of them. I probably won’t continue the series, but I might give the Throne of Glass series one more try (on Audible this time: audiobooks tend to hold my attention better than paperbacks, because I can do other things at the same time).

My rating: ** 1/2

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Review of The Rational Optimist

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A little preface to my review: sometime last year, I finally figured out that, as I am not an auditory learner, it’s not a great idea for me to listen to non-fiction audiobooks if I want to retain anything I learn. Ebooks are best for non-fiction, because I can highlight them and then export my highlights, while audiobooks are best for fiction. I made an exception for The Rational Optimist only because Audible was having a two-for-one sale… but then I had to read the summary of the book on Blinkist (my new favorite app, by the way! It summarizes the key takeaways of non-fiction books so you get the bottom line but don’t have to read the whole thing) to make sure I’d gotten all the important bits.

The Rational Optimist argues—quite persuasively, I might add—that while it’s fashionable for the media to cover doom-and-gloom stories about how the world is headed to hell in a handbasket for any number of reasons, this is not consistent with the facts. The facts are that throughout history, humanity as a whole has become wealthier, happier, smarter, healthier, and longer-lived—and this holds true even for the poorest countries in the world. This trend shows no signs of stopping any time soon, either, largely because of the same economic arguments Adam Smith put forth in The Wealth of Nations: that is, our ancestors moved from self-sufficiency (doing everything themselves) to specialization and division of labor, which led to increased efficiency and a surplus of goods, which could then be traded in a free marketplace. The greater productivity becomes, the more wealth is created as a result of the surplus of goods to be traded. Trade also leads to increased trust (because after all, it’s in the merchant’s best interest to provide good products and services for the sake of his reputation in the marketplace), and a sharing of knowledge. It also means that some of the surplus can be reinvested in technology for the original business, further improving productivity—and the cycle continues. Sharing of knowledge, meanwhile, leads to innovation (after all, many heads are better than one: there’s a reason why the great advances in technology tend to occur in cities with a high population density), which enables humans to band together and solve problems that we collectively face. With example after historical example, author Matt Ridley paints a convincing picture that our plight is orders of magnitude better than our pastoral ancestors whom many of us idolize as examples of “the simple of life”—by any and every metric we can possibly choose.

Nor does he shy away from the more controversial aspects of commerce: Ridley even argues for the tremendous improvements in our lives since the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuel. It was this, more than all the political ideology, that made it economical to abolish slavery, as harnessing such energy sources dramatically increased productivity, and therefore, wealth. The environmental argument against fossil fuels, he argues, fails to account for the fact that the only way the climate could continue to rise as expected would be if the developing nations entered the world market on a grand scale, thus increasing their contribution to the worldwide fossil fuel consumption. While the climate may heat up as a result, these countries would be much wealthier and thus, far better able to withstand crisis than they are currently. (Or the climate may balance out, regardless: after all, he points out, during the time of the Roman Empire, the earth was hotter than it is now, and in the 1950s and 1960s, the fad topic was “global cooling.” Perhaps the earth, like the body’s bloodstream, has a built-in buffer system to account for these things.) Still, Ridley argues that as a result of continuing innovation, we’re burning less and less carbon over time as our energy utilization becomes increasingly efficient. So while the environmentalist interests attempt to lower carbon emissions by force or legislation, we are collectively doing this naturally anyway, as a result of the growth of prosperity, and the free flow of ideas. “Human progress has been driven by our desire to capture and use energy more efficiently.” The internet makes this process faster and more efficient than ever before. Despite all the doomsday reports that sell, the future is, and has always been, bright.

I absolutely love the dispassionate way that Ridley makes his points. There’s no rhetoric, no name-calling, and not even any clear partisanship. He just states his premise and then backs it up using a relentless stream of facts and examples. He did take on a few of my pet beliefs (GMO foods, for instance, or solvent exposure leading to diseases of affluence), and in those cases I could tell that he’d cherrypicked his examples. This made me wonder whether he might have done the same on subjects about which I had less of a foundation to contradict. Nevertheless, I thought he made a solid argument for a premise which (The Wealth of Nations aside) is largely original. Most non-fiction books make one or two points and the rest of the book is essentially filler; this one was absolutely worth a read from cover to cover.

My rating: *****

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