Category: Books

Before the republic became the empire

If you (like me) mostly read popular history about Ancient Rome, you know the story of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar backwards and forwards. The super short version is: Pompey and Caesar were both famous, powerful generals and politicians in the Roman Republic. By the time they were done competing for control of Rome – Caesar won, Pompey was dead – Rome was effectively an empire instead of a republic. (HBO made a fictionalized series.) But, for such a fundamental political change to happen, the battle had to have been much, much bigger than just a political rivalry between two men.

The changes started 100 years earlier, as:

  • Rome starts conquering land that is further and further away from Italy;
  • more money starts coming in from those conquered lands and staying in the hands of the elite;
  • the elite need standing armies to fight far away wars;
  • but those armies are loyal to a particular general and not to the state;
  • not to mention, the elite split into two main political factions; and
  • those factions start caring more about winning than they do about governing properly.

Basically, the state needed to be reformed as Rome grew in size and in wealth, and those in power refused to change. It lead to lots of war and death and power grabs.

The Storm Before the Storm talks about these earlier years much more coherently than I can here. There are compelling figures and a wide sweep of history that echoes to current American politics (but with important differences).

It’s worth your time if you (like me!) enjoy learning about ancient Rome.

Clothes matter

Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore was a delight. It was exactly what it promised to be: an examination of the standard uniform of various writers, mainly but not exclusively of the 20th century. Full of pictures and pithiness, clothes project an image of who the writers want you to think they are: rebels, an aloof outsider, cultured, whatever.

It should be said that clothes do matter; even if you claim not to care what you wear, you are still conforming (or not) to a standard. Grabbing the top t-shirt on the pile (and bragging about it) says so much about who you are and the position you have in society and the amount of respect you have for those around you (little, I would argue).

Clothes do not make the writer – dressing like Joan Didion will not make you write like her – but they are another way authors express themselves. And it  was fun to look at the photos and read what the various authors say about their fashion tics.

(PS I cannot imagine reading this book on a kindle/tablet. Get the hard-cover version and enjoy its design.)

Unexpectedly relevant

I read The Secret History about a million times in college. To this day, I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with it.

When the weather turned, it seemed like a good time for a re-read. The characters were much the same: so obsessed with finding some ancient Greek definition of beauty that they’d lost all their morality. Donna Tartt’s description of   the New England fall and winter were still lovely and haunting and they made me want to spend all my time at a small college in some tiny Eastern state.

What I wasn’t expecting though, was the parallels between Bunny, the tragi-comic character who drives much of the plot, and Donald Trump. They are both bumbling, in over their heads, cruel in a way that doesn’t realize its full consequences, utterly insistent that the world is the way he sees it, and charming (according to Maggie Haberman, Trump is captivating in a one-on-one setting in a way Obama never was). It made it kind of hard to read in spots, honestly.

That parallel made The Secret History surprisingly relevant – I got insight into our current president and the people around him in a way I was not expecting from a book published in 1992.

Recommended, and not just for nostalgia’s sake.

Fake fairy tales

The Language of Thorns is a lovely little piece of world building. Leigh Bardugo writes young adult books that take place in Ravka, her made-up pseudo-Russia and Kerch, a proto-Amsterdam; they are full of magicians called Grisha. The Language of Thorns are fairy tales from this world.

The most important world-building tale is The Too-Clever Fox, because it was inspired by one of the side characters (who I am a big fan of) who is getting his own two-book series next year. Yes, I was looking for clues for how the next series is going to go.

My favorite of the stories is a tie between the first one, Ayama and the Thorn Wood, which had the great line “They prey that their children… will tell the true stories instead of the easy ones,” and the last story When Water Sang Fire, which was inspired by Ursula from The Little Mermaid.

This fills the gap whilst waiting for the next series to come along.

Self care is personal

True story: I once ended up in therapy because I was so stressed out about adding a bunch – too many – self care to dos to my regular to do list. Like, how am I supposed to do everything I regularly need to get done while also doing all the other things I’m supposed to be doing to take care of myself? Deliberate self-care just made the problem worse.

Which is, I suppose, life’s way of telling me that I was doing it wrong. Self-care is supposed to be about making sure you’re taking the time to do what’s right for you, not what other people tell you are the things you should do.

What does this have to do with The Happy Healthy Non-Profit? Well, for the first two chapters (basically: all the ways we stress ourselves out) I was there. I enjoyed reading them and noticed that I was eating more vegetables, walking more, and taking more time for myself during the day. Then, in the third chapter where it got really detailed about all of the self-care items you should add to your to do list? All those pages of do-this-not-that? Stress city.

I was out. Just done. Completely. I’ve been there before, and it didn’t work for me. There was more of the book to be read, perhaps tips and tricks that would have been helpful, but I was having none of it.

That’s the point of self-care. It’s about you doing what’s right for you – my self care is not going to be your self care. My salad for breakfast (don’t knock it till you try it) is your too-much-work-too-early-in-the-morning.

Which, I guess means I should say: this book didn’t work for me. It might for you.

Tougher than you

Manhattan Beach is about New York City in World War II, and it’s about a young woman, Anna, who decides she wants to be a diver. Her father disappeared when she was a teenager; she both wants and doesn’t want to find him. She would like to know what happened to him and to build a life for herself.

I picked up Manhattan Beach because I read the first chapter in an issue of Elle magazine and was entranced by the story of eleven-year-old Anna tagging along with her father as he goes to meet a new business acquaintance. It’s both dreamy and practical. Anna impresses her father’s new business partner with her toughness about putting her bare feet into the cold ocean; the cold ocean and the house on the ocean is shot through gauze. Nothing bad could happen at a house like that.

But overall, I ended up being surprised at the story’s toughness. The rest of the book is not nearly so dreamy or romantic. Bad things happen, people are betrayed, sexism is prevalent. Anna moves through the world competently and with confidence. It’s a nice change from the uncertain way women often act in stories.

Recommended.

Wonder Woman in novel form

Smart, competent girls yay!

Honestly? Plot? A young woman, Alia, gets in a shipwreck. Diana saves her. It turns out there’s a conspiracy around her, blah blah blah, Diana saves the day. You know the plot – no wheels are being reinvented here.

So what’s the point? The point is: smart competent girls get it done despite incompetent and sometimes outright evil dudes. Warbringer is a fun read and will make you proud to have two X chromosomes. Recommended.

Bodies and healthiness and image and mental health

In intellectual circles, we often prioritize the mind over the body. I live in these circles, I’m not going to lie. Except that I also live in upper-middle-class California where life tends to revolve around exercise. How many steps do you average? If you run, what’s your mile time? Do you ride your bike to work?

If I’m honest with myself, I worry that I’m walking every day not to be healthy, but to conform to what American society has decided that the optimal female body shape should be. Am I just policing myself so that I don’t get yelled at by other people? Or am I really trying to be healthy?

These are the themes that Roxane Gay is dealing with in Hunger, except that her body issues  stem from trauma – she was gang-raped at 12. She gained weight to stay safe, to hide. She’s had eating disorders. She’s been through therapy, and is working to get healthy. All of this is laid bare in her memoir.

She also talks about desire; we hunger not just for food but also for connection to other people. Men’s desires are much more catered to in society (duh) than women’s, but that doesn’t mean that women don’t desire.

I would recommend this, if only to remind you that you have a body and what it looks like is part of who you are along with what you say and do.

Why add a romance when it’s not needed?

After I finished At the Water’s Edge, I found myself wondering what makes a book a romance novel? Because this book has a lot of the trappings of one, including:

  • a heroine seeing the world for the first time,
  • a neglectful (at best) husband,
  • a sexual awakening,
  • someone who turns out to be secret royalty (reader, I rolled my eyes).

But I wouldn’t call it a romance. Why? Because it’s not about the romance – it’s about the heroine, her crappy childhood, where it got her, and then her adventures (for lack of a better word) making her realize that people have just been using her her entire life. The romance feels tacked on at the end, as though her editor or publisher insisted that there be a romance to draw people in. It would have maybe been a better book for not squishing it in.

I found her journey from neglected wife along for the party to an actual friend with caring relationships compelling. A romance with an underdeveloped character didn’t need to be tacked on.

Different families get different kinds of stories

Different kinds of families get different kinds of stories in books. A family drama about a white family is probably upper-middle class, there’s probably someone who’s traveled overseas, and there’s probably lots of “finding yourself” type rhetoric. And there’s something to be said for that. Figuring out who you are and what you like is important.

But this is not that kind of book. This is a family drama about an African-American family. There are three generations and they are all poor. All the adult men in the story have been to prison. Racism weighs heavily on them. The father in the story is white; his father killed the man who would have been his brother-in-law. He has only met his children a handful of times; his parents haven’t met their half-black grandchildren. He is the one the mother and children travel to pick up from prison when his sentence is complete.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a heavy book. You can feel the weight of the generations of racism on everyone. The 13-year-old boy is definitely figuring out who he is, but it’s not in a fun lets-go-see-the-world kind of a way. That kind of privilege is absent here. Instead, it’s about learning to take care of your people and understanding who your people are.

Recommended, but schedule a party or something afterwards.