Like many people still largely staying at home, I spend lots of time reading. And for any Iowans out there, remember the derecho back in August that took out power across the state? Good times. And another opportunity for reading.
And so, these little reading/listening list posts have probably moved from seasonal to monthly. If you like them, enjoy! If you don’t…read something else?
Naomi Alderman – The Power
I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale not long ago. Welcome to the opposite of that. Sort of. Like Atwood’s novel, The Power is a dystopian vision around gender. Unlike Atwood, Alderman presents a future world where women oppress men.
How’s that go? Women gain a kind of superpower they use to invert oppressive gender relations. They gain the ability to strike people with lightning, injuring or even killing them. There’s a silly backstory about how women gain this power and why it only applies to women. But let’s set that part aside.
The point? They use “The Power” to change social structures. Though there are gender wars and skirmishes, women come out on top. Alderman narrates the book from a vantage point thousands of years in the future. In that future, society looks surprisingly like it does now. Except women stand on top rather than men.
It’s worth a read.
Jessica Bruder – Nomadland
I’ve been interested for some time now in the experiences of Amazon’s temp worker staff. And so, I picked up this book from the library on a bit of a lark. The book satisfies that interest well enough.
More broadly, Bruder writes about a particular social phenomenon: backsliding ‘middle class’ people who pack up, leave their homes, and live in cars, vans, or RVs. They travel from one end of the country to the other, taking seasonal and temp work.
Why do they do it? Do they enjoy it? What drove them to this? Bruder studies her topic sociologically. Some of them got laid off from comfortable, well-paying office work. Others got divorced and lost the house. Some got sick and couldn’t make it on disability. And many of them just couldn’t pay the mortgage or rent.
Bruder writes about the communities they form. She writes about the stories they tell themselves and others to make sense of it.
It’s also worth noting practically all her subjects are white. And I suspect that’s simply true of this particular social niche. They’re older white people, Boomers over the age of 60. Society left them behind, even though they’re technically members of various ‘advantaged’ groups. They’re backsliding from middle class to proletarian/precariat. Bruder portrays them sympathetically and well.
I find myself wondering how they’re doing in the era of COVID-19.
Robin DiAngelo – White Fragility
I didn’t read this book recently (though I have read it), and I don’t think it’s a good book. So why am I writing about it? It’s having a bit of a cultural moment, let’s say. It sold out everywhere in June and July, and it’s still flying off the (virtual) shelf.
Let’s just say I’m hardly the only person to criticize White Fragility. But I think how all this goes depends on who’s reading it and why. DiAngelo’s work might motivate beginners to learn more or become more involved in racial justice movements. That’s (usually) a good thing. So, she’s an effective motivational speaker.
It gets pretty dicey from there. DiAngelo is a white woman profiting wildly from racial justice literature and corporate diversity training. There’s an issue lurking there. But, more importantly – at least to me – the intellectual content of this book is pretty far off. Her politics are race-identitarian, and she pushes a pretty drastic version of it. In DiAngelo’s world, race is essentially an all-powerful explanatory force. She’s thus a hardcore realist about race: it’s out there and it drives the world.
Another problem with DiAngelo’s book is that her training doesn’t work. That is to say, it doesn’t even do what it claims to do, i.e., help put more black people into corporate roles. If you’re looking for a good intro to racial justice, this book ain’t it. Read something else.
John Scalzi – The Last Emperox
I suppose I figured Scalzi would wrap up The Interdependency Trilogy at some point. He did. This is it. As expected, Scalzi wrapped up all the major storylines. And, as expected, the collapsing empire…collapsed. I won’t say too much else about that, lest I give away the ending.
Readers should start with The Collapsing Empire, the first book in the trilogy.
For readers familiar with the story, Scalzi leaves a lot on the table here. I think he may yet again return to this fictional universe. And, if so, that’s great. He never really tells us the status of Earth in this future society. Readers know the Interdependency disconnected itself from Earth. And Scalzi gives a hint that a character will visit Earth soon. But that’s it.
What happens when the Interdependency society reconnects with Earth? And what’s the deal with that other society, the one affiliated neither with Earth nor the interdependency? It’s a rich fictional universe. I hope Scalzi gives us more.
Jonathan Smucker – Hegemony How-To
Smucker gives us a provocative title here. What’s he really doing with this book? He’s arguing the left should seek power. Mostly in standard ways, i.e., via elections.
But he does so through focusing on public relations narratives in the context of Occupy Wall Street. He thinks the left can dominate the political narrative, i.e., create a left-hegemony. And then the left can take power via good organizing. Furthermore, he argues that some people in Occupy Wall Street wanted to do this. But the more utopian, discuss-it-all-endlessly-without-doing-anything elements ruined it.
More or less.
I think Smucker has some good ideas here. I don’t think he thought carefully enough about using ‘hegemony’ to organize these ideas. But we can set that aside. There are some things readers can take from the book, especially the importance of good organizing. But I wouldn’t overlook the importance of more speculative utopia-building. We can learn from that, too.
