Welcome to the third reading list post of 2025! For this month, I’ve got mostly fiction on my list. How does that compare to yours?
Continue reading for some sci-fi, general fiction, and a bit of non-fiction.
Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg – The Positronic Man
Readers might know this book best by the title ‘Bicentennial Man,’ the name of the original Asimov novella and Robin Williams film. This is a novel-length version of Asimov’s story that formed the actual basis for the film.
The novel tells the story of the 200 year lifetime of a robot who becomes a human being. The robot slowly transforms himself, step by step, from a robot in a robot body to a robot in a human body and, finally, to a human in a human body. As his body becomes increasingly human, so, too, does his mind.
It’s a great story for philosophical concepts. It raises philosophical issues about what defines humanity, settling on the compelling and defensible answer of ‘mortality.’ But it also raises issues of relevance to transgender people. The robot experiences body dysmorphia comparable, in some ways, to trans experience.
It’s worth a read. But I think it’s worth special attention from philosophy professors. I used to assign the film version in my Intro to Philosophy course, and re-reading the novel reminds me why I did that.
Percival Everett – James
Publishers these days seem to enjoy reimagined literary classics. Sandra Newman, for instance, published a reworked version of 1984 (Julia). But with this book, we have a reimagined version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett tells it from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim, Huck’s friend.
Even more so than Newman’s book, the literary world highly anticipated and lauded this book. And it certainly has its moments. Everett has a knack for telling the story in a way that builds agency among the enslaved.
But the book also has its limits. It’s too didactic, focusing on the moral lessons, at times, to the neglect of plot and story development. It takes about 70 or 80 pages for the story to really get going, using too much time at the beginning to dwell on ‘code switching’ inside jokes.
After that, it’s a good story, and it’s worth reading. The final section develops the story in new ways that even compare favorably to the story as Twain tells it.
Emily Mendenhall – Unmasked
Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist who works on the social politics of disease. She takes her observational skills to Okoboji, Iowa, her own hometown. She moved back to Okoboji during the summer of 2020, documenting a sharp rise in Covid in the community due to popular resistance to public health advice.
Mendenhall situates Okoboji within its midwestern world. It’s a small Iowa town, but it’s also a tourist trap on a lake with real gentrification problems. However, unlike other gentrifying parts of Iowa, it’s no college town. It even sets itself up explicitly as a parody of one. Rather, it’s a haven of right-wing wealth with an active youth culture.
Through interviews, Mendenhall traces the outbreak to local bars, careless young people, and one very dumb business owner who put a few dozen healthy people on a long bus trip with a couple of people who had Covid. She also notes the inaction on the part of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. And, perhaps most importantly, she documents how local business leaders undermined public health advice.
Along the way, she explores local attitudes toward vaccines and masks, noting that the same people tended to oppose both. She traces this to feelings of powerlessness and lack of influence. And she finishes the story, appropriately enough, with a showdown over masks in schools.
Sally Rooney – Conversations with Friends
Rooney tells a lively story about a college student and her best friend whose lives entangle with a couple in their 30s. The main character begins an affair with the husband, the best friend develops feelings for the wife, and the four of them take vacations together. And, lest we forget, the best friends used to date each other, and they obviously still have romantic feelings.
What could go wrong?
Frankly, the characters are obnoxious and difficult to sympathize with. The best friend seems interesting, but she’s clearly an entitled brat. Both members of the married couple suffer from affluenza. And the main character repeatedly makes poor decisions, suffering from the aftereffects of bad relationships with both of her parents.
But Rooney weaves all this together plausibly, and she uses her story to tell us something about young people and their insecurities. Any reader who can overlook the obnoxiousness of the characters will find a story worth reading.
Colette Shade – Y2K
Shade is a millennial a few years younger than me, and she tells a story about the Y2K period and its lasting impact on our society. She defines this period as one that runs from about 1997 to 2008 – from the beginning of the Internet ‘dot com’ era to the 2008 recession. In truth, it’s a hot spot for nostalgia right now. Shade also reads it, plausibly, as the last genuine era of societal optimism.
To get at what the Y2K period says about our own time, Shade looks at its culture and politics. 9/11, for Shade, divides it between and early and a late period. The early period saw futuristic optimism, especially in aesthetics. And the late period saw the dawn of a period of decay. In the first half, we flocked to the Internet and watched futuristic music videos. In the second half, we drove SUVs and made war, and the only opposition came in the form of continuously re-enacting the 1960s.
In reflecting on the Y2K period, Shade sees it as a kind of bubble, as the last blaze of a post-Cold War future. By 2008, we had settled into the reality of neoliberal shittiness. After that, we hardly bothered pretending capitalism would make the world better. It was a reaction to the Y2K era, Shade argues convincingly, that produced Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie campaigns of 2016 and 2020, and so on.
I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to reminisce with Shade about a shared past.
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