OptionalBooks

This belongs on your bookshelf like the Stepford wives belong in the kitchen.

Joanna, her husband and their two children move to Stepford. Right off the bat the couple is suspicious of the men's association, the most important political institution of the town. While Joanna's husband tries to change it from within Joanna tries to rally the other women in the neighbourhood. But they seem more interested in keeping their households clean and running.

Obviously something sinister is going on in this horror satire. But what's most surprising is the cleverness and nuance in its feminist critique. What the terrible film adaptations from 1975 and 2004 completely fail to capture is the novel's critique of an ideology rather than of individuals. Feminist fiction often boils down to getting rid of the one bad guy at the top and optionally replacing him with a woman. This is of course much too simple and takes focus from systems onto individuals.

That's why I was so elated to discover that the “evil” in this book was not contained in any particular person or group of people, but rather an ideology or thought pattern that was made almost as tangible and clear in this excellently woven narrative.

With the current popularity of the “tradwife” this novel is very much still worth reading. And even if you know or suspect the twist the execution makes it a worthwhile read.

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This book makes me decide to die

After a failed suicide attempt Veronika is put into a mental hospital for supervision. But she won't be there long as doctors predict her damaged heart to fail within seven days.

After that everything goes downhill. Not for Veronika, but for the reader. Every character in the mental hospital gets a monologue where they lecture Veronika—and the reader!—about madness and sanity, and what it means to lead a good life. These page long rants never say anything actually profound, instead sticking to banalities like “Life ain't so bad” and “Maybe the so-called sane people are actually the mad ones. You ever thought about that?”

Anyone who has thought about the meaning and value of life for more than two seconds will have already generated more insight than this book could ever inspire. Also, anyone who has ever struggled with actual mental health issues will be appalled by its flat depiction in this book.

Apart from the subject matter the plot is also lacking in depth. Events in the story don't seem to follow naturally from each other and instead seem only to serve the didactic mission of the author. Characters are introduced only to monologue about their perspective and then take a backseat in the story. The ending is an unbelievable twist (as in I did not believe it) where the smugness and self-satisfaction of the author drips from in between the lines.

I derived no pleasure from reading this and felt patronized and not the least bit enriched after finishing this book.

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Gripping story at an incredible pace

Jerome's flight is delayed and as if that wasn't enough an annoying man shows up that won't stop talking to him even after he's made it clear that he's not in the mood. The stranger, who later introduces himself as Textor Texel, will not let up and has a snappy comeback for anything Jerome tries or says.

This short novella flies by not only because of its length, but also because of the incredible pace the snappy dialogue between Jerome and Textor provides. Textor's calm and witty remarks do much to entertain until the story takes a turn when he admits to two murders.

Definitely worth what little time it takes to read.

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Every One Should Be Reading This

Ah yes, the internet memes of 2016: Fidget spinners, a dead pet bee, America's dictator, and Harambe (rest in peace). Every single tweet, vine, and tumblr post that we obsessed over back then has only grown in relevancy. Oh wait, it hasn't.

The first half of this book describes every single post that the protagonist scrolls through daily. Often these are just a couple of sentences until the paragraph breaks and the next post begins. In that style it perfectly encapsulates the speed of our social media feeds.

But the feed is from 2016. Does that mean the book is out of date? The book was published in 2021. The outdated feed is part of the point. As such the experience of reading it will warp over time, but it will not lose it's relevancy. While reading about all these memes the reader will recognize a few or even most of them depending on the amount of time they themselves spent online in 2016. But at least some will be foreign, but still embedded in the feed with all the others. And you will be forced to evaluate whether this unknown post about some woman screaming in some store and that then-important post about the cultural origin of fidget spinners might both have never been relevant to your life at all.

This first “internet” half of the book is excellent in itself. But in the second half the narrator experiences a tragedy in her own personal life and is violently jerked into reality where she needs to (wants to?) confront this situation.

An empathetic critique of social media obsession and an exploration of grief in a fast moving age.

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A victorious book

After all the male warriors of the Indian principality Kampili are slaughtered in battle the left over women decide the best course of action to be suicide by fire. Only the nine year old Pampa Kampana decides not to follow the rest of her people into death.

This is how Victory City opens. It should be terribly tragic and shocking, but when reading Salman Rushdie's descriptions of these events I was laughing out loud a couple of times. He writes with such a levity and a good command of humour that the horror of these events only sets in when thinking about it long after closing the book.

I don't mean to imply that only bad things happen in Victory City. Pampa Kampana gets blessed by a goddess to raise a city from the ground and she and the city experience a wide breadth of positive and wonderous things next to some terrible ones. But all of it reads seductively fun and easy.

Victory City is written like stories from mythology, with magic, a grand scale, and full of meaning. Themes of motherhood, fate and power naturally present themselves and inspire thought. A smart and entertaining book.

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Extremely Boring

The author, Taylor Lorenz, sets out to tell a “social history of social media.” When I started reading the book I did not know what “social history” actually meant, but I imagined it to mean that social media's impact on society and culture would be explored. I've since skimmed Wikipedia's definition and I wasn't that far off. But in this book the author does nothing of the sort.

Most failings of the book can be attributed to the fact that Taylor Lorenz is a Washington Post reporter. First off, the clickbait. Yes, there's clickbait in this book. Many sections end with cliff hangers à la “but Vine wouldn't be around for long.” On an online news site these would make sense as they encourage you to read more online articles, but I don't see how they belong in a book I've already paid for. It might be a minor gripe, but it happened often enough for me to still be annoyed by it and to bring it up now.

A more substantial way in which the reporter's mindset impedes the book is its treatment of the rise and fall of social media platforms. Specifically, it focuses on some exemplary individuals who are most affected by the platform. Often this takes the form of anecdotal stories where we are first introduced to a “regular” person that then shoots to fame on one platform or other until that platform goes under and they either pivot to another platform or fade into obscurity. Rinse and repeat for each platform.

In the end, it's unclear whether these stories all sound the same because that's what becoming famous online is like or because that's the bias in the author's selection, not only of the people, but of the part of their lives she focuses on. Completely omitted are the stories of the people consuming content on social media, the stories of those that tried and failed to establish themselves online, and those that tried and had limited success. All these obviously make up a much larger percentage of the population and are, in my opinion, much more important in a “social history.”

Apart from these anecdotes we don't get much. The author refuses to provide commentary on the people, platforms, and culture she is writing about. Instead she cites fellow journalists or influencers, but these quotes often don't provide any additional analysis either. What we get is quite literally a report, an account of things that happened, names of companies that provided online platforms, and a list of people that were most successful on these platforms.

Speaking of platforms I was surprised that Reddit was suspiciously absent. I don't know why. The index tells me that it is mentioned six times one of which is a quote being attributed to “a redditor”, the rest are passing mentions of a topic also being discussed “on various subreddits”. But the author never talks about Reddit as a platform. Without acknowledging the fact anywhere in the book the scope was furthermore very much limited to the US. Platforms like the Russian VK or the German SchülerVZ are completely absent. Everything else that I'd expected was covered though, from MySpace to TikTok, even Snapchat, Twitch, Patreon, and OnlyFans.

Overall, this book provides a list of about 200 people and sorts them to the platforms that they were popular on. But that's mostly it. There's little in the way of describing online culture, no explanation of the dynamics of internet fame, and no exploration of how average lives were shaped by these platforms.

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The key to understanding society

Why do some people consistently misunderstand feminism to mean “more women CEOs”? Why did the enlightenment not lead to a complete abandonment of religion? Who are the people exploring new ways of developing themselves and their community? Where is politics headed? Why has democracy never delivered on its promise, but how and where is it finally starting to? What is Political Metamodernism?

Hanzi answers all these questions and more. And he doesn't go for the simple and incomplete answers. No, he dives deep and gives the most accurate and holistic explanation for contemporary politics to date. His complex ideas get broken down into and explained in an easy-to-follow way. His tongue-in-cheek writing style reflects the metamodern ideas he's advocating for.

The ideas will infect your brain and soon you will recognize patterns of thought and behaviour all around you and even in yourself. You will be like Neo, seeing the code of the Matrix, and you will begin to work on your ability to leverage that knowledge in practical ways. The understanding gained from this book will become so central to your understanding of the world that you will spend hours trying to summarize it to friends, family and strangers at parties.

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Nicht ganz zukunftsweisend

Kassandra ist nicht nur eine Erzählung, sondern ein “Projekt” von Autorin Christa Wolf. Zusätzlich zur Erzählung umfasst dieses auch ein Arbeitstagebuch und Vorlesungen. Ich habe nur die Erzählungen und Auszüge des Arbeitstagebuch gelesen.

Die Erzählung basiert auf dem mythologischen Charakter der Seherin Kassandra. Die Autorin schafft es ihrer Kassandra-Figur eine faszinierende Vielschichtigkeit zu verleihen und sie damit frisch und gedankeninspirierend zu gestalten. Erzählt wird aus ihrer Perspektive in Form von Erinnerungen womit sich Rückblick und Zukunftsvisionen auf interessante Weise überlagern. Der Erzählstil folgt dabei der Logik Kassandra's Gedankenwelt und ist damit voller Wiederholungen, Halbsätze die vorheriges revidieren oder präzisieren und Gedankensprüngen in mitten von Sätzen. Das ist zwar konsequent, erschwert die Lektüre jedoch ungemein.

Die Erzählung allein lässt die moderne Leser*in vielleicht etwas ratlos zurück. Die Auszüge des Arbeitstagebuchs haben mir jedoch einen Zugang ermöglicht, sodass ich abschließend Kassandra als Erzählung weniger, Kassandra als Projekt allerdings schon empfehlen würde.

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Not worth rag nor bone

This extremely short novella has been compared to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I didn't enjoy Alice, so I don't know what moved me to give this a try. As was to be expected I did not like this either.

The characters in Treacle Walker all are peculiar and quirky, but always in ways completely devoid of depth or intelligence. Similarly the plot is wacky and dreamlike following its own child-like logic.

Other reviews applaud this “fariytale fashion” and find “more ideas and imagination than most authors manage in their whole careers”, but I was missing anything to grab me, neither characters, nor world, nor plot, nor prose were giving me a reason to care and before long (two hours) it was all over.

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Poetry to die for

I always thought that everybody but me knew this story. It's hard to escape: It's sometimes assigned in school, the play is still performed in theatres, there's film adaptations in close keeping to the text like Romeo and Juliet (1968), and those taking some… creative liberties like Gnomeo & Juliet (2011). That's why I was quite surprised when I learned that a couple of my friends didn't even know that the two titular lovers commit suicide at the end—which is already revealed in verse 6, so don't you worry about spoilers.

But even if you know the basic plot of this tragedy and have seen a few adaptations, you'll probably still be surprised to find some plot details that are commonly changed or omitted.

And yet, the plot is not the main selling point of this play, the language is. The text is so full of puns, double entendres, and otherwise witty usage of words, that it's a real joy to read. Shakespeare's English is a bit difficult to understand for the modern reader, so I'd definitely recommend getting an annotated version that can help understand the text in all its meanings—I was happy with my copy, annotated by Burton Raffel.

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