When 'getting out' is your dream

One of my favourite movies growing up (growing older but already above the age of 18...)  was the Australian film, The Boys.  It's a heavy film with a heavy theme - but a subtler theme that (maybe?) is more confronting than the murder-rape crime alluded to throughout, is the self-perpetuation of that mixing-pit of adversity, low socio-economic status, crime and violence.  One brother is fighting against that life, only to be convinced that his new partner (a snob in the eyes of the family) is actually exploiting him by helping him obtain an underpaying job.  His reply to the argument that minimum wage is 450 a week is something like "they fiddle with the figures -- they'd have you thinking everyone was a bloody millionaire".  This simple scene is pretty amazing to me - it brings together feelings of humiliation, distrust, confusion, manipulation, the power struggles, and identity crises of folks wanting to change their lot.  This is a suburban Australian family whose disadvantage comes down to money and class.

J.M. Holmes's book of featurettes, centred around the life of Gio, a half-white african-american, and his neighborhood friends as they progress from adolescence to adulthood, brings together those same elements of poverty, class and crime, with the ever-breathing spectre of racism.  The dynamics of race in America are not easy to holistically understand on this side of the world, but the racial spike added to the poverty concoction feels authentic and it's uncomfortable to accept.  There's never a clean break as each character tries to save themselves from the pre-destined struggle to be on the wrong side of the law and the poverty line.  You get an honest job at the fire department only to be treated unfairly by your boss, and you can't live off the wage so you continue to take opportunities to sell drugs, because that at least gives you some hope of rising above your status.  You get a payout from the death of your father, whose NFL career has had the end result of leaving you fatherless rather than guaranteeing you a different life, only to blow most of it on drinks to impress a group of shallow girls.  A group of frat boys accidentally scratch a car on your street, and you can't pass up the opportunity to try and dupe some money out of them.  You're able to obtain a college education, but now your friends and family judge you for looking down on them or for blaming your situation on the systemic problems in society.   Whenever you do find warmth in relationships, you end up sabotaging it because you've spent your life overcoming undercurrents of hatred by depending only on yourself.  Holmes paints it all without clear morals, without judgment or even reflection.  It leaves you amidst that discomfort and it makes you feel like there's a problem.  The characters aren't the ones driving their unhappy fates.

Some praise for Holmes (the kind you read in the blurb of a book) has been that he is a voice 'needed' in this generation, and I could agree with this.  Overall, these characters aren't the kind you barrack for.  The treatment of women is pretty horrible, and one story in particular, Be good to me?, was fairly distressing, but still this kind of book does feel important.

It was the second book listed for the Some More Books podcast of Katy Stoll.

Blade Runner and Electric Sheep

I'd meant to read this multiple times over the last decade but must have kept forgetting - probably because the book of Blade Runner does not share its name with the film.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep might be well lost in the shadow of the film, which I love, and has become iconic in itself.  In seeing Bladerunner 2049, I had been wondering how a movie, which had already become the blueprint for cyber punk, could push any limits while staying within its own world.  However, I thought they did a great job, while retrospectively (anachronistically?), I also feel like Blade Runner was an amazing adaptation of this book.

While I enjoyed it, and while it has themes that aren't in the film at all - e.g. Dekkard's wife, and the electric sheep (which he owns because everyone has to own an animal and if they can't find an animal then they at least need a fake animal so that no-one realises that they don't own an animal), I got a lot more out of the film.  The idea of 'empathy' being the quality that distinguishes robots from humans is more prominent in the book, however such a message might come across as pretty heavy-handed if done in film.

At first, my previous experience of the film was a little distracting, trying to fit the characters in the book to their movie representations, however after a while I got into the flow and enjoyed some of the language and character developments.  The ambiguity of Dekkard being a replicant isn't really a theme in the book, and so anyone looking for answers in this regard won't find any :)

Is The Power about gender issues or about power?

I am trying to read again and have found it good that I had a repository of impressions I got from books I read previously. Also, Cracked the website (and youtube channel) ended as it was and some of my favourite folks there branched off, notably into Small Beans and Some More News, and there are some book related podcasts from both, although in the former case, Kurt Vonneguys is mainly housed by Cracked. Katy from Some More News started a bookclub called Some More Books and the first book was Naomi Alderman's The Power. So that's how I came to read this book. What follows is adapted from a comment I made on the Some More Books post.


Women across the world start developing the ability to zap people with electricity (superpower style). The upshot of which, is that women now represent the physically dominant half of humankind. The chapters follow the perspective of a few different characters whose stories become interwoven by the end. There's a couple of passing passages that wryly comment on the gender reversal - parents are worried about their boys walking the streets alone, males are now mainly good for eye-candy, the issue of male consent arises and so on, however rather this book feeling like a commentary on gender issues, it is more the idea of power and its ability to corrupt.


The concept of power is explored in parallels with political instability - female militias rape and pillage refugee camps, female dictators become paranoid with their hold on power, laws are passed that suddenly disempower specific groups. I don't think the central tenet of the book is that 'if women had the power, they would act the same as men do today', nor is it just a catharsis or wish for power from Alderman, who could see herself as part of the female underclass (on the latter point, I had commented that some could argue it's a revenge novel, but I hadn't meant to suggest that that was the intention or how it comes across to me). Rather, I think there's a genuine attempt to follow the beginning premise through to reasonable outcomes as well as exploring some different dynamics.


So what is the impact, for the reader, of being confronted with such a world? For me, a unique impression that came through was experiencing abuses of power as a “new thing”. For example, in the gang-rape of a male during the female militia pillage, the experience of the humiliating aspects of rape, the loss of power felt by onlookers, feels new. If it were a parallel scene in a story about an unstable country, I would be disgusted, I would feel horrible, but it wouldn't be anything 'new'. Women perpetrating violence is certainly confronting in a different way. The only thing that stopped me from getting into the book properly was that the characters didn’t really have an arc, set out from the beginning (no goal in a hero’s journey sense). You’re just seeing history (somewhat similar to how I felt with Foundations), and that stopped me from becoming invested in any of them. Aside from Roxy, there’s also not much in the way of compassionate and likable characters - Especially males are all portrayed as pretty horrible, even Tunde is only self-interested - but yearning for likable characters isn't an everyone-thing. I definitely recommend this to people, as part of our continuing education in female perspectives and understanding feminist issues.

The day the world ended

Vonnegut has a lovely turn of phrase - a pessimistic irony toward wisdom and life that is somehow heartfelt and optimistic toward the best aspects of humanity.  Like much of Vonnegut's work, at the heart of the Cat's Cradle storyline is that curiosity of how gentle curiosity could have fathered the atom bomb.  The protagonist aligns himself with the religion of Bokononism, its folk songs and concepts interspersed throughout the text.  Here are things that made me smile:

As Bokonon says: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."

Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon.  Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime anywhere.

...and then I told him, "I envy you."
  "I always knew," he sighed, "that, if I waited long enough, somebody would come and envy me.  I kept telling myself to be patient, that, sooner or later, somebody envious would come along."
  "Are you an American?"
  "That happiness is mine."

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us.  "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

Dancin' with sheeps

So, apparently Dance, Dance, Dance could be thought of as the fourth installment of Haruki's first novel series.  I know that Hear the Wind Sing was used as inspiration, or as the basis for A Wild Sheep Chase, and apparently 1970 Pinball is there too, but I was a little confused of where the symbols and characters had come from when I started reading Dance Dance Dance.

Sometimes I think Murakami is a bit of a one-trick pony, reusing the imagery of other books, the solemn lonewolf character who has strangely attractive girls fascinated by him (in this case, a 13-year-old music-loving girl), but sometimes I'll reach a paragraph, take a step back and look inside, and really marvel at how he brings his worlds to life.  He can focus on a smell, a stray thought, a mundane task - always bringing them back somehow to the story or the character's development.

As risqué as it is, the friendship with the 13-year-old girl, Yuki, is probably the most beautiful aspect of this story.  As with all Murakami's enticing females, there is a melancholy about her that can never be accessed directly as she simultaneously accepts the adult world and clutches to her innocence.  This becomes heaviest when she starts referring to the protagonist in past tense, "You were such a nice guy."

You don't know whether this premonitient (not a word) of someone's death, or the inevitable disentanglement of their lives.  At some point, the protagonist must start taking life seriously and stop driving around with 13-year-olds, while Yuki must at some point enter the real world as a young woman.

obligatory Science book interalia

Didn't really go into this book with any preconceptions. It has been sitting on my science books shelf for quite a long time... must have been longer than 4 years. It's really the story of Science that lead from Newton to Maxwell. The history is told in a somewhat roundabout way but is still quite fascinating. Some things irritated me - I thought it was generally good form to not focus on Newton too much as having invented the calculus but rather attribute it to both he and Leibniz - at least that Leibniz should be mentioned in the first sentence... It resolved reasonably well in this respect. Another thing that I know is inevitable in a pop-book dealing with theoretical physics is the incongruence when it comes to the level. Sometimes notions like commutativity, the square root etc, are laboured upon as if the book were written for 10-year-olds, and then the laws of electromagnetism are merely brushed over.

None-the-less, this probably to do with my comfortability in these types of mathematical concepts, and my ignorance when it comes to physics. Overall, I was pretty interested while reading this book and am glad to have added it's general gloss to my mathematical history vocabulary.

The Sense of an Ending

I was recommended to read Julian Barnes' The sense of an Ending by my sister, I think because it had a few mathematical references in it - in particular a diary entry with the equation

b = s - v +x a

or something like that. I think I really appreciated 75% of this book. There are some nice literary references - I particularly like the references to Camus.

I do find it difficult to deal with suicide in books, and I guess part of what this book is about is making sense of a full stop like suicide, but it also is about making sense of the ending to any type of relationship - to young romances where we wondered whether we were in love in the first place, to marriages that drift apart, to friendships that we don't invest enough time into, and to the death of loved ones.

We yearn for that clarity of reflection, and mementos like Diaries, old notes, only really brew up a sense of complexity such that we start to question what began in the first place. I would hate to think of what people reading my diaries would do to their memory of me. I will endeavour to write at least once "this is not me" in each diary - because it's not.

And at the same time everything is.

I think the power of this book could have come by keeping to the unknowable, I found that the way things fall into place at the end made the story a little less ordinary and therefore a little less universal in the emotions that one goes through in reading it. So perhaps it's closer to 85% or even 90% that I liked. The ending is okay, I guess some people need the satisfaction of a wrap-up, but I think there was the potential here to leave things a little more hung.

Whenever there's "maths" in a book it usually captures my scrutiny - I wouldn't really call the equations in this book "maths", but I can relate to trying to represent relationships between people with letters and symbols - not because maths will solve it, just to clarify the thinking process.

hmm...