"Desert Solitaire" by Edward Abbey

I finished Desert Solitaire before Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but with some unexpected free time on my hands, I thought I'd take a stab at Abbey's most well-known work.

I recently borrowed a stack of books from a good friend who teaches environmental science at a local university. I forget sometimes that there are entire genres of books that I never touch, and environmental nonfiction is one of them. Actually, "never" isn't the right word, as one of the first English classes I took in college was Literature of the American Environment. I was a freshman amidst a small group of senior English majors, I was terrified, and I loved the class. I wrote a lot that semester, but my culminating assignment was (what I remember to be) a cool paper on the American West in Thelma and Louise. But that class was almost twenty years ago, so I've plenty of additional reading to do.

Desert Solitaire has a lot in common with Wendell Berry's essays (I wasn't surprised to learn later that they were friends), even though Abbey's focused on the wilderness and Berry with responsible farming. Still, both men are deeply concerned with man's relationship with the land, and in particular, the way capitalism demands destruction of and separation from the land. The Berry essays I read last fall were far more didactic overall than Abbey's, though the latter in no way buries or obscures his point of view and his scathing indictment of wilderness development. There's something unnerving about reading about his concerns with development in the National Parks (Arches specifically, where he spends two summers) in a book published in 1968. Fifty years later, and we're in even worse shape with our National Parks. The most popular sections are overrun with tourists (I'm not exempt, I've certainly been one) and are under constant danger because of it. By seeking to "appreciate" nature by visiting it, we're also destroying it.

Berry and Abbey also share a similar tone--that of grumpy curmudgeon. I found myself of two minds with the tone. On the on hand, Abbey's frustrations with naïve tourists are always funny. On the other hand, Abbey's indictments reflect both arrogance and privilege. Abbey was in a position to explore Arches and other wild locations in their primitive forms. He rails against others accessing them yes, to protect the environment, but also to protect the isolated experience he enjoys. He can enjoy them the right way; others (in his view) can't.

But ultimately Abbey is not concerned only with selfishly keeping others out and criticizing development. Instead, he seeks to evokes the wilderness' power, beauty, indifference, and fragility. That means plenty of the essays are stories of Abbey's experiences, whether his near-death hike in Havasupai or his time kayaking down the Colorado River. In such stories, Abbey is bold, sometimes a little foolish, and always ready to be awed. I had a student write recently about whether we're losing our sense of wonder, but that's something Abbey never lacks. It's infectious--and no doubt the reason so many people, including myself, have been taken with the book.

I started Desert Solitaire in Ohio but finished it while on spring break in Texas. Though not quite the land Abbey's describing, I still felt that I was imbibing some of that desert spirit as I looked out over gentle, vast hills. In some ways, his advice seems more doable than Berry's. I know I'm never going to start a farm, but I can choose to explore what wilderness remains by foot rather than by car; by the challenging path rather than the quick scenic overlook. I can appreciate that there's something to be gained by staring up at the star-filled sky while in the middle of nowhere--and it's something that I can't get inside an air-conditioned hotel.

"Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

I'm not a writer for a lot of reasons, including all the obvious ones: talent, skill, ideas, practice, time. Still there's a minor issue that's haunted me for years and that perhaps has also interfered with any writerly aspirations. A fear that leads me to doubt the legitimacy of most anything I write. The fear of being sentimental.

Professionals have reinforced the idea that to be sentimental is an insult. Popular books are "sentimental." Serious books are "unsparing," which is apparently the opposite of "sentimental" and thus a compliment. Think of all the book blurbs claiming such-and-such novel is an "unsparing look at [insert important issue]." In truth, I'm not always completely sure what it means to be "unsparing"--self-deprecation, ungenerous observations, discussion of the taboo?

My fear of sentimentality has not only stalled my writing, but has also meant I'm always on guard for books or movies that are sentimental so that I can rebuff their advances and maintain ironic distance. This is sometimes hard. When I find myself enjoying a book veering into the land of sentimentality, I fear I'm losing credibility as a connoisseur of literature. What is that, a "Live Laugh Love" sign on my wall?! (I do not have one. One has to take some firm stances.)

All of this is a completely unnecessary introduction to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a shield on the fact that the book is maybe a little sentimental but I mostly liked it anyway. The novel follows the lives of Sam and Sadie, who are drawn together by video games as children and then go on to create video games together as adults. The novel follows the ups and downs of their relationship over several decades, through love and losses; disability and mental illness; trauma and the mundane. It felt very similar to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in its style and focus.

I suppose what leads me to call Tomorrow sentimental is that I have little to say about the book itself. It's a sweet story about the power of someone to "play" with--someone who gets the things you get, values the things you value, finds fun in the same activities. I think that's a good message. The novel begins in the '90s, so it has a lot of nostalgic video game callbacks for people from that era. I never gamed, but I still feel a little warmth for the original Donkey Kong. 

There are some elements that irked me. The way it dealt with unexpected death felt cliché and overdone. Zevin titled her book after Shakespeare's most well-known soliloquy, which feels like a bold move, but I'm not sure thematically it did Macbeth justice. 

Still, overall I was drawn to the affection between Sam and Sadie, their admiration for and understanding of each other. Maybe it's not possible to write about deeply loving relationships without being a bit sentimental. I guess that's okay too. I've reached a point in my life where I know I value those more than anything else, so I suppose it's only to be expected that my tastes in literature would reflect it.

Note: This echoes some ideas I brought up in my Verity review, but I chose to plow ahead nonetheless. 

"Sourdough" by Robin Sloan

I read this one at the recommendation of a friend, not realizing I had read Sloan's other novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, ten years ago (rereading that review, it seems like Sloan has stuck with the same themes).

Sourdough is a little simple, and then... it's bafflingly weird. The first part of the novel passes breezily enough. Lois is an overworked tech programmer in San Francisco, but when the owners of her beloved takeout place are forced to leave the U.S.--and leave her with their special sourdough starter--Lois starts baking. She's even more busy than before, but suddenly, she's no longer depressed, tired, or even run-down looking. Sourdough has saved her! Already the novel is in murky territory. Why does baking renew and rejuvenate her? Certainly the reader understands the classic story of a run-down office-worker liberated by "real work," but Lois' office job is substantive, and she does produce tangible results. She gets praise for her bread from colleagues and acquaintances, but she has no real interest in making friendships, so it doesn't seem like that's the reason for her transformation. Given the end of the book, it could be we're supposed to believe there's "magic" in the bread that's causing the change, but if that's so then the book isn't really about a person growing (the point of all books?).

Soon after, Lois is recruited to join an underground (literally) farmer's market of sorts that's developing new products at the intersection of technology and food. To qualify, she uses one of her company's robot arms to mix the batter and sometimes crack eggs and... why? I have to believe stand mixers are already pretty good at mixing, and I suppose not having to hand crack eggs saves some time, but it hardly seems revolutionary. Lois also quits her high-paying, high-status job for which she's trained her whole life with nary a shudder (I did the math and there's NO WAY she can possibly make enough money to subsist in San Francisco doing this).

I'm not going to go into the ending which comes out of left field and makes almost no sense. We end on a note of personal growth and relationships that doesn't feel earned given what came before. 

This is a lot of criticism for an easy, pleasant-enough read, and I honestly did like some of the insight into sourdough bread and food history. I agree with Sloan that there's fascinating stuff about how tech and food might come together, but I'm not sure this book did it justice. Beo--the shop owner who gives Lois the sourdough starter--feels like he would have been a far more interesting character than Lois. Still, it was a book with too many holes and leaps to work for me.

"Either/Or" by Elif Batuman

Either/Or is a sequel to Batuman's The Idiot, which followed her Turkish-American protagonist, Selin, as she navigated her first year at Harvard and her feelings for the Hungarian student Ivan. Either/Or moves on to Selin's sophomore year, as she ponders over her feelings for Ivan and, more broadly, how she wants to live her life.

Anyone with any negative stereotypes of what Harvard students might be like will have all their worst prejudices confirmed. Selin and her classmates are privileged and pretentious, full of eye-rolling metaphysical philosophy. Their lives are easy, their petty concerns swathed in the language of the academic elite. I believe in the value of a liberal arts education, but Selin is studying Russian literature, for goodness' sake! 

And yet I not only enjoyed the book, but I found it immensely resonant. Partly because I, too, was once a privileged, pretentious, and shallow college student, but also because Selin's questions of a life well-lived matter to us all. Yes, those are questions that can only be considered with the leisure time her social status allows, and her questions don't necessarily lead to real answers or concrete actions, but still we all want to know who we are and who we want to be. 

For Selin, this means navigating her complicated feelings about relationships and sex, particularly when it comes to her independence from or subjection to men. Selin feels pressure to subvert some of herself in order to make herself attractive to men, and she's puzzled over her attitudes toward sex after she perfunctorily loses her virginity to a man she barely knows.

In the last part of the novel, Selin travels to her family's home country of Turkey to do research and write for a travel guide. Unlike in America, Selin is hounded by Turkish men eager to sleep with her, and she navigates a series of relationships--some positive, some borderline abusive. When she finally leaves Turkey, she feels freer and more self-reliant than she has the rest of the novel. She makes her own decisions, less weighted by the fixation she's had on various men. 

The character arc is interesting in and of itself, but it's Batuman's prose that really gets me. Many of the paragraphs are off-hand observations or questions, or simply documentation of the quirks of life that make a day a day. Selin (and Batuman) are thoughtful and keen observers, the kind of people you want to engage in conversation with. I'd happily follow her even if she just sat in her dorm room reading the whole year.

"Verity" by Colleen Hoover

Verity started appearing on my radar late last year, when there was hubbub on the local mom's Facebook group about finding and borrowing the novel and Hoover's other titles. Out of nowhere (at least, in my mind), Hoover was suddenly the hottest thing in middle-aged women's literature. One of my friends had reluctantly read the book for a book club and suggested I read it too. 

Of course, I didn't like the book, for many valid and defensible reasons*, and honestly its appeal is far less clear to me than other books that blew up among my demographic (say, Gone Girl, which I did largely enjoy, or even the awful Fifty Shades of Grey, which at least was something new). Still, I've been parsing over my reaction to the book, given that I knew I'd dislike it before I even began.

If I'm being honest, despite my self-adopted label as feminist, I tend to reject out of hand anything your average, upper-middle class, white suburban woman likes. I see the group as tasteless, bland, and frivolous--even though I don't see myself or any of my friends in that light. In some ways, rejecting products popular with suburbanites feels justifiable (after all, every book and movie tells me this group is the scourge of society), but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that some of must be rooted in misogyny, a sense that I believe many (most?) women like me can't appreciate real literature. (Of course, I don't think most men in my demographic can appreciate real literature either. However, as a stereotype, suburban men only watch football and thus have never picked up a book in their life, so there are not even choices to criticize).

I know all of this is ultimately self-aggrandizement, a sense that I (alone?) with my English degree and refined tastes can rise above the masses and appreciate real art, a snootiness that extends beyond literature to the films and TV shows I watch as well. And, again, I know that none of this is true. My friend didn't like Verity any more than I did, and she has no English background. And I'm sure there are women I know who loved the book whom I think are smart, thoughtful, and cultured.

Still, I'm left uncertain of where to go. I haven't participated in a book club in several years, but back when book clubs were at their zenith and I bounced among a few, I found myself at odds with the other members. The clubs often chose popular books like Verity, which I panned, and I knew I came off as pretentious and condescending to the other members who found them fun. On the other hand, it feels disingenuous to try to "focus on positive"--the fact that it's popular doesn't mean there's anything redeeming about Verity.

I suppose the only real conclusion I can come to is that my choices in books are dictated by my tastes, preferences, and reading experiences. That doesn't mean "anything goes"--that all judgments of literature are inherently subjective (and thus meaningless)--but rather that my end goal may be different than others. That's okay too. 

*Just a few valid and defensible reasons why Verity is bad:

1. The prose lacks any grace or art.
2. The main character, Lowen, is given a generic backstory: she had scary sleepwalking as a child, which caused estrangement with her mom. Her mom recently died. She doesn't like being in public. None of this backstory is developed into any sort of meaning in the novel and appears to exist solely to give her grief to share with Jeremy.
3. Lowen's character is, instead, defined by how hot she thinks Jeremy is and by how creepy she thinks Jeremy's house/wife is. But mostly how hot Jeremy is.
4. We're told repeatedly in the novel that Jeremy's wife Verity, who's a famous novelist, is known for writing books from the villain's POV (which Verity presents as some awesome feat; Paradise Lost, anyone?). It's clear early on that the "twist" will be in that vein, but the actual twist (which I won't explain, it's stupid and convoluted) is boring and nonsensical. 
5. No parent would write that about their kids, even as a writing exercise.
   

"The World We Make" by N.K. Jemisin

In my review of The City We Became, the first book in this duology, I noted my mixed feelings about Jemisin centering her newest series as a "love letter to New York." And I use that phrase with all the cliched baggage it carries with it. After all, New York City is special, and the people there know it, but for all the rest of us... it can get a little much. 

Jemisin's unwavering adulation of New York leads to similar problems in The City We Become, where the main villain is trying to destroy NYC by drumming up outside hatred for the city. This makes the conflict explicitly NYC vs. everyone else, where NYC is a beautiful mix of confident, take-no-crap cultures, ethnicities, and races and "everyone else" is ignorant racists. Don't get me wrong--white suburbanites especially deserve most of the criticism they get, but in this novel the dichotomy seems overly straightforward, and even blind to the many cultures and beliefs that exist outside NYC. 

Jemisin noted that this series was originally intended to be a trilogy that she condensed into a duology, and I think that truncated nature shows, particularly in the book's resolution. Though I finished the book just a couple weeks ago, I have entirely forgot the ending, but I'm pretty sure New York won. (just kidding, I know it did)

Still, like with her previous book, Jemisin always writes fun and engaging prose, even though almost everything the characters said annoyed me. The relationship between Manhattan and Neek (the avatar of NYC as a whole) was more sweet than I expected.

"Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou

Bad Blood traces the infamous story of Elizabeth Holmes and her blood-testing company, Theranos. By now, almost everyone knows at least the basics: young Holmes' superstar rise; her ability to raise millions from prominent investors; her company's utter failure to deliver on any of its promises--and the fraud in which she and the company engaged to hide their failings.

Carreyrou is a reporter who was essential in bringing to light the company's fraud, and Bad Blood faithfully does its journalistic duty. Carreyrou recounts the endless string of employees who were hired full of enthusiasm only to be fired once they voiced concerns about the company's lies. Carreyrou recounts the endless string of enthusiastic investors who were taken in by Holmes' charisma and a fear of missing out on the next tech giant. Carreyrou does all of this recounting well, with precision and detail, though there's so many people covered it's impossible to remember more than a couple clearly.

Still, the book was a disappointment, primarily because Carreyrou assumes the role of a traditional reporter, and the novel is written simply as an incredibly long newspaper article. There's detail and accuracy, but there's no feeling or analysis or depth. 

Most startlingly, we learn almost nothing about Holmes herself. Sure, she understandably refused to grant an interview, but you'd think there'd be some attempt to plumb her intentions, thought-process and motivations. What drove her? Did she intentionally and knowingly lie, or did she truly believe her own hype? Carreyrou notes a number of times that she wanted to emulate tech icons like Steve Jobs, but that's just a statement--not any real understanding. Furthermore, while we're repeatedly told how charismatic Holmes is, we get little real evidence for it or a feel for her personality. She persuaded millionaires and top-level government officials, but how?

We also get only a surface-level understanding of the cultural processes that allowed Holmes and Theranos to get as far as they did. Carreyrou notes two important phenomenon:

1. After the success of companies like Apple and Facebook, many investors had intense FOMO and were almost more afraid of missing out on the next big success than losing money.
2. Investors were eager to see success in someone other than a white man, and were overly willing to embrace a story of a young woman's meteoric rise.

Again, while Carreyrou acknowledges these factors, he gives them little discussion or depth. Consider, for example, why #2 is true--it's far easier to latch on to an exceptional story (a female Steve Jobs!) than consider the systemic issues that made icons on white men--but not women or people of color. But this is never discussed.

Or, even deeper, consider the longstanding myth in American society, the one that serves as the bedrock for the American Dream: if you believe it, you can achieve it. It's been the line behind motivational posters, Instagram memes, and self-help nonsense books like The Secret. If we believe this myth--and there's a lot to suggest many people in America do believe this myth--then everything Holmes did was justified. She didn't accept "no" for an answer. She believed she could solve her company's problems by striving ahead, undaunted. She had thought of an idea, and thus the idea was possible--it just required grit and effort. It's no surprise that such an attitude inherently leads to self-delusion, and it's not hard for self-delusion to justify fraud. 

But, instead, despite some acknowledgment of the culture in which Holmes and Theranos operated, Carreyrou treats Holmes as an individual fraudster, not a natural result of her environment. I don't mean to excuse Holmes misdoings, which are many, but rather to emphasize that no one succeeds like this in a vacuum.

I understand that Carreyrou is not an anthropologist or cultural historian. Still, it seems a waste to tell a story like this without an in-depth probing or why and how it happened.