Books I Finished in June of 2019 (With One Podcast Series)
If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Reviewed earlier in separate post.)
Then It Fell Apart
By: Moby
320 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: B+
Who should read this book?
If you read Moby’s previous autobiography Porcelain and enjoyed it, I think you’ll enjoy this one as well.
If you have not read Porcelain, I would definitely recommend reading it first. It’s a better book and chronologically it comes first.
Representative passage:
After the show I drank champagne and vodka in my dressing room with Ewan McGregor. After a few drinks I decided that he and I should go out and drink more, but that I should be naked. Sandy, my tour manager, urged me, “Moby, at least put on a towel.” So I went out in downtown Melbourne wearing a towel. No shoes. No clothes. Just a towel. Ewan and I stumbled from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker. At the end of the night we ended up in a subterranean bar filled with Australian celebrities. I’d had ten or fifteen drinks, so I went to the bathroom to pee, and found myself standing at a urinal next to Russell Crowe. He zipped up his pants, and then pushed me against the wall of the bathroom and started screaming at me. “Uh, we’ve never met,” I tried to say. “Why are you yelling at me?” He never told me, but he kept me pinned against the wall while he shouted and screamed. After a minute he lost interest, cursed a few times, and stumbled out of the bathroom. I went back to the bar and told Ewan, “Russell Crowe just yelled at me.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. He yells at everyone.”
Criticisms
I read Porcelain last month, knowing that Then It Fell Apart was about to be released, and as you may or may not recall I quite enjoyed it. This book was not as good. And it was almost entirely due to the very depressing sameness of nearly every story. To set the scene, the last book ended just before the release of Play. Play ended up being a gigantic worldwide success, giving Moby all the money and fame anyone could possibly want, and of course, it wasn’t enough, and he spends the entire book desperately, suicidally unhappy. The book in fact opens with a suicide attempt.
He does just about every dumb thing you can imagine to try to fill the gaping, empty hole that is his soul, and everything he tries ends up being a disaster. The level of sex and drugs and alcohol in this book is beyond staggering, and it’s so obvious from the outside what he should stop doing, and equally so obvious what he should be doing instead. After hundreds of pages where he does neither, it starts to wear you down.
Lest you think the entire book is composed of these disasters, he does alternate stories of his debauchery with stories from his past. I enjoyed these parts more, though they were also mostly depressing.
Thoughts
This book was in the news above and beyond what might normally be expected because of Moby’s description of his relationship with Natalie Portman. Moby claimed they dated. Portman was in her teens at the time (18) and claims it was far more stalkerish. Moby profusely apologized and canceled his book tour. Having actually read the parts about Portman, and having read them before I saw that it had made the news I’m going to say that I feel like the whole thing was overblown. He didn’t claim he took her virginity, or something sensational like that. He claims he spent time with her (which appears to be the case), and certainly he characterized this time as dating, but I’m not even 100% sure he uses that actual word. The whole thing actually came across as very chaste. All of which is to say, I agree, Moby screwed up, but I think people made a lot more out of it than was really warranted.
There was one other incident from the book that struck me as particularly interesting. One of the reasons why he can’t get his life under control is that the merest hint of a romantic commitment causes him to experience intense panic attacks. This would be one thing if it had always been present, the source either genetic or buried in the mists of childhood, but as Moby tells it, it all started after a particularly bad LSD trip. As he describes it before then he had had several moderately successful long-term relationships, and was in fact involved in one that appeared headed for marriage at the time of the bad trip. In talking to people with more “domain experience” than me this seems either unbelievable or very uncommon, but it also seems like lots of drugs have a few rare but catastrophic side effects. Accordingly I’m not inclined to dismiss it out of hand, and if it did happen the way he describes, it’s pretty sad, since it’s entirely possible that without these panic attacks that he would have had a much easier time getting his life under control.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
Even if you try really, really hard, money can’t buy you happiness. Particularly if you’re going to mistake hedonism for happiness.
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel
By: Neal Stephenson
880 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: B-
Who should read this book?
If you’ve liked everything else Stephenson has written you’ll probably like this, though it’s unlikely to be your favorite.
If you love mythology and devoured Bulfinch or something similar when you were a kid you’ll probably like the book.
Representative passage:
In the Garden lived a boy and a girl. Trees and flowers, herbs, vines, bees, birds, and beasts of various kinds lived there too. But there were no others like them. The Garden was circumscribed on three sides by a sheer wall of stone, and on the fourth side by the Palace. Above was sky, where clouds danced in the day and stars wheeled at night. Below was earth, where plants of many kinds spread their roots.
Special recognition of how horrible Stephenson is at writing sex scenes:
She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle. “It comes from thinking about mortality, right? Leads to a ‘life is short—let’s go’ mentality.”
He pulled her into him and mashed his doodle, bolt upright, against her stomach. She wrapped her arms around his neck for purchase and mashed back. They went on to perform sexual intercourse on the big pile of T-shirts on the rug.
Thoughts and criticisms free of spoilers
Stephenson is adept at creating rich, inviting worlds. Sometimes those worlds seem fairly realistic, the world of Fall is not one of them. I’m sure part of that is that Fall starts in the present day and then extends into the near future, making the problems of realism much easier to spot. This did bother me less than other people, (for example see Robin Hanson’s criticism) but it still detracted from the novel overall.
In previous Stephenson novels, my sense was that he was frequently going off on small tangents. Generally these were delightful. In his later works, particularly this one and Seveneves the tangents seem much longer, whole dramatic subplots that are aborted before they can really go anywhere interesting. Both Seveneves and Fall felt like they would have worked better as two separate books. And with Fall I could even see the argument for three.
Thoughts and criticisms with mild spoilers
Before reading Fall I saw several things saying that Stephenson tackles fake news and extremism on the internet, but that he doesn’t go nearly far enough. I think this says far more about the times we live in than about the book or Stephenson. My sense is that these days everyone wants all art to be a commentary on today’s problems, and what’s even more ideal is if it’s directly critical of Trump. That everything that has the potential to be a polemic should be a polemic. As I said in the last section I do think the extremism subplot felt tacked on, but I don’t think that’s what people are complaining about, I think they’re complaining that the identification of the righteous and the wicked needed to be clearer.
If the section on internet extremism is one book, than the other section is a book of modern mythology. The online consensus was to favor the section on extremism (even if it didn’t go far enough) over the mythology section. In my opinion that’s exactly backwards. I thoroughly enjoyed the mythology section, while the section on extremism was more bizarre than revelatory.
In Stephenson’s last book, Seveneves, one of my greatest disappointments was that there was never a scene where someone unloaded on Julia Bliss Flaherty for how stupid she had been. In a remarkably similar fashion in Fall there’s a dramatic murder which then barely gets mentioned again, and where there’s never any reckoning.
I didn’t get a strong sense of what the core philosophical differences were between Dodge and the main antagonist. Dodge was good seemingly merely by virtue of being the protagonist with the antagonist being the mirror image of that.
Books I would read before this one:
I would read basically anything else by Stephenson before reading this.
To Live and Die in LA (Podcast)
Hosted By: Neil Strauss
9 hours
Format: Podcast
Rating: B
Who should listen to this podcast?
If you really like blow-by-blow true crime stuff, this is a pretty good podcast.
If you want to see what goes on in a journalistic investigation this is a pretty good example of that.
Representative passage:
CHRIS SPOTZ: I’m not recording any more.
Adea: You’ve beat me
CHRIS SPOTZ: Get out of my truck.
Adea: You have beat me up.
CHRIS SPOTZ: Get out of my truck.
Adea: Beaten me up, you toke my Rolex-
CHRIS SPOTZ: I have the video.
Adea: You took my Rolex. You took my Rolex. You beat me up. Everything hurts.
CHRIS SPOTZ: Get outta my truck.
Adea: I’m not getting out ‘til I get my Rolex.
This very disturbing recording is of 25 year-old Adea Shabani, an aspiring actress who moved from Macedonia to Hollywood to pursue her dreams of becoming, as she put it, “A different kind of star.” But just three weeks before I’m recording this, Adea Shabani went missing. Vanished without a trace from outside her apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, right alongside the legendary Walk of Fame.
Thoughts
I wasn’t sure about including a podcast series in this list with everything else, but these days I think there are a lot of great podcast series out there which, when all is said and done, might as well be audiobooks. This was one of those series, and it was definitely well done. Certainly it had most of the things you’ve probably come to expect out of this format. The story was engaging and mysterious, the narrator was compelling, and the characters were all fascinating.
In particular, while I don’t think this was their primary goal in telling the story, the process of actually getting to the truth, and the time and effort required was fascinating. Particularly since in the end the case didn’t end up being particularly complicated. Which seems like a better commentary on the present day than anything Stephenson may have written.
With that said, you may wonder why I gave it a B. Well...
Criticisms
They teased a lot of things in the beginning, which ended up not going anywhere, and which they exaggerated to boot in an obvious effort to make it sound like there were more twists than there actually ended up being.
By the time the podcast was over, the solution they arrive at feels pretty straightforward, and not particularly mysterious. All of which leads to this series being not quite as good as either of the first two seasons of Serial.
If you were going to take only one thing from the podcast:
Even if you’re absolutely tenacious, with lots of time and resources, and even if the actual events are uncomplicated, it’s still really difficult to get at the truth.
Left For Dead: 30 Years On - The Race is Finally Over
By: Nick Ward and Sinead O'Brien
296 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: A-
Who should read this book?
If you like man against nature stories of extreme survival than this is a great one.
If you’ve always been fascinated by the ocean and sailing this is also a great book, but it might put off of ever going near either.
Representative passage:
The swell I had felt below in the cabin was escalating. Ceaseless seas like corrugated iron were stacked up behind us row upon row as if awaiting their turn. I picked one out. Choosing the most deformed monster from this cliff face of madness, I stared at it mad, enraged. I kept staring. I focused on this one huge moving mass, waiting for it. Grimalkin lifted sharply. The horizon was nearly vertical, but this time I made no effort to save myself. All instinct for survival had abandoned me. I stood in the cockpit with Gerry at my feet taunting the wave to get me. As the horizon disappeared I implored this malevolent beast to knock me out cold, kill me. “Come on you bastard! Come on!”
Thoughts
That’s always something magnificent about a great survival story, and when you combine that with sailing (which I’ve always had a soft spot for as well) you’re going to get a great book. This particular story took place during the 1979 Fastnet race. Fastnet is one of the classic offshore yacht races, but this particular edition of the race ended in disaster. From Wikipedia:
A worse-than-expected storm on the third day of the race wreaked havoc on over 303 yachts that started the biennial race, resulting in 19 fatalities (15 yachtsmen and 4 spectators). Emergency services, naval forces, and civilian vessels from around the west side of the English Channel were summoned to aid what became the largest ever rescue operation in peace-time. This involved some 4,000 people including the entire Irish Naval Service's fleet, lifeboats, commercial boats, and helicopters.
Nick Ward was caught in the middle of it, and was the last person rescued. This book is his story, and it’s amazing.
Criticisms
I have only one criticism. A large part of the book is the question of why he was left on the boat by the other members of the crew. And while you get an answer it’s not as satisfactory as one would hope. Part of the book is the story of Ward, himself, finally coming to terms with the uncertainty that’s left, but I’m not there yet. (It took him many many years, I’ve only had a week or two.)
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory
By: Michael Korda
544 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: A-
Who should read this book?
If you loved Nolan’s Dunkirk (or if you wanted to love it, but it was way too loud) and were looking for further information this would be a great book.
If you like history in general, then this is pretty good as history books go.
Representative passage:
In fact the most warlike decision that Chamberlain made—and the one that would have the most drastic effect on the war—was to invite Winston Churchill to join the War Cabinet, and also to serve once again, as he had from 1911 to 1915, as the first lord of the Admiralty (the civilian head of the Royal Navy, roughly equivalent to the American secretary of the navy). Chamberlain's War Cabinet consisted of nine men, including the prime minister—probably too many, Lloyd George’s War Cabinet in World War One had only consisted of five—and placing Churchill in it was tantamount to putting a hawk in a cage full of doves.
Thoughts
I’ve read a fair amount of history, and getting it to flow well is always a problem. If you do find something that flows well, you often run into a different problem, the book isn’t comprehensive enough. Real history doesn’t come in neatly packaged narratives, there are lots of people doing lots of things all at the same time. Korda manages to do a pretty good job balancing both of these things, and ends up creating a very accessible book that nevertheless does a great job of capturing events at every level, from German strategy all the way down to how Dunkirk played out for an average family in London. Korda is assisted in this latter effort by having been a part of one of those families, even if he was only 7 at the time.
Beyond that I definitely learned some new things about Dunkirk, particularly why the Germans were so ineffective at finishing things off there when they were so effective everywhere else. Probably the most surprising revelation was how well-regarded the French Military was, since these days it’s the exact opposite. But at the time the British thought that the French would launch some brilliant counter attack at any moment, and the Germans were sure that they would manage to hold the line at some point just as they had in World War I. This not only made the French the primary focus, but on top of that Hitler apparently still thought they might be able to strike a deal with Britain, which not only made the situation at Dunkirk less pressing, but may have inclined the Germans in the direction of avoiding a slaughter.
It’s unclear what would have needed to change for the British to have made a deal with Hitler. But clearly it would have been easier if Lord Halifax had been Prime Minister, and it does seem like that was avoided by the narrowest of margins. Something I had heard about but not in any detail. Korda did a great job of detailing not only this event but much of what was happening in British politics during the time of the invasion, and this may have been my favorite aspect of the book.
Criticisms
Korda mentions that during the invasion the mistresses of the French politicians exercised undue influence on them, and that if the British had been aware of how much influence they exercised that things might have turned out differently. I had never heard this and was eager to hear more, but he didn’t go into it nearly as much as detail as I would have liked on that aspect, which was unfortunate, since I would have loved to hear more. There were several examples like this, and it’s something of a minor complaint, obviously you can’t cover everything, but he shouldn’t have teased me like that.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
The mistakes made in war are at least as interesting and perhaps more interesting than the things that went according to plan.
How Will You Measure Your Life?
By: Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon
240 pages
Format: Kindle
Rating: B+
Who should read this book?
If you like other stuff by Clay Christensen, you’ll probably like this.
If you voraciously devour anything self-help related, this one should be on your list.
Representative passage:
To understand how all three work together, let’s continue the example of a child developing an iPad app. If your child has a computer on which to program, and knowledge of how to program an iPad app, he has resources. The way in which he pulls these resources together to create something novel, something that he hasn’t been taught explicitly how to do, to learn as he goes along—these are his processes. And the desire he has to spend his precious free time creating the app, the problem he cares about enough to create the app to solve, the idea of creating something unique, or the fact that he cares that his friends will be impressed—those are the priorities leading him to do it. Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.
I worry a lot that many, many parents are doing to their children what Dell did to it’s personal-computing business—removing the circumstances in which they can develop processes.
Criticisms
Every self-help book has to have something of a special sauce. Something that makes that self-help book different than the thousands of self-help books which have come before, and I’m not sure this book has enough of that. First, I don’t think it has much to say what wasn’t said already and probably better in Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. So, if you haven’t already, I would read that book first. Second insofar as it does have a special sauce it’s kind of vague. Christensen and his co-authors take some lessons from how businesses succeed (or fail) and apply them to individuals and families. But beyond that there’s not much of a unifying theme, and maybe that’s fine. There is a lot of good stuff in there, but much of it wasn’t particularly actionable, and what things were actionable I’d already heard somewhere else. Which is to say after reading most self-help books I come away with at least one to-do item, something to look at more closely or a tactic I want to try out, but that was not the case with this book.
Thoughts
All those criticisms aside, for how short it was it packed a lot in, and on top of that these books are still clearly necessary. Despite the thousands of self-help books which have been published people still do a lot of dumb things, even if they should be very familiar with the principles of success. By way of illustration Christensen frames the book by talking about his own Harvard Business School (HBS) graduating class. One would think that if you have managed to do all the things necessary to get into HBS, that you’d have mastered most of the hard stuff. And certainly that you would have read lots of advice on how to succeed. Despite this Christensen discovers that many of these individuals, who seemed to have lives “destined to be fantastic on every level” show up at each successive reunion more and more unhappy. And this is if they show up at all, in the most extreme example, one of his classmates was Jeffrey Skilling who went to jail for his role in the Enron scandal.
It is for people like Christensen’s fellow HBS graduates where this book probably works best. People who are doing great in business, but at the expense of marriages, families and other relationships. And, to be fair, that’s probably a pretty big group.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
It’s important to find meaning both at work and at home, and if you lose it in either that’s when the trouble starts.
Bloodchild and Other Stories
224 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: A
Who should read this book?
If you’re like me and you haven’t read anything by Octavia Butler then this seems like a decent place to start.
If you’re a fan of science fiction short stories as a form of art distinct from novels, these are some great examples.
Representative passage:
I believed I was ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless. I also thought that everyone would notice these faults if I drew attention to myself. I wanted to disappear. Instead, I grew to be six feet tall. Boys in particular seemed to assume that I had done this growing deliberately and that I should be ridiculed for it as often as possible.
I hid out in a big pink notebook—one that would hold a whole ream of paper. I made myself a universe in it. There I could be a magic horse, a Martian, a telepath.… There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these.
Thoughts
This book was recommended to me by one of my regular readers. I had been meaning to read some Butler for quite some time so this was a good excuse to jump in. As I said, it seems like a decent place to start, though Butler herself admits that her strengths lie more in novel writing than the short story. And I guess that means I should read some of her novels. If anyone has a recommendation on where to start let me know.
Considering things more generally, I liked the fact that this collection included a couple of essays as well. As you can probably tell I’m a fan of non-fiction essays, and I thought the ones in Bloodchild added to the experience. Speaking of non-fiction bits, Butler also did a brief afterword following each story which I appreciated.
Criticisms
I don’t have many criticisms, this is a solid collection of short stories, even if none of them rise to the level of being brilliant. I do, however, want to single out Butler’s final story, “The Book of Martha”. In this story a non-omniscient god (he/she got rid of that power because it made things too boring) asks Martha to make one change to the world that would help humans be less destructive. As a philosophical thought experiment it’s great, but neither Martha nor, seemingly, Butler treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Considered more broadly I don’t think this problem is limited to Butler, which is why this is only a minor quibble. Playing god is difficult.
Books I would read before this one:
I suppose if you have never read any science fiction short stories, then I’m not sure this is the place to start. There’s plenty of classic anthologies out there, and depending on the person, I might recommend starting with one of those to get a feel for the genre before reading this book.
As I just mentioned, one of the books I read was recommended by one of my readers. It’s actually pretty easy to get me to read a book, but if you really want to guarantee I’ll take you seriously, consider donating. I know it’s mercenary, but that’s kind of how the world works.