Book 100

Hey everyone! I just read the 100th book this year, but my year is not over yet. I still have until April 8th to end this project, and I am very curious to see how many books I can read. If you all will bear with me I think I can squeeze a few more in!

Hope in the Dark

"Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement, pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."

Rebecca Solnit

Hope in the Dark

"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think."

Virginia Woolf

I sometimes feel overwhelmed. I feel that things are far from what they should be, and it sometimes seems that no matter how hard we fight, we will never get to the place where we should. Things sometimes feel desperate; sometimes it feels like we've barely made a step forward, only to be forced two or three steps back. I sometimes feel this way with a lot of things: women's rights, health care, living wages and affordable housing, war, climate change. Its often frustrating, often overwhelming. 

In the book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit addresses this question of why we should hope, especially when the problems that we need to solve seem insurmountable. She discusses why hope is valuable and necessary, especially when problems seem to be at their worst, and reminds us that things are never as dark as they seem. Often things are better than they were yesterday, and change is often extremely slow.

She also talks about many of the important and under reported movements lead by activists around the world and examines why they are often successful, even when they did not 'win' the day, and why they aren't talked about much in the United States.

Solnit (author of Men Explain Things to Me, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and the Faraway Nearby) does all of this with masterful prose and beautiful composition. Her language pulls the reader through the book, covering a multitude of subjects (with occasional footnotes for the necessary backstory), and ties the book together extremely well. 

This book is a must read for everyone. It shows us that our actions will always make a difference, even when the world is to dark to wade through, and sometimes acting when there is no light at the end of the tunnel is the bravest thing we can do.

Flight

"Maybe you can't kill somebody twice for real, but it sure hurts your heart just the same."

Sherman Alexie

Flight

Growing up is hard. Growing up is especially hard if you are a zit-faced, teenage Native America boy struggling through a hardly fail-proof foster care system like Zits is. Abandoned by his father at birth and after his mother died when he was six, Zits has a bunch of problems. He can't find a foster home that fits, he drinks a lot, he starts fires, and he does drugs. One day in prison he meets another teenager, named Justice, who convinces him to run away with him and to shoot up a bank full of people because of what whites did to the Native Americans. Right after he pulls the triggers, he finds himself spirited back in time into the body of one of the FBI agents working to bring down IRON in the 70's. His journey doesn't stop there. He leapfrogs from body to body across time, experiencing snippets of the lives of several different people: a Native American boy at little bighorn, a general in the US Army during one of the many massacres in the settling of the west, a pilot instructor reeling from the death of his Muslim friend from Ethiopia. Along the way he learns what it is like to walk in another mans shoes, and learns a whole different way of looking at the world.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I loved the way it looked at how our actions affect others, even if it is years later. I loved the way it looked at how connected we all are, and how two wrongs don't make a right. I loved how it looked at ways we could all be better as people, and the many reasons why what we are doing now is not enough. I loved this book.

I especially loved the character Zits. I loved the way that he described things, and how the language used really made you feel that you are in the head of a sad, hurt, and confused teenager. His character is fantastic, and I really love how the events that happen to him force him to consider really hard questions like those regarding shared cultural blame, absolute moral laws, trust and forgiveness. This was a truly fantastic book. Sherman Alexie is a magnificent writer.

Battleborn

"That's what I prayed for then: divine preservation of something I would never understand, the safeguarding of something I'd already lost."

"Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know."

Claire Vaye Watkins

Battleborn

Nevada is a strange state. Its large and beautiful, made up of basin and range as the state is slowly stretched apart. It's dry, held in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Most population groupings are small, spread out, based on mining, with exceptions in Reno and Las Vegas. The Comstock lode put Nevada on the map, the civil wars need for silver making it a destination. It is a strange place. The Sagebrush Insurgency experiences a large amount of support, Manson was able to convince others to follow him into the hills. It is a fascinating and often overlooked state in the rush to get to booming California and whatever happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, though it seldom does. 

Nevada is the the theme of Claire Vaye Watkins (who also wrote Gold Fame Citrus) collection of short stories, Battleborn. It is a wonderful, dark collection that speaks on themes of desperation, isolation, and loneliness.  Each story is different, some taking place in present day, either in the big cities or out in the rural wilderness, while others take place in the past, during the settling of the state when people considered it a vast and dry desert to be crossed on their way to the mountains full of gold. I loved it. Her characters are diverse, from men seeking their fortune to whores at a brothel outside of Vegas, an old rock hound to college kids fleeing Reno for the weekend. She changes voices flawlessly, and does an incredible job conveying what is happening in the characters heads. 

One of my favorite stories is "The Diggings," which follows two brothers in the eighteen hundreds as they travel west to the mountains to search for gold. It bluntly shows the hardships that they experienced, which is so incredibly different from the glorified image we have of the settling of the west today. It shows the poor living conditions, the racism (mostly against the Chinese and the Native Americans), and how the greed drove people to do terrible things. The main character, Joshua, is often the voice of reason, and his kindness and realistic view of events was a fantastic contrast to the surroundings and drove home how cruel and brutal it was.

This collection was fantastic. Every story was well done, the characters all well rounded and complex, the storytelling beautiful, and the prose fantastic and gripping. I highly recommend it.

It was strange reading, though. I lived in Nevada when I was little, and I remember many of the places she talked about, the roads over the passes, the small towns of Beatty and Verdi, the mines out at Battle Mountain. I remember the places, but I was too young to really see some of the dark things that happened, to see the effects of drug and alcohol problems, the fall out from the mining. It is a beautiful place. It still feels empty out in the middle of the state, unlike most of the rest of the country. It is fantastic.

Presence

"Don't fake it till you make it, fake it till you become it."

Amy Cuddy

Presence

"Stand up straight."

Grandma Liz

What is presence, and how do we get it? This are the questions that Amy Cuddy seeks to answer in her book Presence. The answers she comes up with and the way that she presents them is entirely different than what I expected. I was expecting just another self help book that went into dominant posturing and tips on how to speak, but what Cuddy is talking about is something entirely different. Using tons of research, she looks into how posture can effect the brain, and how we can change that posture in order to bring our "biggest selves" to our biggest challenges. It was fascinating.

Cuddy examines the ideas of "power" and "presence" from several different angles. She looks at how differences in power effect peoples relationships (employers and employees), why the imposter experience is so widespread,  and why post traumatic stress is so debilitating, and then examines how and why power posturing effects the body, and how it can be actively used to treat several different problems.

Throughout the entire book she does this compassionately with a wonderful dose of humor. She explains complicated neurological ideas very simply, and never stops asking questions to push her research to the next step. A great read for anyone who has ever dealt with anxiety, imposter syndrome, depression, fears of public speaking and so many more things. At the very least, check out her TED talk. You won't be sorry that you did.

The Sexual Politics of Meat

"The dissonance they produce is not due to their being false, but to their being too accurate."
Carol J. Adams
The Sexual Politics of Meat

The Sexual Politics of Meat, by Carol J. Adams, is an extremely interesting book. It's well written, a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, which are two things that I didn't think were linked. This book was fascinating, and, truth be told, it got under my skin a little. Truth be told, it got under my skin a lot.

In the book, Adams examines how culturally ingrained misogyny is related to our cultural obsession with meat and masculinity. What is more masculine than eating a bloody steak? and a salad for the lady, please. It examines a history of vegetarianism among civil and sexual rights advocates, breaks down several of the arguments for and against vegetarianism, and looks at several examples of sexualizeing animals and animalizing women that are present in our culture. It extremely well done, so much so that it has me convinced.

Anyone who has ever wondered why eating a steak is manly, or why women who have been sexualized us metaphors of animal products do describe the experience should read this book. Everyone should read this book. It's changed my life, though I find it extremely difficult to talk about. So read it, and message me what you think.

    

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Hey everyone! Heres the next book. I read it with the We Read Drinks crew. Check it out!