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I'm not sure if other people do this in book reviews but I like to annotate how I came to the book in question, because I think it's helpful for others to compare their recent life story to mine in order to better make sense of the review.

It's entirely coincidental that this is second book that I came to via Ranjan Roy's tweeting (see my previous review for why Ranjan matters to me). Ranjan ringingly endorses not this book but Julius Krein's longread, "The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth". Like Ranjan, I absolutely loved Krein's piece and when I finished it, I began trawling its bibliography, which is how I found this book: cites Davis for the helpful term "Nikefication".

Krein's thesis, which builds on a previous piece also in American Affairs by Herman Mark Schwartz, "Corporate Profit Strategies and U.S. Economic Stagnation" which is also fantastic, is that in the US (and less so in other countries), corporate profits and share prices come from specific financial engineering techniques, including share buybacks, spinning off higher-valuation subsidiaries, and recentering on intellectual property. They do not come from the things that you would hope corporations, both public and private, do, like invest in capacity or R&D—those are positively awful ways to try to generate profits and shareholder value. I think you can see this most clearly in looking at American firms' hurdle rates: "In theory, firms should invest in a new project whenever the expected returns on the investment exceed the firm’s cost of capital". In practice, firms only invest in new projects when the expected return is 7% to 15% higher than the cost of capital, a gap that's persisted over decades and over multiple interest rate cycles.

The aforementioned Nikefication is a superb shorthand for this basket of financial engineering mechanisms that American public and private firms use to maximize shareholder value even if it means decreasing competitiveness and accepting malinvestments.

Only the middle third of this book is about Nikefication, but the first third is valuable because it's a deep look at the social and business environments that preceded today's Nikefied field. Beginning with the birth of corporations as mechanisms to raise enormous amounts of capital needed to build American canals and railroads, and their subsequent co-evolution with the American social experiment, was really helpful, because as Davis elucidates, other countries like the UK and Germany, with much stronger central governments and banking sectors, followed a very different path.

After discussing the deep past (pre-Nikefication) and the recent past (Nikefication), Davis discusses the future. The corporate structure is already a thing of the past: the vast majority if IPOs in recent decades didn't need capital, they IPO'd to cash out founders and earlier investors. Gone is the social pact whereby big corporations hire huge swaths of the population and provide jobs and benefits. Vizio and Flip and Google and Nike and Hilton can coordinate huge amounts of business activity with tiny workforces. What comes next? This part of the book is speculative and describes a range of possibilities all along the utopia–dystopia scale—no doubt the future will be two steps forward, one step back.

Davis' prose is clear and approachable, frequently revisiting points and restating them. It's much easier to read than Krein or Schwartz' pieces in American Affairs and just takes longer because it's much longer. I'd love a Krein-ified version of the book but am very glad I read it!

Having read some amazing essay collaborations between Jo Walton and Ada Pamler, including the stupendously important "The Protagonist Problem", when I saw that Jo Walton had written a novel of Medici Florence, I began reading it straightway, only barely registering the title and not even glancing at the blurb—as a lover of the art of Italian Renaissance, especially Florentine art and architecture, I know I couldn't go wrong.

What a story. What verve! I have read a couple of novels steeped in the Catholic mythology (Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow) and gladly add this to that esteemed company—and am especially grateful to avoid even the slightest of spoilers.

I love the color Jo Walton gives us: scraping muck off one's shoes before entering a house, dipping bread in soup. I also find myself very thoughtfully reflecting on how the entire Christian mytho-psychology needs you to have both total confidence in your own worthiness but also simultaneously having total uncertainty about it—something Jo Walton's Savonarola had to contend with, as do today's believers. I shudder momentarily.

Ada Palmer holds up several novels as examples of hopepunk in "Hopepunk, optimism, purity, and futures of hard work". Hopepunk is a neologism initially intended to be the opposite of grimdark but as she elucidates in that excellent essay, it's come to mean more: stories about imperfection, about the hard work of trying to make things better even as we know they might get worse:

We also need stories of people who are tired like us. Who are trapped between crises like us. Who are grungy, and sweaty, and compromised, and struggling like us.

One of those examples was The Goblin Emperor and I loved Maia's goodness, perfectly-rendered to fit with the world-building. I love slow-burn slice of life stories where people are basically good to each other despite life's many imperfections, and while very different than my go-to examples of that genre, The Goblin Emperor joins that list.

And not just because of Maia's honorable approach to life. I have never read a novel where the time or the date are routinely mentioned: I love seeing Maia and his entourage play what my boss calls "calendar Tetris" of trying to fit in appointments. Such a humble mechanism but it adds such zest to the excellent world-building, which includes allusions to economics that fans of Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Hasekura Isuna's Spice and Wolf will love to see.

I am sad it ended.

Occasionally I have need to refer to "a past life", but I doubt I'll be able to use that turn of phrase or that frame of mind without a deep disquiet thanks to Elaine Castillo, a mighty poet-goddess:

“Hero couldn’t imagine Teresa at eight or nine, gorging herself on tiny oily crablets, but the fact that Hero couldn’t imagine it said less about Teresa and more about Hero. Teresa had been that girl, too, in another life. No—not in another life. The same one. Hero was starting to figure that out, too.”

Forgive me, this is ridiculous but in trying to both describe Castillo's novel as well as my path to it (and through it), the following formula presents itself: Garcia-Márquez, minus magical realism thank god, plus some "Trese", plus "Scrubs", plus a lot of Mao, plus my life in the California Bay Area?

Because, yes, here's a profound portrait of the Filipino American immigrant experience. The scene with Paz on an international call, shouting at relatives, "anger her last fortification against fear", is one that I instantly recognize from my childhood (though we came from South Asia).

But I cannot stop thinking about the many side-quests Castillo has given us: an incredible portrait of the Communist rebel life that I'm dying to learn more about (Hero's story reminded of that generation of mujahideen who had lived their entire lives in the mountains, entering Kabul in 1992, and marveling at the glories of a city). The universal professionalism of nurses and doctors. Bruhas and folk healers (that "Trese" reference). The Bay Area dialect circa 1990s—I can hear Rosalyn and Jaime's repartee almost exactly around me, though today they'd have more beautiful Black English grammar, like dropped "be"'s.

Then there's the languages. Oh, linguistics lovers are in for a treat—

“Hero opened her mouth, still unsure of whether to use English or Tagalog when talking to Paz. Paz had a habit of speaking to Roni in a mixture of English, Tagalog, and Pangasinan. It felt like Roni didn’t really know the difference between Tagalog and Pangasinan, and moved between the two interchangeably as if they were one language. Nobody had told her otherwise, Hero supposed. But for Hero, listening to the mixture was like listening to a radio whose transmission would occasionally short out; she’d get half a sentence, then nothing—eventually the intelligible parts would start back up, but she’d already lost her place in the conversation. But when Pol would come in, they’d switch to English, and like adjusting a dial to get a sharper signal, Hero would be able to tune in again.”

And the food, oh the food—

“She brought things that Hero recognized but rarely ate in Vigan, afritada and adobo and pancit, which Hero associated only with festivals and holidays. She brought the foil-wrapped meat loaf Hero thought of as embutido, but which Paz called morhon.”

There are also important omissions. Like Octavia Butler who in many novels didn't have men even as villains, Castillo totally decenters white American culture, and the negative space gives the novel so much completeness. Thankfully childhood bullying is only hinted at.

Yeah, not a book I'd recommend to just everyone—nobody asks me anyway—but one that I suspect I will be shaped by in unexpected ways for a while to come.

Superb—just what I, a big josei fan, needed after the incredible storytelling of the "ODDTAXI" anime. This is a delicately-told tale, as seen through the gauze of memory, curious with poky bits of humor in surprising places.

A couple of notes—I think original title, "Sensei no kaban", meaning "Sensei's briefcase", is much more lovely than the English's non sequitur.

Also something really funny about the opening. In English it goes, "His full name was … but I called him 'Sensei.' Not 'Mr.' or 'Sir,' just 'Sensei.'" I was curious what original text could result in this strange sentence, and I went to look on Bookwalker, and—if I may be so bold as to attempt a non-translation—it is, "… but I called him 'Sᴇɴsᴇɪ'. Not '先生', not 'Sensei', but all in small caps, 'Sᴇɴsᴇɪ'" (先生 is "sensei" in kanji, and the small caps are analogous to katakana, the "uppercase" Japanese syllabary; for the analogy to hold, the author would have typeset it as Sᴇɴsᴇɪ through the whole book). I laughed and laughed.