User Profile

I feel like a lot of contemporary political books I read that aim to address why certain movements fail to generate results keep ending up the same way. I go into them thinking, "I wonder if there are more nuanced factors at play that I didn't realize and that it's not just leftist infighting and unrealistic purity tests again." But then I read it and the culprit is leftist infighting and unrealistic purity tests. This has happened like four times now.

The subject of climate change and how different countries respond to it does have unique problems though, like how addressing it is just a supercharged Tragedy of the Commons (countries who make no effort to curb emissions will still benefit if others do, so no one ends up wanting to go first). The "macro" portion of this book looking at the big picture honed in on how Western democracies are hamstrung by short-term political gains and electorates who either can't or don't want to make long-scale investments. This naturally begs the question: are authoritarian states having an easier time/better equipped to deal with the climate crisis? Besides a brief mention of an individual protestor laying out a self-proclaimed "ecofascist" idealized state (where his ideology is conveniently the one that emerges from the ashes on top), this isn't explored, which felt like a missed opportunity to me.

The bulk of this book focuses on the climate activist scene in Germany specifically from the late 2010's through to 2024. It (I think unintentionally) painted Angela Merkel as an extremely shrewd politician who took credit for policy wins that she personally opposed just by stepping in and giving a well-timed push when public sentiment tipped over just the right way. This eventually resulted in a frustrated movement who wanted more substantive action at a faster pace, which in turn led to a series of different organizations getting progressively more direct and extreme. The discussions of the psychology of the most fringe activists who suffer from the worst cases of climate anxiety were really interesting; people who are most concerned about the future are more willing to accept intense dogmatic principles and chastise anyone who doesn't match their energy. It genuinely reads like cult behavior at points.

There are also mentions of how "adaptation" has become a dirty word among the climate movement. The idea that some level of climate change is inevitable and that we should be pivoting to harm reduction is apparently very contentious because it's seen as a preemptive admission of defeat. The True Believers maintain that there's still time to reverse course, but most people aren't willing to make the necessary concessions and will have to be made to do so. I consider myself a slightly better than average-informed normie, but I've never heard of anything like this.

There's also a brief section on the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and lobbying around Joe Manchin specifically, but this is primarily a niche look at contemporary German society. Which is not something I typically read about, but damned if it wasn't interesting.

You know that expression, "don't meet your heroes," because you're just setting yourself up for disappointment? I feel like I just ignored that advice... and it turned out okay anyway!

The Fisherman is one of my all-time favorite books. I'm talking in Top 3, easily. Because of that, I've ironically always been hesitant to visit any of John Langan's other works because I was convinced there was no way anything else could live up to it, and I'd just end up walking away let down, so why bother? I've owned this book for about three years before I finally decided to pick it up and give it a chance. And while I was right in that it wasn't life-changing, it was still extremely solid.

This was another situation where the author's note to the reader at the end of the book really colored my perception of what came before it and gave me a new appreciation. At first I was confused as to why so many of these short stories in this collection had such similar details. At least three of them deal with adult sons trying and failing to emotionally connect with their fathers. A fictionalized version of upstate New York is the setting for the majority of them (CUNY gets name-dropped a lot), and everyone is a second-generation Scottish immigrant. Also this is one of the most aggressively Gen X books I've ever read; damn near every protagonist was either a kid or a teenager in the 80's.

What stuck out a series of distractingly uniform details made more sense once I realized that these were collectively meant to be literal autobiographical elements of the author's life. In retrospect, it is right there in the title, but went over my head and was a pleasing little revelation at the end.

As is the case with most short story collections, some were stronger than others, but nothing here was outright bad, and the good ones were really good. I'll specifically remember "Mirror Fishing" (I get really squeamish with palm/hand injuries and this had an intense ending that had me physically uncomfortable), "The Supplement" (yet another fresh exploration into themes of grief), and "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away" (I just found it to be a really unique premise for a missing person situation) for a very long time. There are also glimpses of a coherent cosmic worldbuilding in the background of some of these stories if you squint hard enough, and I'm now more interested (and willing!) to dive into his other works to see if there's more going on there.

This book will live in infamy in my book club because everyone uniformly hated it... except for me. Yes, the haters have many valid points, but I simply did not mind.

This is a long book that feels twice as long as it actually is (someone said reading it felt like clocking into work). There is a massive cast of characters to keep track of and new people continue to be introduced pretty much right up to the very end. There is no readily identifiable central plot or sequence of events one could point to as a conflict that rises and is then resolved after a climax. And that's all okay.

At the very end of the book is a note from the author who explains that he set out to create a new mythology of the African American experience that was not wholly centered around the experience of slavery, but also did not ignore it. I think knowing that before going into this book would help most people prepare themselves for it, because this is actually a series of loosely-related vignettes rather than a proper novel in the traditional sense. Stepping back now having finished it, this does feel more like an academic folklore compendium than a fictional narrative.

I don't know. I got a lot out of it, but I can also understand a lot of the criticisms leveled against it. I don't think I would ever recommend it to others unless I knew they were really down with literary fiction or just wanted a really unique take on the fantasy genre, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it.

This must be how straight men feel when they accidentally stumble into a gay bar: just a confusing sense of growing unease culminating in a realization of, "oh, I don't belong here and this isn't for me."

I'll admit up front that this was a blind airport purchase and I did not realize this was the seventh book in a series going into it. And it's not meant to be a standalone; there are tons of references to events and now-deceased characters from previous entries that I knew were going over my head. Throwaway lines like, "just like that time in Israel!" meant nothing to me because I just got here, but I'm sure all the callbacks landed for longtime fans.

The premise of a clandestine plan for China to make a move on invading Taiwan depending on the result of a 2024 U.S. Presidential election intrigued me, and the more I read the more I was almost having fun trying to figure out what was fiction and what wasn't. October 7th, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, COVID, Tiktok, and Elon Musk are directly referenced, but as far as I can tell the point of divergence with respect to the presidency was after Carter? I've never read a piece of contemporary fiction that skirted this close to real events.

Unfortunately this book suffered from the existence of a central protagonist that counteracted any enjoyment I could've experienced while reading it and I genuinely believe this would've been a more compelling narrative if he just wasn't in it. I came for the backroom politicking and international negotiations and double-crossing while rogue submarine commanders threaten to let the genie of nuclear war out of the bottle. Instead I got a comically unstoppable Mary Sue of a former SEAL with survivor's guilt who occasionally hallucinates his fridged wife and daughter (spoiler for previous books in this series I guess) encouraging him to keep killing and surviving.

To say nothing of the way the author can't go more than a few paragraphs without tripping over his dick to score some ham-fisted culture war dig. There are multiple references to how awful and dangerous big cities and San Francisco specifically have become, an extended circlejerk over how great Ayn Rand was, Wall Street executives who engage in ESG initiatives are literally called communists, and the Chinese antagonists (you know, the actual communists) point to DEI programs in the US military for the reason why the PLA will win any hypothetical future war. The way contemporary political issues are addressed in this book read like how someone on the far left would mock someone on the far right; I genuinely thought I was reading poorly-crafted parody at points.

There's clearly references to older and more famous military thrillers and espionage novels and I could tell the author had done a ton of meticulous research. I just wish I got more of the geopolitics the marketing blurb on the back cover promised and less hyper-masculine power fantasy.

There's a certain irony around reading a book like this shortly before I make a transatlantic flight. Yeah I'm vegetarian, I own an EV, and recycle etc. etc., but I also know that a single long haul trip can completely offset the carbon emissions I'd otherwise save, which doesn't even account for the inevitable flight back.

What I appreciate here is that this book doesn't browbeat you into being a Luddite through guilt tripping (though it does mention and discuss other individuals and organizations that try to). Instead, it does acknowledge the necessities and positives of air travel and how it's made the world more connected and accessible. But that doesn't mean it's not without cost.

So is anyone doing anything about it? Turns out, yes, but the technology isn't there yet, and barring some unforeseeable breakthrough, it might never get there on the scale needed. There's specific foci on SAF (sustainable air fuel), biofuels, hydrogen gas, and electric battery-powered aircraft, as well as which firms and individuals are putting the most work into realizing these alternatives, and their unique shortcomings. And it turns out there are a lot of shortcomings, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to change about it anytime soon.

Are we doomed? Probably, especially considering the post-COVID projections for "revenge travel" (this book came out in 2022, and it seems that has played out exactly as forecast), as well as a growing middle-class in China which is supercharging a domestic air industry to rival those in "mature" economies. But this book tries not to make it seem like a downer and highlights that some people are trying to do something about it.