Reviews of the books I've read

I'm a big Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka fan. I found the books on the recommendation of Jim Butcher on some tweet years and years ago, and have been enjoying the Verus series, reading each one pretty much as soon as it is published. I appreciate that Jacka delivers his books very regularly, which means I'm not waiting for a series to continue as the world is with Harry Dresden and the Song of Ice and Fire and the Kingkiller Chronicle (which I am now convinced Rothfuss doesn't know HOW to finish, so he won't) and whatever else books have the author off on a different tangent because that's what interests them at this time and oh, wow, do I appreciate Jacka.

Anyway.

I enjoyed this book. I have enjoyed this series. Two chapters into this book and I realized that reading it felt like coming home in a way, the comfort level of the world that has been developed, my connection with said world and the characters in the world, and the writing style of the author. The Dresden Files does this, too. As did Connolly's Twenty Palaces series.

And I just realized I seem to have a thing for white male author, urban fantasy fiction.

Sigh.

Good thing I'm on a non-fiction kick this year. Go me.

The book was a fun read. If you haven't started on the Verus, start with book one, which is Fated (the naming of which reminds me to add it to my "I have read, but I don't recall when or any of the plot, but I know I've read it" list). Once you're done with those, head over to the Dresden series. And keep reading.

There’s a rhythm to battle, a cadence, almost like a dance. Every move has its counter, every strike its timing. Once you understand it, it doesn’t feel as though you’re attacking at all: you just do what’s natural.
Page 8

Some of the younger men in his profession, the ones who have something to prove, will ignore warnings like that. The ones who survive to Little’s age don’t.
Page 10

“However, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done."
Page 27

“None of the tests were able to find anything,” I said. “But not finding anything doesn’t mean there’s nothing there."
Page 43

"It’s a matter of personality, not what you feel you need, and you simply don’t have enough of a desire to dominate and control.”
Page 48

Yeah. I understand this.

“Everyone has aggressive impulses,” Dr. Shirland said. “They’re a fundamental part of the human condition. If you meet someone who seems not to have any, they’re channelling them somewhere else or keeping them suppressed. Usually, in the latter case, it ends up turning inward and manifesting as depression."
Page 55

"She’s been a little too isolated lately and I don’t think leaving her alone with the contents of her own head for company is a good thing.”
Page 56

I know a few people that this could be applied to, too.

I’ve never lived a safe life and I’ve always accepted that, but it’s one thing to know that there’s a good chance you’re going to die a violent death, and it’s something else to know that it might be someone else doing the dying in your place.
Page 59

"Sure, they’ll offer you protection — as long as you do as you’re told. But as soon as you stop, they’ll make a point of targeting you, just to send the message of what happens to other people who don’t get in line. It’s not getting into those sort of groups that’s the problem, it’s getting out.”
Page 64

You build an army because you’re planning to fight someone.
Page 66

... and the less we knew and trusted each other, the more “harder” shaded into “impossible.”
Page 69

... one of the more useful concepts I’d picked up was the Eisenhower Matrix, a method of ordering tasks by importance and urgency. The idea is that you file every task into one of four quadrants: important and urgent; not important but urgent; important but not urgent; and neither important nor urgent. Depending on which of those four a task is in, you do it, delegate it, schedule it, or ignore it.
Page 74

Rulers don’t like turning on their own if they can avoid it. It gives the common folk ideas.
Page 82

"... If there’s one thing the Council can agree on, it’s that their power and privileges shouldn’t go to anyone else.”
Page 92

“Resentment is an unproductive emotion,” Morden said.
Page 97

I judged him to have potential. Unfortunately power can be a discouragement to growth, and he’s had difficulty adapting.
Page 97

There was another pause. There’s a lot of waiting in battles: when one wrong move can get you maimed or killed, people are understandably reluctant to make hasty decisions.
Page 110

It hadn’t been my fight... but then, that’s how people like Pyre always keep getting away with it, isn’t it? The ones who can stop them won’t, and the ones who want to stop them can’t.
Page 117

“He’s a psycho, but he’s a rational psycho,” Kyle said. “If you can give him a good reason not to attack you, he won’t.
Page 120

“The number one rule when you’re dealing with Dark mages is that you have to negotiate from a position of strength,” I said. “The worst thing you can do is make them think you’re weak. If I don’t have the authority to settle terms, then in their eyes, that automatically makes me weak. And by implication, that makes you weak.”
Page 124

“Don’t people always think that every long-lived institution is immortal right up until the point where it falls apart?”
Page 172

Dragons can tell you your future, after a fashion. But I’ve never known whether they tell you what’s going to happen, or whether hearing it from them is what causes it to happen.
Page 177

Vari’s answer was that everyone has a reason. And when I thought about it, he was right. It’s not like anyone just wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘Hey, you know what, I feel like being a bad guy today.’ Everyone’s got some way to justify what they do. They’ll say that the other guy’s an asshole, or they don’t have any choice, or it’s not like it matters, or it’s just the way the world works, whatever. The point is, knowing why someone’s after you doesn’t really help.
Page 252

I couldn’t change what I’d done. But I could learn from my mistakes.
Page 309

This is the next book in the Caltech book club. I, admittedly, skipped over the biological sciences when I was at Caltech, and that skipping is one of my regrets about my time at Caltech: I came in with these just plain wrong notions about science. Those ideas adversely affected my education, but, fortunately, not my love for science in all its (correctly science) forms.

Anyway.

I read this book, finishing before the first week's discussion, mostly because I keep checking these books out from the library, with due dates much sooner than the slower 1-2 chapters a week pace the book club has. Which is fine, I read the book club books quickly. That I subsequently don't participate in the book club discussions is less fine, I guess.

This book was a meandering survey of various studies, current research, and microbe history. I say meandering because the book lacked a compelling narrative arc. I was expecting maybe a history arc, or a current research arc, or even the author's journey arc. Instead, the end of each chapter lead into the beginning of the next chapter, with each chapter a swirl of interesting information and sometimes a self-contained narrative. Mostly though, each chapter was a fascinating, meandering discussion of a new topic about microbes.

And by fascinating, I mean fascinating. My incoming supposition was, given how much influence chemicals have over our mental state and body composition, the idea that microbes could and do produce chemicals to induce a state in their host doesn't seem so farfetched. After reading the book, learning about how much we know about microbes, and seeing how much we don't know about microbes, my supposition is more like a fixed assumption in my world. One of those "but, of course" obvious things only after the fact.

I enjoyed reading the book. This book is very much worth reading.

Now we’ve seen that they can sway the brain too – the organ that, more than any other, makes us who we are. It is a disquieting thought. We put such a premium on our free will that the prospect of losing independence to unseen forces informs many of our deepest societal fears.
Page 71

Wolbachia can only pass to the next generation of hosts in eggs; sperm are too small to contain it. Females are its ticket to the future; males are an evolutionary dead end. So it has evolved many ways of screwing over male hosts to expand its pool of female ones. It kills them, as in Hurst’s butterflies. It feminises them, as in Rigaud’s woodlice. It eliminates the need for them entirely by allowing females to reproduce asexually, as in Stouthamer’s wasps. None of these manipulations is unique to Wolbachia, but it is the only bacterium to use them all.
Page 78

Huh. So, gay woodlice.

Here is a strange but critical sentiment to introduce in a book about the benefits of living with microbes: there is no such thing as a “good microbe” or a “bad microbe”. These terms belong in children’s stories. They are ill- suited for describing the messy, fractious, contextual relationships of the natural world.
Page 80

A cut or a bruise can split some of your cells apart and spill fragments of mitochondria into your blood – fragments that still keep some of their ancient bacterial character. When your immune system spots them, it mistakenly assumes that an infection is under way and mounts a strong defence. If the injury is severe, and enough mitochondria are released, the resulting body-wide inflammation can build into a lethal condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). SIRS can be worse than the original injury.
Page 81

Some of these molecules get saddled with negative names, like “virulence factors”, because they were first discovered in the context of disease, but they are inherently neutral. They are just tools, like computers, pens, and knives: they can be used to do wonderful things and terrible things.
Page 82

Couples might work well together, but if one partner can get the same benefits without spending as much energy or effort, it will do so unless punished or policed.
Page 83

Well, this one hit home pretty hard.

These principles are easy to forget. We like our black-and-white narratives, with clear heroes and villains.
Page 84

We do. Some of us more than others.

A well-functioning partnership could easily be seen as a case of reciprocal exploitation. “Both partners may benefit but there’s this inherent tension. Symbiosis is conflict – conflict that can never be totally resolved.”
Page 85

To allow our first microbes to colonise our newborn bodies, a special class of immune cells suppresses the rest of the body’s defensive ensemble, which is why babies are vulnerable to infections for their first six months of life. It’s not because their immune system is immature, as is commonly believed: it’s because it is deliberately stifled to give microbes a free-for-all window during which they can establish themselves. But without the immune system’s full selective powers, how can a mammalian baby ensure that it gets the right communities?
Page 92

I find this fascinating.

As humans make our presence felt, we disturb the ancient relationships between corals and their microbes, converting the vivid splendour of fish-filled reefs into bleak algal barrens submerged in a pathogenic soup.
Page 109

And I find this depressing.

... a Grand Unified Theory of Coral Death. It shows how the largest sharks are connected to the smallest viruses.
Page 110

The most obvious difference lay in the ratio of the two major groups of gut bacteria: obese people had more Firmicutes and fewer Bacteroidetes than their leaner counterparts.
Page 114

An important lesson emerged: microbes matter but so do we, their hosts. Our guts, like all ecosystems, aren’t defined just by the species within them but also by the nutrients that flow through them.
Page 116

Herbert “Skip” Virgin published a case study that beautifully supports this idea. He worked with mice that had a genetic mutation common in people with Crohn’s disease. Those rodents developed inflamed guts, but only if they were infected by a virus that knocked out part of their immune system, and were exposed to an inflammatory toxin, and had a normal set of gut bacteria. If any of these triggers was missing, the mice stayed healthy.
Page 120

Dogs carry microbes from the outdoors to the indoors, offering us a bigger library of species with which to populate our developing microbiomes. When Lynch fed these dog-associated dust microbes to mice, she found that the rodents became less sensitive to various allergens.
Page 122

Nonetheless, Burkitt was on the right track. “America is a constipated nation,” he said, indelicately. “If you pass small stools, you have big hospitals.”
Page 124

Scientists will talk about Occam’s razor – the principle that favours simple, elegant explanations over convoluted ones. I think the truth is that scientists, like everyone else, find simple explanations psychologically soothing.
Page 134

Still, they provide more questions than answers. Did the microbes set symptoms in motion or just make a bad situation worse? Was one species responsible, or a group of them? Is it the presence of certain microbes that matters, or the absence of others, or both?
Page 135

But if you looked at these communities in isolation you might conclude that their owners were on the verge of chronic disease, when they were merely on the verge of motherhood.
Page 136

Ecosystems are complex, varied, ever-changing and context-dependent – qualities that are the enemies of easy categorisation.
Page 136

Hello, systems thinking!

So, mammalian success was founded on vegetarianism, and that vegetarianism was founded on microbes. Time and again, different groups of mammals swallowed plant-breaking microbes from their environments, and used their enzymes to mount assaults on leaves, shoots, stems, and twigs.
Page 177

The macrotermites there build enormous mounds. Some can tower for up to 9 metres, scraping the skies with Gothic ensembles of spires and buttresses. The oldest one on record – now abandoned – is 2,200 years old.
Page 180

I want to see one of these mounds now.

Bacteria offer an alternative. They are masters of biochemistry, and can degrade everything from heavy metals to crude oil.
Page 183

Beetle outbreaks come and go but the current one, fuelled by a warming climate, is ten times bigger than any other. Since 1999, the beetles and their attendant fungi have killed more than half the mature pines in British Columbia and affect 3.8 million acres in the United States. They have even hopped over the cold Canadian Rockies, which long fenced them into the west coast, and are now spreading east. A continuous belt of lush vulnerable forests lies in front of them.
Page 187

You can see this on any drive in any West Coast state.

Hornets, hawks, and humans might gradually accumulate beneficial mutations, but that individual hornet, or this specific hawk, or those particular humans can’t pick up beneficial genes for themselves. Except sometimes, they can. They could swap their symbionts, instantly acquiring a new package of microbial genes. They can bring new bacteria into contact with those in their bodies, so that foreign genes migrate into their microbiome, imbuing their native microbes with new abilities.
Page 193

The genes they left behind, these ghosts of symbionts past, aren’t sitting idly among the mealybug’s DNA. Some make amino acids.
Page 202

Whatever the case, it is clear that an insect, a bacterium, and a virus have formed an evolutionary alliance against a parasitic wasp that threatens them all.
Page 205

Which is really, really cool.

This point is worth repeating: taking any fast or instant evolutionary shifts as a refutation of the slow, gradual changes we associate with Darwin’s vision is a fatal mistake because these quick shifts are still powered by gradualism.
Page 207

That is the power of symbiosis: it allows gradual mutations in microbes to produce instant mutations in hosts. We can let bacteria do the slow work for us, and then quickly change ourselves by associating with them. And if these alliances are beneficial enough, they can spread with blinding speed.
Page 208

When the parasite arrived, it spread like wildfire, riding through the forests in the bodies of its sterilised hosts. The flies needed a countermeasure and Spiroplasma rose to the occasion. It restored its hosts’ ability to reproduce, and allowed them to outcompete their sterile peers. Since the flies could pass these little saviours to their offspring, the proportion of infected insects grew with each generation. And Jaenike had caught this spread at exactly the right moment. “It made me doubt my sanity,” he says. “What are the chances?”
Page 209

Say goodbye to dated and dangerous war metaphors, in which we are soldiers hell-bent on eradicating germs at whatever cost. Say hello to a gentler and more nuanced gardening metaphor. Yes, we still have to pull out the weeds, but we also seed and feed the species that bind the soil, freshen the air, and please the eye. This concept can be hard to grasp, and not just because the idea of beneficial microbes is new to many.
Page 215

To control a microbiome is to sculpt an entire world – which is as hard as it sounds. Remember that communities have a natural resilience: if you hit them, they bounce back. They are also unpredictable; if you tweak them, the consequences ripple outwards in capricious ways. Add a supposedly beneficial microbe, and it might displace competitors that we also rely on. Lose a supposedly harmful microbe, and an even worse opportunist might rise to take its place.
Page 216

These emerging infectious diseases of wildlife are emerging ever more quickly, and humans are at least partly to blame. On planes, boats, and boots, we carry pathogens around the world with unprecedented speed, overwhelming new hosts before they can acclimatise and adapt.
Page 217

Yet despite the excessive hype, the concept behind probiotics is still sound. Given all the important roles that bacteria play in our bodies, it should be possible to improve our health by swallowing or applying the right microbes. It’s just that the strains in current use may not be the right ones. They make up just a tiny fraction of the microbes that live with us, and their abilities represent a thin slice of what the microbiome is fully capable of. We met more suitable microbes in earlier chapters. There’s the mucus-loving bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, whose presence correlates with a lower risk of obesity and malnutrition. There’s Bacteroides fragilis, which stokes the anti-inflammatory side of the immune system. There’s Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, another anti-inflammatory bug, which is conspicuously rare in the guts of people with IBD, and whose arrival can reverse the symptoms of that disease in mice.
Page 224

We have already seen that what we eat can substantially change the microbes in our gut, and prebiotics like inulin are in plentiful supply in onions, garlic, artichokes, chicory, bananas and other foods.
Page 227

Jim Collins is more circumspect. Given how much we still don’t understand about the microbiome, he is unsettled by the prospect of engineering microbes that can permanently establish themselves in our bodies. That’s why he is also focusing on building kill-switches that will force the microbes to self-destruct if something goes wrong, or if they leave their hosts.
Page 240

Or that so many scientists would study it that they would organise a bi-annual, Wolbachia-devoted conference to share their results?
Page 250

Of course they would! Humans love their communities, we are social creatures.

I contain multitudes, yes, but only some of them; the rest, I extend into the world like a living aura.
Page 252

We all have our cloud of microbes! I love this!

Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.

We also change the microbes of our housemates. Gilbert’s team found that room-mates share more microbes than people who live apart, and couples are even more microbially similar.
Page 252

In both settings, sterility is a curse not a goal, and a diverse ecosystem is better than an impoverished one.
Page 255

In the developing world, around 5 to 10 per cent of people who check into hospitals and other healthcare institutions pick up some kind of infection during their stay, falling ill in the very places that are meant to make them healthier. In the United States alone, this means around 1.7 million infections and 90,000 deaths a year.
Page 256

By removing harmless bacteria that would otherwise impede the growth of pathogens, perhaps we have inadvertently constructed a more dangerous ecosystem.
Page 257

Gibbons showed this by studying public toilets. He found that thoroughly scrubbed toilets are first colonised by faecal microbes, which are launched into the air by roiling, flushed water. Those species are eventually outcompeted by a diverse range of skin microbes, but once the toilet gets scrubbed again, the communities go back to square one. So, here’s the irony: toilets that are cleaned too often are more likely to be covered in faecal bacteria.

Jessica Green, an Oregon-based engineer-turned-ecologist, found a similar pattern among the microbes that float inside air-conditioned hospital rooms.7 “I assumed that the microbial community of the indoor air would be a subset of that of outdoor air,” she says. “It really surprised me that we saw little to no overlap between the two.” Outdoors, the air was full of harmless microbes from plants and soils. Indoors, it contained a disproportionate number of potential pathogens, which are normally rare or absent in the outside world, but had been launched from the mouths and skins of hospital residents. The patients were effectively stewing in their own microbial juices. And the best way of fixing that was remarkably simple: open a window.
Page 257

And I see, in the driver’s seat, a guy who notices those rivers of microscopic life and is enthralled rather than repelled by them. He knows that microbes are mostly not to be feared or destroyed, but to be cherished, admired, and studied.
Page 263

We see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are. We see how they sculpt our organs, protect us from poisons and disease, break down our food, uphold our health, calibrate our immune system, guide our behaviour, and bombard our genomes with their genes.
Page 264

A bacterium in your gut might be able to transfer its genes into one of your intestinal cells, but once that cell dies, the bacterial DNA goes with it. The gene might become part of a human genome, but never the human genome.

In 2013, Dunning-Hotopp showed that these short-lived unions are surprisingly common (Riley et al., 2013). She analysed hundreds of human genomes that had been sequenced from body cells – the ones from kidneys or skin or livers, none of which get passed on to offspring. She found traces of bacterial DNA in around a third of them. They were especially common in cancer cells; an intriguing result with unclear implications. It might be that tumours are especially prone to genetic intrusions, or that bacterial genes help to transform healthy cells into cancerous ones.
Page 291

As mentioned, I am a fan of The School of Life, their mission, and their products. This book continues that fandom in a strong way. And with this book, I'm well on my way to reading a significantly large number of essays this year.

This is a short book, 96 whole pages divided into six sections: Self-Ignorance, Philosophical Meditation, Emotional Identity, Honesty and Denial, Self-Judgement, Emotional Scepticism. The section that delighted me the most is the Philosophical Mediation section, as it explains the (classical) Stoic process of dealing with the stresses and worries of life by asking (and processing) the questions "What am I anxious about?", "What am I upset about?", and "What am I excited about?".

The last three sections were also particular relevant to me, but, well, your mileage may vary with this book. If you're in a reflective mood, this book is amazing and possibly a life-changer. That life-changing assumes the reader processes the book, and doesn't just read it, shrug, and toss it aside.

Normally, I'd list all the quotes of the book I found meaningful. Here, however, I realize that the parts I find relevant are revealing in a way I find too vulnerable. So instead, here's one note from the Faulty Walnut:

The walnut is extremely bad at understanding why it is having certain thoughts and ideas.

It doesn’t typically notice the role that levels of sleep, sugar, hormones and other physiological factors play upon the formation of ideas. The walnut adheres to an intellectual interpretation of plans and positions that are, at base, frequently merely physiological. Therefore, it can feel certain that the right answer is to divorce or leave the job rather than go back to bed or eat something to raise blood sugar levels.
Location 540

If you're in a place where you're ready to reflect internally and grow, this book is amazing, let me buy you a copy.

I read a blog post recently where the author commented about being in an unmotivated state. He sounded depressed. My suggestion to him was exercise and help someone. Exercise has been shown to relieve depression. Helping another person, even in a small way, has helped relieve depression in everyone I know who struggled with non-severe and non-clinical depression.

My comment received a supportive reply (I really wish I had kept a link to the comment), and further comment that helping others as a way to combat depression was a thought she had read in Hope in the Dark. I put a hold on the book and read it when it dropped into my reading queue.

The book was written about finding hope to keep trying to change the world for the better, during the Bush Jr. administration. Solnit let us know through this book that while, yes, what the administration was doing was bad, citizens were pushing back. Many, many people said no, this is not acceptable, and pushed back on the bad policies and bad laws.

Any glimmer of hope of progress since that administration has certainly turned to despair in this administration, with its obvious greed, corruption, bigotry, racism, and misogyny.

And yet.

And yet.

Solnit comments on this many times in the book, about how despair is one part of the activism spectrum; that even during the darkest despair, there is still hope.

The book reminded me of early 2017, when Eric went to a rally protesting Cheetoh's not releasing his tax records. Oh, how innocent we all were then. Brother Chris was looped into a text conversation that Eric, who was doing his part in the protests calling for the returns, started. Chris' responses were just so damn negative and defeated. "Oh, why do that, it won't do any good." and "That's dumb, nothing will change." Rather than doing something (anything), he gave up without trying.

We dropped him from the conversation and kept chatting. That day, we learned that Chris gives up, doesn't believe in change, and doesn't believe that an individual can make a difference.

Solnit addresses that, too, in the book, that some people give up without trying.

This book might not be life-changing, but I strongly recommend it for everyone, especially anyone who is losing hope (or has already lost it) in these ugly times. If nothing else, these ugly times have created a generation that will be politically active.

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction.

...

It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative.
Location 196

Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.
Location 208

Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious.
Location 236

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggeman noted.
Location 279

Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.
Location 284

In that essay, “The Optimism of Uncertainty,” Zinn continues,

The struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invisible in their determination to hold onto it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience—whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself.
Location 333

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract.
Location 344

Paul Goodman famously wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”
Location 367

And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
Location 388

And this is why Chris didn't move.

How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners?
Page 7

What strikes you when you come out of a deep depression or get close to a depressed person is the utter self-absorption of misery.
Page 7

South America was neoliberalism’s great laboratory, and now it’s the site of the greatest revolts against that pernicious economic doctrine (which might be most tersely defined as the cult of unfettered international capitalism and privatization of goods and services behind what gets called globalization—and might more accurately be called corporate globalization and the commodification of absolutely everything).
Page 9

The despair that keeps coming up is a loss of belief that the struggle is worthwhile.
Page 12

In the name of the so-called War on Terror, which seems to inculcate terror at home and enact it abroad, we were encouraged to fear our neighbors, each other, strangers (particularly Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim people or people who looked that way), to spy on them, to lock ourselves up, to privatize ourselves.
Page 15

This is the lasting damage from Bush Dos.

I think of Bush’s constant deployment of false hope—that we were going to win the war in Iraq, that his wars had made US citizens and the world safer, that the domestic economy was doing fine (and that the environment is not even a subject for discussion). Perhaps hope is the wrong word for these assertions, not that another world is possible, but that it is unnecessary, that everything is fine—now go back to sleep. Such speech aims to tranquilize and disempower the populace, to keep us isolated and at home, seduced into helplessness, just as more direct tyrannies seek to terrify citizens into isolation.
Page 19

Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that’s austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited.
Page 24

Though oil politics had much to do with what had happened, we were not asked to give up driving or vehicles that gulp huge amounts of fuel; we were asked to go shopping and to spy on our neighbors. It seemed as though the Bush administration recognized this extraordinary possibility of the moment and did everything it could to suppress it, for nothing is more dangerous to them than that sense of citizenship, fearlessness, and communion with the world that is distinct from the blind patriotism driven by fear.
Page 56

History is like weather, not like checkers. (And you, if you’re lucky and seize the day, are like that butterfly.) Like weather in its complexity, in its shifts, in the way something triggers its opposite, just as a heat wave sucks the fog off the ocean and makes my town gray and clammy after a few days of baking, weather in its moods, in its slowness, in its suddenness. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That’s why you can’t save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause.
Page 61

Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it imagines an extraction from the dangerous, unstable, ever-changing process called life on earth. But life is never so tidy and final. Only death is. Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories temporary.
Page 61

If you’re lucky, you carry a torch into that dark of Virginia Woolf’s, and if you’re really lucky you’ll sometimes see to whom you’ve passed it, as I did on that day (and if you’re polite, you’ll remember who handed it to you).
Page 68

Benjamin’s angel tells us history is what happens, but the Angel of Alternate History tells that our acts count, that we are making history all the time, because of what doesn’t happen as well as what does.

Only that angel can see the atrocities not unfolding, but we could learn to study effects more closely. Instead we don’t look, and a radical change too soon becomes status quo.
Page 71

The Angel of History says, “Terrible,” but this angel says, “Could be worse.”

They’re both right, but the latter angel gives us grounds to act.
Page 72

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.

...

Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction.
Page 77

The radical center, as writer and New Mexico land manager William DeBuys defines it, is “a departure from business as usual,” is, he continues, not bigoted. By that I mean that, to do this kind of work, you don’t question where somebody is from or what kind of hat he or she wears, you focus on where that person is willing to go and whether he or she is willing to work constructively on matters of mutual interest.
Page 88

Nothing is ever so good that it can’t stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.
Page 88

Velasquez, the founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, says, “Number one, I don’t consider anybody opposition. I just consider anyone either misinformed or miseducated or downright wrong-thinking. That’s the way I look at people, and I believe that what we do, getting justice for migrant workers is the good and right thing in life to do and everyone ought to be on our side.”
Page 89

To be antidoctrinal is to open yourself up to new and unexpected alliances, to new networks of power. It’s to reject the static utopia in favor of the improvisational journey.
Page 92

We are trying to build a politics of process, where the only certainty is doing what feels right at the right time and in the right place—a politics that doesn’t wait (interesting how wait and hope are the same words in Spanish) but acts in the moment, not to create something in the future but to build in the present, it’s the politics of the here and now. When we are asked how are we going to build a new world, our answer is, “We don’t know, but let’s build it together.”
Page 93

It’s an enormous challenge, because in a chaotic world people need something to hold onto and something to hold them, if all is uncertain, if uncertainty is the only certainty, then the uprooted, the fragile, those that crave something to give them meaning in their lives, simply get washed away by the flood and flux of an unsure universe.

For them, hope is often found in certainty. Not necessarily certainty rooted in a predictable future, but certainty that they are doing the right thing with their lives .
Page 93

The philosopher Alphonso Lingus says, “We really have to free the notion of liberation and revolution from the idea of permanently setting up some other kind of society.”
Page 94

This.

Zapatista scholar John Holloway has a manifesto of a book out called Change the World Without Taking Power, a similar argument that the revolution is an end in itself that fails its spirit and its ideals when it becomes the next institutional power.
Page 94

There is a vast area of do-it-yourself activity directed towards changing the world that does not have the state as its focus and that does not aim at gaining positions of power. It is an arena in which the old distinctions between reform and revolution no longer seem relevant, simply because the question of who controls the state is not the focus of attention.
Page 94

The question is about negotiating a viable relationship between the local and the global, not signing up with one and shutting out the other.
Page 97

The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself.
Page 100

The United States is the most disproportionate producer of climate change, governed by the most disregardful administration. This country often seems like a train heading for a wreck, with a gullible, apolitical, easily distracted population bloating itself on television’s political distortions and repellent vision of human life, with the runaway rates of consumption, the violent interventions around the world, the malignancy of domestic fundamentalism, the burgeoning prison and impoverished and unhinged populations, the decay of democracy, and on and on. It’s hard to see radical change in the United States, and easy to see how necessary it is. I spend a lot of time looking at my country in horror.
Page 107

Profound change for the better does occur, even though it can be difficult to see because one of the most common effects of success is to be taken for granted. What looks perfectly ordinary after the fact would often have seemed like a miracle before it.
Page 109

Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan’s new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people.
Page 114

They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word “terrorism,” which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don’t know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.
Page 115

When the planes became missiles and the towers became torches and then shards and clouds of dust, many were afraid, but few if any panicked, other than the president, who was far away from danger.
Page 116

Flights 11 and 175 struck the towers. Hundreds of thousands of people rescued each other and themselves, evacuating the buildings and the area, helped in the first minutes, then hours, by those around them.
Page 116

Adam Mayblum, who walked down from the eighty-seventh floor of the north tower with some of his coworkers, wrote on the Internet immediately afterward:

“They failed in terrorizing us. We were calm. If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves. If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite. This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States.”

We failed, however, when we let our own government and media do what that small band from the other side of the earth could not.
Page 116

Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes.
Page 117

Governments like the grim view for a similar reason: it justifies their existence as repressive, controlling, hostile forces, rather than collaborators with brave and powerful citizenries.
Page 117

Americans are good at the mingled complacency and despair that says things cannot change, will not change, and we do not have power to change them.
Page 127

Much has changed; much needs to change; being able to celebrate or at least recognize milestones and victories and keep working is what the times require of us. Instead, a lot of people seem to be looking for trouble, the trouble that reinforces their dismal worldview. Everything that’s not perfect is failed, disappointing, a betrayal. There’s idealism in there, but also unrealistic expectations, ones that cannot meet with anything but disappointment. Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.
Page 140

I’ve often seen, say, a landmark piece of climate legislation hailed as a victory and celebrated by people working hardest on the issue, but dismissed and disparaged by those who are doing little or nothing for the cause in question. They don’t actually know what work went into producing the legislation, what it will achieve, and what odds were overcome to get it.
Page 140

They may fear that celebrating anything means undermining the dissatisfaction that drives us—if dissatisfaction drives us rather than parks us in the parking lot of the disconsolate.
Page 140

Maybe an underlying problem is that despair isn’t even an ideological position but a habit and a reflex. I have found, during my adventures in squandering time on social media, that a lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with “yes but.” Naysaying becomes a habit. Yes, this completely glorious thing had just happened, but the entity that achieved it had done something bad at another point in history. Yes, the anguish of this group was ended, but somewhere some other perhaps unrelated group was suffering hideously. It boiled down to: we can’t talk about good things until there are no more bad things. Which, given that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more bad things are always arising, means that we can’t talk about good things at all. Ever.
Page 141

I am unsure where or when I picked up this book. I've had it in my pile for a while now, and picked it up when the slower, non-fiction I've been reading was starting to disinterest me. The book was a slower read than I expected it to be, but I'm unsure where my expectations came from.

The book is about Charlie, a lawyer in Small Town, Georgia, and daughter of a defense lawyer, Rusty, who believes that all people deserve a defense, especially those found guilty in the court of public opinion and unlikely to receive a fair trial or vigorous defense otherwise - you know, the lawyer who is guaranteed to make enemies.

Said enemies take out their vengeance on Rusty's family, and there we have the set up for the main character's demeanor, struggle, conflict, strengths, and development.

This is the first Karin Slaughter book I've read. Mom's favorable opinion of Slaughter's writing influenced my reading the book. There were a number of places where I nodded in understanding of some of the characters' actions, so Slaughter's writing is believable and understandable, which is great.

I just don't know that I'm a better person for having read this book.

Stay with me.

Many of the fiction books I've read have a moral to them. If they lack a moral, then they might contain some incident that causes reflection, a pondering, something to consider that affects the reader's life. Take the Imperial Radch series, for example. Leckie writes about privilege and power and how they manifest corruption, all in the framework of a space opera. Heinlein books were all social commentary.

This book, however, I don't feel that. I don't know the lesson, the moral, the point of the book. Yes, "telling a good story" is a sufficient point to a book, but this one didn't leave me with "whoa, that was a good story," or similar thought.

Eh, I don't know. I'd rate this worth reading if you're a fan of Slaughter. Maybe a Slaughter fan can recommend another book written by her that might better showcase her writing?

She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.
Location 167

I like Gamma already.

"Charlie needs to know that she can depend on you. You have to put that baton firmly in her hand every time, no matter where she is. You find her. Don’t expect her to find you.”
Location 257

She asked, “Whose side are you on?”

“There’s no such thing as sides. There’s just doing the right thing.”

“I hate to blow apart your philosophy, Horatio, but if there’s a right thing then there’s a wrong thing, and as someone with a law degree, I can tell you that stealing the murder weapon from a double homicide, then lying about it to an FBI agent, can land you on the wrong side of a prison cell for a hell of a long time.”
Location 1858

Horrible things were a hell of a lot easier to digest when you took away the emotion.
Location 2214

“I’m not saying anything about how stupid it is to smoke after having two heart attacks and open-heart surgery.”

“That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”
Location 2265

“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”

“Okay.”

“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
Location 2312

During the first year of their marriage, one of their biggest arguments had been over Ben’s habit of taking off his socks every night and dropping them on the floor of the bedroom. Charlie had started kicking them under the bed when he wasn’t looking, and one day Ben had realized that he didn’t have any socks left and Charlie had laughed and he had yelled at her and she had yelled back at him and because they were both twenty-five, they had ended up fucking each other on the floor.
Location 2346

I laughed at this. Why? the Underwear Saga, of course.

Charlie washed clothes. Ben folded.
Location 2372

Yep. Good separation of laundry.

Charlie’s shift from supportive spouse to raging harpy had not been gradual. Seemingly overnight, she was no longer capable of compromise. She was no longer able to let things go. Everything Ben did irritated her.
Location 2379

She had always been drawn to people who were delighted by the world, who looked out rather than in.
Location 3254

They had traveled extensively throughout their marriage, Anton taking jobs or Sam attending a conference with the sole purpose of being somewhere new. Dubai. Australia. Brazil. Singapore. Bora Bora.
Location 3270

A massive, reversible toll lane cut through the center of the interstate, catering to all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.
Location 3500

Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.
Location 3703

Rusty remained unmoved. “Death snickers at us all, my dear. The eternal footman will not hold my coat forever.”
Location 3803

She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse. Her tea sachets were inside. Charlie said, “We have tea here.”

“I like this kind.” Sam dipped the sachet into the water.
Location 3916

I understand this, too.

They might have been magnets, but they were of unequal power. Everything Sam knew, Gamma knew more.
Location 3958

“Do you think I should do it?” Charlie considered her answer before speaking.

“Would the Sam I grew up with do it? Maybe, though not out of any affinity for Rusty. She would be angry the same way I get angry when something isn’t fair."
Location 3965

Charlie lifted her chin. They could be in a western, or a John Hughes movie if John Hughes had ever written about aggrieved, almost middle-aged women.
Location 4186

The Wilsons took the lack of information with a type of resignation that seemed ingrained in their souls. They were clearly part of that forgotten swath of poor, rural people. They were accustomed to waiting for the system to play out, usually not in their favor.
Location 4633

She had so many things wrong with her body that she could not imagine why someone would purposefully damage themselves.
Location 4932

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.
Location 5377

“A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial."
Location 5410

“I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.”
Location 5415

Rusty said, “A father’s job is to love each of his daughters in the way they need to be loved.”
Location 5444

“You’ve always said that everyone deserves a chance.”

“They do, but I don’t have to be the one who gives it to them.”
Location 5451

“What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it’s worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.” He waved his hand in the air. “Or not, in some cases.”
Location 5454

“Charlotte has always been a pack animal. She doesn’t need to be the leader, but she needs to be in a group. Ben was her group.”
Location 5458

"He’s either involved somehow or he’s an idiot.”

“I told you stupid breaks your heart.”
Location 5479

Her druthers were always to apply logic to a problem, but as with the weather, life existed in a delicate dynamical balance between the fields of mass and motion. In essence, sometimes shit happened.
Location 5782

“I was so relieved when it happened. You don’t realize when you’re that young that you’re going to get older. That there’s going to come a time when you’re not relieved.”
Location 5969

She used the back of her hand to rub her eyes. “I saw Dad do this closing argument once. He talked about how people always obsess about lies. Damn lies. But no one really understands that the real danger is the truth.” She looked up at the white casket. “The truth can rot you from the inside. It doesn’t leave room for anything else.”
Location 6011

“Ben would be happier with someone else.”

“Utter bullshit,” Sam said, her tone clipped. “You have no right to decide on his behalf.”
Location 6281

Of course, she was still pedantic and annoying, but that came with being their mother’s child.
Location 6310

This book was recommended in a slack channel I'm in, along with How to Write Short. The two books together helped her write better copy for a site she was developing. Having recently read Draft No. 4 and How to Write Short, I read this one, too.

The book has two big sections. The first section has a series of short sentences giving writing advice. The second section contains examples of writing, along with a critique of the examples. I enjoyed reading the second section. The first section annoyed me.

A series of short sentences would be fine if each of the lines were actually a complete sentence. Instead, the book is formated with choppy lines that break apart longer sentences.

So, imagine reading a book.

Where each line has a fragment of a sentence.

And you are supposed to know.

That it is actually a single sentence.

One naturally pauses at a period.

Which is not how this book is meant to read.

The pause habit is not breakable.

In a single book.

Yeah, so the first section annoyed me. Despite this annoyance, the advice is good. I was amused at how much of the advice I ignore, especially when it comes to pronouns. I am so bad with my use of pronouns. In particular, I use too many of them.

Anyway, main themes of the book:

1. Use short sentences, you don't need long sentences.

2. Have meaning in each sentence.

3. Trust yourself. Give yourself authority. Write about what interests you.

4. Notice things.

5. Don't use cliches. Question any sentence that appears unconsidered or "naturally."

6. Learn grammar so that you don't annoy the reader with bad grammar that they might not know about but can sense.

7. Writing is hard work, flow is a myth, "naturally" is, too.

8. Don't use an outline. Sure, take notes, use notes, but don't use an outline.

9. Don't talk down to the reader. Trust the reader.

10. Compose and edit at the same time.

I strongly disagree with the "don't use an outline" advise. At the risk of violating the "don't assume what the author meant" advice elsewhere in the book, perhaps Klinkenborg meant don't be a slave to the outline. Organizing a pile of notes into a coherent work is pretty much creating an outline on the fly. Outlines aren't abdicating thinking about one's writing, it's actively thinking about one's writing and creating a giant note about the direction one wants to go. Nothing wrong with that creation.

I'm not sure I recommend the book, despite learning a lot from it. I did remove a lot of pronouns in this review.

The biggest lesson I learned, however, was, "Don't format a prose book in poetry style, it annoys the reader."

Everything in this book is meant to be tested all over again, by you. You decide what works for you. This is perhaps the most important thing I have to say.
Page 2

Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is.
Page 2

Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.

Know what each sentence says,

What it doesn’t say,

And what it implies.

Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.
Page 3

It’s hard to pay attention to what your words are actually saying. As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying. Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial.
Page 4

Write these things down—the contents of the noise in your head as you write.
Page 6

These assumptions and prohibitions and obligations are the imprint of your education and the culture you live in.

Distrust them.
Page 6

What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too.
Page 7

The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making Says nothing about its necessity.
Page 12

Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you,

The prose of law, science, business, journalism, and most academic fields.
Page 12

That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools:

The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow,

The ability to speak to the reader in silence.
Page 13

No two sentences are the same unless they’re exactly the same, word for word.

(And, in a lifetime of writing, it’s unlikely you’ll ever write the same sentence twice.)
Page 19

I laughed at this one.

The purpose of a sentence is to say what it has to say but also to be itself.
Page 21

No sentence can afford to be merely transitional.

If you’ve written clearly —

And you know what you’ve said and implied

As surely as you know what you haven’t said —

The reader will never get lost reading your prose

Or have trouble following you without transitions.
Page 25

In journalism, the equivalent of the topic sentence is the notorious “nut graf,”

A paragraph that tells you the content of the article you’re about to read,

As if you couldn’t proceed without a précis.
Page 26

I'm delighted to have learned about the nut graf in Draft No. 4.

If you love to read — as surely you must — you love being wherever you find yourself in the book you’re reading,

Happy to be in the presence of every sentence as it passes by,

Not biding your time until the meaning comes along.
Page 26

They recall the moment, as children, when we came upon the phrase

“And then one day.”

You know exactly how those four words feel.

You know exactly what they do.
Page 27

I love this. And then one day.

Were you asked to write in order to be heard, to be listened to?
Page 30

We forget something fundamental as we read:

Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.

We can’t see all the decisions that led to the final shape of the sentence.

But we can see the residue of those decisions.
Page 32

Imagine the reason behind each sentence.

Why is it shaped just this way and not some other way?

Why that choice of words?

Why that phrasing?

Why that rhythm?
Page 34

What you write—what you send out into the world to be read—

Is the residue of the choices and decisions you make.

Choices and decisions you are responsible for.
Page 36

Start by learning to recognize what interests you.

Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,

So they never learn how to notice,

Not even what interests them.

Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed,

Already sifted and sorted and categorized

By everyone else, by people with real authority.
Page 38

There’s always an urge among writers

To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses

Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible,

As if every perception ended in a trope,

As if the writer were a dynamo

Turning the world into words.
Page 40

Don’t let the word “years” alarm you.

Think of it as months and months and months and months.
Page 46

Yes!

This is surprisingly hard to do at first

Because our reading habits are impatient and extractive.
Page 49

And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself,

Camouflaged by familiarity.
Page 50

Try reading your work aloud.

The ear is much smarter than the eye,

If only because it’s also slower

And because the eye can’t see rhythm or hear unwanted repetition.
Page 50

How well you read aloud reveals how well you understand the syntax of a sentence.

Do you remember, in school, going around the room,

Each student in turn reading a paragraph out loud?

Remember how well some students read and others, how badly?

It was a difference in comprehension,

Not of the sentence’s meaning,

But of its texture, pace, structure, actuality.
Page 52

Don’t read straight through without stopping.

Read until your ear detects a problem.
Page 52

How many sentences begin with the subject?

How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject?

Or with a word like “When” or “Since” or “While” or “Because”?

How many begin with “There” or “It”?

What kinds of nouns do you see?

Abstractions? Generalizations?
Page 56

Are you using “with” as a preposition or as a false conjunction, a false relative pronoun?
Page 57

You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syntax to write well.

But you do need to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

Between active and passive constructions.

The relation between a pronoun and its antecedent.
Page 57

You need to look up even familiar words every time you have a doubt

And especially when you don’t have a doubt.

That is, very often. That is, every time you write.
Page 58

You’ve already looked up every word you don’t know.

Haven’t you?
Page 61

Oops.

So why not give up the idea of “flow” and accept the basic truth about writing?

It’s hard work, and it’s been hard work for everyone all along.
Page 67

The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense,

Exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.
Page 68

It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence

And adjusting it until you can.

Just as it’s always useful to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.
Page 74

Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state.

Daily.

Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences — will not.

That distinction is worth keeping in mind.
Page 77

Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions,

With anything, starting from nowhere.
Page 80

Composing a sentence always involves revision

Unless you write down the words of a sentence exactly as they pop into your head.

And why would you do that?
Page 86

So, you’ll be revising each sentence as you compose it.

Composing each sentence as you revise it.
Page 90

What writers fear most is running out of material.
Page 96

You want to begin the piece, not introduce it, which is the difference between a first sentence already moving at speed and a first sentence that wants to generalize while clearing its throat.
Page 102

Don’t get trapped by the thought of writing sequentially.
Page 104

We’re always hastening to be done writing,

But we’re also hastening to get out of the presence of our thoughts.

Everything about thinking makes us nervous.

We don’t believe there’s much of value to be found there.
Page 107

My thought was, "Who the f--- thinks this?"

The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written.
Page 108

How do you decide what works?

What do you do when your sentences seem to waver in quality and value before your eyes?

You read what you’ve written, and it looks good.

You read it again, and it looks bad.

You read it a third time, and now you can’t tell.
Page 110

You can almost never fix a sentence —

Or find the better sentence within it —

By using only the words it already contains.

If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing.
Page 113

Accept it: you’ll surely fail again and just as surely succeed.

There’s nothing linear or steady in your growth as a writer.
Page 115

And yes, you may begin a sentence with “but.”
Page 119

YAY!

Use the simple past tense —

Avoiding the layering of several pasts —

And give the reader clear temporal clues when needed.
Page 121

Our lives are full of endings.

The sun goes down every day.

We ask for the check.

Eventually it comes.

How broad a hint does it take to make a reader who lives on a planet full of endings
Page 121

Why reproduce the whole scene when only one moment matters?
Page 123

A reader who’s opened a book to its first page is in a tender predicament,

Whether she’s standing in the aisle of a bookstore or sitting at home.

All the authority belongs to her — the authority to close the book.

And yet she’s willing — yearning — to surrender her authority to the author

And keep reading.
Page 127

You’ve been told again and again that you have to seduce the reader,

Sell the story in the very first paragraph.

(Nonsense, but it explains a lot of bad writing.)
Page 128

I laughed at this one, too.

No subject is so good that it can redeem indifferent writing.

But good writing can make almost any subject interesting.
Page 129

People clamor to tell their stories in words.

This doesn’t make them writers,

Nor does it make their stories matter.
Page 130

You may be used to denying your perceptions and dismissing your awareness.

You may be caught in a constant state of demurral.
Page 131

Watch for the chronic language of self-disparagement,

The moments when you say, “My problem is …” Or “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

If you say these kinds of things, you probably say them out of habit, almost unconsciously.

This is a product of your education too, at home and at school.

Pay attention to it.

Recognize how harmful it is.

Its message — subliminal and overt — is that your perceptions are worthless.

Do everything you can to subvert this habit.
Page 131

Part of the trouble may be this:
You’re afraid your ideas aren’t good enough,
Your sentences not clever or original enough.
Page 132

It’s surprising how often ideas that seem obvious to you
Are in no way apparent to the reader.
And vice versa.
What seems like common sense to you may come as a revelation to the reader.
Page 132

Some people think that discipline is imposed from without,
Regular hours, strict containment, rigorous exclusion.
Some people think discipline is revealed from within,
Enlightenment, purity, solidity of intent.
Discipline is nothing more than interest and expectation, a looking forward.
It’s never hard to work when you’re interested in what you’re working on.
Page 133

But what if you hate what you’re working on?

It helps to examine the content of your loathing.

What is it you hate?

The movement of your ideas?

The nature of your prose?

The obligations and prohibitions you still secretly honor?
Page 134

It’s surprising how often the trouble with a piece of writing

Has nothing to do with the writing itself.
Page 134

One of the most powerful feelings a writer experiences while working

Is a sense of obligation, of having to make a sentence or a paragraph

This way or that way, being obliged to write that sentence or that paragraph.

It’s a terrible feeling and always a sign of trouble.
Page 136

Don’t preconceive the reader’s limitations.

They’ll become your own.
Page 139

The books that trusted you most may be the ones you love best.
Page 140

You’re not responsible for your readers’ ignorance,

And they’re not responsible for your erudition.
Page 145

“Done” isn’t absolute or arbitrary.

Nor is it really about learning your limits as a writer.

It’s a compromise.
Page 146

“Done enough” sounds too callow to describe the compromise,

So call it “perfection enough,”

As perfect as possible under the circumstances.
Page 147

The better question now is the more fearful one: “How will I know when to stop revising?”
Page 148

Let yourself ask the question why.

Why is the author choosing this word, writing that sentence that way?

Don’t expect to find an answer.

Expect to find some possibilities.
Page 162

This passage has no larger purpose than to exist, to work out, for a moment, the possibilities of some sentences.
Page 166

Reading these sentences — and my commentary on them — you’ll be tempted to side with the writer, to think, “I know what he means” or “I can see what she’s saying.” But that’s because it feels so normal to try to deduce the meaning of the sentence instead of observing what its words actually say.

We’re so trained to read for meaning — to look through the sentence to what we think is the author’s intention—that in our search for it we’re prepared to disregard the literal significance of the prose itself.
Page 169

Don’t make time or frequency an attribute of the vehicle. Let the time or frequency indicator stand on its own. Cars flash past us now and then.
Page 184

He hunched his shoulders, placed one arm on his left leg, and slid into the passenger seat before reaching across his body for his seatbelt.

Can you actually visualize this action? No. Descriptions of physical action require incredible care because we read them with our bodies as well as our brains.
Page 185

Her clothes were nondescript, a white t-shirt and jean shorts.

And yet the writer can describe them. How about She wore a white T-shirt and jean shorts?
Page 193

Dying!

In-progress notes:

Of all the books to stop a reading binge streak, this was not the one I would have expected.

My Review

I wanted to like this book.

I REALLY wanted to like this book.

I really wanted to like this book because I enjoyed Weir's The Martian a lot, what with the solid science and the omg-exactly-mine humour.

I didn't really like this book.

Instead, this book annoyed me. I suspect this book annoyed me because the main character Jazz is annoying. The frequent "What? You were thinking something else?" questions became tiresome very quickly. The self-referrals to her body that Jazz makes could be made only by a guy writing as a girl, thinking that's what we talk about all the time (hint: we don't).

The part that gets me the most, however, is the basic plot: that destroying the moon's source of oxygen could in any way shape or form be a Good Idea™, much less supported by seemingly rational people. Given how utterly perfect The Martian was with its science, this idea just doesn't fit.

So, yeah, if you're a fan of Weir's, which I am, go ahead and read this book. If you aren't, read The Martian, revel in the incredible story-telling and science of that book, and skip this one.

Now to read Rob's review of Artemis, which I haven't read yet... Okay, his review is better. Go read that one instead.

Nothing. He hadn’t noticed me come in and didn’t hear me speak. He’s like that. I smacked him on the back of the head and he jerked away from the microscope.
Location 911

And let me tell you: there’s no one I hate more than teenage Jazz Bashara. That stupid bitch made every bad decision a stupid bitch could make. She’s responsible for where I am today.
Location 1084

I couldn’t get it completely out of sight, but at least it was partially occluded. I slipped the remote control into a holster I had strapped to my inner thigh.
Location 1349

Okay, if you're on a caper, you don't want until you're on location before you strap a something to the inner thigh. You do that before you leave.

My plan was working! I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.
Location 1621

Dad taught me to use a flint sparker because an electric one is “another thing to break.” It was just a piece of flint and steel grooves attached to a springy handle.
Location 1663

My dad also taught me how to use a flint sparker, so I did appreciate this detail.

The droplet trembled along the weld site, then finally seeped upward into the crack above it. My heartbeat returned to somewhere near normal. Thank God for surface tension and capillary action.
Location 1688

He tapped on his Gizmo. “There are no surveillance cameras on airlocks. We’re not a police state. But there is a security camera in the Visitors Center gift shop.”
Location 2138

I woke up the next morning with cramped legs and a sore back. That’s the thing about crying yourself to sleep. When you wake up, the problems are still there.
Location 2357

Food makes you comfortable. It’s how you recenter.
Location 2384

I stood from the bar and downed my Bowmore. I assume everyone in Scotland gasped in psychic pain.
Location 2439

It powered up and showed the familiar wallpaper—a picture of a Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy. What? I like puppies.
Location 2589

What? I'm annoyed at all the "What?"s.

“Wow,” I said. “You really are all about economics.” “It’s what I do, dear. And in the end, it’s the only thing that matters. People’s happiness, health, safety, and security all rely on it.”
Location 3096

Okay, this is what caught my attention.

I frowned. “I can’t just stop being mad.” “No, but you can stop wallowing in it. And you can talk to me like a normal human being.”
Location 3467

“I’ve never pretended to approve of your choices, Jasmine. I have no obligation to. But I don’t try to control you either. Not since you moved out. Your life is your own.”
Location 3508

Very few people get a chance to quantify how much their father loves them. But I did. The job should have taken forty-five minutes, but Dad spent three and a half hours on it. My father loves me 366 percent more than he loves anything else. Good to know.
Location 3522

“Two cameras on your EVA suit, two on Dale’s, and I need a screen for diagnostics. That’s five screens.”

“Could have been windows on the same screen, though, right?”

“Pfft. Philistine.”
Location 3528

“But have I covered every angle?” He shrugged. “No such thing. But for what it’s worth, you got everything I can think of.”
Location 3533

We both stripped down to our underwear. (What? I’m supposed to be demure around the gay guy?)
Location 3637

What? The What?s are annoying.

“Run another line, Jasmine,” he said firmly. “You’re not in any hurry. You’re just impatient.”
Location 3704

I couldn’t see the control room from my vantage point. The smelter was in the way. That wasn’t a coincidence, by the way.
Location 3898

I duct taped both the mask and goggles to my face—I needed an airtight seal this time.
Location 3930

This would be a bitch to remove.

She panted a few times and regained her composure. She was a little older and more weathered than the pictures I’d seen of her. Still, she was spry and healthy-looking for a fifty-year-old.
Location 4013

Okay, for the record, it is not difficult to be spry and healthy at fifty.

Claire recommended this book to me when I was stuck in a mental loop last October. She handed me her copy of her book and recommended it as a fun read when what one needed was a fun read.

She was right. This is a fun read.

It is a space opera of sorts, too short to be an opera per se, more like an operetta, a mini-saga if you will, of a wormhole puncher, a small vessel that punches through space and time to make travel routes for the rest of us.

World building is never an easy task. World building when you're trying to have plausable physics is harder. World building when you're trying to have plausible physics and plausible biology is even harder. Chambers does a great job, even if some of the "here, let me explain this to you" sections are a little forced. Having a new shipmate makes explaining things easier.

Ashby is the captain of the Wayfarer, and was nearly completely what I imagined Corey's Expanse's Holden to look like, really. Which isn't fair, as I think Ashby was supposed to be darker skinned. The rest of the characters had bits of other media parts spliced together for me: Kizzy was Firefly's Kaylee, Jenks was Song of Ice and Fire's Tyrion, Ohan was A Fire Upon the Deep's Tines. The amalgamation worked for me.

The book read like a series of episodes, which was actually nice, as the whole book made for a season arc.

I enjoyed the book. It's worth reading for anyone who enjoys a good science fiction read.

But with the last of her savings running thin and her bridges burned behind her, there was no margin for error. The price of a fresh start was having no one to fall back on.
Page 13

After a life in her parents’ enormous home, full of furniture and knickknacks and rarities, the knowledge that she didn’t need anything more than what she could carry gave her a remarkable sense of freedom.
Page 17

Similar to the advice a Lyft driver gave me last October when she said, "All I really need is what I can carry, everything else is nice."

The point of a family, he’d always thought, was to enjoy the experience of bringing something new into the universe, passing on your knowledge and seeing part of yourself live on.
Page 54

Her [the AI] personality had been shaped by every experience she and the crew had together, every place they’d been, every conversation they’d shared. And honestly, Jenks thought, couldn’t the same be said for organic people? Weren’t they all born running the Basic Human Starter Platform, which was shaped and changed as they went along? In Jenks’s eyes, the only real difference in cognitive development between Humans and AIs was that of speed. He’d had to learn to walk and talk and eat and all the other essentials before he’d begun to have a sense of identity.
Page 58

He slipped them off and stepped into a pair of sandals that never left the room. He found the idea of walking around in there with grubby, gunky shoes quite rude.
Page 59

He is clearly not American.

Jenks spent a lot of time in the pit, even though his job didn’t require it, and going in there with boots on felt like kissing somebody in the morning without brushing your teeth.
Page 59

I giggled at this.

Acting all sanctimonious while spouting bad info was a terrible way to win a debate, but a great way to piss people off.
Page 62

Seems to be The American Way™ these days.

“That’s kind of hypocritical, isn’t it? We assume organic bodies are so awesome, everybody else must want them, then we go off to get genetweaks to look younger or slimmer or whatever.”
Page 62

“The fact that you people have been playing this for centuries says a lot about your species.”

“Oh? What’s it say?”

“That Humans make everything needlessly difficult.”
Page 86

Yuuuuuup.

Humans would’ve died out, too, if the Aeluons hadn’t chanced upon the Fleet. Luck’s what saved them. Luck, and discovering humility.
Page 91

Not a known Human trait.

“I don’t know if I can explain this,” Ashby said. “I wish war didn’t happen, but I don’t judge other species for taking part in it.
Page 145

“Maybe, but not like us. Humans can’t handle war. Everything I know about our history shows that it brings out the worst in us. We’re just not . . . mature enough for it, or something. Once we start, we can’t stop. And I’ve felt that in me, you know, that inclination toward acting out in anger. Nothing like what you’ve seen. I don’t pretend to know what war is like. But Humans, we’ve got something dangerous in us. We almost destroyed ourselves because of it.”
Page 145

Honestly, what was it about that concept that was so difficult for others to grasp? She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death of a new hatchling was so common as to be expected. The death of a child about to feather, yes, that was sad. But a real tragedy was the loss of an adult with friends and lovers and family. The idea that a loss of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.
Page 161

To some Humans, the promise of a patch of land was worth any effort. It was an oddly predictable sort of behavior. Humans had a long, storied history of forcing their way into places where they didn’t belong.
Page 203

“We have different philosophies, you and I, but I can understand where you’re coming from. Violence is always disconcerting, even if it’s only potential violence."
Page 207

Nib nodded. “Some people knit, some people play music, I dig through dusty old facts and make sure they’re accurate.” He flopped back into a chair as the pixels in the central projector flickered to life. “I like knowing things.”
Page 213

“Because people are assholes,” said Bear, dutifully keeping his head down. “Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.”

“What causes the other ten percent?” asked Kizzy.

“Natural disasters,” said Nib.
Page 216

There were few things Dr. Chef enjoyed more than a cup of tea. He made tea for the crew every day at breakfast time, of course, but that involved an impersonal heap of leaves dumped into a clunky dispenser. A solitary cup of tea required more care, a blend carefully chosen to match his day. He found the ritual of it quite calming: heating the water, measuring the crisp leaves and curls of dried fruit into the tiny basket, gently brushing the excess away with his fingerpads, watching color rise through water like smoke as it brewed. Tea was a moody drink.
Page 223

Rituals.

The thoughts he was drumming up were old and safely kept. Kizzy had accused him once of “bottling up his feelings,” but this was a Human concept, the idea that one could hide their feelings away and pretend that they were not there. Dr. Chef knew exactly where all of his feelings were, every joy, every ache. He didn’t need to visit them all at once to know they were there. Humans’ preoccupation with “being happy” was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief. Grief. Yes, that was the feeling that Rosemary needed him to find today. He did not run from his grief, nor did he deny its existence. He could study his grief from a distance, like a scientist observing animals. He embraced it, accepted it, acknowledged that it would never go away. It was as much a part of him as any pleasant feeling. Perhaps even more so.
Page 224

Rosemary’s hand went to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.
Page 225

“We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”
Page 229

Rosemary started to nod, then shook her head. “That’s not the same. What happened to you, to your species, it’s . . . it doesn’t even compare.” “Why? Because it’s worse?” She nodded. “But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?” “No, but that’s not—” “Yes, it is. Feelings are relative. And at the root, they’re all the same, even if they grow from different experiences and exist on different scales.”
Page 230

“Your father—the person who raised you, who taught you how the world works—did something unspeakably horrible. And not only did he take part in it, he justified it to himself. When you first learned of what your father had done, did you believe it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think he was capable of it.”

“Why not? He obviously was.”

“He didn’t seem like he was. The father I knew never could’ve done such a thing.”

“Aha. But he did. So then you begin wondering how you could’ve been so wrong about him. You start going back through your memories, looking for signs. You begin questioning everything you know, even the good things. You wonder how much of it was a lie. And worst of all, since he had a heavy hand in making you who you are, you begin wondering what you yourself are capable of.”

Rosemary stared at him. “Yes.”
Page 231

"Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on."
Page 231

She handed him the mug. “And I had Dr. Chef make you some of this awful stuff.” The smell hit his nose before he even brought the cup to his face. Coffee.
Page 240

“I’m not sure that it happens a lot. But more often than for most, perhaps.”

“Enough for you not to be scared of it.”

“I never said that.”

“You did so.”

“I said I was familiar with it. That’s very different.”
Page 263

"I never thought of fear as something that can go away. It just is. It reminds me that I want to stay alive. That doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.”
Page 265

“You could’ve adopted.”

“I wanted my own flesh and blood. Proof that someone had loved me enough to create a new life with me.”
Page 328

"But I’m scared. I’m starting to think maybe I wanted this so bad that I didn’t let myself acknowledge just how fucking dangerous it is.”
Page 334

“Pairs are not inventors. They are too unfocused, too short-lived. Good for Navigating and discussing theories, but bad at building. Building takes many, many mistakes. Pairs do not like mistakes. They like staring out windows. But Solitary like mistakes. Mistakes mean progress. We make good things. Great things.”
Page 351

“And for the first time ever, I didn’t want a brother anymore, because I finally had one. And there’s nothing better than brothers. Friends are great, but they come and go. Lovers are fun, but kind of stupid, too. They say stupid things to each other and they ignore all their friends because they’re too busy staring, and they get jealous, and they have fights over dumb shit like who did the dishes last or why they can’t fold their fucking socks, and maybe the sex gets bad, or maybe they stop finding each other interesting, and then somebody bangs someone else, and everyone cries, and they see each other years later, and that person you once shared everything with is a total stranger you don’t even want to be around because it’s awkward. But brothers. Brothers never go away. That’s for life.

...

Brothers you can’t get rid of. They get who you are, and what you like, and they don’t care who you sleep with or what mistakes you make, because brothers aren’t mixed up in that part of your life. They see you at your worst, and they don’t care. And even when you fight, it doesn’t matter so much, because they still have to say hi to you on your birthday, and by then, everybody’s forgotten about it, and you have cake together.”
Page 429

Okay, seriously, what brother did Chambers have?

Virgil Flowers, Book 10, because, sure, why not?

Okay, I planned ahead.

Knowing I would be on a plane for eight hours, knowing that I am incapable of sleeping on a plane unless have the space of an entire row, knowing that once I was done with My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry I wouldn't be in any mood to read something thoroughly brain-engaging, and knowing at that point I would have been up for 20 hours, I chose to bring this book along.

I'd been enjoying the Virgil Flowers series for what it is, a non-difficult, entertaining, quick read. This one did not disappoint. I did enjoy it, but recall my brain was, well, awake for many more hours than it was used to being awake, so grain of salt and all that.

This book lacks the previous books' bantering, only one reference to f---in' Flowers, and it didn't make me laugh out loud. I did enjoy that there were no Prey references, there was little of the girlfriend, and that Flowers seems to be as confused as pretty much anyone else would be, given the murder situation that he encountered.

The book is a quick read. It's not a great read, but if you're a fan of the series, or Sandford as a writer in general, keep reading. If you're not a fan of either, start with the first book to get a feel before getting this far.

“I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about God,” Virgil said. “I’m a Lutheran minister’s kid, and, believe me, there’s a difference between a religion and God. I sorta cut out the middleman.”
Page 165

There wasn’t anything in particular, except awkward traces of the dead woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d been struck by the unexpected interruption of murder: you leave the wine bottles by the sink, thinking you’ll put them in the recycling in the morning, and a week later here they still are because you’re dead.
Page 199

“That’s not the entire point here,” Griffin said. “We don’t only want them to stop, we want people to see that they get punished."
Page 265