The Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi

Another apocalypse novel, similar in theme to The Wind Up Girl (which I would like to reread).  This time the author is exploring a future southwest US, when water has finally become so scarce that the main urban centres begin to fight amongst themselves to have control and access to what water remains.  He also explores what kind of development might survive within this crisis environment using the latest technology around water recycling and waste management.  As in so many apocalypse novels, there is the elite that survives and thrives no matter, and then there are the excluded, the surplus, the excess.  Two societies - one militarized, one a chaos of crime bosses, gangs, criminals and paramilitaries.
A good read, but very american in structure - lots of guns, violence, the obligatory sex scene or two.

There is also a theme of what people will do, how they will change in moments of extreme crisis and threat.  The breakdown of civil society and what relations and structures grow up in their place. What does facing that new reality mean?

The Festival of Insignificance - Milan Kundera

The essence of Kundera in telegraphic form.  As he gets older, his books become almost crystalline reflections of the essences of the themes he has explored through his entire oeuvre.  One sentence, one detail about a character will call up a whole chain of characters, ideas, comments from his other longer early novels.  One comment on a young woman can summarize all his reflections and views on the modern age.  All of it built around his usual structures:  older men, younger women; sons and mothers; the undercurrents between friends and loose acquaintances...
This idea of insignificance seems like some kind of final position on his long exploration of the history of modern European/Western culture.  In earlier books he bemoans the loss of all this nuance, reflection, interplay of idea and the world;  in this book his seems resigned, maybe even finding a freedom in this realization of insignificance?

There is a funny sequence that returns through the book, where he brings in Stalin and his cronies.  The idea around these sequences is the philosophical idea of the relationship between reality and our representation or perception of it.  There are two possible positions:  one, we cannot know reality, only our perceptions, but these personal representations have some kind of relationship to the real; two, we have only our representations and there is no underlying real (or it is completely unknowable).  Kundera seems to see Stalin (and other total autocratic regimes afloat on a world of propaganda and ideology) as definitive proof of the second position.  Reality is unknowable, individual, and a strong individual can force everyone to accept their representation, whatever the individual's personal experience might be.  Some relationship to the trap of language here and the relationship between language and perception...

Another great passage:  "... I've wanted to talk to you about something.  About the value of insignificance... Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence.  It is all around us, and everywhere and always.  It is present even when no one wants to see it:  in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters.  It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name.  But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it... my friend, inhale this insignificance that's all around us, it is the key to wisdom, it is the key to a good mood..."  p113

Racconti romani - Alberto Moravia

A collection of short stories from the late 40s and 50s, originally published in a roman newspaper on a regular basis (imagine when you could read this quality of fiction as installations in a newspaper!)  Excellent short stories - quickly sketch the characters and outline the situation or incident.  Storie del popolo, which probably would have been different at the time.  Linked to the similar movement in Italian postwar cinema?  Always a jab, a surprise, a little moral at the very end.  Extremely well written.  It creates such a different picture from the romantic daydream that has become our image of Italy and Italians, as if there are no poor, no creeps, no cafone living there (true of certain other European cultures too...)

Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age - Susan Neiman

Great title, but a bit of a disappointment.  Really an overview of philosophers since Rousseau thinking about childhood, becoming an adult and acquiring an education.  A bit of a slow read.  She addresses some of the issues Crawford does in The World Beyond Your Head, but in a more indirect, discursive kind of way, rather than firmly anchored in examples.

You learn a lot about both Rousseau's ideas and Kant's ideas in reading this book.

The World Beyond Your Head - Matthew B. Crawford

Subtitled:  On Becoming and Individual in an Age of Distraction


A broader scope than his exploration of work on work, Shop Class as Soul Craft.

A complex set of ideas.

He explores things like:

- the importance of connecting with the real world as opposed to the virtual world or the inner world

- the concept of freedom, not as 'freedom from' but freedom as mastery of areas of agency

- the importance of attention to the world and people out there

- the modern drift to interiority where encounters with the world and unmediated others is seen as a bother, as something risky

- touches on the culture of safety and the 'smooth society' (for lack of a better word)  where there is no conflict, no jagged edges - essentially the tasteless, flavourless corporate culture and culture of school

- the longterm social and psychological effects of our current view that everyone is a self-made person

- how the concept of revolution in the arts in the early 20th century, by throwing out tradition and history of the arts, ended up killing the arts that were being revolutionized - acutally, no surprise when you consider the results of violent social revolutions in the 20th century in Russian and especially China;  the very culture itself is destroyed and replaced by nothing, or by money and consumerism

Worth rereading, maybe even buying.

Every Man Dies Alone - Hans Falla

A story about Nazi resisters in Berlin during WW2.  Based on a true story.  Falla evokes the pettiness, sadism and egotism of the period, with the SS at the top instilling fear throughout the whole of society, and everyone else either trying to be invisible or curry favour but ratting on others.  An image of a society based on the worst, most destructive attributes of humans, with the criminals and sadists running the show.  Interesting that Communist societies seem to have gone the same route - something about narrow ideology and the opportunities it presents to those who crave power and status.
This is probably a truer portrait of that society than the one presented by Dick in his police mysteries set in that period.  Dick exposes the corruption of the powerful, but he doesn't explore the pettiness, the grinding down of the general population.  Falla does both.

It is interesting, the "you're either with us or against us" mentality - you don't have to actively act against the regime to be arrested.  It is enough to be passive in the face of it; neither acting for nor against.  Reminds me of Bush's comment after 9/11.

The superior, above-the-law attitude of the police in the story is also reminiscent of the many police incidents with Blacks in the US recently.  There seems to be that same sense of superiority, of limitlessness of power, and of despising the Other.

The Moral Lives of Animals - Dale Peterson

A fascinating book with personal anecdotes and scientific research centred around the presence of such "moral" values as empathy, selflessness, helpfulness, generosity, kindness, fairness etc.  He offers many instances of animals demonstrating this moral attributes that are often seen as originating in religion.  The book presents the case that these traits go way back from an evolutionary point of view as useful behaviours, especially in the context of social animals and animals living in groups.  

Worth rereading as it is impossible to truly appreciate the wealth of information and reflections around this topic in just one read.

A Strangeness in My Mind - Orhan Pamuk

The most beautiful ode to a city I have ever read.  Rich in details of the streets and the lives of ordinary people.  He also weaves the social and political history of Turkey and Istanbul into the background of the story.  It is a sad story, though, a lament for a lost city and a lost way of life, essentially the death of community and human warmth and the triumph of greed and materialism.
Mevlut is a beautiful character, sufi-like.

Well-written as well, with a narrator as well as characters that pop in and give their view of events or other characters in the story.