It's been a while since I did a book post, but then I was reading some rather long books and then they kept interacting with each other in my head and I wanted to get them to settle down a bit before I reviewed them.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: This was in my childhood re-read slot. People do ask about its suitability for children a lot. Well, there's obviously murders but things are pretty tamely described for nowadays. Yes, Holmes does do cocaine occasionally between cases to keep his brain busy and Watson lectures him about it. It's an interesting glimpse into a pre-prohibition world and I don't know of any cases of children becoming drug users because of the example of Sherlock Holmes.
I've also seen charges of racism, which I think is unfair. There are some terms that are no longer polite, but not used intentionally to be demeaning. And there are characters who express contemporary attitudes, but not once does a stereotype prove to be the solution to the problem. Indeed, that would be antithetical to the whole nature of Sherlock Holmes to accept a prejudice instead of probing to the facts. His attitude toward women is also surprisingly even-handed. He'll take facts wherever he can find them.
In spite of all that's come down since they're still quite readable. Holmes is definitely not the detective you'd want to have over for dinner (that would be Father Brown if I'm cooking, Precious Ramotswe if she's cooking, or Lord Peter if he--or rather Bunter--is acquiring the comestibles elsewhere). But he's fun to watch. Which is probably because, despite his emphasis on logic and reason, he's not a dispassionate emotionally repressed person (even if he and Watson both believe he is). His passions are just entirely focused on problem-solving.
Radium Girls by Kate Moore. This was our previous book club read and it was grim but fascinating. It might help to have a little more charity towards skeptics of the latest greatest new thing to recall that over the last two hundred years there have been quite a few new things that we didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, all the downsides of. Science can only tell us the answers to questions we have thought to ask; experience tells us answers to questions we don't even know about.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I usually do *not* like books that are currently popular, but I gave this one a try and to my surprise I loved it. It was a little fast-paced for my taste but so well done and it had one of my favorite sci-fi themes of figuring out communication and what things are essential and what things are variable for sapient life and just fun nerdy buddies. I liked it so much I talked my book club into doing it for our next selection, it was time for something lighter after Radium Girls. I also read The Martian and then DOB and I watched the movie, both were fun.
The Resilience Myth by Soraya Chemaly and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate. I'm putting these together not just because of the title overlap because they have a lot of common themes and I think the same glaring blind spot. Resilience's main point that treating resilience as a sort of internal mental toughness that people need to just have all by themselves is false and often actively destructive; sometimes we need to avoid harmful situations, lots of bad things *don't* make us stronger, and all of us need the care and support of others. Normal expands on Mate's common theme of the role of trauma in addictive behavior to look at physical and mental health and all sorts of social toxicity. Resilience I felt like was much longer than it needed to be and the author got bogged down fitting everything in the world into her hypothesis which somehow exactly matched up with well-drawn political lines which rather detracted from the usefulness or uniqueness of what she had to say. Mate at least has the humility to see some of society's problems in his own mirror.
The starting point for both of them seems to be an assumption that modern society is unusually bad/stressful/toxic in various ways. And I always wonder about that. Not that we don't have plenty of problems. But are they genuinely *worse* than other humans have dealt with through time? Do we really suffer more than others in the past? That seems hard to swallow with almost any reading of history. Or perhaps we are not suffering more, but dealing with it worse--in which case we should probably be looking not just to the things that have always been there (war, poverty, prejudice, violence), but to things that have actually changed, including the changes that we like. Or again perhaps we're not suffering more *or* dealing with it worse we are just more often surviving things that would have killed past humans and needing coping skills to deal with the fallout.
And one thing I think they both brush on but don't genuinely appreciate is that the things they want to see more of are inherently in conflict. Mate expounds on this the most; he talks about the deep human needs for attachment and authenticity. He almost brushes against the potential tension between these two values but then scurries away from it and spends his entire final section devoted to advising people on how to deepen authenticity in their life without really delving in to how much in conflict this value is with the level of human support and connection that would be needed to provide people the support he advocates for in the beginning of the book. Whenever I hear someone declaiming on their journey to authenticity and self-care I always listen to the undertones because you can almost always detect quite a lot of people who were cut off or abandoned along the way. And then what became of *those* people's journey to authenticity? The same, probably, and the end result is a lot of very authentic but very lonely people.
If there's one thing modern (American, at least, but from what I can tell it's pretty far spread by now) humans, of every political persuasion, are in agreement on it is that they should be absolutely free from constraint and judgment in their personal lifestyle choices. (Indeed, if authenticity is really what we're missing how is it the past seventy years of devotion to authenticity have not improved matters?) We don't have a lot of first-hand accounts from hunter-gatherers but we have quite a lot of information from small closely-knit agricultural communities and they are unanimous that the kind of village that provides comfort and support through the ups and downs of life is also insular, judgmental, intrusive, rife with gossip, and harsh on nonconformists. There have also been quite a few attempts to live a simpler, communal life closer to nature since the Industrial Revolution and the ones that didn't turn into sex or death cults mostly seem to have just fizzled out as staying alive is hard on those terms and the comforts of industrialization, even for the poor, are quite alluring.
Humans are social creatures, but like most social creatures, a lot of that socialization is squabbling. We can't be close without stepping on each other's toes. One person's allergy is another person's emotional support animal. To have the benefits of a group, we all have to give up some perfectly valid and good parts of ourselves, like trees in a forest losing their lower branches. To take an example Mate trips all over without noticing, he speaks vigorously of the need for greater support for parents and young children so that children can have the emotional and physical safety they need to thrive. Well and good. But he never openly acknowledges that to do that we would have to, as a society, assert that parenthood was a lifestyle choice that is deserving of an extra degree of social support--thus implying that it is in some ways *better* than not being a parent. Sure, that'll go over well.
Both authors spend plenty of time critiquing the downsides of capitalism, everyone's favorite whipping boy, without really proposing a viable alternative. The world not being made up of pure distillation of 19th-century economic theories, the reality is that we don't have competing systems in the modern world. Every major modernized country has a capitalized private sector that is then taxed and regulated to various degrees to support various kinds of public programs. Differences are in the details but the common unquestioned basis is money, which allows us to get the benefit of the labor of other people (which we could not survive without) without needing any kind of personal relationship with them. It is a system designed for individual authenticity--and solitude. And that is probably why neither author can point to a place where more generous social programs than the US are making that much of a dent in the essential modern problems. The impersonal transactions of modern life (mediated by the government or not) cannot provide a community. As someone who works around the edges of public systems, both getting people in, keeping people on, and kicking people out, I can attest that the world of public benefits is still a terribly lonely one.
Anyway, while I think Mate is right in bringing light to the role trauma plays in both physical health and addictive behaviors, he does tend to overstate his case. If you define trauma so broadly that everyone has it, and addiction so broadly that everyone suffers from it, then you're definitely going to land at 100% correlation but still not have shown causation. We could certainly do with looking at more than the merely physical and finding connection and support for the struggling instead of relying on, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled." But looking solely inward doesn't seem quite the right direction.
I thought this article had some interesting counterpoints to the assertions in both these books. I have done plenty of therapy and found it helpful but it is at best a tool, not a goal. And tools can be easily misused, as I was reminded of meeting with a young man who was facing a much-deserved protective order from his ex-girlfriend. As I was advising him of what he could tell the court to hopefully get an order that would minimize its impact on his future career, I suggested he could promise to go to therapy. "Oh I've been in therapy for years," he proudly asserted, "I've got a great therapist." In many ways therapy is a commercialized lopsided substitute for genuine human connection. We are about equal parts matter and story. Sometimes therapy can help us tell ourselves better stories. But we still have to choose which stories we allow to shape us.
Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen by Garth Nix. This was a fun re-read. I got these books for Dame for Christmas because I know she will love them when she actually reads them but being 16 she is always in doubt about anything I recommend. But she has been gone since New Years' (Bookworm has taken over her schooling and with our house being currently in turmoil while we put on an addition for Bookworm and Rocketboy to move in, it just made more sense for her to stay with them until we are all ready for the move), I decided *I* might as well re-read them. They're one of the few depictions of necromancy that I find intriguing (bells--so lovely and mysterious) with intriguing characters and worldbuilding. (Like the series below, they're not actually a trilogy as such--they're a stand-alone followed by a duology.)
The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold. I did a search and it appears I've never really reviewed these on here which is wild because they are undoubtedly at the top of my list of books I've found as an adult. They are fantasy, but the only real fantasy element is the quintarian religious system which manages to be both natural and transcendent, organized and organic. The main characters are mostly failures, usually middle aged, traumatized and cursed. And therefore in a position to be used by the gods. They certainly have much that is grim but they are also profoundly hopeful and real.
