Still reading
Oh man. A quick, scorching read, full of lyrical prose (“I am sunwarm and eveningwonderful” - I’d love to know more about how Hazel Evans approached the translation from the original Danish). A devastating examination of the weight of being a teenage girl in a world of men waiting to devour you. The duties and expectations of being pure and virginal but ready and eager, incubated but not long enough, and what agency do you have within those constraints to own them? The epilogue maybe doesn’t quite stick the landing - or, I think, less that, more that it decides in the last few pages to veer off into a different direction that isn’t really in keeping with the rest of the book. But beyond that, a difficult triumph.
God, this was a refreshing read, if only to feel like I’m not the only one seeing this and to inspire some optimism about the future. This is a heart-on-sleeve fact-based polemic on the state of late-stage technocapitalism, with a convincing and thorough laying out of how we got into this mess of every service getting worse as it gets more essential, how it plays out in the here and now, but most importantly it provides practical - if ambitious - solutions. It’s also really made me think about my part in this (as a consumer, not a producer, although inevitably the HPE/Juniper acquisition gets mentioned, but we escape it until 92% of the way through the book) - what services do I subscribe to, what efforts do I make to not reward enshittification in these services, and what alternatives could be out there? It’s also just nice to be reacquainted with Doctorow’s writing!
We are fully in the age of the millenial novel, and I mean that as a compliment. Flat Earth revolves around Avery, an art student in New York who is to varying degrees jealous of her varyingly successful friend Frances. The specifics are largely irrelevant. Instead, it talks more to the way the world as we have made it exacerbates and influences that jealousy, the means it provides as an outlet. The precise and cold prose models the remove at which Avery has to take the world, the job at the dating app for the patriarchy, the casual relationships where even she seems unsure whether it’s anything more than just something to do. And why do we want so much what still doesn’t make other people happy?
At one point for my late teens/early 20s, I’d have probably told you that Douglas Coupland was my favourite author - oh for the days of certainty! This didn’t change out of any particular personal growth (mine) or creative decline (his), more just he stopped publishing as much. But picking up this post-covid collection of microfiction, I’m instantly reminded of what I loved about his work. It’s a generational voice that works when stretched above and below that generation, consistent across these 60 bite-sized stories that quantum leap from character to character, but still different enough that each character feels suitably real. Laugh out loud funny in one moment, ruminative on the state of the world the next, and very hard to put down.
I’ve read a few books on the general theme of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency (Michael Lewis’ hagiography of SBF, Zeke Faux’s excellent investigative journalism on Tether), but Howson’s Let Them Eat Crypto takes a different tack somewhat. Rather than another book about the technicalities and the obvious scamminess of it all, this instead looks at the broader social impact: the poor communities in South America and Africa suffering from modern day colonialism; charities and NGOs being scammed into solutions that supposedly work towards their aims but instead absolutely make them worse; the supporting of far-right/longtermist/incel groups. Let Them Eat Crypto is unapologetic in its view that there is not a single good use of the blockchain, and offers a full-throated defence of that that is refreshing to read. What struck me most, though, was how easily translateable this is to the current AI hype - custom-built hardware that will burn out in a year and will end up on landfill, the same names making the same landgrabs for everyone’s mindshare and personal data, the same hype rush overtaking the people asking what this is all actually good for. The books will write themselves in a couple of years time (or, at least, metaphorically).
As is tradition, Mum has given me the Doctor Who annual for Christmas, and as such it is the first book of the year. Not much, as ever, to talk about here. The usual guff, and a short story from Pete McTighe (how many times can Ruby say something “tinged with sarcasm”?).