Books Read
Take Me, Take Me with You
Sorting Things Out
The Control Revolution
Mr Timothy
Seeing Like a State
The Tree Bride
*****
All I can say about Take Me, Take Me with You is that it is NOT recommended. Just don’t. It involves attempted murder-suicide, weird doll obsessions, possible incest, aggravated assault, adultery, Alzheimer’s, mother-daughter issues, creepy men and a gratuitous born-again former drug-addict. I know you’re thinking, how can this go wrong? but it does. Very, very wrong.
*****
Sorting Things Out, The Control Revolution and Seeing Like a State were the final books for my Infrastructure class. The Control Revolution was immensely difficult, and a typical textbook, so don’t read it unless you are really into the subject of bureaucracy and social control. Sorting Things Out was the only one that particularly inspired a review, linked here from mid-month. Seeing Like a State was the topic for a class presentation, so I don’t have anything specific to post here.
*****
Mr Timothy took me a while to read, but actually was really intriguing. It follows the goings-on of the adult Tim Cratchit – yes, of A Christmas Carol fame. Scrooge is still a character, although he is somewhat difficult to recognize at first. The narrative jumped around a bit in its timeframe, or at least present time vs past memories, and was also completely far-fetched in terms of plot mechanisms, and well, plot, but I still enjoyed it. If you have the time, I’d say go for it.
*****
It is a curious thing to like an author, but not like the writer she has created. The Tree Bride, by Bharati Mukherjee is a story within a story. Narrator Tara Chatterjee uncovers the history of her legendary ancestor, the Tree Bride, who was a local leader in the Indian independence movement. Mukherjee writes most of the book as the story told by Tara, but some chapters, or parts of chapters, are written by Tara herself, as she works through a biography of the Tree Bride and associates. I found the book by Mukherjee to be fascinating and well written, but could never fully escape into the writing of Tara. That Mukherjee is able to create a character with a different writing style than herself speaks well of her skills, but I ended up skipping most of those sections all the same.
Unrelatedly, Tara’s husband supposedly invented the modern computer system of packet switching, and the books gives a fascinating description of how the technology works. Coincidentally, I was reading chapters from Inventing the Internet on packet switching as the basis for the internet, and I have to say, Mukherjee’s explanation made a lot more sense to me.
*****
Books to Read
Emergence
Respect
Sacred Geography
Empress
Tar Baby
The Gold Bug Variations
If I read those, I will have finally worked my way through the stack of books that I have somehow accumulated through the years for no particular reason – not gifts – these were books that were passed along with the intent that I also read them and pass them along and it’s time I finally do that. Emergence and Respect are books that I read brief sections of for a workshop this semester, and so would like to finish.
