Fall! Though you’d hardly have known it by the weather. The month kicked off with temperatures hovering in the 90s, which was really a bummer after a very hot summer I was hoping to see finally relent. What we hadn’t had much of over the summer was smoke, but there was a terrible wildfire on the south end of town that burned thousands of acres. I have a lot of thoughts about living in a drought-prone area with not insignificant fire risks that are neither here nor there. But the fire is out and now here we are on the verge of October…with temperatures hovering in the upper 80s.
In Books…
- Sisters in Law: As a young girl, both Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were inspirations for me as someone who thought she wanted to be a lawyer one day (I did go on to be a lawyer, only to discover relatively quickly that I didn’t actually want to be one very much). Linda Hirshman’s book examines the professional lives of the first and second woman to ever be justices of the Supreme Court, looking at the very different paths they took to get there, their confirmations, and the roles they played in the gender equality jurisprudence of the Court. It became pretty quickly apparent that the book she actually wanted to write was about Ginsburg and the importance of her work, both in front of the Court representing clients and on the bench as a justice, to fight for women to be treated fairly under the law. But writing about feminism at the Supreme Court without talking about the first female justice would be weird, so she includes O’Connor. She probably should not have. Her disdain for O’Connor is obvious, with the justice being portrayed as a mediocre jurist (I don’t agree, though I know some do), dedicated to nothing but intellectually barren pursuits, and just shy of a naked partisan. Her take on Ginsburg is all but gushing, even including a chapter at the end about Ginsburg’s late-in-life social media lionization. It’s clear that Hirshman is a left-leaning feminist who believes strongly in the legacy that Ginsburg strove to leave behind, which is an impressive one and worthy of the book’s focus! But it leaves the O’Connor portions feeling shoehorned in grudgingly. I did mostly appreciate Hirshman’s skill at explaining some of the internal workings of the Court (the way the justices shape their opinions to try to hold together the broadest possible majority, the role of dissents, etc) in ways that should be accessible to people who aren’t already familiar with the institution, and she has a knack for presenting the major cases she discusses in a similarly straightforward way. I found it interesting even as a former attorney who has read several books on the Court already, and think it will be appealing even to an audience without any sort of specialized legal knowledge. But its issues are enough that I can’t really wholeheartedly recommend it.
- Shred Sisters: Rule-following, high-achieving Amy Shred would be the golden child in many families, but in her own she spends her childhood playing second fiddle to her beautiful, rebellious, and charismatic older sister Ollie, who commands the attention and indulgence of their parents. But Ollie’s high spirits turn to volatility as she approaches adulthood, and she only avoids justice system involvement for her sticky fingers because her parents help divert her to a psych hospital. A few years later, when Ollie has stopped flinging herself against the bars of her cage long enough to figure out how to get to go back home, she’s there only briefly before stealing money and taking off, leaving her parents and sister reeling in her wake. Just a teenager, Amy is of course not mature enough to understand how to cope with the trauma she’s experienced, but neither are her parents, and the seeds of their family unraveling are planted deeply enough to take root and grow. The story follows Amy as she becomes a person wary of human connection, afraid of risk-taking and leaving herself open to hurt. The sundering of her parents’ marriage leaves its own wounds, as do Ollie’s occasional resurfacings, never predictable except that they will end abruptly and probably with Ollie in possession of someone else’s cash, or at something valuable she can pawn. Lerner creates a well-realized, realistic portrait of the trajectory someone like Amy might take: she is not quirky, not damaged in a cute way played for laughs. She struggles to form and sustain relationships both platonic and romantic. She resists therapy for a long time, dismissing it as useless after its failure to make a difference for her sister. Lerner skillfully avoids the cliched plotlines and character beats one might expect: the harm Ollie causes Amy is largely indirect, but no less damaging for being so. Amy is beautifully realized, sympathetic despite not always being likeable. I’d picked this up because I assumed it was going to be a book about Sisterhood Feelings (one of the few areas I’m susceptible to heart-string tugging) based on the description, but I enjoyed it despite it being something else entirely. Ollie and Amy spend very little time together, actually, after their childhood, though the impact of being Ollie’s sister never stops resonating for her. It is decidedly not “big-hearted”, and whether that’s a positive (like it was for me) or a negative depends on what kind of book you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a clear-eyed character study, this is a very solid read.
- The Past: Four siblings (Alice, Fran, Harriet, and Roland) gather at their family’s rundown country home in rural England for a three-week vacation. They are also there to discuss what to do with the house, which they have not maintained and would require a lot of money to restore, though the house holds a lot of sentimental value for them: it was where their mother grew up. But it’s not just the siblings there: Alice has brought Kasim, the twenty year-old son of a former longtime boyfriend, Fran has her two small children Arthur and Ivy, and Roland has brought along his teenage daughter Molly, as well as his new wife Pilar. While the siblings largely find themselves repeating their familiar patterns of behavior with each other, the addition of the guests creates an oddly destabilizing element, creating opportunities for new connections. About halfway through, the book’s narrative detours back to a brief period when their mother, unhappy in her marriage in London, returned to her childhood home and flirted with the idea of staying (though we know from the present-set sections that she didn’t, she returned to their father only to die when they were teenagers), before returning to the main plotline, such as it is. I am a reader who can happily love a book where “nothing happens”, but there needs to be some sense of momentum, an idea that the story is going somewhere even if it’s just characters coming to deeper realizations about themselves. Both momentum and real character development feel tantalizingly close at times but ultimately never happened. We get brief skims across the surface of most of the characters, enough to make the reader interested and curious about them, but never really deep enough to understand their decisions. For example, why does Alice bring Kasim along? What kind of relationship did she have with his father? Why did it end? How long ago? We’re left to assume that she was a de facto stepmother to him for a time, but without getting that backstory, it’s hard to really get a sense of their relationship. Harriet’s past as a “revolutionary” is mentioned, seeming to refer to left-wing protesting, but what specific causes drove her? Fran is nearly a non-entity, Arthur and Ivy get much more space than their mother ever does, but I found their perspectives particularly well-written. They are chaotic in the way actual children are, developing an elaborate game around the idea of malevolent spirits. The prose quality is really the highlight here, Hadley has a knack for lovely, poignant turns of phrase. But ultimately, when I got to the end of the book (which has a final sentence I found beautifully emotionally resonant), I wondered what the point of it had really been. Not a bad book by a long shot, just a frustratingly underdeveloped one.
- Rodham: In real life, Bill Clinton asked Hillary Rodham to marry him three times. The first two, she said no. What if she’d done so one last time, left him to forge her own path? Rodham takes that idea and runs with it, creating an alternate history that sees her life take turns both that might be expected and ones that might not. She never marries, and becomes a law professor at Northwestern. She watches Bill’s 1992 campaign dissolve in the wake of allegations of a long-running affair (he, of course, did marry) and a poorly-managed primetime interview gone awry. In the wake of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, she’s approached to primary a Democratic senator who voted to confirm. After briefly taking a step back in the face of Carol Mosley Braun’s candidacy, she jumps in again when she starts to hear rumors of a messy campaign and sees an opportunity for victory. From the Senate, she develops a long-range plan for the Oval Office, taking a trial run only to have her second attempt be thwarted by the astronomical rise of her fellow Illinois Senator Barack Obama. But after his two terms, she’s ready to try again in 2016. Of course, though, she’s not the only one with eyes on the prize. It’s not hard to understand what propelled Sittenfeld, a writer I’ve been interested in reading again since I tore through her captivating Prep, to undertake this thought exercise in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. I think it might have been better remaining as a thought exercise. The book is paced oddly, with a full third of it taking place before Hillary has left Bill at all. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to spend time with that part of the story, you have to build it up a bit to make her heartbreak at its ending feel earned, but knowing that the whole point of the book was what happened after she left made me feel like it was taking forever to get there. Sittenfeld also does a lot of fast-forwarding, honing in on particular years of Hillary’s life and filling in light details only as strictly necessary to move the plot forward. It’s a confusing decision, because some of the things she chooses to leave out (the immediate aftermath of the Bill/Hillary breakup, the details of her first Senate campaign) seem like they could have been really interesting territory to delve into. But what was most perplexing was her insistence on shoving in real life details. She still has Hillary making her infamous comments disdaining staying home and baking cookies, igniting a nationwide furor, only as a Senator, The 2016 election still has a role to play for Donald Trump, who at one point gives his initial campaign speech in an entirely different context, and his itchy Twitter fingers. It still features an anti-Hillary chant that takes hold at an opponent’s rally. She uses the word “deplorable” at a debate. Sittenfeld also makes reference to things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, which strains credulity in light of the alternate political timeline the book proposes. It’s just kind of messy, and I never got engaged with it, and I can’t recommend it.
- Because Internet: I enjoy linguistics enough that I listen to a podcast about it for fun, so naturally this was right up my alley…especially since it’s written by Gretchen McCulloch, one of the co-hosts of that very podcast (Lingthusiasm). In it, McCulloch speaks to one of the reasons our particular cultural moment is so interesting for linguists: the availability of representations of casual speech (the kind we engage in outside of edited and/or formal contexts like literature or professional writing/oratory) has exploded with the rise of blogs and social media. She uses the data that has been produced to explore both internet language and internet culture more widely, including using repeated letters in words for emphasis (whyyyyyy), the significance of punctuation in text messages, emoji, and memes. The emoji chapter was a particular highlight! It’s written in a voice which feels very familiar to me from listening to the podcast, enthusiastic about both learning and sharing knowledge. I think she hits a good middle ground between being accessible to a mass audience (she at one point discusses accent prestige and its connection to the pronunciation, or lack thereof, of R sounds, without ever using the term rhotic) while still giving enough context and detail to keep it intellectually engaging. It’s an entertaining read for the Very Online and I’d recommend it!
- The Force of Such Beauty: I’ve been into royals gossip long enough to remember the rumors about Princess Charlene of Monaco. Shortly before her wedding to Prince Albert, it’s said, the South African former Olympian had second thoughts and tried to leave the country. Her passport may or may not have been confiscated. Obviously, the wedding went forward, the couple had twins, and they remain married (though seem to spend a lot of time apart). Barbara Bourland clearly had Charlene in mind when she wrote this story, about a South African former Olympian named Caroline whose life is forever changed when she takes a nasty fall during a training session. Preparing to defend her gold medal in the marathon, Caroline instead shatters her hip socket due to osteoarthritis and hits her face hard enough to shatter a cheekbone and several teeth. In the exclusive rehab facility her Nike-esque sponsor sends her to for surgery on both her hip and face, the 22 year-old meets Finn, a handsome man about a decade her senior and they have an instant spark even through heavy painkillers. But they lose touch and Caroline lives as a “normal” 20-something for a bit, trying and in many ways failing to adjust to the way she’s treated when she’s no longer a top-tier athlete. When they reconnect, though, Finn and Caroline’s chemistry is undiminished and they become engaged after a whirlwind courtship. The first sign of trouble is when Finn’s icy mother Amelie sends Caroline for an invasive physical exam without warning, prompting her to try to leave the country before she’s stopped by the palace’s security staff. The wedding goes forward, but even gilding can’t disguise that the borders of Caroline’s life are actually iron bars and they’re closing ever-tighter around her. She’s an interesting character, Caroline, easy to get invested in despite her naivete but often frustrating, particularly as the story goes on. It is screamingly obvious that something is very seriously amiss, but Caroline doesn’t know what she doesn’t know and doesn’t ask the right questions…or even very many questions at all. The book is strongest at the beginning as her character is being established, with a sense of possibility for how it might unfold even as the broad contours of the story aren’t hard to see coming. It loses some momentum in the middle, I don’t know that Bourland’s choice to put a major plot development at the beginning serves the story as well as it could have. Some aspects of the plot seem overdeveloped, while others, like Caroline’s relationship with Amelie, felt like they could have gotten more focus to build up some less well-rounded aspects of Caroline’s character and circumstances. I did appreciate, though, her focus on Caroline’s body, the way it and the person residing inside of it are treated differently depending on her status: Olympian, regular girl, princess. Usually those ideas are left more to allusion but they’re foregrounded in a very thoughtful way. I think this book will be an engaging enough read for fellow royals watchers, and even those with more casual interest in royalty. It’s not great but it’s solid enough in most respects to be worth recommending.
In Life…
- Dental drama: I got my third root canal early this month when an old filling failed and a replacement one didn’t take either. Honestly root canals are not nearly as bad as people have been lead to believe, it’s more annoying having to hold your jaw open that long than it is actively painful. What will be painful are the bills once I get the crown (my eighth!) attached next month!
- Family trip to Michigan: Once again, we’ve toted C across the country to visit my family and friends back in the mitten! We’re actually still here (we leave tomorrow) but we’ve had a lovely time getting to see our people and spend time in what remains one of my very favorite places. Please pray for us as we prepare to take a very active toddler on his second long airplane adventure in less than a week (and especially hope for an easier trip back than we had on the way out).