And just like that, 2023 is just about over! I’ve got the whole year-in-review post ready to go for tomorrow, so for today I will just say thank you for stopping by during the year that was. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are ready for a lovely new year!

In Books…

• The Signal and the Noise: I am a schedule reader, which is usually nice because the hype has often died way down before I get to something and I can read it on its own terms. But then we get situations like this one, where the air has gone pretty spectacularly out of Nate Silver’s balloon in the time since I bought the book. When his star was burning bright in the wake of the 2012 election though, everyone wanted to know how he looked at data to make his predictions. The insights he offers aren’t especially unique or profound: generally, people are not as good as they could be at making predictions because of various biases, particularly confirmation bias, and also the tendency to not learn from mistakes and adjust models to take new data into account. He then sets about presenting various examples of prediction and its failures: political talking heads, weather, the 2008 recession, earthquakes, the trajectories of baseball players’ careers, before spending the second half of the book writing a love letter to Baynesian statistics. It’s much too long, about 450 pages before footnotes, and the prose style is fairly dry so it’s very hard to stay interested. A big miss for me.
• Stay True: Memoirs, I’ve found, are often rooted in sadness. Either someone lived through a major (probably terrible) world event, or they’re writing about death, grief, disease, addiction, mental illness, crime, or something of the like. Death does play a role in writer Hua Hsu’s memoir, but not in a way that I would have expected. It is, as much as anything, a coming-of-age story about Hua, the son of comfortably middle-class Taiwanese immigrants, growing up in California and carefully crafting an anti-mainstream persona to compensate for not being cool. He enrolled at Berkeley, where a guy named Ken came into his orbit. Being Asian was really the only thing they had in common: Ken was Japanese, from a family who had been in the United States for generations, a member of a fraternity, wore trendy clothes and listened to trendy music. But they became close all the same, being friends in the way college students are, wasting time and being silly. And then Ken was killed in a carjacking. But the book isn’t really about Ken’s death, which doesn’t happen until about 3/4ths of the way through. It’s much more about Hua becoming a full person, which of course includes how the person he became was shaped by Ken’s friendship and loss. The prose quality is very good, Hua’s sharp intelligence and insight is evident throughout. But although it inspired reminiscences about my own college friendships, I struggled to really connect with it. The deep emotions under the surface are hinted at and alluded to but not really plumbed. Which, it feels emotionally vampiric to imply that someone needs to re-open their deepest wounds in order to feel a connection, but also there was just a lack of real vulnerability or rawness here. There’s also not a well-defined narrative arc, which might have helped give it more momentum. It’s solid, but wasn’t at all spectacular for me.
• Diamond Head: I probably should have known that this novel that purports to be a multi-generational family epic was going to fall a bit short when I noticed that the page count was just over 300. To really do justice to a story like the one Cecily Wong is trying to tell, she would have needed about another 200 pages at least. When we meet the Leong family in mid-1960s Hawaii, they are gathered for a funeral. Bohai, son of Frank and Lin, husband to Amy, and father to Theresa, has died. Despite the family’s wealth and glamour, things are amiss. Patriarch and shipping magnate Frank Leong is long dead, Lin hasn’t been seen in public in over a decade, Amy is withdrawn and disconnected, and teenage Theresa is heavily pregnant. Each woman’s story is told and examined through the lens of Chinese folklore around the “red string of fate” that connects lovers. Besides the relatively abbreviated page length, there are some other structural issues that set the book back, including the choice to tell the women’s stories through short alternating chapters and inconsistent use of first and third person, which can make it challenging to keep track of which narrative is which. And each of the women feels a little stock, a little flat, more “types” than people. I feel like there’s a really powerful story about generational trauma and the power of maternal love that could have come out of this, but while it’s decently-written and reasonably compelling it never gets there.
• House Rules: I’d read My Sister’s Keeper ages ago and enjoyed it well enough, so I thought I’d give Jodi Picoult another go…she has to have racked up this many bestsellers for a reason, right? But holy smokes did I hate this! So much! It feels like she took some of the key plot elements of My Sister’s Keeper (same-gender siblings, one of whom has a condition that requires an extraordinary amount of parental attention, a big court case), and mashed them up with a pamphlet from Autism Speaks (an organization widely rejected among actually autistic people). The book is, at its heart, a family drama. Emma Hunt is the over-extended single mother of two teenage boys: Jacob, who has what used to be referred to as Asperger’s Syndrome but is now considered low-support-needs autism, and Theo, his neurotypical younger brother. Their father, Henry, left the family before Theo’s first birthday, remaining in his sons’ lives only through child support checks and twice-yearly phone calls, leaving Emma without a support system and Theo without much in the way of active parental supervision as his resentment towards his brother’s near-monopoly on their mother’s attention curdles into some breaking-and-entering into empty homes. Jacob’s special interest is forensic crime scene analysis, which he is so deeply obsessed with that he reads industry journals and uses a police scanner to arrive at crime scenes and provide suggestions to the cops. And then, one fateful day, shortly after Jacob and his social skills tutor, Jess, have an argument in public, Theo breaks into the home she is house-sitting and surprises her as she’s exiting the shower. Next thing you know, Jess is found dead and Jacob winds up arrested for her murder. Emma is terrified that the things she knows from long experience are manifestations of Jacob’s neurodivergence (a flat affect, an inability to correctly read social situations, a powerful reluctance to make eye contact) will be read instead as markers of his guilt, so she hires a very green young attorney to represent her son in his trial. I will try to start with something kind here. As seems to be typical, Picoult uses a rotating-narrator structure (Emma, Jacob, Theo, the lawyer, and the detective), which gives the reader a nicely-rounded set of perspectives through which to experience the story. It also helps keep the pace moving briskly. That’s about all the good stuff. I had SO many issues with the plot and characterizations in this book. First of all, as someone who not only came from a family with split-up parents but also did practice some family law, there is no family court judge I can imagine who would have just let Henry completely depart his children’s lives (even despite moving to the other side of the country for work). Even if Jacob could not deal with plane travel, at the very least he would have been required to have custodial time with Theo during school breaks and summers! But of course, this would mean that the scenario Picoult wanted to present of the tension between the brothers would be less compelling, so can’t do that! And then there are the characters, especially Emma. On the one hand, her devotion to Jacob is written movingly, and Picoult skillfully portrays both the fierceness of the love behind that devotion with an acknowledgement of the sacrifices that it has required of her and her guilt about the the toll it’s had on her relationship with her other child. On the other, she’s depicted as leaning towards the “vaccines cause autism” idea that has been thoroughly debunked without any textual pushback. Her devotion to a gluten and casein-free diet and a variety of supplements for Jacob is more sympathetic, despite a lack of scientific support, as the decisions of an overwhelmed mother who desperately wants to help her child, but giving tacit support to the vaccine theory of autism is just gross! Also, we are clearly meant to understand and sympathize with the fact that she does not tell her ex-husband that Jacob has been arrested for murder until circumstances literally force her to do so! WHAT?! If a man had been portrayed as hiding a child’s arrest and pending trial for killing someone from that child’s mother, he would be understood as a monster! Because that is a horrible thing to hide from a child’s parent! And just the cherry on the awful sundae is the third-act decision to have Emma literally run across town in the wee hours of the morning, with zero prompting, to set up a romantic subplot with Jacob’s lawyer that has nothing to do with anything! We haven’t even gotten into the ways I found her handling of autism generally to have significant issues! First of all, she references once or twice autism as being something that needs a “cure”, and more widely insinuates that it’s akin to a disease or personality disorder. This is, from what I understand, not a perspective shared by the majority of actual autistic people. Second, Jacob is as much a stereotype as a person…instead of displaying the characteristics of autism at various levels, the way an actual human being would, we are meant to understand that he displays basically all of them, to a significant degree, all of the time. Third, she repeatedly insists through characters that are meant to be professional experts that autistic people don’t have empathy or theory of mind, which is just not true. And finally, despite repeatedly claiming that Jacob is almost pathologically honest, Picoult never has anyone directly ask Jacob exactly what happened on the afternoon Jess died. The most preposterous way she does this is through the lawyer, who says he cannot ask Jacob about it for fear of compromising his ethical duty to be honest with the court. But she doesn’t have Jacob’s defense rest on being not guilty. Instead, his plea is not guilty by reason of insanity. Which means that he has essentially admitted that Jacob committed the crime, but that his inability to perceive right from wrong at the time of the offense precludes a finding that he is criminally responsible for his actions! So if Jacob had confessed to him that he was guilty, he would not have been precluded in presenting his defense! It makes no sense! I have more, but honestly it’s not worth going into. It’s just really bad.
• Death Be Not Proud: I do love bummer books, but even I side-eyed myself for picking up a memoir by a man whose 17 year-old son died of brain cancer. This seemed to be a one-way ticket to tears. But once I started actually reading it, it became quickly clear I was unlikely to actually cry. It’s a sad book, because any book about a teenage boy developing cancer and dying is going to be sad. But the way John Gunther writes isn’t especially emotional. He was already a successful author, having written a travelogue about Europe and was working on another one about the United States. He and his wife Frances, a fellow journalist, brought up their son, Johnny, in privileged, educated circles in Europe and the northeast. Despite Gunther’s origin in the Chicago area, this book feels very upper-crust New England-y. He speaks very little about his feelings or his fears as Johnny goes through periods of recovery and regression, but his pride in his son, both in his character and accomplishments, shines through brightly. Gunther paints a portrait of a thoughtful, high-spirited young man, whose incredible intelligence was matched only by his fierce determination to fight on for his future even as his health declined. It was obviously a work inspired by tremendous love and loss. But he never invites the reader in to his emotional landscape, so I never found it tugging my heartstrings until the end. Gunther concludes the book by sharing some letters and diary entries from Johnny both prior to and during his illness, and then Frances writes a few pages herself. I wish the whole book had been written by her. It was heart-felt and devastating. But with this book, one of the first grief memoirs, his parents created a testament to their son that will live in long after anyone who knew him, and that is a profound memorial in and of itself.
• Annihilation: I don’t read much in the sci-fi or horror genres. They just by and large do not appeal to me, particularly the latter. But I heard enough good reviews of this from enough sources, and holy wow am I glad I stepped outside my comfort zone to pick this up. It’s neither hard sci-fi nor hard horror, more a creepy, deeply unsettling exploration of a world similar to our own but entirely apart. A team of four women (a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a biologist) are sent on a mission into Area X, a mysterious zone that has developed in their version of our world. They are the twelfth expedition, meant to explore and catalog what they find in order to help build understanding of what is happening over there, a place that changed after a never-explained Event. The book follows what happens to the biologist, who (like her cohorts) is never named. She’s not who she seems to be at the beginning. Very little is what it seems to be at the beginning. It’s almost impossible to describe even vaguely the plot, because while Stuff definitely Happens it’s more about the vibes, which are impeccably created. It’s a deeply interior novel, and the biologist is a beautifully-realized character. At just about 200 pages, it moves quickly and it’s honestly hard to put down even as the sense of unease grows as you’re reading it. I’d recommend reading it mostly during the day, it was hard to get out of my head at night. One of the best books I’ve read this year.
• A Princess in Theory: And finally, I read an actual fun and light book during the holidays! Romance is another genre I tend to skip over but this one had gotten very positive reviews and honestly I needed something a little fluffy! Naledi Smith is a grad student working hard towards her dreams of a career in epidemiology, with emphasis on the “work”, so she has no time at all for the scammy emails that have been showing up in her inbox proclaiming her the intended bride of an African prince. Ledi is an orphaned former foster kid, so being royalty isn’t even on her radar. She’s at her side waitressing gig after a day at the lab when she meets a man she assumes is Jamal, the trainee due to start that day. What she doesn’t know is that he’s actually Prince Thabiso, sole heir to the Kingdom of Thesolo, whose assistant has been sending her those emails after tracking her down online. Despite his absolutely terrible debut as food service staff, there’s a spark between the two which turns into a full-blown flame as he engineers his way into her life. The two were betrothed as toddlers, and while he means to explain, he’s thrilled to be meeting someone who has no idea who he is and growing an organic bond with her like a regular person. Complications of course ensue when she inevitably discovers the truth after the two have developed feelings for each other. Tropes abound: hidden royalty, destiny, break up/make up, even a makeover montage for Ledi. But they’re executed charmingly enough, and Ledi is a winning heroine: kind, smart, driven, and sex-positive. I appreciated that Alyssa Cole gave her a complex relationship with her best friend Portia that’s she’s negotiating alongside her relationship with Thabiso, which makes her feel much more well-rounded and like an actual person who might exist. There are definitely some underbaked elements in the narrative, but I was enjoying the ride it was taking me on enough that I didn’t much care.

In Life…

• Baby’s second Christmas: Last Christmas was fun, but even at nearly a year old he had no idea what was really going on. This Christmas, he was so much more aware and engaged. And spoiled, he got so many presents! We’re so lucky to have so many people in our lives who love him!