Dump post
I finished Debt: The First 5000 Years – David Graeber. It was a good read but quite intensive in terms of effort. Found myself losing the thread of the argument while diving in and out of commuter reading. Graeber puts forward some good deconstructions but a lot of it is reliant on extremely extended multi-part arguments that need to be made over several chapters. Sometimes a case study or historical footnote will be highlighted for discussion with the promise that it will eventually make sense. It does, but it makes for a very difficult read in totality. Graeber is still compelling though. More of this kind of academic rigour needs more humour imo. Pretty decent attempt to integrate the history of India and China as well, highlighting the ancient and middle-age Europe’s lags and relatively slow development at times before showing up how colonialism could’ve been done differently using debt as the conversation starter. I recommend it but only if you plan are not reading anything else for a while.
After this I struggled to find a book that really grips me.
I read Preparing to Teach: an introduction to effective teaching in higher education - Graham Gibbs and Trevor Habeshaw. It’s a good book that walks through all sorts of different ways to teach university students which I mostly read for work. The main thrust is that the traditional lecture should probably just die and that there are many alternatives that are really trying to do to the teacher’s fear of upsetting expectation or losing authority. It’s good but mostly a textbook.
I then read Ways of the Hand - David Sudnow, an autoethnographer who also happens to be a skilled jazz pianist. The book is essentially about the beginning to end journey of learning how to play the piano from the very start to learning the most advanced elements of jazz improvisation for piano. I could not stick with the book once it started to get into the technical stuff and I think it’s mostly just because Sudnow is just endlessly describing what it feels like to play piano for dozens of pages without really offering many conclusions. I think this book would be more enjoyable if you yourself are a musician but as a non-musician I really struggled and had to give it up after about 50 pages.
Since then I’ve had more bad luck and am juggling three books at the moment:
1. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
I had this recommended to me many times by different people because of the focus of the plot on videogame development. The book follows a group of graduate students making a game together in the 90s and follows their career into success. Ostensibly this is a framework for exploring the on-again off-again character relationships as they fade in and out of familiarity. Unfortunately, the framework comes to be one of the major flaws of the book , of which it has many. You cannot read this book for long without tripping over some really wedged in videogame trivia to keep things contemporary to the current year. Characters will randomly stop conversation to muse about how ingenious a given game released in 1996 was, listing the full staff credits and describing its core gameplay loop to each other in a way that no human was discussing videogames 30 years ago. This stuff feels like it’s for the lay-reader and is just distracting for a more familiar audience. No extant videogame can be discussed casually in this book.
Not only this, most of the characters are unlikeable, inconsistent, and fairly shallow. The relationships hinge on us being told that they just like each other or suddenly decide to hate one another because of some perceived slight.
The book also stretches believability with regards to the make-up of the team. Three central characters make up the original student bedroom team: a coder/artist (who seemingly does everything), a designer(?), and a producer (for a Three. Person. Team). The game that leads to their breakout success also sounds like a very boring and pared back indie game version of Ico or a critical darling that would be more at home in the mid 2000s than 1998. Development of the game mostly consists of characters discussing ideas for the game rather than any interesting issues that actual development leads to, especially regarding the challenge of collaboration.
Later when they get larger budgets and actual studios we get no real development of characters and how they might relate to other co-workers. We only ever hear about these central characters and the faceless game developer studios which they then eventually lead do not expand the cast or complicate matters in any interesting way. The world is a miniature. Characters will discuss something about a project and then we will see something like a two year timeskip after which conversation resumes about something they were talking about two years ago as if it happened two hours ago. Dialogue and exposition provide some new contrivance or cliche on almost every page. I am very close to quitting the book but a family member gave it to me and I feel somewhat obligated to honour the gift. I’m telling myself that I’m learning how not to write a book.
There is some decent stuff around the coder artist (woman exploited in early industry culture) and several of the characters explore biraciality but it struggles to get to a really interesting place that resonates with everything else.
2. On Freedom - Timothy Snyder
This is better written and at least has some interesting philosophical discussion of the nature of freedom as well as some good history. However I can’t read it for long without feeling that the book is overly sententious and often virtue signalling to the reader. The negative and positive freedom binary feels a bit too absolute at times as it is discussed here. Snyder frames positive liberty (Ukraine and Europe being the prime example) as always preferable to negative liberty (America) in concept but this ends up feeling like a bit of a childish comparison. Why not both? Surely a mixture are important but I think Snyder is clearly writing to an American audience and is somewhat annoyed with them. The book is broken up into very short segments which are like miniature essays. I liked this since it chunks up ideas nicely but it also means that the transitions between each section are quite abrupt.
One section begins with Snyder telling us, unbidden, how when the recent war in Ukraine started his daughter donated all her money to Ukrainians without any other context. This introduces a section that’s meant to talk about recognising injustice but ends up coming across as irrelevant or lacking context, kind of like ‘what am I meant to do with this information?’ and many sections have similar transitions.
There are sections that are very well written but the book’s weakness is the same as many other pop-sci or politics digest books when they start to quickcite pop psychology such as skinnerboxes or confirmation bias. Re-explaining these basic facts in a haphazard manner ends up casting doubt on other anecdotes and citations elsewhere and just feels like a cogent and concise edit was avoided in favour of getting it out at the nexus of a second Trump presidency and Putin’s war continuing. I can see myself reading more but maybe not finishing it. There’s not really a structured throughline and the question is really just an open-ended ‘what’ about freedom rather than a clearer manifesto. This was also a gift from a family member and so am stuck in the same problem.
3. The City and Its Uncertain Walls - Haruki Murakami
Probably the best of the three that I’m juggling since Murakami is usually at least readable without feeling you have to constantly blink hard after a particularly rough passage. This book is his most explicitly surreal book diving straight into fantasy from the first couple of chapters. It’s set within a sort of alternate reality/city where people’s shadow selves live protected by an impenetrable wall. The protagonist has a teenage relationship with a girl in his hometown and the story bounces to in this perspective and his visit to the wall later as an adult to become a dream reader to his girlfriend’s shadow’s dream librarian. Actual details and exposition are breadcrumbed throughout but it’s not long before we hear about the unbearably hot boiling of the main character’s loins any time he thinks about the developing breasts of his friend. I am very early in it but it is a long one and despite being more readable than the other two, is still quite airy for such a big novel. It could go either way with this one.
Funnily enough I got this one as a gift for another family member so maybe it’s going to have the inverse effect?