Birth of the Chess Queen
That the queen was once a vizier is a neat fact. That the queen used to only be able to move one square diagonally is a neat fact. That the queen was mocked for weakness when her piece was frail, but then scorned for madness when it was potent, is a sad one.
Pages move quickly in Birth of the Chess Queen, driven by the singular focus of the narrative. It is an honest surprise that an entire book can be filled with the theories surrounding “Wherefore Queen?” and the facts supporting those theories. The answers it gives are satisfactory and—given the relative esoteric nature of the material—probably as close as anyone will ever get to the truth.
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The Almost Nearly Perfect People
This is the strength of modern non-fiction: you don’t need to care about the subject matter if the writing is good enough, the narrator affable enough, the information fascinating enough. The wider a net you cast—the more books you pick up, topic sentences be damned—the more exposure you’ll get to things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. That is how we gain knowledge; the same facts being thrown at us a dozen times from a dozen different perspectives. And the dozen different perspectives are something the Nordic countries apparently lack.
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Color: A Natural History of the Palette
In the national arts library at the Victoria and Albert Museum I read how the cobalt quality varied throughout the Ming dynasty. The finest blue was in the mid-fifteenth century Xuande reign, while under the emperors Zhenge and Jiajing a hundred years later, porcelain-makers were using an excellent violet glaze. Meanwhile—and bear with me on the dates here—the “blue and white” from the Chenghua (late fifteenth) and Wanli (late sixteenth) reigns was virtually “gray and white,” after those emperors imposed trade sanctions against Central Asia. With the details scribbled down in my notebook I went down, with some excitement, to the Chinese gallery and tested it out. To my delight I could now tell immediately, by color alone and from a distance, when a Ming vase was probably fired. The possibilities for pretentious expertise were endless.
When I write reviews of non-fiction, I tend to excerpt the facts and strip them of their commentary. Unless the point I am reinforcing is authorial presence in the narrative or something similar. The dry banter throughout Color adds an immense value, and the above illustrates how a likable author can carry the reader through any subject. The minutia is interesting but partially irrelevant [note from 2022, I cannot believe I called it “irrelevant” when it has been my most-cited concept over the last eight years!!]; what is most fascinating is the basic concept that color and creation can be tied to history through physical production.
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Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
Political identity has become yet another personal brand to manage, so any critique of it can feel like critique of self; but Kill All Normies is correct in its assertion that in the rush to avoid being conformist, mainstream culture has created a sort of void into which anything goes as long as it is prefaced by the statement that it is “true for me.” And that “true for me” ethos seems right and just and good when it supports the things you support—gender-neutral bathrooms, gay marriage, open access to and non-performative hang-wringing about abortion—but really, really bad when it is employed to support absolutely proven-to-be-false claims of genetics-based intelligence or extrajudicial detention and deportation of undocumented human beings. Anyway, counter-hegemonic transgression is a lot like the office of the president: if it is your guy, it doesn’t seem to matter that the checks and balances designed to stop the consolidation of power (like, say, thousands of drone strikes without the approval of Congress) in a single person have been routinely undermined.
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Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
What differentiates Hacker Hoaxer is the humanization element—Swarm presents DDoS actions and internet protesters as, well, a swarm; Hacker Hoaxer dissects the mass movement, nearly de-anonymizing Anonymous. The two books are the inverse of the same issue; one takes individuals and presents them as a political movement while the other takes a movement and breaks it down into individuals.
When Hacker Hoaxer began its technical chatter, I remember balking: if the author doesn’t know what “AFK” means, why should I trust her breakdown of a botnet?
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The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet
It might sound tautological, but different things are different, and should be treated as such. We want to analogize DDoS actions as sit-ins, because we know where to position sit-ins in our worldview. But they aren’t sit-ins. The internet isn’t the sidewalk—it’s more like Outer Space. Because no will hear you scream. Except, again, it isn’t like Outer Space either; the trap of the analogizing brain makes everything like something else, even when it isn’t.
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The Nakano Thrift Shop
There’s something real about the aimlessness within Nakano that intrigues without leaving impact. It captures the haziness of being underemployed with few responsibilities and very little direction; I wonder how much of this book I’ll remember in a few weeks.
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A Visit From the Goon Squad
The well-written but tepid—“She’s calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”—chronology of Sasha and Bennie could have ended on the scene with in Napoli. It would have, if this was just another insightful novel of human lives interacting. That it doesn’t, that the climax requires society to be a broken, satirical mess of uber-networked human uniformity, that the most marginalized outcast-class of current times becomes the messiah for reclaimed personhood, moves A Visit from the Goon Squad from an wonderfully clever piece of writing into a novel of real substance, with a message and a voice for society writ large.
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Satin Island
This is why hubris is the weakness of our age, as it is with any age of humanity that reaches a crescendo in individualized art before enforced structural equality.
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MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction
Maybe the issue I took with MFA could be more simple than that; one didn't need to manufacture a shadowy cabal of the elite, laughing as we—the reading public—eagerly lapped up the hubristic detritus of their patrician parables. There was already enough trite juxtaposition and cynical self-help-section cashgrab baked into the title to raise one's hackles—successful writers writing to non-successful writers because that is the audience that would swallow it:
Fucking MFA programs. The students were arrogant because they had been accepted by this fancy program. They were also desperate to believe they had done the right thing—that being there would help them, change them, save them in some way.
Apply the same pathos to the hardship writers of NYC’s East Village—desperate to justify their thousand-dollar-a-month bedroom sublet—and you get the same outcome. MFA vs NYC; paean to a life well wasted.
But all my grousing fell away as the sheer volume of excerpts and quotations piled up. As I reviewed them, thinking of how to review the book, I recognized that different voices surged and different perspectives clashed; nothing was stable, nothing pushed an agenda. What I had latched onto—from the Raffles incident—was preconceived; I brought it to the book, rather than pulling it from its pages:
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A Tale for the Time Being
When split narrators are done well, the reader tends to lament the end of one chapter as it heralds the switch to a different point of view. By the time that chapter ends, the feeling rises again—a mild disappointment clinging to each new beginning. You know there will be a tangential push before you can return to forward story motion from whichever narrator just finished. What A Tale for the Time Being does well is create that same feeling whether it’s Naoto or Ruth; whomever you’re with, you do not want your time to end.
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Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City
But then, the whole point of being in this City, it turned out, was staying nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange things the City might choose to offer to you.
Very Recent History wasn’t at all what I thought it was when I picked it up: at first, that irked me, but once I shed my expectation of Derrida’s New York: The Novel and let this book take me where it wanted to go, it was worth the journey. The point of reading fiction, as with life (within the City or away from it), is to stay nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange things a novel might choose to offer you.
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The Medici Conspiracy
There is something poetic about the The Medici Conspiracy; the art and antiquities it discusses are breathtaking, but it is not a beautiful book. It is written in a technical style that emphasizes information—even to the extent that it occasionally repeats itself—ahead of readability. It can be tedious, exacting, too focused on minutiae. It is a written reconstruction of an in situ archaeological dig; no outsider is ever going to “Ooh” and “Aah” over a plot of dirt with a few potsherds sticking out. Most would rather see the reconstructed Euphronios Krater sitting under glass.
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The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts
The missing pages of my borrowed copy were not lost to the mists of time, nor were they torn out, but a simple, ghostly blank. They were near the very beginning of the book and—after my first attempt at bypassing them—crucial in establishing a base of knowledge with which to decipher the rest of the text. I decided to delay my cartographic journey until my second library hold arrived, certain that the guide-pages meant to lead me deeper into Iron Age Gaul would appear.
My second library copy contained, of course, the same jarring, eerie blankness at preface pages xi-xiv; again at one through four; yet again at nine through twelve. I decided—after consulting the parabola of a pigeon’s fearless strut down Second Avenue—that the blankness filled the role of dark space of cartographic legend, a fundamental impossibility of complete, elucidative knowledge available to, or perhaps about, Celtic society.
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On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks
On the Map is the One Thousand and One Nights of cartography: it feels impossible to predict what the next vignette would be. Facts and tidbits would pop up where you least expected them, such as the etymology of “limelight,” which seems inter alia puzzling for a book about maps. Before it was employed as a spotlight in theaters—or the grammatical shift into the figurative center of attention—an oxyhydrogen flame directed onto calcium oxide was created as a cartographic tool to cut through the fog and inclement weather to enable proper coastal surveys. Orienting one’s self—getting one’s bearings in a relatively novel environment or circumstance—should seem a nonsensical or meaningless phrase, unless you’ve seen ancient maps. “What we regard as north lies to the left, while east is at the top, a placing that has given us the word “orientation.’” “Gerrymander” is in there too, and it has to do with salamanders. On maps. For real.
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Paradise Rot
I suggest you just read it. I say that not simply to make my job of reviewing it easier than flailing around for five thousand words and coming to the same muddled conclusion anyway, but because it defies description with its Mulholland-Drive-mixed-with-a-Björk-song flair. I think you’ll pull out what you bring in. I came with directionless curiosity, and left with exactly what the staff card at the Haight’s Booksmith foretold: “feeling a bit off.”
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The Secrets of the Starbucks Lovers
That I laughed out loud at least eight times in seventy pages, particularly at the back-page order form for the forty nonexistent other books in the series. And the sister-series Ed Sheeran Adventures. And darker spin-off Taylor Swift Case Files.
These are just a few of the things that make the book a real treat. As the pair of pop icons flounce around specifically referenced NYC Starbucks locations, Taylor Swift: Girl Detective: The Secrets of the Starbucks Lovers thoroughly enjoys itself.
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The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
As it builds in height, a wave crest becomes steeper and steeper, finally becoming unstable and tumbling over. This instability occurs when the wave height is greater than one-seventh of the wavelength and also when the interior angle of the peak of a wave is less than 120 degrees.
It makes logical sense that water waves would have a particular height-to-length ratio and a specific angle from which they will fall. The trick is in realizing that there is a question that can be asked in the first place, an order underlying the chaos—not just a collection of random water falling all over itself.
A feeling of wonder pervades The Lost Art of Finding Our Way: tales of “sunstones” and “celestial huts”, “portolan charts” and “ecliptics” make it hard to not get wrapped up in the obscure and the exotic. But it is the more mundane aspects of peregrination that can truly astound:
Our perceptions function in two roles: First, the sight of familiar landmarks helps us update our location in the internal map. Second, the sight of objects drawing nearer as we approach them and receding into the distance behind us gives us a sense of speed and motion. We usually take all of this for granted.
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