Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
My understanding from the history lessons of the book is that malls were intended to be “safe” replacement downtowns for white-flight suburban women, plunked down in empty fields in a vaguely cardinal direction from the nearby (and newly built) island of suburban homes—hence the “[direction] + [land type]” naming convention. The mall as a structure was isolated by what the book refers to as “moats” of highways and parking lots so that only those suburban car-havers could get there; protection from the dangerous elements of the city from which the suburbanites fled in the first place. Car supremacy & anti-black racism, the beating heart of mid-century America.
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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
There is as much detail packed into every page of Because Internet as there is meaning packed into a period at the end of a short text message. Sometimes having information bursting at the seams means there is little room for authorial voice, quirky digressions, or the myriad other pleasantries that make modern non-fiction fun to read. Not so Because Internet. Maybe because I love Internet Culture Books (note the capital letters? I used to assume this was a convention of SFF [double brackets, but I won’t make you play my twitter game if you don’t know SFF is Science Fiction & Fantasy] genre when talking about Talents or Powers or Magic, but it tends to be deployed in writing across styles to convey impact!), but the author finds a way to push voice and appealing examples on every page.
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Strange Weather in Tokyo
Right, so, cue this this book called Strange Weather in Tokyo. There’s a woman who is just sort of faffing about, working a job and existing in the normal—but not literary—sense. If she was just a person you knew, she’d be fine: a job, a home, stuff to eat, hobbies, etc etc. But if you’re reading about her, well, it seems a little flat. Something’s gotta happen, right?
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A Girl Goes into the Forest
There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.
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Fake Accounts
Imagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.
“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?
Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.
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Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Much like you need to be “above 5’9” and under 6 feet” to be considered a model, you need to know what words will be used and how in each specific frame of reference. But VIP never moves too fast, or assumes you come into the pages knowing exactly what a high-end club looks, sounds, or feels like. The book never punishes you for being outside, looking in: in fact, it is presented from the liminal space between inside and outside the scene. As both erstwhile model and active sociologist, the author is in the field, participating without disrupting; an important facet of why the book works as well as it does. As reader, you never feel left outside the velvet ropes so the author can flex their intellectual fortitude.
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Lord of Chaos
Beyond the expanded scope from adventuring party to nation-state wrangling, the plot has to slow for another major reason: Travelling. Rand can warp around, collapsing time and distance in such a way that “the journey” as a trope barely exists anymore. And “the journey” is the beating heart of the Fantasy genre: we all live in the travelogue that “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale” built. Now that he and a few others can move around the world near-instantly, plot-restrictions-via-distance are a thing of the past.
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The Fires of Heaven
What I wrote about Perrin in The Shadow Rising holds true for Nynaeve in this volume; she is a microcosm to understand another of Rand’s problems. This time, it isn’t about delegating responsibility and accepting your limits, but about understanding—maybe even embracing—who you are; even if you don’t want to. Rand has to come to terms with Lews Therin: his past, his present, and his refusal to put women in danger, even to the point where Moiraine has to sacrifice herself to save him.
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The Shadow Rising
I called Perrin the star of The Shadow Rising, but I think it might be Moiraine. Here she is, the Allanon, the Belgarath, the Gandalf, and all of her hobbits are hyper-powered wizards in their own right, not to mention stubborn and distrustful of her after a lifetime of culturally ingrained biases against everything she is and stands for. Is it simply because I’m old that I find Perrin interesting, or think Rand may be a doofus for pushing back so hard against experienced advisors? Will Moiraine continue her trajectory into being the secret best character in the whole series?
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American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
A series of general mistakes by the Silk Road guy and on-the-ground investigative labor—rather than literature-inflected hamartia or celestial kismet—brought down “the amazon.com of drugs.” The scene where the Silk Road guy is telling the police all about Silk Road, and that his roommates know him by another name, and gives them an email address @tor.com, and they’re just like, “Oh, okay, have a good day, citizen” had me yelling.
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The Dragon Reborn
It is weird feeling of anxiety, balancing reading through a book quickly because it pleases you, but slowing down because there is not an easy way to pick up the next in the series. For good or ill, the third book in the Wheel of Time is where the series finds its feet. All the characters are who I remember them being: Mat’s not a jerk anymore; Perrin is a little boring; Elayne, Egwene, and Nynaeve start rolling their eyes with exasperation at “men” on the reg:
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This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
This is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.
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Catch & Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
Catch & Kill is too Eustace Tilley to be a trash spectacle, too sombre because it respects and internalizes serious subject matter, too close, too soon, too decent. It’s the opera Pagliacci when you’re searching for the “But, doctor, I am Pagliacci” joke format.
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This is How You Lose the Time War
Two households, both alike in dignity, except this time fair Verona is the entire space-time continuum. Because they’re not just rival agents and star-crossed lovers, but interdimensional beings butterfly-effecting the timestream, unstitching each other’s work while needling their own intricate patterns.
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Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: The Untold Story of the Wu Tang Clan's Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America's New Public Enemy No. 1
I am not exaggerating when I say I would consider myself successful as a writer if I turn a garbage-nothing clichéd phrase like “due diligence” into idiosyncratic flow with half the zest as a cool quarter of the sentences in this book.
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