by Patrick Radden Keefe (2018)

2024 reads, 20/22:

“Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.”

What initially drew me to this book was the TV show Derry Girls, a masterful (and incredibly funny) portrayal of life in 1990s Northern Ireland. The show juxtaposes the realities of the Troubles with the high school “problems” of a group of friends. But since the show is primarily a comedy, I was left wanting to better understand that era of Ireland. Even before Derry Girls, I had only the vaguest idea of what the Troubles were about, admittedly only through songs such as The Cranberries’ Zombie, or U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. All I knew was that there was violence in Ireland back then, but there were many gaps in my knowledge.

Generally, I liked Say Nothing – it’s probably closer to 3.5 stars for me, as it did a great job at laying out what had happened during the Troubles. My big takeaway was learning about famous IRA figures such as the Price sisters, Gerry Adams, and Brendan Hughes, and how their stories intertwined and shaped Irish history and independence.

Keefe also spent a lot of time on the aftermath of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, as the last third of the book focused on the Belfast Project at Boston College. This was interesting, but I would have liked to see more on the background of the conflict between Ireland and the UK (but to be fair, that’s through no fault of the author, as he clearly states the scope of his book).

Overall, I’ve been trying to increase my nonfiction reading, but my problem with nonfiction is that at times, it can feel like a bore to get through. That being said, I ultimately always come out glad I read it. Maybe I’ll get to some more nonfiction on my TBR list soon. If the Troubles, or Irish history/politics (or even journalism) interests you at all, this is a great book to pick up.

“History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave… But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme”

-Seamus Heaney, The Cure of Troy

#readingyear2024 #govpol #history #book2screen

by Thomas Pynchon (1990)

2024 reads, 1/22:

“When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colors of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally — here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution.”

The year is 1984, and surrounded by the old-growth redwoods in northern California, Vineland thrusts us into the lives of ex-hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie, who must go into hiding because of the return of a federal agent from Zoyd’s past. As they go into hiding, Prairie starts to learn more about the life of her mother she never knew, Frenesi.

This is a Russian doll of a novel; we gradually loop, alongside Prairie, from the eighties to the sixties and even earlier, to learn about the events surrounding her mother. As part of a film collective in the late sixties, we see the dismantling of the counterculture movement through Frenesi’s eyes, through her old flings, her mistakes, and ultimately, her disappearance.

Along the way, different characters’ histories are also explored, such as Frenesi’s kunoichi friend DL, ‘karmic adjuster’ Takeshi Fumimota, and mathematics professor Weed Atman. Not only were these characters three-dimensional, but their relationships were more defined. For example, I loved reading the history of how DL and Takeshi met, their back-and-forth bickering like an old married couple. Furthermore, the love that Zoyd has for his daughter, Prairie, is so clearly carried throughout the whole book, and I found myself caring for them both. Vineland is, so far, Pynchon’s most sentimental book.

“Following the wisdom of the time, Zoyd, bobbing around among the flotsam of his sunken marriage, had been giving in to the impulse to cry, anytime it came on him, alone or in public, Getting In Touch With His Feelings at top volume, regardless of how it affected onlookers, their own problems, their attitude toward life, their lunch.”

The backdrop of Vineland, like Inherent Vice, is the decline of sixties counterculture; however, taking place a little over a decade after the events of IV, the anti-counterculture faction is much stronger now. Reagan is president, federal agencies such as the D.E.A. are in full force, and the sixties youth is feeling the pressure to come and participate in the current times. Businesses are booming, and everything is now commodified, able to be procured at the local mall. Case in point, the ‘designer seltzer dispenser’ produced by Yves St. Laurent, or even the local pizza joint where Prairie worked, serving a high-quantity yet low-quality product:

“Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.”

Delicious, right?

I also loved the theme of communication and hidden signals that Vineland exhibits so well: messages are seemingly constantly bombarding Zoyd, Prairie, Frenesi, DL, and others, usually originating from the ‘Tube’ (the always-capitalized TV slang, signifying its place in the eighties as a Proper Noun). For Zoyd specifically, these Videodrome-esque messages had me constantly asking: is some technocratic higher power forcing these messages unto him? Or is Zoyd, maybe subconsciously, getting himself into his own situations, unable to resist? Maybe, it’s some intertwined combination of the two, like Todd from BoJack Horseman.

“He bounced slowly from one Honolulu bar to another, allowing himself to trust to the hidden structures of night in a city, to a gift he sometimes thought he had for drifting, if not into intersections of high drama and significant fortune, at least away, most of the time, from danger.”

In many ways, this novel reminded me of White Noise, with its similar themes on technology & commodification, pop culture, and changing times. Jack Gladney and Zoyd Wheeler would hit it off, Gladney talking about his fear of death, and Zoyd his fear of life. This was a great read: character-driven, hilarious yet heartwarming, filled with pop culture, with a bit of cynicism as well. I still think TCoL49 is his best book to start with, but if you want to get into Pynchon, this is probably the second-best starting point.

“It was like being on 'Wheel of Fortune,' only here there were no genial vibes from any Pat Sajak to find comfort in, no tanned and beautiful Vanna White at the corner of [Zoyd’s] vision to cheer on the Wheel, to wish him well, to flip over one by one letters of a message he knew he didn't want to read anyway.”

#readingyear2024 #govpol #pynchon #physicallyowned

by Hunter S. Thompson (1973)

2023 reads, 6/12:

“Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

On the surface, this reads like a tamer version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, although with just as much gonzo, as this novel chronicles Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 democratic primaries and the resulting race between incumbent Nixon and nominee George McGovern. Within the text, Thompson throws in his own haphazard accounts of his time as Rolling Stones’ journalist for the Democratic party.

“...back on the Campaign Trail… running late, as usual: left hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, seeking music, and a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling into my crotch on every turn.”

It starts off a little slow, because like any primary race, you spend the time meeting and learning about an entire cast of politicians. But things pick up as that cast dwindles and as Thompson gets closer to the Democratic and Republican primaries, then to the race between Nixon and McGovern, and finally the resulting aftermath. It was enlightening to see how, over the course of the novel, the campaign took a toll on Thompson (which he never hid from us, remarking “…the last thing I wanted to think about was the grim, inescapable spectre of two more frenzied months on the campaign trail”). To me, that perfectly reflected the fatigue we’ve all been having these past few elections.

“Yes… and… uh, where were we? I have a bad tendency to rush off on mad tangents and pursue them for fifty or sixty pages that get so out of control that I end up burning them, for my own good.”

Thompson gives us an up-close and personal look at the election, with some comprehensive political analysis and interviews, while also remarking on the danger of running for president and bashing the American political system. This work was described as “eerily prophetic,” and while there is no one-to-one analog between present and past politicians, I certainly agreed that entire concepts and commentaries in the campaign heavily reflected that of 2016 and 2020. Of course, that could just be the fact that some things never change.

#readingyear2023 #american #govpol #humor #physicallyowned

by Amitav Ghosh (2016)

“Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.”

As a quick overview, this book is divided into three sections: literature, history, and politics. Each section explores the relationship between that section’s theme, and (mainly) anthropogenic climate change. My thoughts on each section below:

From what I’ve seen, a lot of people enjoyed the first section, ‘Stories,’ which discusses how and why climate change is portrayed poorly in fiction. Personally, this section did not really capture my attention as well as the other two, but I will say that the connection Ghosh makes between the limitation of timescales in fiction and climate change is interesting; it just takes a bit long to get to that point (this is also the longest section in the book).

The second part, ‘History,’ is probably my favorite section, and one of the most interesting takes on climate change that I have ever read – Ghosh argues in great detail how imperialism (alongside capitalism) should be at the center stage in the rise of anthropogenic climate change in the 19th and 20th centuries. What cemented my love for this section was the well-thought-out argument of how the relationship between Asia and western countries (such as Britain and the US) perpetuated climate change into the 21st century.

The final section, ‘Politics,’ continues discussing imperialism as hidden driver of climate change, while simultaneously expanding on two well-known culprits, capitalism and denialism. This section concludes with another personal highlight, a comparison between the Paris Agreement of 2016 and Laudato si’, Pope Francis’ second encyclical, released in 2015.

I recommend this book to anyone who not only wants to take a deeper dive into human history and climate change, but to hear some intriguing takes on humanity’s relationship with the climate and each other.

#readingyear2021 #environment #govpol #science