Walking on the Moon

Sidewalking is David Ulin’s collection of thoughts composed while walking the streets of downtown LA.  Of course he’s polished those thoughts more than that, but that’s the idea.

Ulin is a New York City transplant and academic, which shapes his thought and writing style.  His views of LA are informed by comparisons to NYC’s own vibrant street life.  These places are very different, though the differences seem to constantly surprise those raised in either place.  I say that as a transplant myself who has been surprised by the differences between LA and my life.  Everyone’s experiences light LA from a different angle, and Ulin’s are both interesting and well expressed.

Ulin does have the perspective of writing as an academic.  Again, I have some experience in that world, and we often write for posterity.  Ulin does this, citing historical perspectives and framing his physical and literary ramblings against the policy initiatives that LA city government are carrying out to revitalize downtown.  It’s a nice combination of erudition and street experience, albeit from different streets.  For me many of his thoughts are as much conversation starters as pronouncements. I keep wanting to say “yeah, but in Southern California…”

And I’m no native.

Overall, an interesting read.

I was successfully marketed to for this book by The Big Library Read at the LA Public Library.  It’s a book targeted to young adults – the Twilight demographics – about a school shooting.  A book for high schoolers about a school shooting seems inherently interesting to me.

Overall, Marieke Nijkamp’s This Is Where It Ends is a well constructed thriller with some meat to it. Nijkamp builds a set of detailed characters who turn like clockwork through a believable scenario.  The motivations all feel realistic to me, often forming reasons for the horrifying actions without becoming excuses.  The story is told from various students’ points of view that form a mosaic view of the events.  The plot and storytelling are excellent.

The diversity of the cast is also impressive.  Despite being set in a small town, the students all come from believably different backgrounds.  Multiple sexualities and ethnicities are all represented without feeling forced.  The sexuality of some of the students is a plot point, but not one that is overplayed.  It all fit together well and felt like a look at a realistic school, not something constructed to make a point.

The major shortcoming for me was that none of the student’s narration had a different voice to me.  Everyone had different details and features, but their word choices and sentence constructions all were consistent. Nijkamp corralled a bunch of diverse students who all talk like they’re in the same English class.  A missed opportunity, IMHO.

Recommended.

Between the World and Me caught a fair amount of attention for its frank and clear assessment of the dialog between black men and their sons, not to mention between black society and America as a whole.  It is all that – and that’s a lot – but it’s also something more special.

As harrowing and sometimes appalling as America’s treatment of black people has been, there are many heartfelt factual histories of that treatment and the ongoing evolution of that situation.  Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work here is more brave and personal than most.

Here is what I’ve learned about Mr. Coates from Between the World and Me: he’s a deep thinker and a poetic writer.  The abstractions and metaphors he chooses when writing of his experience illuminate people and institutions in personal and unique ways.  Individual word choices turn colleges into churches and human policies into automations of menace.  His expressions are clear and powerfully show institutions and experiences in new ways.

Beyond that, Coates is an atheist.  His point is not to justify his religious position, but it informs everything he writes.  He speaks of how American systems control the bodies of black people; he describes the mixed feelings that the power of churches in the black community evoke in him – and particularly how his beliefs can deny him solace.  The reflections of his atheism are only one way that World is powerfully personal, but it is unusual and telling.

Overall, a brilliantly written mixture of memoir, position paper, and message to the future (the text is written as a message to his son) well worth one’s time.

Strongly recommended.

Huh.

I hadn’t realized that Jean Stein’s West of Eden was such a recent release.  I checked it out of the LA Public Library‘s e-book collection to try that out and assumed that it was an older book.

Eden is essentially a set of interviews about key players in Los Angeles’s past.  I mean that there is no explicit narrator’s voice or textual context.  The whole book is composed of transcribed snippets of interviews laced into these discussions.  The compositions are deft, which provides Stein’s narrative voice.

Reading the interviews rather than hearing them in a narrator-free documentary gave me a sense of distance from the events being described.  Some of these events are detailed stories of chaotic LA parties, which makes the absence of immediacy pleasantly dissonant.  Drinking stories on the page are different than in a secluded bar, though the implications flow both ways. The overall effect is an unusual reading experience to say the least.

While I found this to be an interesting way to understand these figures – and the figures are fascinating – I think I need more context to really understand the significance of them. I’m still looking for more conventional histories of LA.

Recommended.

It’s Warren Ellis‘s fault that I read this, and I thank him for it.  Kio Stark has a great gift for seeking out and describing the small moments that interacting with strangers can bring you.  There are moments of fright, enlightenment, joy, melancholy, and usually mixtures of all those.  She writes remarkably beautifully about them.  Ellis brought them to me by mentioning her brilliant newsletter in his brilliant newsletter.

When Strangers Meet is Stark’s manifesto claiming that people should seek these moments out. The whole thing is brought to us by the TED folks, no relation.  She makes a fine argument and I’m predisposed to believe her.  Seeking out exchanges with strangers one of the things I’ve begun doing lately, and I agree with all the benefits she claims.  But the best arguments for her position are her vignettes.

Recommended, as is her newsletter.

There are a lot of cool books that don’t change your life.  Because I have a huge ego, I imagine that authors find and cherish my reviews.  I always feel a little bad about reviewing a cool book that didn’t amaze me, because I think that the author would feel damned by faint praise.

Abigail Carroll has done a fine job with Three Squares.  It’s absolutely a cool book.

Her topic is the history of American eating habits from the 1600’s to today.  Those habits have been formed by and reflect the whole of the evolution of American culture and technology.  Seeing all that reflected in a taco truck on every corner is remarkable and fun.

Carroll does a great job of stepping back and letting all that shine through.  There aren’t any breathtaking insights or jaw-dropping expressions, but I learned a lot.

Recommended.

Eben Weiss’s manual is more a manual about the care and feeding of the owners of bicycles than for the machines.  That’s a bold plan; bikes are simple and people are not.  The bikesnobnyc (Weiss’s well-known online handle) seizes the opportunity and writes a quite brilliant book.  It’s a manual in format and a keenly observed and clearly articulated introduction to a multifaceted community in content.

That community is the cycling community.  The idea that the set of people who share only the attribute “I bought a bike and want to use it” have formed a community is kind of laughable.  The bikesnobnyc has explored many of the corners of that set and found the shared values that form the community, while never losing the bristly independence that characterizes the proud enclaves within it.  It’s a  unique and powerful achievement.

For people who are drawn into this opinionated and often embattled community, the Owner’s Manual is indispensable. Cyclists appear because of love of the act of cycling, desire to change the world/ecology, or the simple dollars and cents issues of getting around cheaply.  The snob speaks to all those motivations and more with neither denigration nor condescension.  None of the motivations nor communities around them escapes criticism or goes unappreciated.  No matter which pack appeals to the reader – or appalls them – the group gets a fair treatment.

Also, it’s very funny.  Not in a wakka-wakka-wakka kind of way, but in a vivid and engaging way.  The bikesnobnyc does have a reputation for “snark,” so there’s some vinegar in there, but it never obscures the point.

Now, don’t read this expecting details about how to tune your brakes.  I certainly learned things from it – including technical points – but the power of the work is in understanding the people doing those technical things.  There are plenty of places to learn the details.  This is the best book I’ve ever seen to explain the lay of the land.

If you’re interested in cycling or are trying to understand a cyclist in your life, this is the book you need.

A must.

While there are many things I love about e-books, there are things to learn as well,  I was surprised to find that this was primarily an annotated book of photographs of Mexican american teams and players.  I was hoping for more of a history of the area’s game, a la Fastptich.Once I understood what I had, I was quite pleased with it.  It’s a very well-curated set of images.

This is a short story by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, but Google Play sold it to me for a buck, so it gets a review.

Totem Poles is an exercise in magical realism dressed in SF tropes.  The protagonists are all globe trotters fighting unorthodox invaders from another world, but at the end of the story, it’s all magic and literature. Which I suppose it always is, but this didn’t knock me over.

Probably worth the buck, but probably wouldn’t be my favorite in most short story collections.

There’s a lot I didn’t know about womens’ fastpitch softball.  I’d seen a few games that my niece played in and saw a few snippets when I passed a TV tuned to a game, but I really had no idea about the history or traditions of the game.  Erica Westly has helped me out by writing a lively history of the game and some of the folks who pioneered it.  While softball has been around long enough that its origins are no longer the stuff of the first person interview, the game has burst into the national consciousness recently enough that there are some movers and shakers around to talk with.  Not for long, though, so Westly’s work is timely and interesting.

One of the many things I was surprised to learn was that my current stomping grounds – SoCal – figures prominently in the sport’s history.  Champion teams of the past have come from here, both as the result of cultural traditions and careful team construction and as a result of lightning spontaneously jumping into a bottle.

I’m charmed and amazed that the Whittier Golden Sox were US champions in living memory and none of my sweetie’s family of lifelong Whittier residents seem to know or care.  Where I’m from, those people would have a sign.  And honestly, I think they do.  I’ll plan to look next time I’m in the area.

I remain a great lover of the history of such diversions, and Westly does a great job of whetting the reader’s appetite for both more history and to see the game continue to grow.  A sport this storied deserves to thrive more.  She does a great job with the personal and institutional history. Her analysis of the game’s merits makes them evident and believable.  Probably the only place I’d say the book falters is in making the game sing.  Given that my interest is piqued enough to seek a game out now, that’s a minor shortcoming.

Recommended.