Booksbooksbooks 05/2024

Tiny reviews for books from Salman Rushdie, Don Winslow, Mary Shelley, Ottessa Moshfegh, Werner Herzog, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and many more.

Peter Frankopan - The Earth transformed - An untold history (dt. Zwischen Erde und Himmel: Klima - Eine Menschheitsgeschichte) ★★★★★ A riveting world history retold through the lense of environmental changes and climate which tries to integrate our knowledge about them into history as a foundational layer that was, until now, largely ignored. Frankopan largely succeeds with this reevaluation of history, and manages to fuse a world history that takes history of (mostly) Africa, South America and China into account with a history of human extractivism and exploitation of nature. Despite being a whopping 900 page tomb, it's accessible and it unfolds like the famous hockey stick graph: We get hundreds of interesting pages about the ever increasing exploitation of nature, accompanied by historic episodes of climate change and their impact on human economies throughout world history, only to be presented with an explosion of pollution and extraction after the start of industrialization, which culminates in the sheer suicidal trajectory of the last 50 years under neoliberal ideology: Half of all fossil fuels were burned after the last episode of Seinfeld, and the book makes it crystal clear that the consequences will be dire for everyone, but mostly for those who're already exploited and historically oppressed in the global south. My climate change thinking for a long time now goes along the lines that after 2030/40ish, that the unforeseen (and foreseen) consequences of atmospheric and environmental pollution will be so dire, there will be no other topic of relevance. This book confirms this view a good deal.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - Crooked River (dt. Ocean - Insel des Grauens) ★★ Likely my first and last Pendergast novel as i don't like Pendergast very much. I have a soft spot for the objectively not-so-good 90s monster-thriller The Relic, the movie adaption of the first book in the series, but never bothered to read any of it, and now i did. I don't like the pretentious "gentleman-intellectual quirky detective who is also superman and good with guns and fighting and speaks in latin sometimes and is funny too and who's also Sherlock Holmes and he's reckless and sticks it to the man" schtick of this, and i don't like the supposedly mysterious female sidekick with violet eyes who is also Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell but also vulnerable and who is also an all-competent assassin and so forth. The pulpy action at the ending is entertaining, but doesn't go well with those characters for me, and it doesn't mix with the pretty standard detective procedure novel that makes up a large parts of the book. On top of that, the german title and blurb suggest some monster from the deep sea thriller which this is decidedly not. As this is one of the newer novels in this long running series, i might give Pendergast another try from one of his first adventures, but not anytime soon.

Anthony Ryan - Red River Seven (dt. Ein Fluss so rot und schwarz) ★★ I was in the mood for some postapocalyptic pulp and this so-so delivered but not in a very good way. People on a boat wake up with amnesia and they have to figure out who they are and why they are there, they find some phone and some voice tells them what to do. Turns out, they got their memories whiped out, traveling along River Thames through a London full of plant-mutant-monsters, and remembering things triggers the mutation. The book is full of weirdly bad written moments, for instance, when one of them mutates because she remembered some stuff, but not her name, she also claims that she hated her name anyways, which is weird when you don't know your name. The book makes this kind of stuff constantly. It's a somewhat entertaining novel, an amalgam of 28 Days Later and The Girl with all the gifts, but plotholes and inconsistent logic turned me off, besides the clichéd plot and characters.

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (dt. Generation Angst) ★★★ I wrote a lengthy review of Haidts book and the gist was that "I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle."

Lee Child - Persuader (Reacher #4) (dt. Der Janusmann) ★★★ The 12th Reacher i've read, Persuader will be the source material for the upcoming third season of the (quite good) series adaption. Reacher is working unofficially with the DEA to infiltrate a criminal operation by staging the kidnapping and rescue of the son of a gangster. Reacher becomes a trusted bodyguard, while trying to get a stab at a guy who ten years ago brutally murdered Reacher's colleague. All Reacher ingredients are there, it's suspenseful and sometimes clever, and i just like the character and his stoic approach to everything. It's just that Childs simple prose just can't elevate the material to something more than "clever pulp". Which is just fine.

Lee Child - 61 Hours (Reacher #14) (dt. 61 Stunden) ★★★ The 13th Reacher for me, and another good one: After a bus accident, Reacher strands in freezing South Dakota, where the witness of a crime is threatened by corrupt cops and gangster bosses closing in on an epic meth deal for the ages. Another good Reacher that, while being rather low on high octane action, is well put together with some fresh stylistic manorisms of Child, but comes with a botched ending. Spoilers now, i guess. Look, dude, you just can't show your hero trying to escape an imminent giant kerosine fireball of epic proportions and then simply fade away. We all know he made it, Child wrote more Reacher-novels after all. But this is like that music joke where someone plays a piece of music except for the final note and then can't sleep until he hits that note on the piano, completing the unfinished composition -- and this is an unfinished novel. It's a noob mistake, and a stupid one at that. I still enjoyed the book, but come on.

Werner Herzog - Die Zukunft der Wahrheit (eng. The Future of Truth) ★★★ A short meandering essay about the state of truth, which we can't know or perceive anyway. Herzog tells anecdotes and poetic historical vignettes, draws a rough sketch of what he terms "extatic truth", in which art and epistemology come together to make you feel or experience truth instead of perceiving it. Unfortunately, it stays a bit shallow and doesn't dive deep into its subject, which ofcourse is owed to the short form of only 107 pages. It's ideosyncratic, weird and quirky, just as you'd expect from Herzog, but it also stays a bit underwhelming compared to the oevre of its author, and the bits about tech, AI and deepfakes are not very well researched, if you know the topic.

Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation (dt. Mein Jahr der Ruhe und Entspannung) ★★★ If you want to read a well written novel about an annoying, rich, entitled, depressed, young woman, this is your book. I liked the prose, but expected some more meditations on, well, meditation and introspection. Instead, we get a woman hoarding pills and psychopharmaca, constantly complaining about everything and everybody, except her looks, and an ending you can see coming from a mile away. Still, i liked the prose and somewhat connected to the entitled little prick, so, job done, but not much more.

Peter Sloterdijk - Die Reue des Prometheus: Von der Gabe des Feuers zur globalen Brandstiftung (eng. The regrett of Prometheus: From the gift of Fire to global Pyromania) ★★★★ German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk lays down a theory of climate change, based on marxist materialism, going from the prehistoric discovery of fire to its many applications in combination with exploitative forms of labor (slavery, industrialization), ultimately demanding an "energetic pacifism" and the formation of a global "firefighter brigade". I'm sucking up some theoretical and philosophical takes on climate change at the moment, and Sloterdijks entry to the "genre" is a good and sometimes great contribution in a field that is just starting to take shape, from fictional visions in solarpunk-novels to theoretical approaches like particle-based economics of materialist transformation and the terrestrialism of Bruno Latour. As i said above about Peter Frankopans climatic world history: I expect this stuff to be the only topic of relevance within a few decades, simply because we must.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Chain-Gang All-Stars ★★★ I'm a sucker for those old 70s italian postapocalyptic future gladiator movies full of deadly gladiator fights between inmates in the future and great, i thought, and bought this blind, expecting, well, some good scifi action with some critical undertones about the US-prison system. But while we do get all this, the book is also full of flat characters who all talk the same and act the same, it's basically just people talking and gladiator fights, and all of this in a pretentious prose that wants to tell its minimal plot with epic pathos, using even biblical language. It's like a Madmax ripoff but all characters talk like playing shakespear, but because ofcourse it wants to be "badass" they also say "fuck" all the time. This makes it sounds worse than it is and the action is entertaining (but not great), but the social critique stays shallow and the prose comes around as sometimes cool, sometimes annoying. Meh, as they say.

Aleida Assmann - Im Dickicht der Zeichen (eng. Semiotic Thickets) ★★★★★ Aleida Assmann is a reknowned cultural scholar best known for her work on semiotics and cultural memory together with her late husband Jan Assmann (about whom i wrote recently in Cultural Memory in the Digital). In Im Dickicht der Zeichen (which translate to something like Semiotic Thickets), she collects some essays into one book about various forms of "natural semiotics", that is: Reading and seeing symbols within nature, and the historical transformations of epistemology, of what we know, how we know it, and where we get it from. It goes into basic semiotics, structures of signage, hieroglyphs and their various interpretations throughout philosophical history and more esoteric examples like silent movies. The book, while being very demanding and deep, is not a very complicated read and stays accessible for a non-academic like me, which is something i admire in academic writers. If you're into symbols and signs, typography and epistemology and you're interested in theoretical takes, the whole body of work from this scholar-couple is highly recommended, and this book is no exception.

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein ★★★★★ I finally read the orginal Frank, and it was just as great as i expected it to be. Most interesting to me as a huge fan of the old Universal Monster Movies and the original Frankenstein and Frankensteins Bride were the differences ofcourse, of which there are plenty. After reading the novel it becomes clear just how much the screenwriters added, changed and shuffled the original material, sometimes making an improvement while adapting it for the screen -- the famous scene where the monster throws the girl in a lake is not in the book, where we get the murder of a boy leading to a court scene with very different dynamics and outcomes. The book puts more emphasis on entangled fate which neither creator or creation can escape, and the consequences of guilt for everyone involved. I loved the prose and structure, the composition of a retold story which is sandwiched by chasing scenes in the arctic, and it's ambivalent message about scientific progress stays timely. It's exactly the great classic i expected, and everybody should read Frankenstein at least once.

Salman Rushdie - Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (dt. Knife: Gedanken nach einem Mordversuch) ★★★★★ When Rushdie was attacked two years ago, it shocked and surprised me a good deal. I never read Satanic Verses and while i tried to read other Rushdies, i can't really get into his ornamental, colorful, fractured prose, which is okay. But i just like the guy, having seen plenty of him on talkshows like Bill Maher, and he's just a great, cool, sympathetic figure to me. Then there comes an asshole, accordingly named "asshole" in the book, and puts a knife in his eye and the book is Rushdies way of dealing with that. He does that with a ton of humor, but also with unforgiving sharpness, analyzing the islamofascist wannabe-murderer as the humorless unfucked prick that he is, and not wasting too much time on the guy because, after all, he's just not that interesting. Instead, Rushdie tells us a lot about his late life love for his wife, how they met and how his family and friends all dealt with the situation, how he healed and thankfully, humourously, simultaneously does and doesn't spare us from some of the more painfully embarassing medical procedures. It's a historical literary document, a tragic story of hardship, and also the diary of a funny guy full of life, and that's all such a book can achive. I have nothing but Respect for Salman Rushdie.

Don Winslow - City in Ruins (Danny Ryan #3) ★★★★★ I friggin love Winslows Danny Ryan-saga, with this last entry bringing this gangster epic to a more than satisfying conclusion. I already loved the first two books, and this one just brings it home. I love his prose, that is both barebones and detailed, his realistic dialogue that makes character come to life, and his kickass style of composing action in a highly suspenseful cross-cutting technique. I love Winslows intuitive sense for suspense and revealing moments, and how he manages to draw characters you care about, even the smallest, not at all important minor guy. I love how much of Winslows action stays implicit, with final sentences of chapters creating whole Scorsese-movies in your head, of splosions and gangsters and heroes killing each other in the night. I already have two more Winslow-novels on my stack (The Winter of Frankie Machine and The Power of the Dog) and i can't wait to read them. This is fantastic Thriller-entertainment at it's finest and the literary equivalent of Martin Scorsese.

Heinz Paetzold - Ernst Cassirer zur Einführung (eng. Introduction to the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer) ★★★ I wanted an accessible non-academic book about Ernst Cassirer and his philosophy of the symbolic form, and the blurb says this is an accessible introduction to that, and i got a short but inaccessible book full of academic jargon that demands a whole set of pre-study, and which never explains its presumptions. It's useful, and if you put in the work and follow the mentioned literature, i bet you can get a good overview of Cassirers thinking out of this, but this is not the book with which i was able to do that.

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