51 – Enchantress of Numbers
This was a disappointment. I was hoping for a book that charted the scientific accomplishments of Countess Ada Lovelace, sometimes credited as being the originator of the first computer program. The text however is a lot less about algorithms than I had hoped, and a lot more about dowries than I had expected.
In essence this reads like something from Jane Austen or other writers obsessed with a woman’s place in a social system that places strict boundaries on what her life may be. I guess, historically speaking, it’s important to set her work in context. It’s just that the core thing that I wanted to read about is sidelined to the point it is basically an irrelevant MacGuffin. If her fascination had been metalwork or carpentry I don’t think it would have meaningfully changed anything in the story. There are insights in here, to be fair – her mother’s troubled relationship with Lord Byron, for example – but it’s all largely indistinguishable from a genre of books I found, and continue to find, almost unreadably dull. As Mark Twain once said, omitting Jane Austen from the shelves can make a fairly good library out of a room that didn’t otherwise contain a single book.
That’s unfair, of course. I’m reflecting my own opinions here rather than any objective truth about the quality of Austen, and her contemporaries and imitators. I’m just saying that Enchantress of Numbers, while a functional book in and of itself, failed to endear itself to me in any way. It felt like a chore to read through to the end. Not because it was bad but because it just goes on and on and on about the same social fripperies and marital contractualisms. Repeating endlessly like they’re trapped in a while loop with no termination clause.
52 – Crying in H Mart
Crying in H Mart marks the point at which I completed my ‘a book a year by women authors’ project, and thus I have a certain affection for it. It’s a relatively touching memoir about family, belonging, and loss. It’s a massive hit on TikTok and BookTube and so I was genetically programmed to detest it. I will say that it didn’t – at all – live up to its hype. It did though teach me a lot about the immigrant experience and I guess the ‘love language’ (urgh) of food. However, contrary to the promises on the back of the book it did not ‘have me in tears’, I did not find it especially moving, and I must have nodded off at the points where it was supposed to be funny.
Realistically though, I think this is the kind of book that seems transcendent when you haven’t had the life experiences that render it as workaday. For a lot of the book I was simply thinking to myself ‘Yeah, this is just grief. We’ve all lost a loved one. None of this is remarkable except to you.’. My own father died on my 21st birthday, I just didn’t write a book about how sad it made me.
And I think that’s what sours me on this book – competent as it is. It feels horrendously exploitative. It feels like personal grief has been packaged up into a unit for consumption by the general population. It feels like it takes a moment that should be private and personal and instead makes it public and performative. I know that’s just life these days – that all human experience is a commodity to be monetized – but it’s undignified. It’s disrespectful. I swear to god if anyone wrote a book about my death, I’d haunt the shit out of them for it. No matter how painful, tragic, or (hopefully) absolutely hilarious my death might end up being. If I end up being pinballed from tusk to tusk in the middle of an unexpected rhino stampede, the correct response is to go ‘Huh, I didn’t expect that’ and to grieve privately while attempting to hold back the laughter. It’s not to fire up Microsoft Word.
Crying in H Mart is certainly a book that has its merits. Really though it just reminded me of how reality TV ‘star’ Jade Goody, when being diagnosed with cancer, turned it into an emotionally manipulative circus of television exposure which the press and the public lapped up like the grief vampires they are. Crying in H Mart is classier than that. It’s just not much classier.
53 – You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
And then I kept going! After hitting 52 books, I decided to aim for 100 by the end of the year. Again, by women authors. And this was therefore the first book of the first stretch goal of my 2023 project.
And it’s great! It’s a slim book about how artificial intelligence works, the circumstances under which it doesn’t work, and the likely trajectory of where it’s all going. It was written before the sudden explosion of relevance that GPT-3 triggered, and as such it feels like bits of it were written a million years ago despite the book’s 2019 publication date. Look beyond that though and you’ll find this is a witty, thoughtful and very likable primer to the technology that is – even as you read this – stealing your job. Seriously, check your email. You’ve already been downsized.
If you want to know why that happened, this is a good book for laying out the broad strokes. It doesn’t require anything really in the way of pre-existing knowledge and it gives you a grounding in the big picture without obsessing over the small stuff.
It’s a non-fiction book so it doesn’t have any plot or characters so to speak. It’s just a very nice, very fun book. While it’s not quite in pace with the technological zeitgeist, you can still see it if you squint into the distance from the shores of these pages. At least for now.
54 – Neon Gods
Be forewarned – some salty language in this review!
I really didn’t like this book, but it’s not really the book’s fault. I bought it expecting yet another reinterpretation of Greek myth of the type that some writers seem positively addicted to exploring. I thought it would be kind of like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juiliet (god, how old am I??) in that it would take a historical template and superimpose it upon a modern context. Neon Gods after all is a novel about billionaires in sharp suits, each taking on the symbolic name of a Greek god, and repeating their patterns in an aesthetic plagiarised from the Great Gatsby.
That’s what I was expecting. And that’s what I got for the first hundred pages or so. It wasn’t particularly interesting, but it did have resonances to an extent of the video game Bioshock – a paradise turning dark because of the libertarian excesses of its creators. It was fine, for a while, even if I was starting to get a little bored of it because nothing was happening. It was though largely the book I had been expecting.
What I hadn’t been expecting though – and it’s my fault for not researching it properly – was the hardcore pornography that occupied the rest of the book’s narrative.
It turns out Neon Gods is classified as ‘erotica’, and once you get past the pedestrian scene setting it’s essentially Clash of the Titans meets Fifty Shades of Grey. Hades, the lord of the ‘undercity’, takes Persephone under his protection when she flees a forced marriage to Zeus. And then they have a lot of BDSM-tinged sex.
That’s it. That’s the book.
So, this isn’t really my kind of thing. I’m not a prude or anything but if there’s going to be explicit sex in a book I like it to be in service of the story. Neon Gods approaches it from the other angle. As it were. The story is in service to the sex. It’s all there to explain why – oh yeah, they fuckin’. They’re shagging in private. Shagging in public. Pages and pages of penises and vaginas, metaphorically rubbed in the reader’s face.
I kept reading though, because you know – I was on a timer to hit 100 by the end of the year and the book was a breeze to read. Uncomplicated phrasing, unchallenging narratives. And absolutely no emotional sophistication that would have elevated this from Greek mythology slashfic into something more edifying. It’s just, ‘Hey you fucked me and it was nice so I guess I trust you with my life now?’. Hades in turn trusts her with his secrets, as if his penis was somehow loaded up with magical semen that binds women to his will. None of this emotional connection has time to develop naturally, or authentically.
I don’t know, I’m not into BDSM. Maybe having a woman who is your prisoner perform oral sex on you in front of an audience of your rich peers creates some kind of unbreakable bond of trust. I just didn’t really see how any of it really cohered.
I guess I may be expecting too much for a book of written pornography, but I’m not even sure it succeeded in that respect. The book cover promises something ‘unspeakably hot’ and perhaps I am a little dim for not making the connection. The Song of Achilles though is also pitched as unspeakably hot by some people and I wouldn’t classify that as erotica. The sex scenes in Neon Gods had all the arousing properties of snaking your shower drain at 3am in the morning.
Yeah, I didn’t like this much but it so clearly wasn’t written for me that it’s only to be expected.
55 – The Ten Thousand Doors of January
On the other hand I love this book so much. Instant five stars, an absolute marvel of a novel. If I had to describe it – and I guess I do, otherwise there’s not a lot of point to what I’m doing here – it would be ‘a mean-spirited deconstruction of colonialism that is also a palimpsest of a love letter to literature’. It’s a piece of clever steganography which encodes its true meaning – a simultaneous longing for and a rejection of home – within a surface-level tale of wardenship and compulsion. It seems to be one kind of book, and it turns out to be another. A better book.
That better book makes it read a bit like a fantastical novelization of the song ‘Wand’rin Star’, memorably growled by Lee Marvin during the movie Paint Your Wagon. ‘Home is made for comin’ from, for dreams of goin’ to, which with any luck will never come true’. I know I’m not doing a good job of explaining what thisb ook is, but I honestly don’t want to spoil a page of it and I think that’s exactly what I’ll do if I try to connect these disparate dots into anything as cohesive as a thesis.
I guess I can probably safely outline the core elements of the plot though. January Scaller is the ward of a rich benefactor called Mr Locke, who cares for her and looks after her while her father plays the role of a kind of indigenous Indiana Jones, tracking down artefacts of rare value for the pair’s wealthy patron. Her father is seldom part of her life – he’s always busy, on the hunt for new treasures – and January thus grows up estranged and adrift from her own history. She feels a bit like an entry in Locke’s collection herself – cherished, sure, but forever aware that her own exoticism is part of what keeps her guardian’s affection. Her father sends Jane her way – a dark skinned woman who becomes her confident, teacher and protector. Together with her dog, Bad, she drifts aimlessly through a world of rules and routines that aren’t hers.
Then one day, she discovers a book – one she believes has been left to her by her benefactor – and everything changes at exactly the point Locke tells her that her father, Julian, has died on an expedition. The book unlocks possibilities for her, and she follows them to…
That’s enough, I think.
Seriously, do yourself a favour. Read this book. It is wonderful.