Check out an updated review from 2018!

"It's a bagatelle." These words have been knocking around my mind ever since grade 10, when the world's most awesome English teacher introduced me to Sophie's World. (For those of you not in the know, I'm referring to Ms. Sukalo. She also brought her remarkable energy and attitude to drama class, much to the enrichment of myself and my classmates. And she allowed a small group of us to form a lunchtime Shakespeare book club, but that is a story for another day. She's moved on to teach in New York. We still talk. I wanted to be a teacher long before I met Ms. Sukalo, but it's safe to say she showed me what kind of teacher I wanted to be.)

I confess that the fact Sophie's World is translated from Norwegian completely escaped me the first time I read it. This time, it was obvious—and I want to express my admiration for the translator's skill, for this is a work that relies more heavily on the nuances of language than most. Also, I originally didn't know how well-received this novel has been, both in Norway and elsewhere in the world, to the tune of being the #1 bestseller in Norway for three years. (Go Norway! Keep that philosophy alive.) For me, however, Sophie's World will forever be associated with the halcyon days of grade 10 English, and with everything it has taught me.

This book broadened more than my vocabulary: it taught me history, philosophy, even some science; and it made me think about the tenuous relationship between fiction and reality. Ever since reading it in grade 10, this book has been stalking me. Although my memory of the particulars faded, I recalled the title and the general premise, and with my penchant for philosophy electives in university, Sophie's World has always been quick to come to mind. A few years ago, this copy showed up in a box of books I acquired from a friend who moved away. It is a tattered and much-worn paperback: spine broken, duct tape obscuring half the back cover copy, the bottom left corner of the front cover completely gone, and the cover itself slowly peeling away from the spine. And that makes it perfect. I am never going to get rid of this book until it literally falls to pieces in my hands. And then I will go out and buy a brand new copy the very same day.

What is it about Sophie's World that holds me captive? Really, it's all there in the subtitle: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. OK, I suppose that for the average kid (or adult, for that matter), such a subtitle says nothing more than, "Walk away now." For me though, it's the equivalent of a flashing, neon sign that reads, "This book is made of pure crack." Sophie's World is unabashedly a didactic novel. I find this very appealing. Moreover, unlike many such novels, it also has an excellent story and a vibrant, wondrous protagonist. As Sophie Amundsen learns philosophy from her teacher, Alberto, we learn philosophy too. But we also get to watch Sophie, a 14-year-old approaching her fifteenth birthday, grow and mature as a person thanks to her experiences. By "mature" I don't mean "become more adult-like", because that is exactly what Alberto wants to prevent. Prior to receiving her course on philosophy in the mail, Sophie is like any 14-year-old girl, thinking about school, friends, her parents, and of course, turning fifteen. That all changes:

She had never thought so hard before! She was no longer a child—but she wasn't really grown up either. Sophie realized that she had already begun to crawl down into the cozy rabbit's fur, the very same rabbit that had been pulled from the top hat of the universe. But the philosopher had stopped her. He—or was it a she?—had grabbed her by the back of the neck and pulled her up again to the tip of the fur where she had played as a child. And there, on the outermost tips of the fine hairs, she was once again seeing the world for the first time.

The philosopher had rescued her. No doubt about it. The unknown letter writer had saved her from the triviality of everyday existence.

I love that last line in particular. Philosophy is neither dry nor dusty; it is far from esoteric. It is the means by which we can liberate ourselves from the quotidian and the ordinary and see what the universe is: a place full of continuous sensation and wonder. And life? Life is more than mere survival, more than the dreary daily drudge work of sleeping, eating, working, cleaning. But if one wants to escape that vicious cycle and be awesome, one needs to think philosophically. While an understanding of the history of Western philosophy isn't strictly necessary, it certainly helps.

The subtitle of Sophie's World is not exaggerating: it covers the history of philosophy—albeit mostly Western philosophy. (To his credit, Gaarder does mention Eastern philosophy several times, talking about Hinduism's relationship with pantheism and comparing Buddha to Kierkegaard.) Through Alberto, Gaarder covers the earliest Greeks—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenedes, Anaxagoras—through to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all the way up to the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers and then the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century thinkers of Marx, Darwin, and Freud. This is an incredibly powerful and compelling way to present philosophy, for it provides a sense of the provenance of philosophical ideas. We see how Socrates influenced Plato, and how Aristotle's interest in the natural world was in turn a reaction against Plato's obsession with divine forms. In particular, I loved learning about the impact of Greek philosophy on Christianity, including Augustine's attempts at syncretism, and the preservation of the Greek philosophers through the Arabs and the Byzantine Empire. Later, Alberto conveys the respective zeitgeists of the Renaissance, the Baroque period, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic period. It's a whirlwind tour but one that manages to hit all the right notes. As a grade 10 student largely ignorant of such history, it had a huge impact on me. Now I am more knowledgeable, but thanks to Sophie's mix of adolescent credulity and scepticism, it all feels new again.

Of course, any such survey is bound to be incomplete in some way. Constraints of the novel's length, as well as dramatic requirements of the plot, mean that Gaarder cannot devote equal space and time to philosophers who might deserve it. He has to gloss over the contributions of the likes of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bertrand Russell. While Gaarder begins his history quite broadly, a comprehensive theme quickly emerges, centred around the question of the nature of reality and our ability to perceive it as it truly is.

As it turns out, Sophie's world is not such a straightforward place after all: Sophie, Alberto, and her entire world are in fact the creations of a UN major, Albert Knag. Sophie's World is a philosophical novel Knag wrote as a fifteenth birthday gift for his daughter, Hilde. The major scatters various birthday greetings to Hilde throughout the story: mostly they are in the form of birthday postcards, but sometimes he shows off. One time he writes them on the inside of an unpeeled banana. When this happens, Alberto likes to scowl and mutter something about bagatelles and how the major should be ashamed of himself for playing god with his creations in this manner. He then observes:

"…it is feasible that they, too, are nothing of the mind."

"How could they be?"

"If it was possible for Berkeley and the Romantics, it must be possible for them. Maybe the major is also a shadow in a book about him and Hilde, which is also about us, since we are a part of their lives."

"That would be even worse. That makes us only shadows of shadows."

Sophie then goes on to speculate that, if this is possible, then it is also possible that the hidden author behind Hilde and Albert's actions is himself a character in a book:

"Of course it is, Sophie. That's also a possibility. And if that is the way it is, it means he is permitting us to have this philosophical conversation in order to present this possibility. He wishes to emphasize that he, too, is a helpless shadow, and that this book, in which Hilde and Sophie appear, is in reality a textbook on philosophy."

"A textbook?"

"Because all our conversations, all our dialogues…"

"Yes?"

"…are in reality one long monologue."

Oh. I see what you did there.

As Hilde and Sophie's birthday approaches, Alberto and Sophie conspire to escape the book. Gaarder cranks the meta-fictional deconstruction up to 11 when Alberto and Sophie succeed at this goal. And there my spoilers shall end, because I want you to read the book and am only going to tease you by whetting your appetite for what will prove to be a wild and amazing ride.

I love this meta-fictional aspect of Sophie's World almost as much as I love how Gaarder encapsulates Western philosophy. This unique storytelling device is one of the reasons this book has stuck with me through the years; it has always been that "book where the characters escape from the book". Yet it's so much more than a mere bagatelle. Gaarder could have just had Alberto mention Berkeley's speculations and the possibility that we are all shadows on the cave wall, but would it have had the same impact? Putting these philosophical ideas into action, as it were, forces the reader to confront them and process them. More importantly, for the character of Sophie Amundsen, it offers hope—both the literal hope of escaping the major's control, but also a thematic escape from the expectations of society. Alberto does not sugar-coat his history. He doesn't hide from Sophie the misogynistic aspects of Aristotle and Hegel, and he laments the dearth of women in his story of philosophy—but when he can, he mentions those women who do play a role, such as Olympe de Gouges. So it is significant that Gaarder chose a young woman to be his protagonist. And with his meta-fictional escape plan, he empowers Sophie, saying, "Yes, fourteen-year-old girl, you can defy the expectations of your parents, of your teachers, of your society. You can be who you want to be, your own person. You can be a philosopher, and you can be awesome." I can't think of anything more uplifting than teaching a young person to think for themselves and question everything.

Sophie's World. Read it.

The words “dull” and “lazy” come to mind.

I don’t think Beatrice & Virgil was on my to-read list for any reason other than its author. Yes, I have read Life of Pi, and I suppose it was all right and I liked it well-enough at the time, though I’m thinking that if I do ever go back and re-read it I’m going to feel somewhat meh about it. Yann Martel is a paradigm example of a CanLit author who is impressive to the impressionable type of young mind I had back in my teens and early twenties, but as I get older and more cynical and less patient with pretentious literary bullshit, these kinds of stories start to wear on me.

Henry is a moderately successful author, who publishes under a pseudonym. His most recent endeavour is a combination of novel and essay about the representation of the Holocaust in fiction. When his publisher essentially shoots down the whole idea, Henry sinks into a funk. He and his wife move to a country in Europe, where they can enjoy the easy-living kind of lifestyle that fictional writers of Henry’s calibre often enjoy. Then, one day, Henry receives among his fan-mail a curious, bulky package from a local sender. It contains a Flaubert short story and the page to a play, by the sender, about a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil. Henry visits the sender, an ornery and dispassionate taxidermist, and despite a cold reception and little in the way of small talk from this man, Henry takes it upon himself to help the taxidermist with this play. Their relationship does not develop, though, and it all kind of ends in tears, but I guess by the end we’re supposed to learn that bad things at least spur a writer’s imagination to make good art about the Holocaust? Idk.

Writing this review, I have this sudden urge to compare Henry to Michael Beard from Solar. This isn’t a very fair comparison, because Beard is a much worse person than Henry. Yet Martel’s narration reminds me somewhat of McEwan’s, and both characters exhibit so little in the way of character development throughout the novel (though Beatrice & Virgil takes place over a much shorter time period). Both books have this very dry narration that exposes us to the protagonist’s thoughts but never reifies other characters on the page. We don’t really get to know Henry’s wife, Sarah, until the very end of the book; otherwise, she, like the rest of the characters, simply exists as someone else within Henry’s sphere of experience. Notably, Henry has precious few conversations in this book—he doesn’t seem to have any friends. And while this is obviously a choice on Martel’s part to portray Henry in such a light, it also creates a very dry (and somewhat dull) narrative framework.

Then you have these large chunks of a short story within the story and a play-within-the-play. Plays within the play are great for plays; I find them less successful, in general, in novels. In this case, of course, Martel uses the excerpts from the taxidermist’s play to shed light on the taxidermist’s philosophy, building up to the reveal at the end that’s supposed, I believe, to make us think more about how we portray the Holocaust in our literature. If anything, though, the heavy allegory draping these pages makes for a very opaque theme. If I want to read a book about the Holocaust, I’m going to read a book about the Holocaust. And I don’t really care about Henry’s views on writing books about the Holocaust, because I don’t really care about Henry much.

Indeed, I think I might just have to nix reading any more books whose protagonists are themselves writers. There’s a bit too much navel-gazing that goes on, in my opinion, especially in these highly literary novels. Martel is trying to make some kind of grand point about storytelling, about the potential for books and other forms of literature to help us ask poignant questions about the darker parts of the human condition.

I’m just not here for it. I’m over there for it.

I don’t really care that Henry is having a tough time writing his latest novel or writing in general or that he wants to help a creepy taxidermist. I don’t care about a play within the story about a talking donkey and monkey who want to act like philosophical avatars for the author. Add on to that a somewhat abrupt shift in tone at the end, a twist I neither saw coming nor particularly wanted, and there’s actually nothing in this book that I do like.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to label this book bad. But it’s pretty much emblematic of what I don’t like about CanLit these days: it is a bland kind of story that thinks it is more important than it is, and we need to stop giving out cookies for these kinds of things. We need to stop arbitrarily awarding certain authors the praise and laurels, etc., for writing “serious” fiction while other authors go unrecognized or generally unremarked simply because they happen to be writing about pirates or robots or robot pirates on spaceships (fuck yeah). This is not, I should probably be clear, Yann Martel’s fault—I’m not suggesting some kind of Illuminati-esque conspiracy wherein Martel and Atwood and Boyden meet up in a forest grove in robes and cowls and chant in order to prevent the intrusion of inappropriate works into the CanLit Canon. And our media is slowly starting to recognize different types of fiction these days—very pleased to see something like Madeline Ashby’s Company Town show up on Canada Reads last year.

If you really enjoyed Beatrice & Virgil, all the more power to you. But as I sat in the bath on Sunday morning, toes pruning up and tea slowly cooling, pondering the final pages of this book … I just shrugged. It didn’t intrigue me, didn’t keep me captivated. Certainly did not move me the way one might want a book even tangentially related to the Holocaust to do. Martel definitely has some flair when it comes to experimenting with his stories, but this isn’t the kind of thing that appeals to me any longer, if indeed it ever did.

That classic cover, tho, with the weird … fishnet? bikini thing on Gorgik, and his awesome ponytail mullet. The 1980s were a wild time.

Neveryóna: The Tale of Signs and Cities is another visit to the fantasy time and place of Nevèryön. Whereas the previous book was a series of connected stories, this one follows a single protagonist, Pryn, a mountain girl from Ellanon as she makes her way to Kolhari and into the world. Although each chapter is indeed its own little vignette, as a whole they form a coherent narrative. Even so, Samuel R. Delany is up to his usual tricks, encouraging us to question even what we might consider a narrative to be.

Pryn’s adventure begins when she encounters Norema, who was a protagonist in the previous book. Already agitating for adventure, Pryn listens to Norema’s tales and advice, and it shapes and focuses her energy. She heads off to Kolhari and ends up spending time with Gorgik the Liberator as well as a wealthy investor and businessperson, Madame Keyne. These chapters have some fascinating conversations on economics and the politics of liberation. Gorgik is this complex character, portrayed as a liberator of slaves; Delany positions Keyne as a foil, pointing out through her that one can be a liberator of slaves but not yet a force for general equity within society. Pryn acts as a literal go-between, someone still young and removed enough from these forces that she hasn’t yet formed her own strong opinions on the matter.

It’s brilliant how Delany captures these diverse voices and patterns of thought. I mean, I would hope that we can all agree that slavery is bad. Yet it’s really easy for an author to create characters who are extremely black-and-white in their opinions. Delany gives us characters who have much more nuanced views, characters who might agree that slavery is bad and wrong but disagree with what should happen once slavery is eliminated—or characters who conceptualize slavery differently. There’s this dense, complex conversation running throughout this book, both in the discussions Pryn has with characters and in the lives we see them lead.

This latter part is the second brilliant thinga bout Neveryóna. Pryn takes us on this little mini-tour of Nevèryön. We get glimpses at how different parts of the country live, at how different villages cook and sleep and work, and how these lifestyles influence the ways in which people interact and develop their philosophies. This is a thin book, but Delany avoids creating either monocultures or cookie-cutter “planet of hats” type cultures. Neveryóna is this wonderful, dazzling tour of smaller microcultures dotted across the landscape.

Delany is one of my favourite authors because his work never fails to make me think, and even his most straightforward-seeming stories usually end up blowing my mind with the critical subtext they contain. On the surface, Neveryóna is a pulp fantasy story about a girl coming of age. But it won’t take long for any but the most casual of readers to notice that there is so much more going on here. Each chapter involves a slightly different adventure or encounter of Pryn’s. But the substance is much more involved. Delany tosses ethics and economics, politics and personal pleasure, questions of history and semiotics and moral philosophy at us … this slim book is so densely packed!

Finally, Delany always reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin. They both have a very deliberate yet very subversive way of approaching serious topics through science fiction and fantasy—by subversive, I mean sometimes you don’t even see what they’re doing until it’s too late, and then they’re upon you, all up in your brain, educating the hell out of you. I have two massive anthologies of Le Guin’s short fiction awaiting my attention, but I’m kind of saving them for the summer. Amidst my sadness at her passing, it was nice to delve into some Delany and be reminded of how good it feels to have my mind stretched in these particular ways.

Occasionally copies of the Massey Lectures show up in my hands (I think it’s usually my dad’s fault). Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship is the collection of Adrienne Clarkson’s 2014 lectures. As the title implies, she examines what it means to “belong” to a nation, with specific reference to her experience as an immigrant Canadian. Clarkson is definitely a fascinating author for this topic. Given her background, her career as a journalist, and then her time as Canada’s Governor General, she has a diverse wealth of experience. She can certainly pursue this topic from a variety of angles, and this comes through in her lectures. On the other hand, I was never completely sold on what I saw here.

In the first lecture, “The Circle Widens”, Clarkson examines how we build trust networks. She relates a few historical anecdotes: a village in France whose inhabitants today can trace most of their lineages back to the 1400s; a man who was impersonated for decades yet his closest family either didn’t realize or went along with it. This is an effective beginning to the question of Belonging, I guess, and the anecdotes were all right. However—and this is a critique that’s going to recur—I lost the central thread of her argument until she sums up at the end of the chapter.

In the second lecture, “The Glory That Was Greece”, Clarkson looks at ancient Greece as a birthplace of democracy and the concept of citizenship as a specific political class. My main takeaway from this chapter is the emphasis on participation as a necessary condition to belonging; i.e., the real evolutionary idea within democracy is that these “citizens” are otherwise ordinary people who participate in the co-creation of their society’s norms in a very direct, egalitarian, overt way. Towards the end of the chapter, Clarkson critiques elements specific to Athenian democracy, then segues briefly into how this relates to Canada as a beacon of a country that has experimented with democracy in a more inclusive way. More thoughts on this soon.

In the third lecture, “The Cosmopolitan Ethic”, Clarkson examines how growing up in a more diverse, inclusionary, or multicultural society might influence one’s sense of belonging. She takes us all across the globe and history, looking at the Icelandic althing, as well as her own experience growing up in southern Ontario, and the general experience of what an immigrant to Canada might discover as they learn about this country. Although Clarkson by and large tries to acknowledge and include Indigenous perspectives on these issues in her lectures, this chapter uses the phrase, “The primitive tom-toms linking blood to nationality are somewhat slow to lose their resonance…” and I’m not sure how that got past the editors. Much side-eyeing should be directed here.

In the fourth lecture, “Ubuntu”, Clarkson uses the titular concept to discuss what connections between people lead to feelings of belonging. (N.B.: I am typing this using the operating system Ubuntu.) This chapter features more detailed discussions of Indigenous perspectives and how they contrast with European values that colonized Turtle Island. Clarkson’s experience as Governor General, and therefore as a representative of the Crown in many a ceremony, negotiation, or meeting with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit representatives, exposed her to a lot of unique and interesting moments that no doubt shaped her thoughts on these subjects. But with so many topics and ideas to discuss here, nothing really gets the time or focus it deserves.

Finally, “Gross National Happiness” proposes alternative ways to measure and maintain a nation’s satisfaction. To make people feel like they belong, Clarkson argues, you need to cultivate that sense of belonging. You need to have conversations as a whole society that very deliberately discuss and debate and then determine the values by which we decide who and how we belong to this body. This is a compelling point of view, I suppose, although also kind of self-evident?

I guess what I’m trying to get across is that there isn’t really a lot in these lectures that jumps out at me as particularly objectionable or outright wrong. Yet there also isn’t anything that made me sit up and go, “oh, whoa, you’re right”. Clarkson tries to cover so much, jumps around from topic to topic and theme to theme, that no unified thesis emerges over the five lectures. Despite ostensibly discussing “belonging”, Clarkson meanders over far too much territory to leave me with a strong enough impression of what she actually wants to say.

I’m also really ambivalent about the rah-rah Canadian exceptionalism that seems latent to her tone. Yes, she offers some critiques of how settler Canadians and the European settlers before them treated Indigenous peoples. She points out racism, such as the Chinese Head Tax that affected her own family’s immigration. Yet underneath this all, Clarkson suggests that Canada is better than some other places, positions us as this beacon to which many people travel and seek belonging. Given her history, I’m not at all surprised by this position … yet I can’t really agree with it.

Belonging lacks the structure or the bite to really make it as thought-provoking as it could be. It’s a richly-layered, well-told set of Massey Lectures that nonetheless leaves little in the way of a memorable impression.

This is not a drill.

I repeat: NOT A DRILL.

Yes, Caitlin Moran has written a sequel to the sublime How to Build a Girl. I never expected this, never asked for this … and I definitely don’t deserve it, but young women do. This sequel is arguably better, brighter, more brilliant than the first book. I devoured it in a day, and I already want to go back and re-read it, underline it, find quotations, make my friends read it to hear their opinions. This is a book I want to share and evangelize and enjoy again and again, but it is uncompromising and unflinching in its feminism … yet it also contains so much joy.

Spoilers for the first book! Content warnings for this book: lots and lots of drug use, explicit sex (if you are sex-repulsed you are not going to like this), sexual harassment/misconduct, discussions of eating disorders/purging/fatphobia.

How to Be Famous picks up where the first book leaves off: 19-year-old Johanna Morrigan, writing under the pen name Dolly Wilde, reviews music shows and lives in London. She is, in her own words, a raunchy “Lady Sex Adventurer”—but really, of course, she is still young and learning her way through the sometimes terrifying and disappointingly misogynistic world of the London music scene. Johanna refuses to sleep with a comedian, then gives him a second chance—but when she snubs him yet again, he takes revenge. Soon Johanna finds herself in a situation too many prominent women face: being publicly shamed for her sexual behaviour (which is really no one else’s business).

Once again, I’m struck by how much I like Johanna as a character. She is a raw and honest narrator, telling the story with some distance from her younger self but still exposing us to her younger self’s earnestness. Once more she lives this split life: on one hand, she is Dolly Wilde, fearless music journalist and Lady Sex Adventurer; on the other hand, she is still Johanna Morrigan, nineteen-year-old girl trying to figure out what the hell this life is all about. This is particularly noticeable when she talks, at length, about her feelings for John Kite. As much as Johanna evinces this confident, sexually liberated exterior, deep down she is still inexperienced, still trying to figure out who she wants to be—and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Indeed, one of the most poignant moments in the book for me comes when Johanna finds herself in the position to take a friend’s virginity, to teach him and show him the ropes, and she discovers how enticing a prospect this is for her. Suddenly, the sex act is not about showing how good she is at pleasing a man; it’s this collaborative experience. Johanna is basically a microcosm for portraying the epochal shift that feminism underwent over the decades, from perceiving “liberation” as “we can or should have as much sex as we want, when we want” to “we can have as much sex when we want, with whom we want, entirely on our terms”. Moran recapitulates this much more resoundingly later in the book. In between then, of course, we have the juxtaposition of Johanna’s unsatisfactory experiences with Jerry Sharp.

Although set in the mid-nineties, this book will obviously resonate with the current #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Johanna discovers firsthand the inequity of being a woman who has casual sex. In addition to the professional fallout from refusing Tony (in the first book), there’s the way Jerry Sharp essentially goes out of his way to target her—something that sounds all too credible to me, unfortunately, just from what I read, and will no doubt feel even more familiar to some women readers. Moran masterfully manages the emotional upheaval that Johanna endures, the ups and downs culminating in a fantastic nadir, a flight, and then of course the redemptive realization that she would rather fight (but how?).

This is where How to Be Famous departs from some of the more gritty takes on rape culture that I’ve read over the years: it has a happy ending, and Johanna gets some measure of closure or retaliation. Despite dealing with a very serious subject, it nevertheless remains hopeful and buoyant and defiant in that way. And I want to be clear: I’m not saying that’s better than books that adhere to a less optimistic storyline. The whole point is that we deserve all sorts of narratives about this topic. We need narratives that portray the brutal, uncaring realities about rape culture. We also deserve narratives about how it is possible to fight and to win against men who abuse their privilege. Just as How to Build a Girl made me excited for teenage girls to read it because it talks so honestly about some of the feelings they might wrestle with, I’m excited that How to Be Famous exists for young women. It shows them that you can be strong and still be scared, and upset, and at a loss at times. You can fight back and still be terrified and unsure of yourself. Media often simplify narratives, raising up some people as paragons and casting down others as unworthy—and it is never that simple. It is always more complicated. Moran captures that in Johanna’s behaviour here.

This book feels a lot more focused, in terms of plot, than the first one, which is another reason I find it even better. That being said, don’t mistake this book for solely a novel about sexual misconduct. There’s so much more happening in here, so many fascinating feminist subplots. Let’s just briefly list them: Johanna and her dad, the way she’s acting as this proxy mother figure (and at odds with her own mother); the hilarious conversations between Johanna and her brother Krissi, which always warmed my heart; the ruminations, once again, on the effects of poverty on one’s psychology and actions—see the scene with Johanna and her brother Lupin; Suzanne and the record deal and the way Suzanne has a lot of ideas but is scared to commit them to a recording; and, of course, the quixotic love story between Johanna and John Kite. There is just so much happening in this book it actually beggars belief. I definitely need to re-read it at some point because there are so many rich little nuances I probably missed as I tore through it this once.

If you want something that is honest and uncompromising in its portrayal of women’s sexuality, yet also fun and optimistic and hopefully empowering (not really my lane here), How to Be Famous might be that. You don’t have to read the first book, but I would highly recommend it. This is not just a worthy sequel: it’s an exquisite pleasure, a story I never thought I’d get—and honestly one that I wasn’t really clamouring for, yet now I’m so happy to have it. Again, this book isn’t really for me per se … I’m so excited to share it with my female friends, to see what they recognize of their own experiences in this, to have fascinating conversations with them. But it definitely helped me, helped expand my empathy and my understanding, which is why I would recommend it to a general audience. Moran’s writing is humorous and humane, and I always want more of that in my life.

I was feeling rather emotional over the weekend while I read this, and … I’m not sure if this helped. There were a couple of points where I nearly or did burst into tears from what was happening. The Heartbeats of Wing Jones is an earnest, heart-warming book about a teenager trying to find herself in the face of an incredible family tragedy. The feels are real with this one, and Katherine Webber’s writing is ridiculously good. What started as a somewhat ho-hum kind of book rapidly ramped up to an intense, emotional journey. And the payoff, while not perfect, is still very good.

Wing Jones is 16 and lives in the shadow of her older brother, Marcus, star of the football team at their Atlanta high school and general darling of the community. That is, until he is at fault in a drunk driving collision that kills two people and leaves him in a coma. As Wing wrestles with what this means for her and her family, she discovers solace in a new pastime: running. When Marcus’ best friend and her secret crush, Aaron, discovers her new hobby, he persuades her to join the girls’ track team. Suddenly Wing is no longer relegated to the sideline: she has her own story. But will she run with it?

I can appreciate how some people call Wing a passive narrator, because it’s true that for much of the book she just seems to go along with things. Yet I contend that Wing changes, and she becomes less passive; this is all part of her development. When the story begins, Wing is so fixated on how she relates to Marcus that she doesn’t seem to pursue passions of her own. Everything that she tells us is in reference to Marcus: how her mother and grandmothers treat her, versus Marcus; how Aaron looks at her, versus Marcus; how she feels out of place at school, versus Marcus. (She isn’t bitter, just … focused.) Wing defines herself very much by the fact that she is not her family’s golden child, and while this means there isn’t much pressure on her, she also seems to be unsure what to do with herself.

Marcus’ collision and subsequent coma change all of that. It isn’t just the running, or the fact that Wing gradually displays athletic aptitude that should then be rewarded—it’s Wing’s new attitude. She watches her mother and grandmothers bend under the burden of bills, and she feels the need to do something. But when you’re 16? What can you do? Except … maybe just run. Run until you’re exhausted. Run until you feel better. As Wing tries to deal with her feelings—her ambivalence about the change in Marcus’ status, her attraction to Aaron, the strange, strained friendship she has with Monica—running is part escape, part hers. It’s something that defines her, that isn’t related to being Marcus’ sister or being half-black, half-Chinese. It’s just part of who she is, and that is freeing.

I like that Webber eschews or lampshades some of the more common tropes of high school teenage drama. For example, there is bullying here, but it’s low-key and continual rather than acute and melodramatic. There isn’t anything wrong with books that focus on the intense bullying that accompanies a specific event. Yet there is so much need for books like this one, books that show how constant micro-aggressions and regular aggressions can wear someone down. And then, towards the end, when Wing’s bully shares a moment of vulnerability with Wing, there is no redemptive swelling of music, no apologies. Wing herself comments on this, and I like it. I like the lack of resolution there, the idea that the bully isn’t just automatically going to be nice because Wing suddenly reached out to her: sometimes the bullies don’t go away, but you change and realize they can’t get to you any more.

If you crave resolution to every loose end, The Heartbeats of Wing Jones might leave you wanting. I won’t get into too many spoilers. But let’s just say that this is not Marcus’ story, it’s Wing’s. The book ends with a resolution to Wing’s plot, not to Marcus’. I can see how that might be frustrating to some people, how that might feel incomplete. Thematically, though, it feels right. This is a book about Wing’s transformation, and by ending it where she does, Webber shows us how one chapter of Wing’s life is finished and another is beginning. Of course her story isn’t over—but there is no way to wrap up, satisfactorily, all the plots in this book. Any such attempt at resolution would be unbelievably trite and convenient or incredibly convoluted and difficult to read. Webber can’t promise us a happily-ever-after; she can just promise us possibilities.

Now, on the romance front … as one might expect, this was not my favourite part of the story. In my opinion, Aaron is somewhat unremarkable as a love interest. He isn’t bad or anything, but he’s just there. We don’t learn much about him beyond: he’s a nice guy; he’s hoping to do track in college; he lives with his mom. Wing’s attraction to him is fairly basic, the whole “we’ve known each other most of our lives and you’re my brother’s best friend” thing. Again, nothing wrong with this type of romance story, but it doesn’t do much for me. I’m grateful that there is more drama to be found in Wing’s internal conflict than in her seeking a relationship with Aaron, because the drama that Webber does give us here isn’t much.

By far, my favourite aspect of this book was Wing’s relationship with her grandmothers, and their relationship with each other. We see this throughout the novel. At times cantankerous and even rude, Wing’s grandmothers are both prone to ordering her around and making demands. Yet they also love her and demonstrate their love in a myriad small ways. And despite their frequent arguments, they love each other: there is a dramatic, pivotal scene towards the end of the book that is just so heart-wrenching and good, but it only works because of all the other small moments between Wing’s grandmothers up until that point.

Really, I guess what I’m saying is that, with certain exceptions like Aaron’s bland characterization, I really like how Webber writes people. She manages to create conflict and conversations that feel real with a minimum of effort and exposition. Wing might not be the most proactive narrator at first, but she is sympathetic.

The Heartbeats of Wing Jones is a moving piece of historical YA. It’s … sweet. It’s a book that happens around a tragedy but isn’t really about the tragedy, except insofar as it affects the family involved. It reminded me how absurd it is that Americans don’t have universal healthcare. And it made me happy to see Wing discover herself, by placing one foot in front of the other.

Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, and that’s just the way it is, right? Girls like nurturing toys and boys like toys that involve motion or action, and don’t even bother trying to change those habits—they’re ingrained at birth, yeah? Doubtless you’ve heard these and other stereotypes and claims about the biological origins of sex differences. In some cases, such as the pink/blue divide, you might already be aware of the history of the phenomenon, including the fact that the colour assignments used to be reversed. Nevertheless, like any area of science, pseudoscience has set up shop in the study of gender, bolstered by media’s intense desire to seize on anything that has the patina of advanced, hi-tech science even when the results come from flawed research.

Delusions of Gender is a thorough debunking by Cordelia Fine of scientific studies and scientific posturing regarding what we know about the biological (and particularly, neurological) differences between sexes. Fine basically wants to restore the reader’s doubt and uncertainty, challenging us to be a little more sceptical and critical of what we read and hear. She isn’t making the claim that sex and gender are entirely social constructs with no biological influences. Rather, her thesis is that the scientific study of sex and gender is still fraught with uncertainty, and we really don’t know as much as some people claim we know. There are a few reasons for this: firstly, although our technology for studying the brain has advanced considerably, we’re still a long way off from understanding it; secondly, it seems like people doing these studies are really vulnerable to spurious correlations; thirdly, the biological influences on sex and gender are complex because they interact with cultural conditioning in ways that are difficult to replicate reliably in a lab.

Somehow, Fine manages to distill this into a 250-page book, and it mostly works. She does a good job of wading through recentish (from my perspective, given that this book is verging on a decade old) research and writing, picking apart arguments and debunking theories. She links these ideas to much older ideas about sex and gender. And she provides some guidance to the layperson in terms of how we can approach learning about sex and gender, from a scientific perspective, in the future.

In Part 1, “'Half-Changed World,' Half-Changed Minds”, Fine catalogues the sex differences seen in modern society (mostly American, though often her homeland of Australia and sometimes the unhelpfully nebulous “West” in general). She reviews the standard gaps in workforce distribution, in pay, in equity of housework and other caring labour. This part is interesting but perhaps the least memorable, in my opinion, particularly if you’re not someone who needs much convincing of the inequities that exist owing to one’s gender. Perhaps the most interesting chapter was “XX-clusion and XXX-clusion”, in which Fine discusses the difficulties of defining gender in any concrete biological sense. This seems particularly topical given absurd rumblings from the US government about defining gender in law. Again, I was already well aware of a lot of what Fine said in thsi chapter, but she lays it out clearly.

Part 2, “Neurosexism”, is where the book really starts to come into its own. This is where Fine tackles claims about differences between “male” and “female” brains. This whole part is valuable because she talks specifics, right down to the study and the scientists conducting them. Laypeople (myself included) often put a lot of stock into scientific results that come from what appear to be more rigorous or “hard” experiments, like MRI scans, as contrasted with a “soft” experiment like a psychological study. This is a bias that’s really hard, at least in my experience, to counteract. So it’s well worth my time to check that bias by being reminded of all the ways in which scientists (who are human, and therefore faulty) can draw faulty conclusions from these types of experiments. Fine challenges the shallow understanding most people have of the links between testosterone and masculinity; she points out that animal behaviour (even primate behaviour) can’t always be used as an analogy for unsocialized human behaviour, etc. This section is just a great reminder in general that science is a human process, and like any human process, is prone to error and a good tonic against thinking of science as this black box that we put experimental data into and get facts about the world out of.

The final part, “Recycling Gender”, is where Fine provides some opinion and analysis of the state of the field. She basically says: we don’t really know a lot about gender, and it’s really hard to test, and I’m not going to tell you there are no biological differences between sexes—but can we please stop falling back on this explanation because we think gender-neutral parenting is futile? She points out that gender-neutral parenting often seems to “fail” (as in, kids still adopt gender stereotypes) because no matter how good the parents are at being neutral (and they usually aren’t as good as they think), the rest of our society is still hella stereotypical, and, you know, most families end up being part of society. I like the inclusion of this part in the book, because it encourages readers to consider how we actually apply scientific discoveries to our lives. That being said, this part of the book is probably the most scattered of the three and the least interesting from a scientific perspective.

Delusions of Gender endears itself to me because, at the end of the day, Fine is basically saying we need to stay skeptical of claims that appear to be scientific on the surface but, if you scratch that surface, reveal supposition. Beyond its subjects of sex and gender, this book encourages critical thinking about doing science, and that is something that is sorely needed in society today. Lastly, although I have long been interested in gender and thinking more deeply about it, this book definitely got me thinking about gender along different tracks. While I already knew much of what Fine explains or alludes to, I learned more things and even had my own unconscious biases checked at some points. And really, that’s what I want from a pop science book!

No, but seriously, did you expect anything less of a rating from me? This book is kickass. It is literally everything I have wanted in a science history book for a while.

Hidden Figures details the lives and achievements of the Black women who worked first as computers, then as mathematicians and engineers, for NACA (the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics) and its successor, NASA. Margot Lee Shetterly pulls back the curtain on an aspect of science history that has remained obscured and neglected. As she explains in the afterword, it’s not that these women and their roles in history were deliberately suppressed; instead, no one had really bothered to piece together their stories and tell the general public. Shetterly, in her first book, pulls together the threads of several women’s lives, creating a compelling book that doesn’t just tell us their story but actually tells the story of NACA/NASA, and the transformation of the American aeronautics industry from World War II to the moonshot.

If you’re a woman, you don’t need me to mansplain to you why this book is important. In fact, you’re probably good just skipping the rest of this review and going out and buying a copy right now.

If you’re a man, particularly a white man, and you’re having trouble comprehending why I’m gushing so unreservedly at this book, then let me point you to Kameron Hurley’s essay, “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative”:

I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women’s History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.

Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.

What Hurley says of women fighting is true for women in STEM. There have always been women in STEM. Unfortunately, it’s just so much easier to name prominent men in STEM than women, thanks to the way our historical narrative has been constructed. Sure, when pressed I can name a handful of women mathematicians off the top of my head—Ada Lovelace, obvs., Emmy Noether, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Sophie Germain. Even when I do this, however, all I’m doing is stretching the Great Man theory to accommodate another sex; in doing this, I erase the contributions of thousands of unnamed women who laboured and calculated and thought.

Shetterly avoids succumbing to this temptation. True, she focuses more on some women than others, like Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Goble Johnson—but she names and briefly explores the lives of many more. Although she relates biographical details, this is not a biography. It’s a history, a history of the early twentieth-century United States and how its technological prowess in air and space allowed it to become a global superpower. Oh, and by the way, that prowess was built on the computations of Black women. Or, as Shetterly observes at one memorable point, there is precious little in aeronautics and space history that women have not been involved in or somehow helped to build.

Before we had electronic computers, we had human computers. People—by which I mean, women, because computing was seen as women’s work—sat at rows of desks and did the math required by engineers designing and prototyping aircraft for the war effort. We’re not talking about sums and differences on a calculator here; we’re talking about complicated algebraic operations the likes of which would dazzle you unless you happen to have an undergrad math degree—which most of these women did. Yes, women graduated from university math programs in the 1930s. And, like Dorothy Vaughan, they almost always went into teaching (especially if they were also Black), until the war came along and the demand for women in the workforce—and for computers.

There were white women computers as well, and Shetterly names several of them and mentions their contributions at NACA. By focusing on West Computing and its Black computers, however, she can use this history to examine the paradox of racism in the American South during and after World War II. And this is where Hidden Figures transcends merely flipping the script on forgotten women to become a comprehensive and edifying history. I learned so much about discrimination, segregation, and the civil rights movement from this book!

As a Canadian, of course, I didn’t learn an awful lot about the American civil rights movement (nor, sadly, do we learn much about our own country’s anti-Black policies). But I thought I knew the gist of it: Black and white people sent their children to separate schools, had separate bathrooms and water fountains and separate seating on buses and at movie theatres. I knew of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. I didn’t know about the numerous other legal challenges involving higher education, nor was I aware that following Brown, Virginia was basically like, “Welp, we’ll just defund public education instead.” I had no idea that for five years a county in Virginia closed all of its public schools in an effort to stop integration. Smh. So wild.

(It seems wild to me, sitting here and writing this from my relatively enlightened position in 2017. Yet I’m aware that I benefit from hindsight, and I spun off a rant about blindspots in the present day into a separate blog post.)

Even in the history of civil rights, I think it’s easy to get caught up in how Black men fought for, advocated for, agitated for freedom from discrimination. Aside from a few token women, like Rosa Parks, mythologized for a single act of defiance, the movement is defined by masculine resistance. Shetterly shatters this conception, showing us how Black women resisted every single day: Miriam Mann’s quiet war to remove the “Colored” sign from the lunchroom table; Mary Jackson working with her son to build the most aerodynamic soap box derby racer; Katherine Johnson literally demanding that she be allowed to sit in on editorial meetings—this is a story where women are not just wives and mothers and cheerleaders of others but actors and makers of history in their own right.

Similarly, Hidden Figures is the story of the States’ transition from wartime boom to post-war bustle. Shetterly captures the tension and patriotism ignited by the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, and how it galvanized the States to transform NACA into NASA and begin aiming for space. If her exposition into the administrative intricacies of how this transformation happened gets a bit much at times, I cannot fault her dedication to such details. Despite such digressions, the book remains fascinating through and through.

I can only hope the movie based on Hidden Figures is as good as this book. It’s past due for women like Vaughan and Johnson to get the recognition they deserve, and it’s time that we change the way we tell stories about the history of science and technology. Writers like Shetterly remind us that there is so much more to the story than a few Great Men having leaps of intuition or spearheading intense, improbable projects. Some “untold story” books fizzle, failing to deliver on their promises of a brand new perspective on an old story. Not so with Hidden Figures. This is one untold story that you need to hear.

I saw the movie, and I blogged about it!

Sometimes it seems like smug people like to point smugly to science to justify their smug opinions about their superiority. Alas, many of these people turn out to be men declaiming the natural inferiority of women. As much as some men would like you to believe it, however, “science” doesn’t prove that women are naturally inferior to men. As Angela Saini explains in her book of the same name, “science” backs up what many of us have observed for millennia: it’s complicated, y’all.

Inferior references Delusions of Gender, which I also read recently. Whereas Cordelia Fine’s book is about the perceived differences between men and women (particularly neurologically), Saini is more interested in examining scientific explanations that have historically been used to justify the view that women are somehow the “inferior” sex. So, while there is some overlap between these two books, they by and large have different theses.

Saini takes us right back to Darwin and his theories of natural selection and sex selection. She explains how Darwin, as important as his writing was for the development of the theory of evolution, nevertheless maintained sexist views about the role of women—and people like Caroline Kennard challenged him on it. From here, Saini starts to examine certain apparent biological differences between men and women—such as the fact that “females get sicker but males die quicker.” Finally, Saini confronts outright myths and misconceptions that have propagated across science and history, and she tackles how it’s difficult to determine how much of our sexual and social mores are biological or cultural in origin.

My overall impression of this book is that much of what Saini says here won’t be, overall, that surprising if you’ve been interested in this topic for a while like I have. Nevertheless, what makes Inferior so interesting is the amount of detail. There is a wealth of knowledge here. It is, as she says in her introduction, a resource that you can refer to if you need specific evidence when you’re trying to refute someone’s annoyingly essentialist arguments (though I’m not sure I have the memory to actually remember these studies off the top of my head, sadly).

The last few chapters are fascinating in their facts about the diversity of human sexuality. I loved learning about various cultures that have matriarchal elements to them, particularly when it comes to sexual behaviour and infidelity. For example, I hadn’t heard of the Mosuo “walking marriage” before. Saini does a good job highlighting these various departures from what we consider “normal” from our stunted Western perspective without exoticizing or fetishizing them.

I do wish she had been somewhat more critical of evolutionary psychology in general…. Saini admirably criticizes specific experiments in evolutionary psychology, and she is quick to point out how various biases (cough, old white guys, cough) can taint results. Yet she doesn’t really delve into the problematic nature of evolutionary psychology in general.

Saini demonstrates that even with the amazing tools of scientific method available to us, we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw, the theories we publish, and the statements we make about so-called “differences” between sexes. We are so obsessed with creating categories and labels and putting people in boxes, when the reality is that we are complicated, and that there’s a lot more to our bodies than certain chromosomes or specific hormones might determine.

So one day I was looking for some advertisements I could use with my English classes to discuss graphic texts and advertising strategies. I stumbled across Vintage Ad Browser's repository of Coca-Cola advertisements, and I was just captivated. It had never occurred to me before that Coca-Cola provides a perfect opportunity to chart the evolution of advertising over the course of more than a century. I pulled many ads through the decades to use with my class, and as we discussed the popularity of Coca-Cola, I started wanting to know more and more about this globally dominant brand. Although I am a millennial, I’m enough of a bookworm that my second reaction (the first being “I’m going to look on Wikipedia”) was, “Someone must have written a book about this.”

Indeed, Mark Pendergrast has. And even updated it twice over! For God, Country & Coca-Cola deserves its subtitle (The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It). Pendergrast is beyond thorough in his quest to chronicle the origins, expansion, and ongoing influence of The Coca-Cola Company. From Dr. John Pemberton’s initial attempts to create a mildly profitable medicinal nostrum to the beginnings of the Company under Asa Candler all the way through the hegemonies of Robert Woodruff and his successors, Pendergrast discusses every intimate detail of Coca-Cola production. Basically, if there was ever any question you had about the history of Coca-Cola, it is probably here somewhere in this book.

Now, finding it might be a different matter entirely…. This book is intense. My edition is ~500 pages of fairly small type, and this is a large-format paperback. Pendergrast is not playing here. So I totally understand why some reviewers have panned the book for its length and detail. Not everyone is looking for that; some people just want the broad strokes, and I think that’s legitimate criticism of the book. One of the reasons I’m not giving this book a full five stars is simply that, yes, it’s exhaustingly exhaustive. Nevertheless, I don’t know what I would say should be removed. It’s all germane and interesting stuff.

The genesis of Coca-Cola, of course, is probably one of the most fascinating parts of the story. So much has been mythologized (mostly by the Company itself), so Pendergrast strips that away with a blow-by-blow account of who owned (or thought they owned, or claimed they owned) what pertaining to the Coca-Cola beverage and brand. His descriptions of these internecine interactions among Pemberton et al soberly reminds us that, had any one tiny thing been different, then perhaps we wouldn’t have Coca-Cola as we know it today. In its beginnings, there was nothing that special about Coca-Cola. It took the hard work of a lot of individuals over decades to build it into the behemoth soft drink it has now become.

I also really enjoyed learning about Coke’s involvement in World War II. Particularly, the way in which “Coca-Cola men” received privileged status and shipping priority because American troops were so enamoured of drinking Coke. Moreover, I wasn’t aware of Fanta’s origins as a substitute conceived by the head of Coke in Germany after the United States entered the war and the Company wouldn’t be able to ship syrup to Germany any more. The interplay between world events and Coca-Cola’s growth around the world is complex, so I just loved reading about it as Pendergrast lays it out, complete with footnotes.

As the book approaches the present day, the details become less interesting. Pendergrast focuses overly (in my opinon) on Coke’s stock price and similar, highly technical measures of “success.” Indeed, throughout the book, Pendergrast assumes a certain level of corporate knowledge (stock splits, holding companies, etc.) that the average reader might have to stretch to comprehend. There’s nothing wrong with that (I like learning new things from a book!), but I wouldn’t describe this as a “popular history.” Pendergrast really likes to get technical in the way he comments on or explains certain decisions that Coke makes. I did, however, enjoy the whole chronicle of the New Coke debacle, since that was just before my time.

The common theme throughout this book, as the title and subtitle both imply, is that Coca-Cola is inextricably linked to American identity. Yet perhaps paradoxically, Pendergrast also notes that Coca-Cola has worked hard to become “of the people” in whatever country it’s in. He chronicles the Coca-Colonization of the world, yes, and is appropriately harsh in certain moments when the Company did not act in the most upstanding of ways. Yet he also observes how Coke has always tried to fit in with the cultures it’s marketing towards, whether we’re talking the Philippines or Japan. Consequently, Coca-Cola is “the American soft drink” in the United States, but it also aims to have this oddly non-specific, localized feel the world over.

The final lesson? The Coca-Cola Company is a very unique story. Even Pepsi, which features heavily in the back half of this book, just cannot compete when it comes to Coke’s legacy and popularity as a beverage. No other brand has spread around the world in quite the same way as Coca-Cola. (A few have certainly come close—but seldom do they do it with profit margins so richly generous as a carbonated water product will get you.)

This is not a book for the faint of heart. Nor would I suggest trying to read it all in one go. If you really want to learn about the history of Coca-Cola, however, this is the book for you. Just take it slow. And, yes, I did consume a single Coca-Cola at one point while reading. (I do nominally prefer Coke to Pepsi, but these days I try not to drink much pop at all.)