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medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
I jumped this book to the top of my queue because my sister gave it a 5-star rating on GR. But to me, it was meh. The eponymous Fortune is the engaged middle sister of a Brooklyn Syrian Jewish family. Nina is an old maid at 26, and Lucy, at 17, is going steady with a doctor. Fortune does what's expected of her and lives a meh life. And her fiancé's proposal--egad:
In the end, I wasn't that surprised to see Saul standing in the foyer. I was more confused as to why he chose to do it tish way, hijacking my dreams at an ungodly hour, a fog of sleep trailing me as I descended the stairs, one foot in front of the other. Was he worried that in a state of full consciousness I might say no?
This line of thought, though
Saul used to tell me that I was easy to love. I don't want to be easy to love; I want it to be hard to love me and I want someone to do it anyway, because not to would be too unbearable.
informative
medium-paced
Sally Gould takes us through her practical paramedic training and her work on the job, with forays into the job's impact on her mental health. it's a lot of this happened and this happened, but with enough emotional detail to make the story compelling. It may have helped that I listened to the audiobook and Gould sounds a little like Hannah Gadsby. It definitely helped that I'm married to an EMT and so have a little extra knowledge and interest in the work.
dark
medium-paced
Careless People is a spicy Facebook tell-all by someone who is a reliable narrator, but also deeply delusional. Wynn-Williams gets it into her head that she wants to work for Facebook because she believes in Facebook's community mission. She thinks Facebook can bring the world together and therefore wants to help with international policy. Wynn-Williams is a New Zealand diplomat, so you'd think she'd be good at reading the room. And she kind of is...?
The first roadblock is that Facebook the company prides itself on being difficult to reach.
What about that makes you think the company is not full of assholes? And yet Wynn-Williams tenaciously develops a contact and eventually gets them to create a job for her. And you know what foreign policy is all about? Tax shelters! Did you know that Dublin, Ireland is a tech hub? Ireland is a tax haven country--for businesses. Employees still get to pay taxes, which is just so capitalism. On page 155, about a third of the way through the book Wynn-Williams observes
There's no pretense that Facebook is out for anything but ourselves. It's brazen. By this point I know I shouldn't be surprised but it still makes me recoil.
I don't think she's a third of the way through her seven years there at this point and knows they're irredeemable and yet she can't let go.
Let me pause and say that I'm hard on Wynn-Williams, but this is a very readable book (even if I did feel more depressed and anxious than usual while reading it).
Here's a WHAT?!? moment. After a diplomatic screwup with China (the one country Wynn-Williams refuses to have anything to do with, but can't entirely get away from)
...Mark [Zuckerberg] gets another chance to speak with [Chinese president] Xi. In Mandarin, he asks Xi if he'll do him the honor of naming his unborn son. Xi refuses.
🍌🍌🍌
But if you think this book is mostly about what an asshole Mark Zuckerberg is, rest assured she leans in to shedding light on Sheryl Sandberg's venality, hypocrisy, and creepiness.
Sheryl emails the leadership team from Davos breathlessly highlighting how terrorism is working to Facebook's advantage: "Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is 'basically dead' as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security." In other words, this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people's privacy. Which is good for Facebook's business.
And then Sandberg pressures Wynn-Williams to go to bed with her on the private jet. We don't know what going to bed entails. I, maybe naively, didn't assume it was sexual, but it was definitely a show of power. When Wynn-Williams refuses, her relationship with Sandberg is never the same.
Another Facebook executive who gets his moments in Wynn-Williams's memoir is Joel Kaplan who becomes her boss a couple few years in. After Wynn-Williams returns from maternity leave after the labor and delivery of her second child that required 35 blood transfusions and put her in a coma, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review. Of the period she was on maternity leave and still recovering/hemorrhaging. Kaplan wants to know where she's bleeding from. He also asks her how breastfeeding works. And now he's MAGA's guy at Facebook. Classic!
But back to Zuckerberg--he seems genuinely shocked (but still kind of blasé) to learn that Facebook put Trump in office in 2016. Whereas Sandberg is ready to make lemonade
...once [Sandberg] grasped what Trump's campaign did, her immediate response was not horror but that it was brilliant and innovative and do you think we might have a hot at hiring Trump's guy Brad Parscale to come work at Facebook.
And after the election, heads of state become more gentle with Zuckerberg. No one wants Zuckerberg to use his power against them. Reading this book, I was reminded of the omnipotent kid from The Twilight Zone who becomes a total monster because everyone has to do what he says. (There are anecdotes about how everyone let Mark win at games, and how he accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she beats him.) I wondered if Zuckerberg was always that awful (good chance) or if it was power corrupting, as it likes to do.
At some point, Wynn-Williams seems to feel like she's in a golden birdcage. She's moved her family from DC to Silicon Valley. She joined Facebook before the IPO, so she has stocks--that she gets access to only if she stays. I'm semi-sympathetic, but I looked up what a director's salary is at Facebook, and per Glassdoor, it's half a million. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Director-Salaries-E40772_D_KO9,17.htm Being the primary earner in a family of five is surely expensive, but I'm guessing Wynn-Williams could have gotten another job. She literally met the leaders of most of the countries in the world. She is from NZ, and her husband the UK. If all her US contacts got burned, she'd still have options. Still, I understand feeling stuck; I really do.
And Kaplan again, or rather one of his lieutenants at a "diversity brown bag session"
"When will women focus on work and stop talking about diversity already?"
Then HR steps in, sharing the process for reporting, that Facebook takes complaints seriously, etc.
Most of the company is made up of white and Asian men who don't seem to have a problem with how things have been going. The entitlement in the Facebook offices flows as freely as the prosecco from the Prosecco Tap that's installed in one of the Facebook office kitchens.
Damn.
When confronted with their role in connecting the Charlottesville organizers and the other 200 hate groups Facebook platforms according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the executives are defensive.
It reminds me of the way a nationalist movement responds to criticism. Nationalism always begins with the claim that you're on the principled, moral righteous side of things.
Finally, when Wynn-Williams parts ways with the company, she has some inkling that her mission-driven plan was never going to work.
I had told myself I could do more on the inside than the outside, but realistically, being the grit in the machine isn't working.
That Wynn-Williams ever thought there was something worth fighting for at Facebook is what's surprising to me. I mean, I do enjoy Facebook and am sorry that it's past its heyday. I think the interactions there are better than on any other social media platform, but I've never held any delusion that it has an interest in being a public good.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
Symington follows Lily, an amalgam of her transgender friends, as she experiences her first year out. She navigates emotions--her own and those of the people in her life and the physical challenges of her transition.
It's sweet and relatable and answers many questions that you're not allowed to ask, but need to know the answers to if you're hoping to support someone going through it.
It's sweet and relatable and answers many questions that you're not allowed to ask, but need to know the answers to if you're hoping to support someone going through it.
adventurous
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
In the summer of 1940, when I was nineteen years old and an idiot, my parents sent me to live with my Aunt Peg, who owned a theater company in New York City.
This is how we're introduced to our heroine, Vivian, who, having been kicked out of Vassar for failing all of her classes, doesn't have anything going for her but her ability to make her Singer sewing machine sing. Aunt Peg's company, which churns out musicals in its raggedy theater, The Lily turns out to need someone who can do costumes, so Vivian finds herself a place there. She quickly becomes enamored of one of the show girls, Celia and adopts her drinking and fucking lifestyle. She makes some other great friends along the way, including a British actress, Edna, who is stranded in the US with her idiot husband because her home in the UK was bombed, leaving them with nothing--other than Edna's prodigious talent and professionalism.
Part of Vivian's idiocy is that she is self-involved, like many teenagers and many people in theater are (I've been both, or rather all three, so I feel comfortable saying that), and that gets her in trouble with pretty much everyone. She is exiled back to her WASPy parents' home upstate, having learned a Valuable Lesson.
I appreciated the self-awareness of the naive character as she narrates the story when she's in her 90s. Her audience is a woman named Angela, whose identity we don't fully learn until close to the end. It's a long book, but it doesn't drag. The device of having a specific audience works well. Gilbert was maligned for her wealthy white woman ways in Eat, Pray, Love, but both are engaging stories of the write-what-you-know variety.
Here are some of the quotes I highlighted for lols or depth
He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz.
heard. Another truth
(never trust the month of March in New York!)
Which, honestly, I'd extend to the entire season of spring.
It was more important for me to feel free than safe.
^ Accurate observation about youth, which is connected to this statement from adult Vivian
Anyway, at some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.
After that, she is fre to become whoever she truly is.
On the 1900s
During the most violent century in human history...
Have we surpassed that yet? [sob]
sad
slow-paced
I was curious about this book because the leader of my high school friend group was a huge Frank Zappa fan. Note that my high school friend group was male gaze pilled, and I'm no longer friends with the FZ fan because he was insufferable (when not funny and charismatic). I found Moon Zappa to be insufferable without the humor and charisma unfortunately, though I'm sympathetic because her parents seem to have been absolutely despicable people.
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
When we meet her, apple-of-her-daddies'-eyes, Bridget Bloom is a full-on diva, matriculating in a Chicago boarding school at least partially because the kids in her Nebraska town hate her because she's so talented such a narcissist. She has no idea about the real reason, and her dads don't seem to either. They indulge her in everything, selling part of their land to pay for school and not stopping her from decorating her not-yet-arrived roommate's portion of the shared domicile. When the roommate, Ruby, arrives, she's not into Bridget's help, and their relationship deteriorates from there.
Shortly after her arrival, Bridget learns that her abominable music theory score has kept her out of the musical focus program (MFP), which was her whole reason for going to the school. She agrees to a hard sacrifice in exchange for the possibility of getting into the program later, once her theory score improves.
Lessons are learned.
Best description: "I tingle, like my skin's covered in Pop Rocks."
Shortly after her arrival, Bridget learns that her abominable music theory score has kept her out of the musical focus program (MFP), which was her whole reason for going to the school. She agrees to a hard sacrifice in exchange for the possibility of getting into the program later, once her theory score improves.
Lessons are learned.
Best description: "I tingle, like my skin's covered in Pop Rocks."
adventurous
hopeful
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
This was such a fun book, and as soon I finished it, I looked to see if the author had any other books out. Nope--or at least I hope not yet. MC Charlie Porter is a hockey player--a junior on a private school coed team captained by her brother. When a douchebag from the public school fouls her, causing her to miss the game-winning shot, she's pissed, especially because the refs don't see/call the foul. Violence erupts, leaving Charlie suspended from her private school and sentenced, not to public school (she's at Cranford on a scholarship), but also to community service at the rink. And of course she's suspended from the hockey team.
Strangely, the rink takes Charlie in another direction: figure skating. In the melee, Frankie was injured and his pairs partner, Alexa, is left without a training partner. Male skating partner pickings are slim this late in the season, and there's nothing that says Alexa can't train with another girl.
There's also a subplot with Charlie and her mom, who is mostly out of the picture with her new family, including perfect little femme daughter Kylie.
btw Alexa is Jewish. Is it just me or are there a lot more gratuitously Jewish characters in books and TV lately?
Strangely, the rink takes Charlie in another direction: figure skating. In the melee, Frankie was injured and his pairs partner, Alexa, is left without a training partner. Male skating partner pickings are slim this late in the season, and there's nothing that says Alexa can't train with another girl.
There's also a subplot with Charlie and her mom, who is mostly out of the picture with her new family, including perfect little femme daughter Kylie.
btw Alexa is Jewish. Is it just me or are there a lot more gratuitously Jewish characters in books and TV lately?