August 19, 2025 · 12:19 pm

The Wedding People: What fun.

Alison Espach set my vacation off to the best possible reading start with The Wedding People. Such a good start, in fact, that I found myself unable to really get going with book number two because it wasn’t the same great romp. So promise me if you have a plane ride, a long weekend, a sick-day where you are well enough to read a novel but not nearly well enough to work on a report you’ll grab this one.

Oh sure, it’s not brilliantly written (though it is not at all badly written), and it oozes with privilege (despite the nod to the adjunct salary and the lack of benefits that come with being an adjunct it is still very much a book that derives some of the joy of reading from the opportunity to read about how rich people throw a wedding), but if you can – if you can – park these critiques and settle in for the rom-com ride you shall not be disappointed.

What the book does best – amid the laugh out loud funny moments of dialogue and situational humour – is remind the reader that where happiness and love come from (first and always) is within and not (as so many rom-coms promise) from the perfect other person. It’s not an overly complex idea or nuanced theme, but the book presents it carefully and warmly in ways that let the reader knowingly agree in a way that doesn’t feel like reading a motivational poster in a home decor shop – live! laugh! love! – but instead like several years of therapy: ah, yes, love comes from within. Which is to say, it’s an explicit theme (like I think our protagonist, Phoebe, says it directly at one point lol) but it’s not hammered and, more importantly, we feel like Phoebe earns the revelation through actual character development and introspection.

So enjoy, enjoy.

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August 19, 2025 · 1:27 am

God Human Animal Machine: Again

I read first Megan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine a few years ago, but returned to it this summer for another go. Rare, now, are the books I read twice and I came back to this non-fiction (!) work on the nature of consciousness and the religious dimensions of technology because in the first go-round I wasn’t sure I reached the end sure of what O’Gieblyn is arguing about what makes humans human and AI AI. Second time around and I think it’s just as fuzzy because O’Gieblyn is much more a cartographer of the philosophy of consciousness than she is a polemic writer; the argument – consciousness is something between the subject and the world – slippery for this reader to firmly hold.

What does seem ever more true of this reading in 2025 is the way in which the recent advances in AI force questions on the nature of concisousness, on who and what can claim it – as well as the intersections of technology with these ever-more slippery ideas of soul or life before-after-beyond death.

Should you be a reader wary of a dense book of philosophy: be not afraid. O’Gieblyn writes a charming first person narrative that interweaves her background in fundamentalist Christianity, her journey away from faith, her experience of addiction, and her continued questioning in ways that make the moments of exposition on the philosophy of Descartes read as a charming side quest (rather then, as they are, the heart of understanding the challenge Descartes’ disenchantment of the world has posed).

Of the many fantastic threads in the book – the interconnection of trees/mushrooms/the internet; the sentience of robot dogs; the way a profound question can unsettle our sense of identity as much as any drug – the one I found most lasting was the parallels O’Gieblyn draws between the story of Job and that of the all-knowing algorithm. Though the section is a departure, a bit, from the sections on what it is to know or constitute or explain or recognize a self (I-Thou!) it nevertheless does a spectacular job of demonstrating the rich, varied and embedded ways technology can be read through religious texts and – more importantly – religious questions. What rights do we humans have to question the all-knowing? What audacity do we have to ask ‘why’?

Anyway – it’s prompted a whole series of other readings and re-readings, so enjoy (or don’t) the next reviews on the spirituality of AI.

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August 10, 2025 · 3:21 am

The Burgess Boys: If You Don’t Like Elizabeth Strout I Don’t Want To Hear About It

For years if someone liked a food I found disgusting I’d explain to them why they were wrong and how whatever it was was gross. Turns out this is neither a polite, nor particularly well received exchange. You’re meant to just say ‘oh’ and privately think the other person is wrong and their food choices disgusting. Is it different for book (and movies and TV)? Probably it’s meant to be the same. But my face clearly outwardly flinches when someone tells me how much they enjoyed a book that is objectively bad . (And this from the reader who unashamedly told her boss about the glories of Fourth Wing.)

All this to say I love Elizabeth Strout and at the park the other night was explaining to some other parent (who, to be fair, definitely didn’t care about the book I was reading and definitely didn’t want to be listening to me *at length* describing how great it is, but was trapped both by my enthusiasm and No Clear Exit) and she told me she just didn’t care for Olive Kitteridge. The moment was worse – surely worse – then some partisan political exchange. I looked at her with utter disbelief. What is wrong with this woman, I thought, and thankfully didn’t say. But surely my face and eyes did because I am me and I cannot control my face.

All this to say. I loved The Burgess Boys as I have loved everything else Elizabeth Strout and I do not want to hear about it if you didn’t.

I’ve said before that books find me (all of us) at odd times. Or maybe we read into them whatever it is we need in that time. With The Burgess Boys when the young nephew of Bob Burgess is arrested and detained for throwing a pig’s head into a mosque, and then is surprised by the scale of reaction and consequence and the rest of the book follows how this one decision reverberates through a family I thought ah. Ah.

Which is all to say had I read it another time, or in different circumstances, I might have been struck instead by the way Bob’s entire sense of identity is shifted by his brother Jim’s revelation about the death of their father. Or the thread of the novel that is about how we make our own stories and that these stories are all that matter (not any fact you might claim as such). Or the thread of a marriage betrayal. Or that of discovering love when you aren’t expecting it. Or of the gap between celebrity and individual experience. Or.

But we find in great novels what we need in the moment we read them. And in this Strout novel I found consolation, and beauty, and the reminder that whatever we are in – it is already changing. And that these, the stories we tell of ourselves, our mistakes, our worst moments – are ours to make.

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August 10, 2025 · 12:51 am

The Emperor of Gladness: Such poetry in fast food

Ocean Vuong is a poet, and The Emperor of Gladness is a novel infused with poetry. Such beautiful writing. I was tempted to try to explain how beautiful, but the irony of poorly trying to explain poetic beautiful language was too great a risk. Suffice to say: gorgeous.

And such an odd little plot to have such beauty. The novel opens with our protagonist, Hai, perched on the edge of a bridge ready to jump. Saved instead by an old woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia and ready to be saved, herself, too. The rest of the book follows how they care for one another and try – often failing – to care for themselves and the people around them. Most memorable, I think, is the cast of characters at the fast food restaurant where Hai works – finding among the connection, reciprocity and care he’s been missing.

Of course in a book opening with a suicide attempt, much of the book is spent wondering if Hai will find a way back to stability – and how he will get there. And how Grazina will be allowed to live and die with any dignity. How any of his colleagues will find their way to their specific and relatable and earnest hopes – my favourite being starring in amateur women’s wrestling – along with the dignity of doing work that supports security. In a way I was reminded of Demon Copperfield in the way the novel holds up the failures of systems and structures – health care, justice, education, social services – and the way these failures are felt by individuals.

And so rather then believing in any system that you’ve been told you should trust, The Emperor of Gladness offers instead the fragile security of other people: flawed, ailing, constantly letting us down out of their own hurt and inadequacies – and yet better, ever better then the imagined farce that we can do any of it alone.

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