Tag Archives: books

November 8, 2025 · 3:25 pm

Dream State: Strong start and then

I made a mistake in telling a few friends to read Eric Puchner’s Dream State when I was only a third of the way in. It’s such a strong start – evocative writing, a pulling theme (how does one major decision or one major event shape the rest of your life?), interesting characters. Set amid the present and near future of climate catastrophe to make the aging of the characters over the course of the novel vivid against what can feel in our incremental experience of time unnoticed in the sharp changes for the reader between decades for a glacier or a lake or an endangered species.

And it’s not like the writing changed – the scene on the mountain with Elias is haunting and beautiful – it’s more I lost conviction that I knew why any of the characters were making any of their decisions. I suspect it’s a form thing – with the big jumps in time (with the exception of one incredible passage where the two children age together over summers over the course of the passage and the reader feels the slipperiness of time in the verb tenses and the dialogue) happen between chapters the reader is given snapshot moments to make sense of Big character decisions, and honestly, so much happens ‘off stage’ that it’s hard to believe the impact of those decisions on the characters and how they behave next. We have to take it on the faith of third person narration that yes, indeed, Garret and Cece still love on another because that’s what a long marriage means? I guess?

So sorry to M. and K. for forcefully recommending this one before reaching the end. If you haven’t yet started it, I’d say it would be a fine beach read, but not something I’d interrupt a year of comic book reading to go out and get.

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Filed under American literature, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction

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August 31, 2025 · 5:48 pm

Wild Dark Shore: Eco-parenting-elegy

I’m trying to remember the name of the book I reviewed here that was about the near future, climate catastrophe, parenting, and some biblical themes. I really liked it. The bible part is what did it: A Children’s Bible.

Why am I trying to remember that one? Because Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore reminded me of it – similar theme of how to parent amid the climate collapse, of how to not only explain to our children the destruction and loss, but to prepare them for the present and future of suffering and inequality and grief.

Wild Dark Shore manages to keep you reading what might otherwise be too overwhelming an indictment of our inaction and paralysis of the scale of the problem by placing the themes amid a gentle mystery and a (albeit somewhat implausible) romance.

The mystery: a woman washes up on the shores of Shearwater island – a remote island where there is one family who are there to protect Earth’s last seed banks until the seeds can be moved to a safer location (the sea levels are rising, permafrost melting and the seed bank is no longer safe) (if such a location even exists). As she recovers and we learn why she is there, she begins to uncover suspicious things and witness strange behaviours from the family. What, the reader wonders along with her, happened here.

From there plenty of implausible plot points follow – and I enjoyed and liked the book too much to take much issue with them – but there is a host of things that just… didn’t seem likely (at all), but I allowed because the writing was beautiful and, perhaps, because I wanted them to be possible (the romance not the least of them).

But what the book does best (at least, I think) is make palpable the choices that climate catastrophe have forced on those parts of the world already most impacted and will – are – forcing on the privileged like me through the pressing decisions around the seeds, but also – and most evocatively – in the choices about what to do with/for/by our children. What sacrifices ought we have made already or should we be making to the future (and no, this isn’t an argument for effective altruism, more a practical question of what can one generation reasonably do to better the outcomes for the next).

The climactic scene – while perhaps too on the nose and overly layered with Symbol – brings this question to a head and the reader is left mourning not just the particular loss for the family, but through this synecdoche our greater loss as a planet.

Anyway. It’s not a perfect book by any stretch, but it will make you feel something about our planet and our connection to it – and that is no small feat.

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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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