Strange Books for Strange Days
Our culture is rapidly changing under the triple blows of the pandemic, the police killings and the depression, and it’s all for the best. Books are a small part of the world of culture, but they are changing, too. Here are three examples.
Read a book lately? How about our media stars? Do they ever mention what they’ve read on a talk show, that might be interesting to viewers? Even our progressive hosts on youtube seem to be bookless (although some do have book cases behind them on zoom interviews).
I’m sorry to have to say this, but if you don’t read, it’s a sign of intellectual decline. Beware of dementia. It seems to me that even some younger people I talk to already suffer from very early onset of dementia.
But that’s not why you should read. Reading a book takes you to another place where you become another person with new found skills. Become a detective, sink into the abyss of an unhappy marriage, find the love of your life, take off for another planet. It’s all right there between the pages of a book. Or read it on your computer, pad, or phone.
Better yet, listen to it while you’re driving or taking a walk. Audio, the spoken word, is the earliest form of a book. Long before literacy happened, troubadors would entertain the courtly crowd with the tales of Gilgamesh, Jason, Achilles and countless other brave heroes.
Someday soon, you may be able to absorb an entire book by sucking on a gummy. But not yet. Today, most people are literate. But once again, racism rears its ugly head. Schools for people of color are inferior to those of the white upper middle class. But even deprived kids have phones, and if they don’t, give them one. Then (another government program), there should be an audio version of every book in the library that can be downloaded by poor kids for free. Don’t start with great literature. Adventure stories will do fine. They’ll be learning without even knowing it.
We adults have some learning to do. We all need to know more about the insidious nature of racism. What better way to learn than through a novel written by a talented writer of color? The first book I want to tell you about fills the bill to a T.
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The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
Excellent book by an excellent writer. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020. She won a Hugo Award, three years running for each book in her Broken Earth series. She is leading the way to a new beginning for sci-fi/fantasy.
Yes, as the story says, people really do become the cities we love. This is one of the brilliant insights about Jemisin's book. Part of each of us is the land, the home, the city that we know, and love. This is why gentrification is so hated, something the rich just can’t understand.
In the "before times" (before COVID, BLM, depression) almost all sci-fi writers wrote about the exploits of white males. While the tech is futuristic in sci-fi, the social relations are backward. There are no people of color, no LBGTQIA characters, and women have subordinate roles. How will anyone dare write another novel that doesn't recognize the diversity of their audience, country and world? This is a beautiful novel to read because of that diversity.
The City We Became is about many things, but, for me, it is a novel about fighting gentrification. I noticed this because I had just written a non-fiction book, "Gentrifying Paradise," about the people of Venice, California, fighting, and often winning, against gentrification.
I stressed, and Jemisin enhanced, the importance of working people's culture, and their love of their city, if they are to be successful in that fight against gentrifiers, no matter what universe they come from. How fortunate we are to learn a lesson about how to live our lives, from what appears at first glance to be “merely” a sci-fi/fantasy book.
Jemisin’s book does have a fantasy element, and a very important one that draws the reader in to a story about a city. And well it should. My experience with gentrifiers is that they seem like they are from another planet that is totally devoid of human compassion. Jemisin raises the level of the battle with these extraterrestrials, but the novel remains rooted in the Blacks, Puerto Ricans, immigrants and others who are the real, but often unacknowledged, New York.
Nora Keita Jemisin was born in Iowa (like James T. Kirk) in 1972, but now lives in Brooklyn. She has written at least nine science fiction, and/or fantasy novels, and many more short stories.
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The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has long been one of my favorite science fiction authors. His trilogy on Mars is the last word on that planet until we actually go there. His many other novels are varied and long ranging, but they all have a theme of human betterment running through them. There a a few “bad guys” within the pages, but they never win. These are classic stories of what used to be called “men against nature.” In his books, they are “all people cooperating with nature.”
I’m writing about this book because it tackles the biggest threat to human existence, global climate change. If you think the pandemic was dangerous, just wait until you’re in the middle of a typhoons, tornados, ice storms, droughts, heat waves that kill thousands, floods, wildfires, or other natural disasters. Some have already happened, such as, the vast wildfires that have devasted California. Some are yet to come, such as, massive flooding as ice sheets of Greenland become the ocean that covers Florida.
Robinson (KSR, as he is known to his legion of fans) also addresses the impact that our destruction of the planet’s ecosystem is having on plants and animals. We are hurting countless species with our wanton behavior.
This is not a depressing book. It is an activist book. KSR shows us the problem, and calls on us to join the fight to repair it. Even in the midst of the climate catastrophe, we are shown the beauty of the world.
While weaving a stunning novel of our hoped-for future, KSR does not neglect the social element. He takes time to teach us about the Gini Coefficient, which measures the degree of inequality in a society. At the same time, he warns against monocausotaxophilia, a condition where someone believes there is a single idea that explains everything.
Robinson was courageous to take on this impending disaster that could kill us all. We should reciprocate by reading the damn thing. The novel begins in India, with a character most of us would assume is the hero of the novel. He’s not. That role would fall mostly to women, who risk their lives to slow down, and even reverse, the fast approaching doom.
I won’t spoil the novel, you’ll have to read, or listen, to it to find out if we go extinct or survive to make amends.
Kim Stanley Robinson has lived his life on the Left Coast. At the University of California, San Diego, he studied with Prof. Fredric Jameson, who became a big influence in his intellectual life. Like KSR, Jameson’s interests include Marxism, post-modernism, utopias and science fiction. KSR currently lives in Davis, a small Bohemian town near Sacramento.
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Gentrifying Paradise: Resistance and Removal in 21st Century Venice California by James R Smith
Wait a minute. I wrote that book. It would be unseemly of me to review it. Fortunately, Walden Bello, the world-renown economist and social theorist, will take over to explain the book:
A fascinating chronicle of community activist and labor organizer’s James R Smith’s love affair with Venice, California, that takes us through struggles against scheming developers, nasty Los Angeles city officials, and other urban gangsters whose aim appears to be to make life in Southern California’s most defiantly progressive community non-affordable, repressive, and soulless.
The chief villain in this 50-year-long struggle is the Los Angeles city government that Smith depicts as having taken over Venice “in a bloodless Anschluss” years ago and occupied since then.
Smith’s Venetians win some and lose some, and the moral of his tale is that when ordinary people are united and willing to go the distance, they can prevail over powerful forces that seek to control and disrupt their lives. Sometimes.
As he unfolds the story of his community, Smith treats us along the way to memorable sketches of figures who either lived in Venice or with whom he had interesting encounters, like Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury, the poetess Philomene Long, and the anti-war icon-turned-failed-liberal Tom Hayden.
James R Smith was born in Flushing, NY, but has spent most of his life in Venice California. His academic studies include journalism (BA), and sociology (MA). He walked away from a PhD in economics at UC Riverside to take a job - the first of many - as a union organizer.
All three books can be picked up at the usual places. Please put Amazon at the bottom of your shopping list.
Additional disruptive books:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne (Did the wrong side win the Revolutionary War?)
Passing Through The Territory by Robert Wells (Huckleberry Finn meets John Brown)
Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson (Nova Africa wins the Civil War)
The Black Jacobins by CLR James (Slaves win the war for Haiti)
Guevara, Also Known as Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo
Formative Early Writings by Karl Marx: A Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, On the Jewish Question, Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology, The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon and Preface to the Critique of Political Economy
Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card (The Aztecs conquer Europe)
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano (Barack Obama’s “favorite” book)
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock (A wholistic theory of Earth)
The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks (Communism in the stars)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown (The definitive book on the genocide of the indigenous peoples)
Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (from scarcity to abundance)
On the Beach by Nevil Shute (The nuclear end of the world)