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Wed Reading Meme..
Stayed away from the news for the most part today, and that helped reduce my anxiety levels considerably. Work feels a bit like pushing boulders up a hill with my mind. So been obsessing over my up-coming trip to Costa Rica and all the crap I apparently need. Because suffice it to say, I don't have water/active athletic adventure stuff. I hope the footwear is okay. I think my strap on sandals should be fine.
To distract myself on my commute, I'm reading books on the Kindle. The Kindle Paperwhite has advertisements for movies and books that Amazon thinks I'd be interested in. The current one that keeps popping up is entitled "We Have Lost The President", and every time I see it, my first thought is "if only that were true. But alas, it's not."
What I just finished reading
Against the Tide by Elizabeth Camden which apparently won a Christy and a RITA at some point. I don't know why. But I don't understand why most things get awards. Awards in the arts are purely subjective and based purely on the subjective tastes of whomever is voting for them.
That's not to say that I disliked it, it was okay. Just two-three star material. I guess I should have realized that if it won a Christy, it was in the Christian fiction genre, or rather a historical Christian romance. I did figure it out by about a hundred pages in. I think this book would appeal to anyone who is a devote Christian and a linguist, and also likes historicals that take place in the 1800s, and are a bit of a thriller, with a mystery or puzzle.
The Christian bit...it didn't bother me so much, as...well, I'm not a fan of religious fiction. Christy is one of the few religious fictional novels that I've read and liked. It's not "Christianity" that bugs me, it's religious that does. It can be a bit on the sanctimonious side.
And I felt that the writer was a bit repetitive. My mother who read the same book, didn't. So mileage varies.
I'm not a historian, but the history played well here, and the author clearly did her research. The main character is a linguist working in a Navy Yard in Boston during the late 1800s, and she's addicted to opium. But doesn't realize she's addicted because she's been taking it over the counter in a headache medicine that she'd been given as a child. In the 1800s, a British company, Mrs. Winslow's, developed a formula called "Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup" which calmed teething babies and small children, also helped with other ailments. Many orphanages used it. The heroine is an orphan and spent her childhood in an orphanage which spoon fed her Mrs. Winslow's. Little did people know that the soothing property in Mrs. Winslow's syrup was opium. The hero is working to stop the opium trade and uses the heroine to help him in his quest. He's your wounded hero trope. I normally like the wounded hero trope, but he irritated me. Actually all the men in this novel irritated me, they were portrayed as selfish, manipulative, and somewhat stupid.
There is no sex in the book - for two reasons, one - the writer is adhering to the period, two - it's a Christian romance.
The writing? It was okay. Found the dialogue to be a bit stilted. But you know I'm picky about dialogue, it's all that theater and play-reading background. And the villains seemed to be a tad one-dimensional and underdeveloped, which bugs me more than most people.
All of that said, I did get something out of it -- the main theme seems to be the pitfalls of self-importance and arrogance. All the main male characters in the novel, who have power, hurt others when they put their own self-interest/ego before others. The Admiral fires the heroine because she makes him look bad, and breaks his morality code. He refuses to look at why she does what she does, or the circumstances of her situation or anything else. He shows her no compassion.And later when she saves his son's life, he is beside himself to thank her and apologize, but she refuses to hear him -- suffering through an opium addiction, but once again it's all about him. That's just one example. The need to make oneself feel important, or be the hero, at the cost of another is explored here - and subtly. It's actually the best part of the book. The hero, does the same thing. He has this noble cause -- to end the opium trade and redeem himself. But he tramples over the heroine and various others to get it. He must save the day. It becomes less about the cause and more about the hero's ego. The heroine, who doesn't make it about her ego or gaining a higher being's approval or redeemption, does end up saving the day.
What I'm reading now
Red Shirts by John Scalzi -- this is an interesting science fiction novel, that in some respects reminds me a little of Ready Player Now, but I think I like this one better. It's a meta-narrative satire of Star Trek and fictional television serials similar to Star Trek. And in the larger scheme of things, an adept critique of our ego-driven narcissistic society, where the stars matter and no one else does. If you are a star or the lead in the show, you live, and everyone else's life and purpose revolves around you. They validate your existence. Instead of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, the needs of the elite or top few outweigh the needs of the many. Like I said, a deft critique of our culture.
This book in some respects, oddly enough, echoes the themes of the prior one.
Also reading a lot of newspaper articles online. They discovered a solar system with seven planets, including one like earth, orbiting a dwarf star. So, maybe aliens will invade us after all?
OR after the Doofus destroys Earth, we can escape to this distant solar system?
And the New Yorker had a rather interesting article... Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds.
Well it appealed to the frustrated psychology major inside of me, at any rate.
To distract myself on my commute, I'm reading books on the Kindle. The Kindle Paperwhite has advertisements for movies and books that Amazon thinks I'd be interested in. The current one that keeps popping up is entitled "We Have Lost The President", and every time I see it, my first thought is "if only that were true. But alas, it's not."
What I just finished reading
Against the Tide by Elizabeth Camden which apparently won a Christy and a RITA at some point. I don't know why. But I don't understand why most things get awards. Awards in the arts are purely subjective and based purely on the subjective tastes of whomever is voting for them.
That's not to say that I disliked it, it was okay. Just two-three star material. I guess I should have realized that if it won a Christy, it was in the Christian fiction genre, or rather a historical Christian romance. I did figure it out by about a hundred pages in. I think this book would appeal to anyone who is a devote Christian and a linguist, and also likes historicals that take place in the 1800s, and are a bit of a thriller, with a mystery or puzzle.
The Christian bit...it didn't bother me so much, as...well, I'm not a fan of religious fiction. Christy is one of the few religious fictional novels that I've read and liked. It's not "Christianity" that bugs me, it's religious that does. It can be a bit on the sanctimonious side.
And I felt that the writer was a bit repetitive. My mother who read the same book, didn't. So mileage varies.
I'm not a historian, but the history played well here, and the author clearly did her research. The main character is a linguist working in a Navy Yard in Boston during the late 1800s, and she's addicted to opium. But doesn't realize she's addicted because she's been taking it over the counter in a headache medicine that she'd been given as a child. In the 1800s, a British company, Mrs. Winslow's, developed a formula called "Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup" which calmed teething babies and small children, also helped with other ailments. Many orphanages used it. The heroine is an orphan and spent her childhood in an orphanage which spoon fed her Mrs. Winslow's. Little did people know that the soothing property in Mrs. Winslow's syrup was opium. The hero is working to stop the opium trade and uses the heroine to help him in his quest. He's your wounded hero trope. I normally like the wounded hero trope, but he irritated me. Actually all the men in this novel irritated me, they were portrayed as selfish, manipulative, and somewhat stupid.
There is no sex in the book - for two reasons, one - the writer is adhering to the period, two - it's a Christian romance.
The writing? It was okay. Found the dialogue to be a bit stilted. But you know I'm picky about dialogue, it's all that theater and play-reading background. And the villains seemed to be a tad one-dimensional and underdeveloped, which bugs me more than most people.
All of that said, I did get something out of it -- the main theme seems to be the pitfalls of self-importance and arrogance. All the main male characters in the novel, who have power, hurt others when they put their own self-interest/ego before others. The Admiral fires the heroine because she makes him look bad, and breaks his morality code. He refuses to look at why she does what she does, or the circumstances of her situation or anything else. He shows her no compassion.And later when she saves his son's life, he is beside himself to thank her and apologize, but she refuses to hear him -- suffering through an opium addiction, but once again it's all about him. That's just one example. The need to make oneself feel important, or be the hero, at the cost of another is explored here - and subtly. It's actually the best part of the book. The hero, does the same thing. He has this noble cause -- to end the opium trade and redeem himself. But he tramples over the heroine and various others to get it. He must save the day. It becomes less about the cause and more about the hero's ego. The heroine, who doesn't make it about her ego or gaining a higher being's approval or redeemption, does end up saving the day.
What I'm reading now
Red Shirts by John Scalzi -- this is an interesting science fiction novel, that in some respects reminds me a little of Ready Player Now, but I think I like this one better. It's a meta-narrative satire of Star Trek and fictional television serials similar to Star Trek. And in the larger scheme of things, an adept critique of our ego-driven narcissistic society, where the stars matter and no one else does. If you are a star or the lead in the show, you live, and everyone else's life and purpose revolves around you. They validate your existence. Instead of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, the needs of the elite or top few outweigh the needs of the many. Like I said, a deft critique of our culture.
This book in some respects, oddly enough, echoes the themes of the prior one.
Also reading a lot of newspaper articles online. They discovered a solar system with seven planets, including one like earth, orbiting a dwarf star. So, maybe aliens will invade us after all?
OR after the Doofus destroys Earth, we can escape to this distant solar system?
And the New Yorker had a rather interesting article... Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds.
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)
Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.
Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”
Well it appealed to the frustrated psychology major inside of me, at any rate.