December 2021 books
Table of Contents
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
This was a terrible book. 1.5/5 stars. Review soon to come in The Tech.
The Stranger, Albert Camus
4/5. This was my first existential read. A man who is indifferent to life reacts to being accused of murder. The book opens with the man, Meursault, apathetically attending his mother’s funeral. She moved out of their shared apartment some years ago because he was not able to financially support her on his meager salary. At the funeral, he barely feels any sadness and is instead preoccupied with the sweltering heat. Once he returns home, he befriends his neighbor Raymond, a pimp, and helps him physically assault his girlfriend for cheating on him. He does this not with enthusiasm but with a “Sure, I’ll do it”, nonchalant attitude. Drawn into his neighbor’s underworld, he gets caught in a brawl between the girlfriend’s brother and Raymond. To refrain Raymond from shooting the brother, Meursault grabs it from Raymond but ends up shooting the brother instead. In that moment, he only recalls the sun beating down on him, which induced him to pull the trigger.
The second half of the book details Meursault’s life after capture. In prison, he reconciles with life and decides that it matters not when or how he will die but only that he will eventually die. Therefore he doesn’t care about appealing his innocence and instead accepts his fate. He feels closer to his mother then, as he realizes she probably felt the same way on her death. That’s why she became engaged to another man so late in her life. On the last day before his execution by guillotine, a priest tries to persuade him to accept Jesus as his savior, for only by believing in Him will he achieve eternal life. Meursault, however, armed with his recent epiphany, scoffs at the priest and his beliefs. In the end he dies happily in front of a large crowd.
Broadly speaking, the book is about absurdism and the futility of rationalism. Every character around Meursault seeks something in life – a companion (Salamano), marriage/emotional fulfillment (Marie), revenge (Raymond). Meursault on the other hand lives without putting much thought into his actions. When his boss offers to move him to Paris for a promotion, Meursault rejects the notion (p. 41):
I said yes but that really it was all the same to me. Then he asked if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.
After the murder, Marie is hopeful that he will be released and marry her. His lawyer hopes that Meursault will provide a strong defense for him to work with. These attempts are all met with apathy. During the trial, the prosecution sought to provide a rational explanation for the murder by concentrating on Meursault’s indifference to his mother’s death. Meursault does not understand the focus on this seemingly unrelated topic to the murder. The flood of reporters in the courthouse, eager for a story and thus an explanation for Meursault’s actions, symbolize society’s need to rationalize the absurd.
Finally, Meursault’s indifference towards life can be seen throughout the book by his description of other characters. In Marie, his lover, he only ever comments on her physical traits, such as her clothes or breasts. In Salamano and his dog, Meursault only notices their yellow complexions and splotchy skin.
Overall, this was a different read from what I’m used to. I’d recommend the book for anyone interested in learning more about existentialism or wants to be inspired by Meursault’s actions.
To Hold Up the Sky, Liu Cixin
3.5/5. This is a collection of short stories by Liu Cixin, originally published between 1985 and 2014. The collection was translated into English by multiple authors and published as To Hold Up the Sky in 2020. There are 11 stories in total, and I’ll briefly go through each one and why I like/dislike them.
“The Village Teacher” (2000)
This is either my favorite or second favorite story.
In a remote mountain village school in northwest China, a teacher, in his last dying breaths, teaches his impoverished students Newton’s three laws of motion. The children walk miles to attend school, usually against their parents’ wishes. The region is backward and traditional and wholly uneducated. The villagers sold off all the advanced farming equipment granted to them by the government for 250 yuan, two meals worth of food. A father decided to sacrifice his wife’s life in childbirth in order to save the child, a son. The villagers tore down the school walls to use as kindle.
In this backwater, the teacher sees himself undertaking most likely a futile task. He knows most of his students will not make it to middle school and that they will live the rest of their life farming and toiling in these remote mountains. Yet on his deathbed, he recalls a passage from one of Lu Xun’s works:
Imagine a windowless, iron room. Many people lie asleep inside. They will soon suffocate and die in their sleep. You shout, and a few hopeless sleepers awaken to a wretched fate that you are powerless to prevent. Have you done them a favor?
Unless you wake them up, what hope do they have to escape?
This passage motivates him to use his last lesson to teach the children the basic laws of physics.
While the the village school sputters on its last breath, hundreds of thousands of miles away watching Earth is a fleet of aliens, the Carbon Federation, engaged in an intergalactic war with the Silicon Federation. In an effort to cordon off the Silicon Federation, which has retreated to the outermost edge of the Milky Way’s second arm, the Carbon Federation is destroying planets with no sign of advanced civilization. The criteria for being deemed a civilization is answering three questions of the 3C Civilization Test correctly.
As suspected, the schoolchildren from this remote village are captured by the Carbon Federation to be administered the test as soon as their teacher imparts the last of Newton’s Three Laws of Motion in his dying breath. They answer three questions correctly, unwittingly saving humanity from destruction.
I was moved by this story for two reasons.
First, this story is an ode to teachers. Despite China’s increasing standard of living and GDP, its rural citizens are largely left behind in its prosperity. Children frequently drop out of school to work in cities or be married off. The most remote rural regions are still largely traditional and thus, in the terms of city-folk, “uncultured” or “uneducated”.
This story asks, is it worth it to spend time and money on a futile cause? The schoolteacher believes so. In the Lu Xun passage, the “hopeless sleepers” are the students, forever relegated to live a life of ignorance (a “wreteched fate that you are powerless to prevent”) in their villages (“windowless, iron room”). The person shouting is the teacher. If he doesn’t attempt to teach them, will they even have the slightest chance to escape this backwater?
Furthermore, when the alien fleet spares human civilization, they notice an interesting trait about the fledgling species. They transmit knowledge across time through “teachers”. For them, advanced beings with hereditary memory, this is absurd and primitive. Though they see this method of information transfer as inferior, they are still in awe of humanity for independently evolving this far, without interference from extraterrestial civilizations.
This brings me to my next point: the juxtaposition of the large and the small. In his foreword, Liu attests that he always aims to “imagine and describe the relationship between the Great and the Small” in his works. In “The Village Teacher”, this is obvious. Beings less than 10 years old in a tiny, forgotten sliver of China are caught in a hyperspace war that has lasted hundreds of millions of light-years. The head of the Carbon Federation fleet, the High Archon, marvels at humanity’s purity for having evolved so far with no outside interference. Humans have not yet gained the knowledge to communicate through multidimensional space and to travel through hyperspace. However, this also means humans are also spared from the universe’s darkness and violence.
As the saying goes, igorance is bliss. The High Archon recalls the last time the universe has seen independent evolution of a civilization, tens of millions of years ago.
“It was an era full of passion and yearning. A terrestial planet was a complete, limitless world to our ancestors…”
The senator felt as if he had found a pearl in the depths of his ancestors’ ocean home. “Such a small planet, populated by organisms living their lives, dreaming of their dreams, completely oblivious to the strife and destruction in their galaxy. To them, the universe must seem like a bottomless well of hopes and dreams.” … “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” said the High Archon.
“The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible,” said the senator.
This passage (pp. 50-51) made me feel the same way I felt more than a year ago when I read Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy. It’s that awe when you realize everything you think you know is not all that’s out there. You feel insignificant. There’s so much more, things we can’t even imagine. We just don’t know.
“The Time Migration” (2014)
In this world, people can immigrate to the future with the help of cryocooling. Originally planning to only migrate a century into the future, they decide to settle 11,000 years in the future instead, when life on Earth has returned to its most primitive state.
The story opens with a famous Tang dynasty poem by Chen Zi-Ang (661-702), “On the Gate to Yuzhou” (p. 52):
前不见古人， 后不见来者。 念天地之悠悠， 独怆然而涕下！
Where, before me, are the ages that have gone? And where, behind me, are the coming generations? I think of heaven and earth, without limit, without end, And I am all alone and my tears fall down.
The poet laments how he will never meet those who have already passed away and those who have yet to be born. Realizing how time and earth are boundless and how transient his own existence is, he sheds tears.
It’s a moving poem beceause it puts into perspective how little we experience and how much we miss out on in our lives. Story is slightly above average, partly because I’m biased about the story’s opening.s
“2018-04-01” (2009)
This story is about a man who weighs the cost of life-extending treatment. He could easily embezzle the money to afford such treatment given his position in the finance sector but the only thing holding him back is his love for a woman. An average story about human selfishness.
“Fire in Earth” (2000)
An engineer introduces a revolutionary mining technique in an effort to honor his father, who died in the mines.
I think this story was the most “human” work I’ve read of Liu’s, in that the motivations of the main character stem from interpersonal relationships. Good concept but I found the story stagnant.
“Contraction” (1985)
What happens when the universe stops expanding and begins to shrink? Does anything we do matter then? Our parents’ deaths, the disasters on Earth?
Existentialist science fiction. Great story.
“Mirror” (2004)
This is probably my third favorite story of the collection. The story is not based on a novel premise – what happens if there’s an omniscient being? In particular, if that omniscient being is a superstring computer that has calculated the placement of every atom in the universe since the Big Bang?
Against the backdrop of a government corruption scandal, the story explores the reactions of humans to such an object, a “mirror”. As the mirror retraces the history of human civilization, the observers notice the discrepancies between recorded history and actual history. Troy was just a collection of houses, and Marco Polo never reached China. In the present-day, the mirror reveals the illicit actions of each government official in the room – their embezzlement, the secret lives of their children. One righteous official,though, originally framed and in prison for exposing his senior’s corrupt deeds, sees the age of the mirror as a golden age. To him, no evil could hereforth exist. “Human society will become as pure as crystal.” (p. 167). The man who programmed the mirror challenges this judgement.
“Imagine if DNA never made mistakes, always replicating and inheriting with perfect fidelity. What would life on Earth become?” … “Society is the same way… A fish can’t live in perfectly clear water. A society where no one ever makes mistakes in ethics is, in reality, dead.”
The programmer behind the mirror admits to his own infidelity towards his wife, which he’s scared the mirror will expose. He defends his immoral actions (p. 168):
“But doesn’t everyone live like that? Who doesn’t have some sort of secret? … If the digital mirror makes everyone into perfect people who can’t take a step out of line – then what’s even fucking left?”
I don’t like the last example because of its macho undertones, but I agree with the theme that humanity has evolved through its mistakes, whether they be good or bad. I’m not trying to justify the Holocaust, but because of it we as a species are now more aware of human rights abuses and racist sentiments.
The universe does not operate in black and white but instead in shades of grey. We shouldn’t force it to, either.
“Ode to Joy” (2005)
At the final UN gathering, amidst a classical piano concert, the delegates realize that Earth sits on a string of an alien’s instrument and that they are literally caught in an alien’s personal concert. Small –> Big.
“Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming” (2001)
This is a war story and too political. The author’s note at the beginning of the story dedicates it to “the people of Russia, whose literature has influenced me all my life.”
“Sea of Dreams” (2002)
I did not like this story. There were so many plot holes compared to Liu’s other works. What happened to the ocean animals? Why did this alien appear out of nowhere when in other stories some origin story was given for the appearance of aliens in the solar system?
Images are wondrous but the story has no substance.
“Cloud of Poems” (2003)
The plot is a little absurd but I liked the theme that technology is unable to surpass art. An extraterrestial god tries to surpass Li Bai by writing all possible five- and seven-syllable line permutations of Chinese characters. To save all these poems, he would need to destroy all the planets orbiting the sun to encode the data using quantum bits. After the quantum computer finishes composing all the poems though, the god realizes that he cannot make a program to find the best poems, the ones that surpass Li Bai (p. 315).
“At the start of the poetry composition, I immediately set out to program software that could analyze poetry. At that point, technology once again met that unsurpassable obstacle in the pursuit of art. Even now, I’m still unable to write software that can judge and appreciate poetry.”
I am probably once again biased towards this story because I like poetry and literature and art.
“The Thinker” (2003)
This is my favorite story in the collection, probably because it’s a simple love story that unfolds across a lifetime (one of my personal weaknesses).
The story starts with a brain surgeon in training visiting an observatory at night, where he meets a young astronomer. They discuss their professions and the finiteness of the universe compared to the infinity of human thoughts. Before the surgeon leaves, the astronomer hands him an abstract painting made of pebbles she collected. The curve on the painting represents the twinkling of the sun. The doctor never forgets that night and the woman he met.
Ten years later, on a hospital employee trip, the doctor visits the observatory, where he happens to meet the astronomer again. There he see more pebble paintings on her wall and points out that one is identical to the one she handed him ten years ago. Since no two stars are identical, they quickly theorize that the phenomenon is caused by transmission of the twinkling between two stars. To test this hypothesis, they agree to meet seven years later at the same time and place.
Sure enough, when they meet seven years later, they observe the same twinkling pattern from a third star. To gather yet another datapoint, they plan to meet again 17 years later.
By the fourth meeting, both are renowned professionals in their field. The surgeon brings a model of the human brain as a gift to the astronomer. Within the model, lights flash between neurons to demonstrate how human consciousness passes thoughts to different parts of the brain. The astronomer realizes that these neural flashes resemble the twinkling of the stars and asks what the stars must be thinking. The surgeon says only impulses that have traversed the entire universe can be felt. The rest are insubstantial (p. 333).
“We used up a lifetime, and saw of ‘him’ just one twinkling impulse that ‘he’ couldn’t even feel?” she said hazily, as though in the middle of a dream.
“Use an entire human civilization’s life span, and we still might not see one of ‘his’ actual experiences.”
“People’s lives are bitter and short.”
The astronomer then realizes that since the universe is always expanding, a cosmological impulse will never travel far from its source. In other words, the universe will never have an actual experience. She asks the surgeon if humans ever have actual experiences. “‘I have’, the surgeon replies confidently.” (p. 334). In his mind, his journey with this woman, who he met on the same mountain 34 years ago, is real.
I liked this story again because of the juxtaposition of the Grand and the Small. The universe is so vast that it will never have a true experience yet it is ultimately finite. On the other hand, our brains that fit inside our skulls are inifinitely rich in thoughts. It’s refreshing to see that despite Liu’s grand views of space, he still believes humans are infinitely more complex and beautiful.
Beartown, Fredrik Backman
A couple friends have recommended me this book over the past few years and I finally got around to reading it. It’s really, really good and extremely accurate in summing up the effect of sports on a small town. The two main themes are inequality, winning, masculinity.
The book starts off slow, which is good, because it builds each character’s backstory. There’s a whole cast: the former hockey star, the new hockey star, the poor kid who has always been overlooked but is actually a secret star, the old school coach, the new coach, the bully, the bullied, the jock who hasn’t come out of the closet yet, the coach’s daughter who has no interest in hockey, etc. The list goes on. It’s really a wonder how Backman was able to tell each of their stories so succinctly yet so fully so that the story felt neither rushed nor too crowded. Each of the characters represents a different part of Beartown, and each of them are affected by hockey a different way. Honestly it reminded me of Sex Education.
Onto the themes. First, inequality. Beartown is a microcosm. There are the have’s (the Heights) and the have-not’s (the Hollows). Those who play hockey and those who don’t. Those who are destined to sludge away in the town’s factory after graduation and those with a brighter future, farther away. However, it’s more complicated than surface-level inequality. Kevin is rich and possesses NHL-level talent but at home he is bereft of love and emotion. His best friend Benji is poor and lives alone with his mother after his father took his own life with a pistol in the woods one day but is raised with love by his mother and three older sisters. I could go on but basically, everyone is complex and not who they seem on the surface.
Second, winning. There is nothing in Beartown, and it’s a place so accustomed to losing that it is only focused on winning. All hopes on winning are tied to its youth hockey team, a group of 17 year old boys who are told only to win at all costs. And win they do. The novel then explores how far so many people desperate for something will go to win. Even if it means suppressing a rape of an underage girl by the star hockey player.
Third, masculinity. This goes hand in hand with winning. From a young age, the boys are told that they are bears and bears don’t lose. They do whatever it takes to win. It doesn’t help that the club board and sponsors reflect this culture of toxic masculinity as well. Kira, wife of Peter, the club’s general manager, recalls the first time she went to a club formal and was treated as a servant despite being Peter’s wife and a career lawyer. That was the last time she attended one of their events. These powerful men frequently demean women from the stands. In Beartown in general, the narrator comments how hockey is only for boys and girls are only involved if 1) they are fans or 2) they are trophies for the winning boys on the team. Before Maya is raped, William Lyt bets Kevin that Kevin won’t be able to sleep with Maya at an afterparty. Then of course, there’s the problem of victim shaming and protecting the boy at all costs, especially since the boy is going to restore Beartown to its former glory.
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
This book is anything but a love story. A lot of us have grown up hearing the tragic tale of Anna Karenina, who fell in love with the young Count Vronsky despite her existing marriage and throws herself underneath a train. Personally, I believe Tolstoy explored the clash between the old and the new in Russia through the lens of this romance and the characters that surround them.
To understand the novel, we must first understand Russia. Originally a collection of princedoms centered around Kiev united by their Orthodoxy religion and Slavic origin, through a series of marriages and alliances the kingdoms and duchies became united in 1547 as the tsardom of Russia. For centuries, Russia was considered the backwater of Europe, always there but uneducated and uncultured. Through much of its history, boyars or nobles held most if not all the political influence in the kingdom after the tsar. More than 90 percent of the population consisted of serfs, or peasants who were literally enslaved to the land. All this changed during the reign of Peter the Great, who ruled from 1682 to 1725. After a tour of Europe, he sought to modernize his kingdom and put an end to Russia being the laughingstock of Europe. In the century and a half following his death, Russia grappled with implementing new reforms and adopting Western manners. In 1861, Alexander II abolished serfdom. However, Westernization was only visible in cities and among the aristocracy. The novel picks up this struggle between the old and the new, the Russia and the West, the urban and the rural.
Anna Karenina, married to a renowned St. Petersburg politician, is a Society woman, which is to say she’s a rich housewife who participates in the elite social circles of the time. She falls in love with a charming young officer, Count Vronsky, on a visit to Moscow. Vronsky is young, extravagant, and brash and represents the new nobility that arose in Russia at the time. While Anna is supposed to be a devoted wife and mother to maintain her husband’s political reputation, she puts her own interests first in her relationship with Vronsky. This struggle between the the service of family and the service of self torments Anna throughout the novel. Anna is a modern woman in a conservative world. Dolly, Anna’s sister-in-law, on her way to visit Anna, reflects on Anna’s lifestyle and choices: “Everybody lives, everybody enjoys living” (p. 546). Of course, while on the surface Anna may seem happy, she is actually tormented by her choice to leave her husband and son.
The other half of the book follows a wealthy landowner Levin, who prefers the company of peasants to that of Society. He is troubled by his quest for meaning in life and the role of God. His internal struggle on the old and new is related agriculture. He wants his peasants to adopt new agricultural technology from the West but also theorizes that the unique relation between the Russian peasant and his/her land hinders modernization. In terms of politics though, Levin could not be bothered by the battle between the conservative and liberal landowners and during the provincial elections, is heard asking his stepbrother who he should vote for (p. 586). After his marriage to Kitty, he is constantly preoccupied by his need to understand the purpose of his life. The book concludes with his “enlightenment” after a conversation with a peasant, through whom he realizes the meaning of life is to live for good and live for God (pp. 715-717).
Some brief notes on the characters:
- Dolly and Anna are foils imo.
- Dolly: husband cheats on her, doting mother of six children, worried about her family’s expenses and the raising of her children, still loves her husband
- Anna: cheats on her husband, negligent mother to her daughter with Vronsky (but loving to her son with her husband), doesn’t love her husband, flirts with men to test her charm
- Oblonsky and Levin are foils.
I also want to comment on Tolstoy’s writing. His prose is direct, simple, long, but still incredibly enticing. The narrator knows the thoughts of each character and as a result there are passages from the point-of-view of Kitty, Dolly, Koznyshev, a dog, and many more minor characters. A couple pages (pp. 223-230) are devoted entirely to descriptions of scythe mowing yet are deeply interesting. This is my first Russian novel and I definitely find this style of writing more attractive than the long, droning sentences of British novels of this time.
Overall, 5/5. One of my top 10, even top 5 books.