The World Unites: Clearly It’s Fiction

Recently, my wife and I went to the local cinema to watch “Project Hail Mary.” It stars both Ken (Ryan Gosling) and a pile of rocks (James Ortiz), and both play their parts well.

And, subsequently, I’ve read the novel that the movie was based on. I enjoyed them both, just as I enjoyed “The Martian,” book and movie. Both books were written by Andy Weir. And, as if you didn’t already know that, there may be spoilers in this post. You are warned.

From https://www.mgm.com/movies/project-hail-mary

I found “Project Hail Mary” to be well done in both movie and book form—which is something, given that there are differences between the two stories in the two media. The movie simplifies the story and leaves out much of the science details, some of which I wish that they had hinted more strongly in the film. For instance, in the book Eva Stratt had planned for Dr. Grace to be a backup science officer all along and had quietly ensured he had all the necessary science insight. Or that Ryland Grace had to be the one to go partly because of a rare genetic trait that made him unusually likely to survive a long coma.

Most of all, I wish that the way that the breeding of nitrogen-resistant Astrophage worked in the book was in the movie. I liked the slow progress through generations of microbes; it’s a reminder of how evolution and deliberate breeding actually work.

But I understand that it’s almost always necessary to leave details out of movies—they are a different, simpler narrative medium than books.

At least one change from the movie to the book improved the story, for me. In the movie, Eva was businesslike and determined, just as she was in the book. But film Eva has a bit more humanity—the karaoke scene, for instance, softens her. In the movie, she forces Dr. Ryland Grace to go on the mission by inducing his coma early, as she does in the book—but Sandra Hüller’s excellent acting shows the conflict Eva feels despite her compulsion to have the project succeed at all costs.

The book.

Well. I like my science fiction with rivets, and “Project Hail Mary” is science fiction with plenty of plausible, interesting science conjecture—it has got its rivets on. Yet any story is better if it has both factual depth and human heart—and like Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings, the deepening friendship between Ryland Grade and Rocky provides a lot of heart. Meanwhile, the themes of what bravery is and isn’t, and whether it’s ever OK to remove another person’s agency to save others—those, added to the science, gives great depth to the story. I also like that Dr. Grace is literally the “chosen one” who isn’t chosen for some magic or innate superpower—he’s chosen for his science background, built over years of study. Score one for graduate school.

He is definitely the reluctant hero. “Some people are failures,” as he says. “Some people don’t rise to the challenge.” And yet, in the end, Dr. Grace does.

Partly due to Rocky. While the designated astronauts are training, Dr. Grace comments to Yao Li-Jie, played by Kenneth Leung, that Grace doesn’t think he has a bravery gene that the crew has. Leung’s character replies that it’s not a gene—you just have to find someone to be brave for. Ironically, Dr. Grace finds an alien to be brave for—I like that the film shows even a coward can sometimes do incredibly brave things.

If anything, the most fantastic, unbelievable part of the book and movie isn’t that mysterious bugs are eating Sol and most nearby stars—it’s that the humans of our world would so quickly unite behind such a complex project. Our current leaders would probably deny that Astrophage is real and refuse to be part of Project Hail Mary because it sounds too Catholic (or is a Chinese hoax). Would that we respected science a bit more in this reality.

There are many stories that work as both books and movies and many that don’t. In my life, my earliest experience with such a working pair was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee—great book, great film. Also, both the book and movie “The Princess Bride” are wildly entertaining.

Sometimes, one part of the movie-book dyad is superior. I admire Stephen King as a writer, but enjoy many of the movies adapted from his works more than the original books or stories. “Stand by Me” is way more satisfying to me than “The Body,” for example.

Anyway, I’m glad both book and movie work so well for “Project Hail Mary.” It’s an uplifting tale, with troubling elements, which adds to its charm—it can spark endless discussion, as deep stories do. Yes, I am also among those who appreciate that the alien was so “alien,” but in important ways, so much the same as us, too. Even some surprising similarities are explained—Rocky “sees” with sonar and has much better hearing than Ryland Grace, and in the book Dr. Grace wonders why their hearing should overlap so much. Rocky raps on the floor and asks if Dr. Grace could hear that—their hearing overlaps because important physical sounds in both of their worlds overlap in sonic frequency. Well, cool.

So, in summary. I rate the movie “Project Hail Mary” 10 of 10. Or, in other, more musical, words: "Amaze, amaze, amaze."

Reshaping the Weirdness of Oz to Something New

I have not yet read the novel “Wicked,” but I do plan to, having recently seen the musical movie of the same title.

“The Wizard of Oz” was always a bit of a strange tale to me. I read the book when I was young, and it was OK but not one of my favorites. That also sums up my feelings about the 1939 movie, too—it’s OK, it was on TV in my childhood and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something that I was all that gaga over.

Never mind, the world of “Wicked” is a radical re-imagining of L Frank Baum’s and Hollywood’s imaginings, and Oz isn’t exactly the same. Yes, in the 1939 movie, the wizard was willing to hoodwink the crowd with his tricks—but in Wicked, we see a much darker Wizard of Oz.

And I like it. It’s relevant to today. I feel that we follow too many wizards in our lives now—fakers whose only talent is to play to the crowd, and who feel that you unite folks by giving them someone to hate.

My wife saw the stage musical “Wicked” in London, but I have not experienced the stage show, so the movie was my first introduction to this alternative alternate reality. I am a fan, and I find myself really enjoying the songs, too.

When they do work, musicals can be magical. I think part of what they do is what the songs in the musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” did—the singing is a convention that allows the characters to think aloud, to reveal themselves. It also helps like a musical when there is a great ensemble song.

“Wicked” is wickedly good partly due to the quality of its songs. It’s also good because of they way in which both the songs and the plot beyond the songs subverts expectations of what or who is truly wicked.

I liked that Glinda (or Guh-Linda), while good at heart, is also vain and shallow. That the most intelligent and empathetic characters, Elphaba, is the one who will be falsely branded as “wicked.” That much of the social life of Shiz concerns ephemeral fads and shallow criteria of what or who will be popular—sort of like school actually was, although more high school than university.

Wikipedia image of book cover.

Popularity as a goal is a strong cultural force in this era of orange ogre Presidents and social media and success measured by clicks—and “Wicked” is partly a rumination on how far some people may go in order to achieve popularity.

Plus, it has all those scary parallels with the world we inhabit: “What you need to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy.” Yikes, Mr. Wizard, that’s so sadly true and sad that it seems so true.

I don’t have an opinion of the way Wicked was “Hobbit”-fied—that is, a shorter story was somehow expanded, for “The Hobbit” was a short children’s book somehow morphed into a trilogy of movies. For “Wicked” a Broadway play was somehow doubled in length and made into two movies.

Poster from www.Wickedmovie.com web site.

I do think that the pace of the first movie was a bit slow at times—I liked the climatic song, but it just went on for a bit too long.

Yet, I can only judge the movie, not it in comparison to the stage show. And I give the movie two thumbs way up. I am excited for part two to come out later this year so this wicked saga can continue. I predict that it’s going to popular, even without a makeover from Gah-Linda.

Reading Two Books About My Place

Cover images of two books, both from Amazon.com.

This summer, I’ve read two novels that offered more than the usual pleasure that any novel does of taking you out of the everyday world into someone else’s vision of the world. One reason I liked them is because these two summer reads were both set in my part of the planet.

“The World of Pondside,” by Mary Helen Stefaniak, is an interesting novel, part mystery, part suspense, about a death at an Iowa City fictional nursing home, and the slightly shady back story of a computer game that is set at that nursing home.

“Motel Sepia,” by Dale Kueter, is more of a crime drama, set in Cedar Rapids in the 1950s at a real motel, although the crime is fictional.

In “The World of Pondside,” Pondside Manor, a long-term care facility and nursing home, is recreated in a computer game in which residents and staff can have their own avatars and live their best lives. The administrator becomes a hot New York fashion designer. Long ago dances and events live again through the memories of some residents, brought to life in the game partly through digitized photos.

Image I made of Mary Helen Stefaniak when she was a visiting writer at Mount Mercy University one day in fall 2022.

A kitchen helper, Foster Kresowik, has helped Robert Kallman, a younger resident affected by Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease, bring his vision to life via the game. And, at the start of the book, Kallman is discovered dead in the pond and the computer server that runs the game is gone. Was it suicide? Murder? Was there something about the game tied to Kallman’s death?

One thing that’s great about “Pondside” is Stefaniak paints interesting portraits of contrasting characters. One of my favorites was Erika Petersen, a U of I nursing student who gets a job at Pondside Manor. She’s young, she’s a sorority sister, she’s pretty—and she’s very bright. Besides studying nursing, she also studies computer science. And thus, she offers some of the more interesting twists and at times takes a leadership role.

To me, the idea of a nursing student studying computer science is an unusual combination, but not beyond reality. I teach at a university with a large nursing school, and I know some of our brightest students study nursing—they have to be bright, nursing is a demanding field of study. And, now and then, I’ll encounter one with enough transfer credits and gumption to add some unexpected other field. So, Erika, to me, seemed like a familiar kind of driven young woman.

Two of Stefaniak's books for sale at MMU last fall.

In the book, Stefaniak kept me guessing, and I was not expecting many of the plot twists. It’s a unique, timely book, firmly set in today’s world.

“Motel Sepia,” in contrast, draws from a world that was rather than the world than is. It is set in a motel in Cedar Rapids established by a Black couple who run several successful businesses. Early in the book, there is a brutal murder in Illinois, and somehow you know that the murder and some crimes in Cedar Rapids (a “kissing bandit” is politely robbing local establishments) will collide.

In the meantime, Roy and Lillian Sanders are busy, very busy, running their motel. And Roy is concerned about race relations. The motel is one of the few stops along Highway 30 in the 1950s that welcomes Black guests, and the motel becomes an unusual place where White and Black people sometimes come together.

Dale Kueter also wrote a nonfiction book about the Vietnam War and spoke at MMU in 2015 during a series on Vietnam. Image I made of him then.

It was fun reading about Cedar Rapids of the 1950s. The businesses and other settings are of a bygone time but still familiar, too. I was not alive when the book was set and I never had been in Cedar Rapids before the 1970s, so it is not a time I have any memories of. Yet, I liked seeing my town of the past spring to life.

I enjoyed both and would recommend both. It was fun this summer to read two diverse works of fiction set in places nearby.

How Media Divides and Unites Us

Two books about media I have read in 2022.

I’ve recently read two very different books about media, and they prompt me to marvel a bit about how our media consumption can, at the same time, unite and divide us.

“Narratives, Nerd-fighters and New Media” by Jennifer Burek Pierce explores the geeky corner of the internet created by the Vlog Brothers, Hank and John Green. The book describes how the two authors and media producers have created and facilitated a global village of readers and online content creators, centered at first about John Green’s books and their Vlog Brothers channel.

The other book, “Hoax,” by Brian Stelter explores the fake narrative of the 2020 election that took hold and led to the Jan. 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow a legal, and relatively clean, election.

First, the book about uniting. In “Narratives,” Burek Pierce briefly reviews the reach of an online community crated by the Green brothers. Hank Green in particular has been a driving force behind the creation of many interesting corners of You Tube through the company Complexity. SciShow, Crash Course and others are places where one goes to satisfy curiosity.

John has been involved in some of those projects, and is a well-known young adult novelist. In recent years, Hank also has joined John as a novelist, writing two science fiction books. One central theme of Burke Pierce’s book is how central reading is to the online community that centers around the brothers. How reading, and sharing about reading, creates a sense of place.

Place and community can be promoted by the internet. And the Green brothers are to be credited because they use their moment of fame not just for self-gratification, but for their ongoing “project to reduce world suck” in which worthwhile causes, like health care in Sierra Leone, are supported.

“Hoax” is a different kind of book about different media. Stelter describes the weird, symbiotic relationship between Fox News and former President Donald Trump—how, due to his media consumption habits, Trump picked up many of his key talking points from Fox News programs.

And, driven by ratings successes, Fox evolved to emphasize the opinion programming that Trump favored. Journalists and journalism were squeezed out of a network whose name has “news” in it. As the corrosive and destructive Trump presidency went on, it seems like Fox was coopted by the MAGA movement to the point where it was almost captive to the whims of Trump.

To me, one key to the weird new era we inhabit is the influence of social media in the form of things like Facebook and YouTube—where community can form that, unlike nerd fighters, doesn’t seek to build a club of readers so much as a mutually cheering squad that pushes and promotes the most extreme views. What I mean is that the community-building power of the internet can work strongly against the community as a whole. And the incentives to echo more extreme views is something Hank Green ruminated about in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capital:

The body politic seems to mostly be suffering from the community building being done by election deniers and the MAGA crowd—but I don’t think those negative effects of incentivizing extremism are exclusive to the political right.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of "Hoax" is that, due to its time and place and sizeable audience, part of what drove the Trump years of insanity was Sean Hannity and his kin on an old-school cable news channel.

Of the two books, I enjoyed “Narratives” more, but then I’m a casual inhabitant of the neighborhood it describes. Perhaps “Hoax” is on a more important topic. The books suffers from its chatty, gossipy tone, where who is sleeping with whom gets in the way of the main narrative but is still worth the time to unpack some of what went on as Trump and Fox grew together.

But books both are interesting reads on recent moments in media history. And both remind us that media often rewards the most noise, which can be a detriment to us if we remain unaware of that tendency.

Rating “The Anthropocene Reviewed” by John Green

There is a lot to like in a new book by novelist and vlogger John Green. His newest work is not a novel, but a collection of nonfiction essays, some of which appeared in a podcast that has the same title as the book: “The Anthropocene Reviewed.” (The Anthropocene is an idea of a geological age named due to the way in which our species has reshaped the environment of our home planet.)

There are also some things to not like. I don’t always agree with him, and dislike a few of his reviews. He manages to extract meaning from an opening sequence of “Penguins of Madagascar,” which is cute of him to do, but I worry it might lead some innocent soul to experience that movie—and, please, don’t. It’s a horrible movie, more horrible because it successfully appeals to the lack of aesthetic sense of the young via flashy action, simple gags and silly characters. A bad movie made all the worse by being part of a trend of contemporary movies that make the meaningless artful as a way of thoughtlessly entertaining us, especially children. Do yourself a favor. Pick any Pixar movie for your kids instead.

In defense of John Green, I will agree that a point of his in this essay—that we, humans, make consequential decisions for other species—is important, and one of the many compelling factoids in this entertaining set of essays that comes from this review is that lemmings never commit suicide by casting themselves into the sea.

We choose to believe many things that just aren’t so.

As a journalism professor, I also think John is too hard on CNN—although I agree with his premise that a huge problem with news media is the lack of context in most news. I also concur that long-term, important trends are under-reported because they don’t cause unusual day-to-day events. My issue with his point is that I don’t think CNN is central to these trends—those tendencies existed before that cable TV network and are exacerbated today by social media. Lack of grounding in context has been a problem with American journalism since colonial times, although the problem is getting worse. CNN is not innocent in this, I just don’t it’s as guilty as Green implies.

In my kitchen, a monarch butterfly has emerged. My wife and I adopted a caterpillar in a program run by a local nature center, and we successfully raised this one to butterfly stage (not much to it, it was large when we got it and formed its chrysalis the next day). We are leaving on a trip and will have to have our daughter release it after its wings dry, so I have not seen the other side of its wings to confirm its biological sex. But I see no evidence of scent spots that males have. We named our caterpillar Anderson Pooper. After the CNN anchor. Turns out it may be Andrea.

Still, agreeing with his opinions or disagreeing with them is not really central to enjoying this book. In many ways, I like reading an essay that I don’t completely agree with—it causes lots of thoughts in me, which is pleasant to experience.

And good writing should encourage the reader to think—full credit for that, John Green.

A daughter got me this book for Fathers Day. It's cool that John Green signed thousands of sheets of paper so that each copy of the book has his actual signature in it. I don't think he doodled a cat, however--I think that image may be courtesy of a 5-year-old grandson who has a cat. Or his mother. Cool, either way--I am happy to have a book signed by John and decorated by family.

Beyond the nits I can pick, the book, overall, is excellent. Green has a pleasing, repetitive structure to many essays. He’ll open either with a personal anecdote or a seemingly unrelated tidbit, ruminate on it for a page, and then the main idea or thing that this essay reviews enters the stage, with Green sharing what he likes or does not like using the opening tidbit as narrative glue or for comparison. Each essay ends on the titular topic of the essay being rated on a 5-point scale.

He also writes about how artificial, how human, the 5-point rating scale is, which is part of the fun. He’s rating the works of humankind on a contrived, human scale. We live in a universe that our complex mammal brains give us the ability to reshape and tell stories about and make sense and nonsense of.

I’m listening to “The Mountain Goats” as I write this, a band I have never tuned into before. I don’t know that they’ll be a favorite of mine as they are of John’s—so much in musical taste depends on your age when you encounter that music—but I can hear his point. It’s good music.

It’s also media consumption that feels more useful than both CNN and “Penguins of Madagascar.”

To me, the book is all about the duality of humanity. We are a global species and we are doing a lot of damage to this Earth—and yet, we have the capacity for shared endeavor and understanding that maybe leaves some room for hope that we can learn to shape that impact in a less disastrous way.

One of my favorite essays is early in the book: “Humanity’s Temporal Range.” Temporal range refers to how long a species has been that species (or will be that species). We are, as humans, much younger than many types of life whose existence we have ended. The dodo was far more ancient than us. Elephants, whose long existence we now threaten, have been modern elephants for approximately 10 times longer than we have been modern humans—homo sapiens have had their hands on this planet for something on the order of 250,000 years, compared with the African elephant, lumbering along for more than 2 million years.

And one reason for us to think about the future of the elephant is that we are part of a complex web of life that we ignore at our peril.

As John puts it: “We probably didn’t know what we were doing thousands of years ago when we hunted some large mammals to extinction. But we know what we’re doing now. We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we chose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”

A profound point, even if the editor in me want to remind John that the name of our planet—Earth—is a proper noun. Maybe he means we are treading upon dirt—earth—but I think the sense of the noun in his sentence refers not to soil, but to our planetary home.

Consider another nit picked.

“The Anthropocene Reviewed” is a book of our time. It is written during the pandemic, which is one of the points. Such a pandemic has long been foreseen, and inevitably, like the next flood, will occur again because of human action and inaction.

So, it would be easy to despair at the state of humans. Indeed, in many personal essays, John Green deals with his own mental health struggles, living with the black force of meaninglessness.

However, he does not despair, and neither do I. His brother provides scant comfort for him in an essay about the pandemic by noting “the species will survive this.” Well, yes, but I would like to survive it, along with all who I love and even some who I don’t love, too. As Green notes, diseases that wipe out many humans are not unprecedented, they are very precedented, and what matters is our response.

Some of the essays concern nature, and how we are not separate from it, but part of it. “Sycamore Trees” are reviewed, and like Green, I am occasionally comforted by gardening and by nature. It’s good to gaze in awe at the trees.

As he puts it: “I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.”

It is.

Morning glory bud Monday in my backyard. It will be a pretty blue flower on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. Life is temporary but beautiful. It's good to be in awe of it.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away, that it’s too much of a spoiler, to quote the end of this flawed but marvelous book, because it encapsulates John Green's message well, and also the words will resonate more when you experience the journey that brings to you to them. We are connected to each other as humans and to the planet that spawned us. We are not entities on Earth, but part of Earth that has become conscious of being part of Earth. We are Earth experiencing Earth.

“I won’t survive, of course. I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. But until then: What an astonishment to breath on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.”

With a capital E.

I give “The Anthropocene Reviewed” five stars.

Books: Reading is Fundamental

“The post–Gutenberg world was revolutionized by the advent of the printed book.” Understanding the Media, your optional online text, page 89.

Image is 1940s Paperback from Amazon.com. Paperbacks in the 20th century made books less expensive and less durable. Today, books are also available as electronic e-files. But the most long-lasting book format is the so-called "hardback," or book with a hard cover.

(This post is required reading material for CO 140, a class I am teaching this spring, but y'all are invited to read this text for that class for free. You're welcome.)

Books are the first mass medium we turn our attention to because of their foundational nature. By this, I mean both they are the historic root of all mass media, and they still today remain an important foundation of content in the larger media world. Think of how many movies, online or network TV shows, are based on books.

Literature began orally, with poems and plays, but those literary ideas only became fixed when scribes started to, well, scribe. The first books in our culture date to around 3,000 BC, when Egyptians began writing book-length papyrus scrolls. Printing was invented by the Chinese around 700 AD, and in Europe, really took off after Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type for use on the press in 1488.

Books had originally been hand-written, and when scribes or monks had to transcribe them, they developed into elaborate works of art as well as texts.

But when books became more common, culture was shifted in multiple ways:

• 

  Johannes Gutenberg
  from Wikimedia Commons.
  

  Both the Renaissance and Reformation, revolutions in in knowledge and religions that fueled dramatic social upheavals, were indirectly caused by the spread of subversive ideas in book form.

• Our modern sense of “childhood” and “education” are largely tied to a culture that valued literacy, partly for economic reasons. A factory mechanic is a more valuable employee if he can read the manual that came with the steam engine (or, these days, the robot).

• While media content comes from many sources, the most recognized media tropes, stereotypes and characters first came to us in book form. Think of “Lord of the Rings” or Harry Potter. These days, nonfiction books still have political influence. As we noted earlier in media history, this country was partly created due to a booklet called “Common Sense.” The Civil War was foreshadowed by the cultural rift exposed in “Uncle Toms Cabin.” Former President Donald Trumps first impeachment was partly the result of the “Mueller Report,” a special counsel government report available in book form.

It is sometimes stated that we live in a “post literate” world—that the educational revolution caused by Gutenberg is being terminated by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, TicToc and YouTube.

That’s bogus, for many reasons. While it’s true that it’s a cultural problem literacy is not as “popular” as it once was—readership of all print media struggle, it’s difficult at Mount Mercy to encourage many people to glance at even brief printed works such as a 6-page edition of “The Mount Mercy Times.” Yet, in my experience, the brightest people I know are all “book” people. Sure, some book readers can be introverted nerds and retreat to books to get away—but think of how book-oriented almost all of your professors are. I grew up in a screen generation too, even if the screen of my youth was the television set. Anybody who has an advanced degree has come to terms with the need to both extract meaning from, and to produce, long text forms.

Even today, several MMU students are “book people,” and mostly they are among the best students I know. To an important degree, anybody seeking a university degree is learning the writing of their chose discipline—and the best and most effective writers are all book readers.

I think many ideas—both fictional and journalistic—are best expressed in book form. Books are a linear text medium that reflects sequential thought. That many people today don’t read means that many people don’t engage in deep thinking, because deep thought is cumulative, orderly, sequential—bookish.

If you want a healthy body, you have to both be lucky—we don’t control our DNA nor our environment—but also exercise and eat right. If you want a healthy brain, you face the same issues. I hope your DNA and the MMU environment foster and improve your thinking ability. But exercising your brain and gaining depth of knowledge still requires that you cultivate that brain by engaging in sustained mental work. In short, read a book.

How to be smart, part 1 of the How to Live series. Be like her. Read. Woman floats in Dead Sea, Wikimedia Commons image by Patrik Neckman.

And books that we enjoyed when we were young often form touchstones of our lives. Just as music we loved as a young adult partly becomes our personal soundtrack, the book you didn't have to read but devoured early in life sticks with you, something I ruminated about in this blog post I wrote in 2015 which is also about "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

Over time, I’ve written about books now and then on my blogs. Here is a selection of some past posts:

• February 2019: The Enduring Power of Books (another post for this class).

• August 2019: Memoirs that Make Me Wonder on The Why of XY (about two books, one my a woman, one by a man, that explore what key women mean in the authors lives).

• November 2020: Val Verde: A Fake Reality in a Tale of Fake Reality (a post about Hank Green’s latest novel).

• June 2019: Memoir, Michelle Style (about Michelle Obama’s autobiography).

• December  2018: An Absolutely Remarkable Green Year (about Hank's first book, still my favorite).

• January 2018: Vlog Bro Writes Touching YA Novel (for some equal time, John Green enters this blog, too).
  

And even today, prominent YouTubers sometimes get together. Over a book:

Val Verde: A Fake Reality in a Tale of Fake Reality

Cover, image posted by Amazon.

In a way, Hank Green’s second book, “A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor,” is a bit like the making of the Matrix, years before the Matrix.

If you read “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” then you’ve met our cast: April May, who apparently may have died in a fire, although there is a strong hint at the end of the first book that she did not. Her Scooby gang, Andy, Miranda, Maya—and the alien who sometimes appears as a robot, Carl.

I really enjoyed Hank’s first book, which I thought was an interesting rumination on life in the internet age, in particular, how internet fame changes people. I’m a fan of the second book, too, although to be honest, I probably enjoyed the first one a bit more.

Cover of Hank Green's first book.

For one thing, the second book is told from multiple points of view, which is OK, but sometimes got in the way, for me. I found myself in particular resenting Carl a bit, who, while benevolent in intentions, was still busy manipulating people whose future he could predict.

But I did like the rumination on what it would mean if artificial reality became so compelling people were willing to give up reality for it. And that internet social media companies, even if run by good people, will find themselves doing whatever makes them money (a truth of most companies in general, I suppose, which is why we do need regulations on our economy).

So the “Dream” being coopted by an evil company called Altus, headed by our old nemesis, Peter Petrawicki. By the way, there is a software company called Altus, and I wonder what they think of this name? Peter doesn’t even run the company, which is really a tool of Carl 2.0, Carl’s more powerful sibling who secretly was sent to Earth in case Carl 1.0 failed. I did wonder a bit about the advanced alien intelligence that supposedly sent these two: Couldn’t there backup AI overlord have a few more lines of ethical coding along the lines of Carl 1.0?

Anyway, everything about Altus is a lie. It’s not even in Puerto Rico, but in Val Verde—a name I did not recognize and looked up, only to find it’s a fictional country. I liked that bit of trickery—the fake internet company that seems to be setting up the Matrix fake reality to keep humans safe in a weird alien zoo is located in a fake location.

So there was a lot to like about this second book. But beyond the switching narrators, I struggled with a few aspects. The resolution, involving a hostile leveraged buyout and the raising of billions of dollars, was clever on some level, but didn’t completely click for me. I also wish that Peter, the evil leader, was a bit more troubled by, and maybe manipulated by, the shenanigans that Carl 2.0 put him up to.

Still, I do recommend the book. Read the first before the second—I don’t know if the second would make much sense without having read the first. The second is a bit slow to start, but once April uses her robo arm to punch through a back door, the action never stops.

And maybe that’s what mostly bothers me. The pace of the book was a bit slow at first, and then became almost an endless chase scene, and I wanted to the characters to slow down and react a bit more. True, some of them spent some time holed up in a luxury apartment (plot point that bothered me—I would think Carl 2.0 could have figured that out, given that they were in contact with the old crowd), but the action was wham! wham! wham! and I wanted a little less grungy people on computers and a bit more, well, life.

Still, I think that was part of the point. Social media can take us away from life, and what does that do to us? Despite seeing some flaws in Hank Green’s second book, I rate it fairly high. It is imaginative and creative. The “Book of Good Times” was an interesting twist. I kind of liked Carl as a monkey, although a talking cat would have worked for me, too. Maybe he needed thumbs. Carl the raccoon? The idea that Andy would be seduced by the neo-Matrix and have trouble giving it up felt right, too.

In summary, get the book, read it, especially if you, like me, enjoyed the first one.

I also enjoyed Hank’s reading of his first chapter some month ago, and note that he edited the final line. I like the edited version better, and it’s interesting to see how a “done” book can still evolve as it nears completion. There’s some lesson there about editing in the real world.

Memoirs that Make Me Wonder on The Why of XY

Earlier this on this blog, I noted that I enjoyed reading Michelle Obama’s memoir this summer.

Well, last night I finished “Godland” by Lyz Lenz. Immediately before that, I read “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah.

Reading them back to back was not really by design, but it seems a fortunate coincidence. I liked both books—both authors have interesting stories to tell, and are worth your time if you enjoy memoirs. And I see some parallels between these works by a African late-night comedy show host and an opinion columnist at my local newspaper.

One uniting theme is that, for an old white man (today is by 61st birthday), both books have interesting insights into the lives of women. That may be obvious in Lenz’s book and less obvious in Noah’s. But Trevor Noah’s memoir is very much a rumination on his relationship with the single woman who brought him onto this globe—his mom, who was shot in the head by his stepfather.

Noah’s book first—it's filled with poignant anecdotes and is also quite funny. That may seem strange for a book that concludes with the aforementioned violence, but (spoiler alert), his mother survived with minor injuries, the bullet passing through her head without entering her brain or destroying another life-required structure.

The book is very accessible—the fact that Trevor grew up in another culture on another continent somehow makes the stories of his misspent youth resonate more. Weren’t we all young and awkward and struggling to understand our moms? But the book left me angry at the universe, in a way, partly because the man who shot Noah’s mother suffered very little in return.

The patriarchy strikes again.

Speaking of anger, there is a fair amount of it in “Godland,” but mostly there is a yearning for completeness and a quest for it. Lenz wrote about the time when her marriage broke down and she was left adrift, seeking a new spiritual home as she rejected the male dominated churches she had been at home in.

The end of “Godland” is pretty powerful, and sneaked up on a me a bit, just because I had not looked ahead and didn’t know the number of footnote pages there would be. I was reading last night, and thought that this chapter, about her experience in a new church, not only seems pretty powerful, but is bringing the themes of this book together.

And I turned the page, and there was half a page of text facing footnotes. Well, cool? Except I wasn’t quite ready for it to be over, and I wish Lenz had written more. Well, that's a measure of a book you like, I suppose, that you yearn for the time you engrossed in it when it ends. At least with her new job at The Gazette, I'll be getting fairly frequent Lenz fixes anyway.

Although both Lenz and Noah have very different religious attitudes and different faith backgrounds, God is a potent character in both books, too. Across time and continents, Jesus can provide some pretty universal themes, which I guess is not really a surprise, but was interestingly on display in these books.

One contrast between these two books is that Lenz does a lot more reporting, while Noah is sticking with his personal experiences. Yet, Noah’s book, which roams over his childhood, high school years and early career, felt “broader” to me. It stretches over more time in his life, while Lenz wrote a tighter personal narrative on a narrower snapshot of her life.

Still, my own personal journey was, in some small measure, enriched by these two writers. And as an old man, I don’t feel that I understand women—but then again, they don’t understand me. In fact, I often don’t understand most men, either—in this life, gender is significant, but not the full story of our joint and severed humanity which makes all of us complicated individuals.

And I consider myself a feminist. I want all humans to be unfettered by biology in their personal journeys—life will throw enough barriers in our ways, we don’t need assumptions or ideas about masculinity or femininity to add to our burdens.

Yet, as demonstrated in both books, women have challenges that are weighted differently. Being heard. Being accepted as leaders. Being paid. Being acknowledged as full-fledged adults. And also, not being shot in the head by angry significant others—those are all human struggles, but they fall unfairly on the XX chromosome-bearing members of my species compared to those of us who express XY traits.

I don’t know why. The reasons are complicated.

And although answers may be elusive, the injustice is simple to see. And both of these books help with that.

The Enduring Power of Books

List made in class of books I and students thought had an impact on our lives. I think all date from when we were young--I read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" when I was maybe 12 or so.

This week in my Understanding Media class at Mount Mercy University, we’re discussing the enduring influence of books.

The class will look at the cultural impact of different mass media, and we start with oldest fixed medium. It’s arguably not the oldest of all media—cave paintings certainly have a few years on tomes, and what became written literature open existed as epic oral tales or poems. But books are an ancient medium, and one that is at the root of culture.

Empty shelves in Busse Library. Books are being moved around.

Many of our stories in other media are derived from novels or nonfiction books, and even comic books.

I argue to students that the reality is every communication career involves serious, professional writing—and all writers first have to be readers. Of course, you don’t have to regularly consume books to be a “reader,” but I think it makes a huge difference. A student who voluntarily wades through the longer form narrative that a book represents has to exert themselves in logical, linear thought. They stretch their minds, acquire more words and learn so see the world through the mind of another human.

Other media offers some of those experiences. A video series or movie can be a transformative narrative—but books articulate longer, more nuanced narratives and thought. They, books, exercise more of the imagination of the reader.

I've touched on books before on this blog--writing a post about books that meant something special  to me as I was growing up, and one a bit later on the death of Harper Lee. On my more general blog, in 2018, I wrote posts about books by John Green and Hank Green.

And here are more recent highlights of Joe’s bookish life—some of my reactions to books I’ve recently consumed:

“Dead Wake” by Erik Larson. I’m already a big Larson fan, his “Devil in the White City” may be about my favorite nonfiction book, and this book, which tells some of the stories behind the people who traveled on the Lusitania during its doomed final voyage, does not disappoint. Besides the passengers and crew of that ocean liner, the book also follows the crew of the German U-Boat whose single torpedo strike doomed so many to a watery death. I’m a sucker for well-told history, and Larson is one of our best story tellers. His world is the real one compellingly recreated—there are not many heroes or villains here, just people caught in the great web of history and chance.

“The Reckoning” by John Grisham. I’ve read a lot of Grisham books—and do recommend them—but to be honest, they sometimes leave me with mixed feelings. The sucker punch at the end of this book left me feeling a bit down, and I found, as I often do in Grisham novels, that I don’t seem to feel enough empathy for these characters. Still, it’s an interesting story that moves a bit slowly at first, but it does maneuver its characters into a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s not my favorite of the recent books I’ve read, but still one I recommend.

“The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. I am halfway through this book, and both interested and put off by it, in almost equal measure. It’s a provocative book, and while it makes many valid points, it also oversells some poor ideas. The authors insist, for example, that the “intention” of the senders is a key point when some verbal attack on a protected group is alleged—but, no. On the other hand, whether an expression is offensive is supposed to be given a “reasonable person” test, not a “sensitive person” test, and here is where many of the examples the authors cite go astray. I’m halfway through this book, and interested to read what the second half brings. I feel compelled to keep going despite qualms about these authors’ ideas—partly because I think reading an interesting nonfiction book that you disagree with is a healthy mental exercise. I think I would agree with the authors on one of their key ideas—a university should be a place where diverse ideas can be aired, and diversity of ideas is not always encouraged on American campuses. It remains to be seen what I’m thinking of this book after the second half.

As is often the case during a semester, my “to read” cue is a bit stacked up right now. Here are books I have on hand and plan to read—the "Toxin" one is another faculty reading selection, so it’s not a book I personally chose, but the others are. And the Storm Lake text was a Valentine’s Day gift from my sweetie, so it’s extra special. My current reading cue:

Thanks for the family memories, Harry Potter

Image from Wikipedia.

I am a little late to the party, but here’s to 20 years of Harry Potter.

We were living in a tiny town in western Iowa when the novels started coming out. I am not sure how or why we heard of the series, and my wife says she bought the first and second books at the same time, but the novels quickly became a family affair. My wife and I and our kids all read them—indeed, the first few were read aloud to children too young to read them for themselves (or, perhaps, just wanting to hear them read even if they had already read them).

And we bought into the whole hoopla that started to spring up when new installments were published. While we never stayed up overnight in a book line, it always was a bit of a saga to locate the latest installment as soon as possible.

For one of the books, my wife was working second shift as a hospital nurse, and stopped at an all-night grocery store after work. The store was already stocking for the next day—release day—and put out a display of the new Harry Potter book, which my wife purchased two copies of.

The next morning, the kids were very excited that we already had the book.

There developed a bit of a family system for Harry Potter. My oldest daughter and son were “first readers” because they read relatively quickly. My son sometimes would stay up all night and devour a HP book in one massive read fest.

I was always at the back of the line—I am a writer and a reader, but I read like I ride a bicycle. I enjoy it and do it a lot, but I do it slowly.

The series was to our family what baseball was to the father and son in “Field of Dreams.” It was something that united us across generations, a shared cultural experience that was exciting to all of us.

I respect the series on several levels. For one thing, an enduring theme of the Harry Potter universe is that it’s not usually your nature that makes you good or evil, but rather it’s the choices that you make.

The series is responsible for many happy memories for me and my family. Cuddling up together in the evening as a family to hear JK Rowling’s stories is one. There was also the sharing and discussion of the latest book—and the thrill of secret conversations that have to be carefully gauged until, finally, dad read the darn thing.

During one Freedom Fest in Cedar Rapids, my youngest son and I (we must have been at the end of the line) were photographed by “The Gazette” as we awaited a fireworks display at Kirkwood Community College. We were reclining together on a blanket, reading one of later installments of the series.

Harry Potter! To me, you are always first and foremost a book series. It would be sad to know you only via the movies, and I’m glad you were there as I was raising a family of readers. For almost a decade, the hoopla around your books helped make reading cool. That wasn’t so important to my bookish brood, who enjoyed many other books, too—but still.

You were the boy who lived in our imaginations, on the pages we read and as part of our family experience.

So thank you, JK. This muggle is glad that you shared your imaginary world with us. Twenty years—hard to imagine it has been that long.

July 4 addition: After I posted this, my youngest daughter found a copy of the photo from the Gazette. I was (based on the book I was reading) published in 2003:

The son in the foreground is now in his mid-20s and getting a PhD at ISU. Three of my other children are also in the image. The son in the picture looks like an older version of his youngest nephew (and also his oldest nephew). Come to think of it, a bit like older versions of his other nephews, too.

The Sudden Appearance of Newspapers for Students

Two papers to read in my house this weekend--I subscribe to The Gazette and receive The Corridor Business Journal because I do a  monthly column for them. Students, did you read a story in The Gazette today?

I’m requiring a group of university students in a media class to read at least one story from the front page of the local newspaper each day for three consecutive days.

The internet doesn’t count, so don’t try to smart-phone it in, students. Hold the dead tree in your hands.

The class has a mix of different kinds of students, but most are majoring in some communication field. And yet few, if any, are in the “newspaper habit.”

We are studying newspapers this week, one week after discussing books. At the end of the book week, we talked a bit about what literacy means, and whether it’s even possible to think “big” thoughts if you don’t experience such thoughts or stories about them in book-length form.

I posed the question to the class: Why do so many college students, who are aspiring to become educated adults, eschew reading, doing the minimum for classes and possibly less if they can get away with it? Of course, being busy is part of the answer, but while that's true, it reflects what you value in your life. I'm not less busy than most students, but I skim a newspaper and read a part of at least one book every day--it's not that hard.

One student’s answer was “peer pressure.” And, sadly, I think she has a point. Reading, while promoted in a vague sense as a “good” in our culture, is also not something that is widely seen as worthwhile in terms of what many adults do. And it’s not something, in too many cases, that the cool kids do. It’s a sign of a socially awkward nerdness, or perhaps a juvenile activity, something you did when you were 10 that is passé by the time you’re 19.

And yet, reading is so data rich, so cognitively engrossing, that I don’t think any narrative medium can truly recreate the “book experience.”

In a similar way, I’ll try to argue next week that the “newspaper experience,” even if economics and big media forces make it rarer in the future, represents something important.

What are the advantages of newspapers over google news on your smart phones?

• The newspaper is not always “on.” You skim it in the morning over breakfast, and have been “briefed” for the day. You don’t feel the need to be instantly informed. While I favor being in the “know,” and repeatedly make the point to students that the world will consider them much more employable in any field if they become more world aware--on both the local and global levels--yet, I also think it’s healthy to get away from 24/7 “bulletin” news, which is too often pointless.
• The newspaper contains longer narrative forms of writing. That’s a bit dicey to state in an era when page size and story length are both much, much shorter than in the past, but compared to the quick paragraph of text on the radio or TV, a newspaper story still has more time and space for reflection and context.
• The newspaper fits into a habit of literacy. We’re talking all semester long about media literacy, and such literacy means more meaningful understanding of all media when consuming them--but, I think, the deepest media literacy, indeed the deepest experience of human life, is only possible with a dose of literal literacy. The ability to read and reflect on reading is foundational to all knowledge.

College educated adults, in every field, are to some extent professional writers. But you can’t write well if you don’t read. Sadly, too many college-age young adults are getting into post-literate habits, convinced that their electronic tribe on Facebook will post the information that they need.

Hey, that's me! My column on inside page of CBJ.

But, as class discussion starkly illustrates, if you ask many college groups basic news questions, such as: What country is Vladimir Putin president of? or Who is John Roberts? most will not know. My wife reports that recently, in a senior-level nursing capstone class, virtually none of the students could talk intelligently about ISIS--they didn’t know what it was or what it had to do with them, even in the same week when President Obama asked Congress for authority to use the U.S. military against ISIS.

The ISIS crisis illustrates a larger problem. Neil Postman worried we were amusing ourselves to death. We seem to be almost there. As the phones in our pockets have grown smarter, I don’t think it’s good that we have grown less smart.

So, students--am I full of it? Do newspapers really matter? If not--how do you accomplish your daily news briefing without a newspaper? If they do matter, why? And if so, when should you start your own personal newspaper habit?

Is Scout Worth A Second, First Visit?

Next week in my media class, students will be reading and talking about the first mass medium: Books.

The news in the book world this week, of course, is about an intensely private woman who for most of her adult life maintained that she said all she wanted to say, and she wasn't going to publicly say any more.

Now, she will “speak” on the pages again. Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has a second book coming out.

Actually a first book, apparently. According to news stories, Lee had penned “Go Set a Watchman” first. It’s a story written and set in the 1950s, when a 29-year-old woman from New York returns home to Alabama to visit her aging father. His name is Atticus Finch. You know her as Scout.

Cover of recent paperback edition.

Or at least I hope you know her. You should read “To Kill a Mockingbird” when you’re young, maybe 10 or so, not so far removed from the fresh life view of its 6-year-old narrator.

I don’t know what a 29-year-old Scout will be like, and maybe Harper was right to think she had said it all in “Mockingbird.” The story goes that she showed her first novel, “Watchman,” to some editors way back when. They liked it, but even more they liked some flashback scenes which were set in the Depression era South. Those became “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Will I read a second Harper Lee book? Oh, sure. I loved the first one. It’s one of those books that is worth rereading—encounter it when you’re young, and read it again as an adult.

I would be interested in whatever else Ms. Lee had written. But there are some questions—she clearly had refused to submit this other book for publication for most of her life, and it only surfaced after the death of her sister, apparently a lifelong ally in Ms. Lee’s quest to be left alone. Coming out now when she is old, frail and without her sister’s protection raises some questions: Mostly, why now?

Then again, Ms. Lee has followed her own drummer for many years. Maybe she just decided it’s time. I hope so.

Anyway, while it’s controversial to some, with its themes of race, sex and rape, I put “To Kill a Mockingbird” among the you-really-should-read-it list of books for any American youth. And it makes me think of what other books I consider key in my own young journey to some level of literacy. What else made Young Joe want to read and to write?

• “Half Magic” by Edward Eager. And the rest of his light, whimsical books, including “Magic by the Lake” and “The Well Wishers.” I think I would call “Half Magic” the better book now, but I would say “The Well Wishers” was by far the most enchanting Edward Eager book to 11-year-old Joe. I don’t know if there’s a tie there for a white Midwestern boy, but “The Well Wishers,” like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has a racial undertone.

• “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White. The main character saves someone’s life through creativity and writing, and then herself dies in a heart-wrenching chapter, that, honestly, makes me choke up a bit even today just typing this sentence. Well, at least Charlotte’s daughters hang around. If you read “Charlotte’s Web” and didn’t love it, I don’t want to talk to you.

• “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. It was important to me, because around the age of 9 or so it was the very first “chapter book” that I struggled through on my own. Of the Narnia books, I actually eventually grew more fond of “The Horse and His Boy,” but LW and W still has a special place in my heart.

• “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien. Not as full of boring elf hotels as “The Lord of the Rings,” the story of Bilbo’s quest to find a dragon without any clear notion of what he was going to do with the dragon when it was found was just too much fun. My father read it aloud to us as children, but I was still fairly green when I read it for myself.

• “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein. I read it when I was young, and didn't pick up its rather dour libertarian political overtones, which I strenuously disagree with today. But it was still a good book to read as a youth just to open my eyes to lots of different ways to view the political world. And I didn't notice, at the time of my youthful reading of the book, that the narrator was black, so this is again a book with racial overtones, although I didn't find that out until I was well into adulthood. Like “Charlotte’s Web,” I think the fact that it grapples with death is part of its appeal, too. Bog, is a computer one of your creatures?

Granddaughter "reading." She will learn to turn the book over.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are the best or only books for youth to read. Certainly my own kids loved Harry Potter, which didn't make this list only because I had kids by the time those books were published. Lemony Snicket is a wickedly subversive children’s writer, and at least mildly supervise, in my opinion, is a good thing for youth books to be. They don’t corrupt the young so much as mentally knock them off guard just a bit, which is something a good book ought to do to anybody anyway.

Well, students, we’ll see what our text author says about books in general. For you personally, what are books that have meant something to you, particularly books that you were not forced to read but rather chose to read in your younger days? And, blog universe in general, same question, but also how do you feel about Harper Lee’s new book?

Me, I’ll probably be in line the first day it’s available.

I can’t help myself. Atticus was a nice guy, but frankly I didn't really fall that hard for him. A saint is difficult to love. Jean Louise, on the other hand—baby, Scout, where have you been?