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What I've Finished Reading
Warmth: Coming of Age At The End of Our World is a mostly very thoughtful and attentive small book by Daniel Sherrell, a climate-change activist who is trying to decide whether to have children and how to live meaningfully within what he calls The Problem without just crying all the time. It's written in the form of a letter to a hypothetical child, in explicit imitation of (and sticking the landing a little better than) Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. I like this kind of book because I'm a sucker for tender and fraught parental feelings but also because I inevitably spend them imagining the bewildered, distressed, embarrassed and exasperated teenager defensively rolling his eyes at the end of all those plaintive and searching "you"s.
I loved Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa, which is an elegantly weird double elegy for the end of two worlds, past and future. In the far-future cloud city that is all that remains of human life on Earth, a community member named Lear translates a mid-90s translation of the lost memoirs of a sixteenth-century Aztec boy turned Catholic priest, as her own community resolves to end history for real this time by forgoing language entirely. You can probably figure out for yourself whether this is a good idea, but it's worth reading the whole thing.
Credit Card Carole also deals with the end of a world, but author Sheila Solomon Klass isn't going to help Carole mourn it. Carole is 17 and loves to shop! She loves to do other things, too, like track and quoting Shakespeare, but she also just loves to shop! Her credit card, paid off every month by her parents, makes it easy and fun! Then one day her dad announces that he is leaving dentistry for the stage! and they will all have to tighten their belts. . . and cut up their credit cards!!! Carole mopes around for a while but eventually discovers The Value of Work, courtesy of the easiest job search imaginable (her friend's parents' collectable figurines need dusting! which also gives her the opportunity to eavesdrop on their troubles and reflect on the paltriness of her own) and also the Value of True Friends Who Are Not Shallow Bitches. The other side of the consumer-identity-formation coin is represented by Jim, who is so guilt-ridden by his father doing business with South Africa's apartheid government that he shaves his head and stops eating. There's also a con-man plot that I completely forgot about until I opened the book just now to check on Jim's name! It's a lot for 150 pages.
1980s Money Mores Check-In
Readers over 40 (or younger if you feel like jumping in), did you have the impression when you were a teenager that it was normal or desireable for minors to have credit cards? I ask because Carole's panic at being asked to live without one (in New Jersey, 1987) was so intense ("Mom - I can't. I don't carry cash like you and Dad. I can't write checks. I can't manage.") I'm about ten years younger than Carol and grew up in a mall-rich environment in the US, and I didn't know anyone in high school - at least, not anyone I was close enough to try on clothes with - who had a credit card as a minor, and it would never have occured to me to ask for one. So I'm curious about other people's experiences.
What I'm Reading Now
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside. Silverberg is a new-to-me science-fiction author who writes exuberant, fast-moving, weird but mostly transparent books - the other one was Project Pendulum, about a novel structure for a time-travel experiment involving identical twins. In The World Inside, 75 billion human beings live their whole lives within a procession of thousand-story tower blocks that girdle the continents, seldom leaving their five-story "cities" and never going outside. Since the problem of where to put everyone has been temporarily solved by eliminating privacy, building really tall, and shoving dissenters down the garbage chute at the slightest provocation, a culture of frenetic fertility has developed in which young people marry at twelve or thirteen and vie with each other to produce the largest families possible. Could this system have a flaw? Some of the characters are worried that it might.
The World Inside was published in 1970. Besides the population anxiety, its 70sness is expressed mostly through state-mandated casual sex (mostly but not entirely hetero and usually involving young teenagers), and occasionally by the presence of really good drugs. Its landscape owes a medium-sized debt to We and a large one to Urban Renewal.
What I Plan to Read Next
I just learned that Vernor Vinge wrote a book set in 2025! In which computers are tired and SMART AR CONTACT LENSES are wired! I tried and failed miserably to get contact lenses when I was 13 so I am always a little taken aback by how easily everyone in the world pops those little buggers in and out in speculative fiction.
(see also: the Very Topical Second Life Contact Lens Plot on Supergirl. Or don't, if you value any of the irreplacable minutes of your life).
Anyway, 2025 is right around the corner, so I'm going to see if the library has it.
Warmth: Coming of Age At The End of Our World is a mostly very thoughtful and attentive small book by Daniel Sherrell, a climate-change activist who is trying to decide whether to have children and how to live meaningfully within what he calls The Problem without just crying all the time. It's written in the form of a letter to a hypothetical child, in explicit imitation of (and sticking the landing a little better than) Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. I like this kind of book because I'm a sucker for tender and fraught parental feelings but also because I inevitably spend them imagining the bewildered, distressed, embarrassed and exasperated teenager defensively rolling his eyes at the end of all those plaintive and searching "you"s.
I loved Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa, which is an elegantly weird double elegy for the end of two worlds, past and future. In the far-future cloud city that is all that remains of human life on Earth, a community member named Lear translates a mid-90s translation of the lost memoirs of a sixteenth-century Aztec boy turned Catholic priest, as her own community resolves to end history for real this time by forgoing language entirely. You can probably figure out for yourself whether this is a good idea, but it's worth reading the whole thing.
Credit Card Carole also deals with the end of a world, but author Sheila Solomon Klass isn't going to help Carole mourn it. Carole is 17 and loves to shop! She loves to do other things, too, like track and quoting Shakespeare, but she also just loves to shop! Her credit card, paid off every month by her parents, makes it easy and fun! Then one day her dad announces that he is leaving dentistry for the stage! and they will all have to tighten their belts. . . and cut up their credit cards!!! Carole mopes around for a while but eventually discovers The Value of Work, courtesy of the easiest job search imaginable (her friend's parents' collectable figurines need dusting! which also gives her the opportunity to eavesdrop on their troubles and reflect on the paltriness of her own) and also the Value of True Friends Who Are Not Shallow Bitches. The other side of the consumer-identity-formation coin is represented by Jim, who is so guilt-ridden by his father doing business with South Africa's apartheid government that he shaves his head and stops eating. There's also a con-man plot that I completely forgot about until I opened the book just now to check on Jim's name! It's a lot for 150 pages.
1980s Money Mores Check-In
Readers over 40 (or younger if you feel like jumping in), did you have the impression when you were a teenager that it was normal or desireable for minors to have credit cards? I ask because Carole's panic at being asked to live without one (in New Jersey, 1987) was so intense ("Mom - I can't. I don't carry cash like you and Dad. I can't write checks. I can't manage.") I'm about ten years younger than Carol and grew up in a mall-rich environment in the US, and I didn't know anyone in high school - at least, not anyone I was close enough to try on clothes with - who had a credit card as a minor, and it would never have occured to me to ask for one. So I'm curious about other people's experiences.
What I'm Reading Now
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside. Silverberg is a new-to-me science-fiction author who writes exuberant, fast-moving, weird but mostly transparent books - the other one was Project Pendulum, about a novel structure for a time-travel experiment involving identical twins. In The World Inside, 75 billion human beings live their whole lives within a procession of thousand-story tower blocks that girdle the continents, seldom leaving their five-story "cities" and never going outside. Since the problem of where to put everyone has been temporarily solved by eliminating privacy, building really tall, and shoving dissenters down the garbage chute at the slightest provocation, a culture of frenetic fertility has developed in which young people marry at twelve or thirteen and vie with each other to produce the largest families possible. Could this system have a flaw? Some of the characters are worried that it might.
The World Inside was published in 1970. Besides the population anxiety, its 70sness is expressed mostly through state-mandated casual sex (mostly but not entirely hetero and usually involving young teenagers), and occasionally by the presence of really good drugs. Its landscape owes a medium-sized debt to We and a large one to Urban Renewal.
What I Plan to Read Next
I just learned that Vernor Vinge wrote a book set in 2025! In which computers are tired and SMART AR CONTACT LENSES are wired! I tried and failed miserably to get contact lenses when I was 13 so I am always a little taken aback by how easily everyone in the world pops those little buggers in and out in speculative fiction.
(see also: the Very Topical Second Life Contact Lens Plot on Supergirl. Or don't, if you value any of the irreplacable minutes of your life).
Anyway, 2025 is right around the corner, so I'm going to see if the library has it.
