By Any Other Nerd

Meridian by Alice Walker My rating: 4 of 5 stars Meridian is a complex and fascinating novel; one that not just warrants re-reading but also revisiting by fans of Walker's The Color Purple and other powerful works by African American women. I stumbled across it in a used book store and took to reading it.  The novel starts toward the as a character, Truman Held makes his way into Chicokema, a southern town, where he quickly learns that Meridian Hill is still up to her resistance tactics, fighting on behalf of African Americans and suffering the debilitating illness that follows such resistance (her body near gives out on her).  From there, readers are guided through a disjointed timeline of the evolution of Meridian's and Truman's relationship over the years.  It is, of course, not the typical story of love but it is a story that includes more complex and nuanced forms of love (something that Walker will also do in The Color Purple) and teases out the messin...

Estimated Reading Time: minutes So 2020 as a year, it goes without saying, has been abysmal on too many levels to count.  But one area that it hasn't (at least for me) is in the realm of reading.  We know that I love to read (if you don't know that and you've been reading this blog, then you clearly haven't been reading this blog!).   The last few years I skipped on my best reads of the year but managed to get to it in time this year.   Of course, the challenge here is that there are so many great books to choose from.  I gave myself a goal of reading 250 books and I met my goal ( you can see the full list here )--and even passed it to land on 270 books for 2020.  So I promised myself that I would not go for more than 30 for my list, which was hard but still managed it.  You'll find I broke them into three distinct areas, which made sense once I went through the list.   Rather than give you paragraph reviews (many of them are revie...

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker My rating: 3 of 5 stars Barker recenters the narrative of the Trojan War around a crucial but often under-valued character: Briseis, the woman turned slave captured and given over to Achilles as a reward for his accomplishments. Thus, readers get a bird's eye view of the events of The Iliad and beyond, while presenting the often silenced voice of the characters of the story. While stories have often been told about the noble women whose lives interweave with the Trojan War, we hear almost nothing from the slaves who were taken and traded throughout. Briseis's story is one of falling from nobility into slavery as she becomes a pawn for the egos of Achilles and Agamemnon. While she is used as a pawn, she is passive and that is the beauty of Barker's work. She gives us a richer world of experience, relationships, and struggles that Briseis must navigate with the Trojan War as background noise. Overall, I enjoyed Barker...

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor My rating: 5 of 5 stars Conceived in violence, born of love, and raised in a mixture of exile and community, Onyesonwu must find her way in a world that rejects her kind (ewu--people born from the two groups/races) within this post-apocalyptic afro-futurist novel. Like Okorafor's other novels, readers slip very quickly into this story with Onyesonwu's first-person narrative that shifts times sometimes to fill in the past but largely moves forward from the day when she begins to realize that she has magical abilities to her confrontation with her father and her fate. The story follows Onyesonwu as she finds a formidable partner, a group of friends, and learns much about her magical abilities, the complex nature of the world, and what it means to be truly powerful. However, also like Okorafor's other novels, it's more than just a singular story. Okorafor interweaves stories about the relationships between lovers, amongst...

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes Last month, Creative Commons , an organization that I'm a big fan of and who literally show up in every single post in this blog (check the bottom) announced a call for proposals for lightning talks.  It was an opportunity for folks interested in open education to share things they're working on.  For me, it's an opportunity to flesh out an idea I'm trying to gain traction on and develop to help articulate the value of open education as part of the public sphere.   A screenshot of one of the slides Here is the abstract that I submitted so you can get a sense of what I will cover:   " Quantifying the public good that education provides is often elusive and hard to quantify in a capitalist world defined by numbers, so often grounded in financial transactions. But what if we are looking in the wrong places to capture the public good that open education affords us?  For decades, the market has determined the ever-increasin...

Supernova Era by Liu Cixin My rating: 4 of 5 stars While I don't have a sense of how Cixin is judged within China, there's much about him that reminds me of Isaac Asimov in terms of thinking about big history--but he does it so much better than Asimov.  This book offers a fascinating glimpse into an Earth where a freak accident has lead to adults dying and children needing to steer human life on Earth.  While the adults were around, they did what they could do to prepare the youth but really couldn't anticipate all the ways it could go egregiously wrong.  After the demise of adults, children enter the Supernova Era (named for the supernova start that blasted radiation that had a catastrophic impact on adults), a time where they must figure out how to go forward.  What's fascinating about this tale is the ways it both reflects the worst and the best of humanity--evoking (and sometimes invoking) previous tales like Lord of the Flies but also showing t...

The Absolute at Large by Karel Čapek My rating: 3 of 5 stars Capek's novel lands as an interesting thought experiment that falls a little bit flat in its execution; it's satire but not entirely satisfying.  This makes sense given that it was his first novel.  It doesn't have the finesse that comes with R.U.R. and from what I understand, is not as nearly as compelling as War of the Newts.  Yet, it's a curious and fun novel all the same.  The story focuses on the creation of a machine (the karburator) that is able to produce nearly infinite energy from a very limited amount of matter.  It's set to revolutionize the world except that it has one significant side effect.  When it abstracts the energy, it also puts out something else--a spiritual essence (the absolute).  This absolute just hovers in the areas wherein the karburator is working and instantly inspires the people with an overwhelming sense of the spiritual. They experience a sp...