By Any Other Nerd

So 2020 will mark the 10th year of blogging.  This here is the 1679th post, which means I averaged about 167 posts a year since starting this blog in March 2010 (originally named "The Hitchhiking Adjunct").  Some posts were obviously more substantial than others.  And a good portion of them were reprinting what I had written elsewhere.  Of course, there were the ones that were part of a year-long series such as when I did the 365 Short Stories and 365 Photos projects .   This past year, the posts have been a bit less than usual, to say the least.  I've published about 60 or so posts, most of which have largely consistent of reprints, reviews ( which I first posted to GoodReads ), and pieces that I had written previously (e.g. the PhD Chronicles were written in 2018 and the Mudty Relations essay series was mostly written in 2018).  There's been a variety of reasons for this including it being busier with different projects and work (make e...

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling My rating: 4 of 5 stars Factfulness is a book that reminds me in many ways of the works of Daniel Pink, Steven Pinker, Steven Johnson and Matt Ridley. Like those authors and some of their more popular works, at the core of Rosling's (or the Roslings') message is a focus undermining the simplicity that we humans often seek to instill intentionally or unintentionally as a result of our thinking and the ways we connect facts. Rosling's particular approach is to get people to slow down with the facts that they receive and spend some time poking around at them using a set of questions and reminders that he provides through the book. Part of what I enjoyed about this book is Rosling's dive into specific examples and instances where he, an expert, failed in thinking clearly through his problems and other instances where non-experts were able t...

The Fall of Freddie the Leaf: A Story Of Life For All Ages by Leo F. Buscaglia My rating: 5 of 5 stars My father had me read this when I was a kid and well, I read it to him when he was in the hospital dying. That might sound morbid but it is the best endorsement I can give this book as it is such a simple but powerful story about recognizing and accepting death despite how hard it can be. It has been an essential book for me in gaining any sense of comfort and closure in the passing of people in my life. The book uses a simple story of Freddie, a leaf who comes to life in the spring and enjoys a vibrant summer before realizing what fall will mean. The language is simple yet powerful and Buscaglia shows just how powerful a metaphor can be to help people of any age come to terms with something that is so overwhelming and so uncertain but yet we must all face. It is a great book for anyone looking to have a more complex conversation about death. View all my r...

The Body Papers by Grace Talusan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Talusan's memoir interweaves the various threads of her life into a tapestry that is magisterial to see in its fullness and both powerful and painful to watch in its development. She shares with readers the many challenges, emotions, and scars she has experienced through her life negotiating her racial, ethnic, social, and gender identities. From leaving her home in the Philipines to growing up in a white suburban Boston enclave to surviving sexual abuse from a family member to grappling with the forboding odds of various cancers to navigating familial and spousal relationships through all these issues, Talusan tackles everything with a directness, balanced by sincerity and insight garnered by much reflection. There are so many things to appreciate about her writing from the elegant but accessible prose to the ways in which each chapter unravels with just the right amount of pacing and absent of overt explan...

The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley My rating: 4 of 5 stars In this poignant retelling of Beowulf through the eyes of women, Headley pulls off an incredible feat (heroic, one might say). She modernized the tale of Beowulf into the US in the decades following 9/11. The story follows Dana, a veteran who has returned home after captivity by the "enemy" and interrogation by her superiors. She's pregnant and has been abandoned by her country. She returns to her home town, Herot Hall which is next to a mountain filled with an abandoned station and tunnels. She takes up residence in the mountain where she raised her child, away from the humans who have given her nothing but grief. As she raises her son, Gren, she grapples with the locals increasingly looking towards ideas about the mountain and her son, increasingly wanting to explore the town. Besides Dana, the story primarily focuses on Dana, Willa, the Lady Macbeth-like wife of first, the heir apparent of...

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture by Roxane Gay My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book hits readers hard, really hard. This anthology explores what its like to be on the violated end of rape culture in American society. For those who do not understand what is meant when we use the term, "rape culture" or have trouble understanding why or how people are victims, this is a necessary read. Each contributor shares her, his, or their story about what it means to be perceived as a sex object first and (rarely) a human second. The stories that are told are powerful, not just because the writers are skilled and nuanced in how they unpack their trauma, but in the many different ways in which they are violated. No two stories are alike and yet every story strikes a universal pang of injustice and frustration with how often and how varied it happens coupled with empathetic tears to know that for some readers, there is solace in knowing it is not just them who have suffe...

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya My rating: 5 of 5 stars I stumbled across this book in a used bookstore--my favorite place to find such gems. I had likely heard of this book before in title but not in content. The novel follows the life of Rukmani, a child-bride in early 20th century rural India and her life as she moves from her family into her husband's Nathan's home. As a third daughter, the dowry she could provide was insubstantial and thus she is married away to a poor (but kind) man who works the rice fields. Together, they work year after year to yield life from the land but encounter increasing hardships as they have children--some who stick around but more who go--and deal with the inevitable ways life is made infinitely harder and more nuanced for the poor. After dealing with a particularly harsh drought, they continued to decline in their ability to sustain themselves and eventually, even the land they work on is taken from them. They make a final ...

The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts by Israel Zangwill My rating: 2 of 5 stars After coming across the title in about four times in two weeks, I decided that I needed to fill this gap in my reading experience. So this book is the supposed original reference for the concept of the United States as a "melting pot". In that regard, it reminds me of Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the first use of the term robots. And that comparison works in a lot of ways in that it's often surprising to see what something fairly common in our language and to see that its first use was not particularly striking or surprising. In this case, The Melting-Pot is a 4 act play about David Quixano, a Jewish immigrant from Russia who plays the violin and writes music. He lives with his uncle and his grandmother in New York since his parents were killed in one of the Russian pogroms. The play opens with a woman, Vera arriving and talking with his uncle and grandmother a...

So--as a friend likes to say--I did a thing. During a weekend in October, my partner and I went to Provincetown to celebrate our anniversary.  While there, since we're not into drinking much nor bands, we looked for things to do in the evening and stumbled upon The Mosquito Story Slam. It draws its inspiration from The Moth but looks for a bit more spontaneity.  They provide a theme for the night and when people arrive, they can put their name into a hat.  Assuming there's a reasonable number (no more than 10-12), then they will have each person come up on stage and tell their 5-minute story.  You can check out the different shows and seasons on their Soundcloud channel .  We learned about the show sometime in the morning and decided we would go.  In the back of my head, I started wondering if I would go up and tell a story.  The theme was:  Road trips, wanderlust, and getting lost.  I figured I had something I could talk about but would i...

Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism by Derrick A. Bell My rating: 5 of 5 stars Bell uses allegoric storytelling to explore the legal, cultural, and philosophical racial underpinnings of American white culture and its impact on black identity and methods of surviving in this hostile racialize structure. His approach in many ways reminds me of the philosophical dialogues that we see in the works of Plato and the like. They are sometimes clear and simple settings and other times fantastical, but with each, the story's context and the fictional protagonist (Bell, himself) engages in a tete-a-tete with other characters including one recurring character, Geneva Crenshaw. Through these discussions and thought experiments, Bell draws upon the legal and cultural history as well as contemporary thinkers such as Kimberley Crenshaw and bell hooks to which help him explain a nuanced understanding of race, racial power structures, freedom, and oppression in the...