What I'm Reading Now

I usually read more than one book at a time.  Right now I'm reading Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okaoafor.    

Who Fears Death is a post apocalyptic novel set in a futuristic subsaharan Africa.  The heroine is a 16-year-old girl who is a social outcast because she is the product of a violent rape as an act of war between two tribes.  Onyesonwu is discovering that she has magical powers like shape shifting and traveling to the land of the dead, and she must learn how to use her power wisely.  The author uses fiction as a means to address intense social issues like racism, war, sexism, genocide, rape and female circumcision.  She combines themes of race, class and gender with fantasy fiction to create a world that's eerily mirrors our own.  This book is not for the faint of heart.  There are some brutal scenes in which the author does not flinch from portraying scenes of violence.  Interestingly, it's not that depressing because our heroine clearly intends to overcome the horrific discrimination she faces. Will she find her power?  Will she ultimately use it for the good?  I don't know yet, because I haven't finished the book.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

While the summer isn't over yet, this is the most powerful book I've read so far.  Author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer has established himself as a master story teller.  In his first two books, you get the sense that he's drawing on real life experiences and family histories to create his fiction, and in Eating Animals, you get to see the source of his material.  Eating Animals is Foer's work of non-fiction.  Weaving a tapestry of stories of his family history with stories of the farmers, activists, animals, and virtually everyone he meets along the way,  he exposes the cruelty of animal agriculture in a way that no one has before.  When his son was born, he wanted to be a good father, so he decided to investigate how to feed him in a way that was truly nourishing and healthy. His book, the story of that investigation, combines impeccable research (with 17 pages of footnotes),  devastating data and brilliant storytelling.  It is his storytelling, however, that keeps the reader interested and engaged, even in places where the cruelty is difficult to bear. Throughout the book, he intertwines stories of his doting Jewish grandmother's complex relationship to food.  A holocaust survivor who came very close to starving before the end of WW II (and a quirky, compelling character who is recognizable throughout his fiction) she has experienced a trauma that she transmits to succeeding generations of her family.  Although he never makes a direct comparison, the reader cannot help but compare, through his juxtapostion of stories, the cruelty of the Jewish holocaust to the slaughter of animals he describes so unflinchingly.  Foer makes a case for the argument that our capacity for disconnection and denial is at the center of all human cruelty.  Our relationship to food is central to our identities and our relationship with others, yet we feed ourselves without knowing (and often willfully denying) where our nourishment comes from.  Indeed, the conscious denial of not only the slaughter methods, but the conditions in which most farm animals are breed and raised, is necessary for us to continue to support the industry with our money and our appetites.  Foer's book is not judgemental, just sensible and compassionate.  Like all serious writers, he does not back away from emotional truth.  Characteristically, where most writers stop, Foer dares to contintue writing, always taking his topics a little deeper than the reader is prepared to go.

This book seriously challenged the way I eat.  Like Foer, I had vascillated between vegetarianism and meat eating for a number of years.  While watching Food, Inc. had a temporary effect, reading Eating Animals was far more powerful.  Why is this?  I believe it's because of Foer's brilliant writing: his compelling characterizations of people and animals goes beyond the mere facts of the matter (which only appeals to our intellects) to the emotional truth where a deeper connection within ourselves makes permanent change possible.  Foer makes us realize that eating is central to who we are.  We are what we eat and eating compassionately changes our bodies as well as our souls.

Freedom (TM)

Freedom (TM), another high-tech thriller by Daniel Suarez, is the sequel to Daemon, which I read earlier this summer.  In Daemon, Matthew Sobol, a computer genius and video game designer, creates a program that goes into effect when triggered by his death.  The program (or daemon) manages to create nightmares of network security, kill a lot of people, pretty much bring down the infrastructure of society and take over the world.  It hacks the data of major corporations, banks and the government, manipulating people and institutions who must either do his bidding or...well, die. Sobol leaves video records that guide the investigation into his crimes.  At the end of Daemon, Sobol's motives are still not enitrely clear to the reader.  While he seems undoutedly sinister at the beginning of the book, by the end the reader is wondering if maybe he's not such a bad guy.  Does he have a larger plan for the world in mind?

In Freedom Sobol's motives are revealed.  Because the world has already been taken over by corrupt megacorporations who have bought government influence, Sobol's program is actually trying to do a good deed and win the world back for common humanity.  Unfortunately, the daemon does not shy away from violence, but uses it to his advantage, creating gruesome bloodbaths in a number of places. (According to my sources, this is a play on video game violence.)  In fact, the ending of Daemon was so ridiculously violent that I almost didn't read Freedom.  Well, I thought about not reading it, but you know how inquiring minds are.  They have to know and I had to know what Matt Sobol's grand plan actually was.

Some of Suarez's best writing is in the sections in which he fictionalizes technology.  A lot of the action actually occurs in a video game-like setting.  Sobol creates an alternate web called the "dark net" which has its own economy and is governed by the daemon's logic and by popular vote.  A character in the game (meaning any member of the dark net) can click on another character's icon and get all sorts of personal data, as well as a matrix of their connections to other characters.  Imagine someone being able to click on your head and having access to anything you've done on a computer ever -- and your email contacts and Facebook friends list. This easy access to information as well as the fact that almost everything is vidoe taped creates a kind of transparency that is weird, but interesting to imagine.

At times Suaraz's writing degenerates into the didactic.  I don't like it when a fiction writer tries to teach a lesson.  Of course, all good fiction writers do this, but the lesson should be so suble that the reader is unaware of being taught.  Suarez is at his worst when writing about farmers and their victimization by a megacorporation that is taking over their farmland, patenting seeds, planting only one crop and basically running them out of business.  One of the characters (a farmer's daughter) has to convince her father to join the dark net to fight this company. She teaches us about Monsanto's (not the name Suarez uses in the book) escapades in the Midwest in a thinly veiled lecture on the evils of industrial farming.  

By far the creepiest thing about this book is how true it is.  Reading it during the Gulf Oil Disaster, I was already wondering why BP seemed to be in charge of the clean up rather than the regulatory agencies of the government.  Then the stories of sex and drug parties for MMS employees came out.   And now the $10 million tax write off for BP.  And what about Ken Salazar's relationships to the oil industry? What about all those government subsidies to the oil industry ( depreciation tax write offs) and the hold that industry seems to have on congress?  Is does seem that people who speak up against them have paid a price.  The haunting question Freedom asks is this:  How true is Suarez's fiction?

Here is the first in a six-part interview with Suarez on "What the Tech?" in which he talks about the technology behind his fiction, how he wrote the book and marketed it.  Interestingly, he self-published the book before it was picked up by a mainstream publisher.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer says he lived in the brain of Oskar Schell for two and a half years to write this book.  Oskar Schell is the quirky, nine-year-old protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer's second novel.  Foer interweaves stories of personal trauma, family history and international tragedy to acheive insight into love, loss and the search for meaning.  One of the first post 9/11 novels published, the book has been widely acclaimed.

No one writes characters quite like Foer does.  Where most writers stop, Foer pushes a little further, delving deeper into the psyche of his subjects, adding details and description, thoughts and feelings that breathe life into his pages.  Oskar, for instance, is a precocious child, raised by progressive parents on the Upper East Side of New York City.  He  is mulitlingual, a pacifist,  a vegan and an amateur astrophysicist. Oskar is also lost in a sea of grief at his father's death. It is through Foer's portrayal of Oskar's remarkable intelligence that his pain becomes palpable for the reader.  Oskar's intense and questioning mind needs answers.  When he finds a key in his father's closet, his story takes on the dimensions of a quest as he searches to find the lock the key opens. And like most quests, it does't lead Oskar where he thinks it will.


Oskar's story is interwoven through parallel narratives with those of his grandparents, survivors of Nazi occupied Dresden.  Each narrative has a distinct style and vocabulary and each character has a personal story to tell.  The stories are tied together by a shared history and the impact of a single, horrible event on the course of a human life.


Foer also uses "postmodern" technique to take the book beyond the conventional format of a novel.  He includes photographs, handwritten notes, codes and script written over script to convey his messages. 

This is the first of three books I will read by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Next I'm reading Eating Animals which is a nonfiction book he wrote after he and his wife had a baby.  He wanted to know more about how to feed his child.  In it he explores not only the way our food is produced, but the culture of eating and our various attachments to food.  After that I'm reading Everything is Illuminated, which is supposed to be hilariously funny, but in a dark way.  I've already seen the movei and it was excellent. I love his writing and look forward to reading more of his work.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal is a nonfiction work about passive entertainment.  Boal's title evokes the classic 1960s book on education by Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is about passive education.  Friere is a personal hero of mine (and Oman's) and some of the theory behind our race, class and gender course is based on his work.

Boal applies Friere's theories on education to theater.  He traces how theater has evolved over the centuries from something with more audience participation to a model in which the audience sits passivly and watches.  He suggests that through empathy with the characters and catharsis through the action in the story, spectators are rendered passive. He belives that when spectators have no control over the outcome of the story, it affects them in their lives outside the theater.  He believes this passivity translates into the spectators' wider life and that our model of theater helps to create a general society that is helpless and incapable of social change. 

Boal started a "people's theater" in Peru in which audience members participate in the action.  They improvise a scenario in which spectators have the opportunity to change the action to see what kind of outcomes may arise.  He gives a series of theater exercises at the end of the book, and they sound truly fun.  We plan to try some of his ideas out next year in race, class and gender.  Boal has presented workshops on his methods all over the world.  I got this book from Elisa Hernandez, and she and I plan to go to one of these workshops for training in his methods.  Unfortunately, Boal died last year, so we won't be training with him personally, but he left behind a movement in theater and many people are teaching his techniques.

Boal's theories on story are thought provoking.  He even makes me question The Hero's Journey as a story model.  According to Boal, story is a powerful educational force, and through it we are conditioned to believe that power resides in individuals and that those individuals are usually someone outside ourselves.  He makes a good point, but that's only because most theater (and literature) is bad.  A good story motivates, changes and empowers the reader.  I'm left with the question what makes good story and what activates people to make positive changes in the society they live in.

Testimony

Testimony by Anita Shreve is, on the surface, a testimonial against teenage drinking.  Set in a elite boarding school in Vermont, the story revolves around a sex scandal that occurs ostensibly as a result of binge drinking.  The author says in the clip below that if she could chose an audience for this book, it would be teenage boys.     

The story unfolds through the voices of each of the major characters and with each entry, the plot thickens.  Suffice it to say, things are not as they appear on the surface.

This book has gotten excellent reviews.  I read quite a few  and not a single one questioned why Shreve does not go more deeply into the back story of the girl who was involved.  She deepens almost every other character's story.  I was left wondering what would motivate a girl to behave this way and Shreve did not answer my question. I thought it weakened the book considerably.

Daemon

Daemon by Daniel Suarez is not a book I would normally read.  It's an action packed, high tech thriller with a bit too much violence for my taste.  I read it, however, because it is the set up to Suarez's sequel, Freedom, a book that deals with corporate globalization.  Freedom was recommended to me by Paul Hirsche, and José Cordero is reading it right now.  Both say it is worth the read.

A daemon is a software program that runs continuously in the background of a computer system.  It's invisible to users until an "event" happens that triggers the program.  In this case, the "event" is Matthew Sobol, a legendary computer game designer's death.  Sobel is the architect of a program that once activated, takes on a life of its own.  Essentially, Suarez's daemon is on the way to systematically taking over the world.  It runs, of course, on logic, and the author does a good job of making the story plausible.   Since virtually all of our institutions dependent on computers, it's not difficult to feel vulnerable to this sort of attack. Plus, certain aspects of this dystopia are similar to the world we live in already.  We don't have to imagine the presence of nefarious minds tampering with our data.  We read about technology spies and hackers in the news.

This book is by no means great literature, but an interesting commentary on today's political, technological and economic climate.  I want to follow up with Freedom before the summer is over, but I'm in no rush.  According to my sources, Sobol's motives for creating the daemon are revealed in Freedom, and they are not what you think they might be.