CORONAVIRUS TIMES
continued. My first ebooks!! How to cite them?
And pulling quotes is a headache: sometimes I was able to get page
numbers, sometimes not. Navigating the TPL’s “Libby, by
OverDrive” system will surely become more familiar.
Brother
and sister Evered and Ada are left orphaned on the most
remote-imaginable coast of Newfoundland when their parents sicken and
die. Evered is eleven at the time (appearing to be early nineteenth
century, perhaps), Ada a little younger. Schooled only by observing
their parents in seasonal rounds of backbreaking chores, their lives
are constricted by the cod catch and all its preparations. Twice a
year, the ship The Hope arrives to exchange their catch for
the necessities of isolated life, handled by their father Sennet
Best. Only one other human being had the youngsters ever seen:
midwife Mary Oram.
Now
Evered and Ada throw themselves into the same cycle, not wishing to
leave their shabby home for a port called Mockbeggar. Over the next
few years Evered learns to deal with the Beadle, accounts master on
The Hope. They experience the horrors of a
long-foundered ship and the grimness of winter weather. Visitors
occasionally come by chance (get it?): once a couple rescuing them
from starvation, once a group of rough sailors who disturb the close
equilibrium of the pair. Crummey has done a magnificent job immersing
us in the solitude of an unforgiving land, deadly tragedy, and the
struggling introspection of an untaught but inquiring mind. The
Innocents is lively with colloquialisms, the words—bladderwrack,
bawn, yaffles, mollyfudge, nigmenog, callibogus ... et al!
▪ Father’s
favourite expression of frustration: “God’s nails!”
▪ Mother’s
favourite expression of frustration: “Piss and corruption!”
▪ She
could talk the bark off a tree, their father said, a note of awed
disbelief in his voice. [midwife]
▪ It
hadn’t occurred to Ada that a name was bestowed on a person and not
something you were born with. [baby sister who ultimately did not
survive]
▪ “May
earth bear on you with all its might and main.” [incantation during
childbirth]
▪ Most
of their speculation centred on the figure of the Beadle who was
Cornelius Strapp’s man, fish culler and keeper of Strapp’s
ledger. Their father spoke of the man with a mix of animosity and
foreboding.
▪ One
of the three said, “You’re the very daps of Sennet you is.”
▪ His
wrists were atonic and sore, the fingers stiffened to claws. (113)
▪ “Sister,”
he said. “I’m so bad now as old Mr. Lucas’ goat.” (135)
[unaccustomed to the rum shared by The Hope sailors, and
learning their lingo; Evered has never seen a goat]
▪ And
years passed in that same severe round with little variation but the
ratcheting wheel of the seasons and nothing but the slow pendulum of
The Hope’s appearances to mark time on a human scale. (141)
▪ A
queer look to him, jet-black hair in tight curls and his skin a
colour unlike any colour Evered knew, a barky-tea complexion. (202)
▪ “Mr.
Long Shanks is too bockity to be any use in a boat. He nearly fell
overboard just now.” (206)
▪ “She
got the nerve of a mule Ada has.” (242)
▪ Pleasure
and shame. Shame and pleasure. These were the world’s currencies.
And it paid out both in equal parts.
Margot Hunt. The Last
Affair. Electronic edition (ebook), 2019.
Download from Toronto Public Library. Originally published by
Mira Books(?), 2019.
Nora
Holliday and Josh Landon, both married with children, fall into an
affair that feels like love. Each of their marriages is a disaster,
of course. The crime/mystery element of the story opens with the
murder of Josh’s wife Gwen. Who dunnit? And on we go with an
anatomy of two different
families. I’m puzzled why
I had
put this book on my list. One judges by blurbs, and I failed to
foresee
that the psychological drama
and the crime perpetrator would be so predictable. Nora lives
unhappily with an alcoholic husband, Carter; Josh endures the cold,
narcissistic Gwen. For the sake of the children—oh,
give me a break.
Josh’s
daughter Abby has
just been dumped by her boyfriend and thoughts
of revenge are the only thing that pull her out of depression.
Accidentally
discovering her adored
father’s infidelity is
like a double
whammy; she
keeps it secret, determined to identify the woman. Perhaps better
than her father, Abby
knows
her mother’s hypocritical, sociopathic
nature. A number of people
have a reason to hate Gwen. Divorce
plans go into action. There’s
nothing bad
about the writing or the
characterization. Just me, longing
for more challenge in a crisp Scandi-noir or Hiassen-like
absurdities.
Josh:
▪ “It’s
always about you,” Josh said quietly. “Gwen the great. Gwen the
victim.”
▪ Josh
had told Gwen he’d never again underestimate her capacity for
cruelty.
Carter:
▪ “I
don’t think it’s safe to be around Dad right now,” Matt said
softly.
▪ “You,”
Carter said, pointing his finger at Nora, “don’t get to tell me
what to do ever again.”
Abby:
▪ One betrayal had chased the
other right out of her mind.
▪ “Your
wife is having an affair with my father,” Abby blurted out.
Nora:
▪ You
have to stay strong, even in the darkest moments, when you feel like
you have failed at everything you’ve touched.
▪ If
Gwen needed to talk to her, didn’t Nora owe that to her?
Gwen:
▪ “I
will not ever allow you to make me look like a fool. Is that clear?”
▪ “Abby’s
not staying here because I don’t want her here. She can go with
you, wherever it is you’re going.”
Anna Wiener. Uncanny
Valley. Electronic edition (ebook), 2020.
Download from Toronto Public Library. Originally published by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
How to relate to a book about the
high-tech industry when you don’t have the faintest clue what they
are talking about? Anna Wiener relates best to me when she describes
her own mixed feelings about Silicon Valley’s startup days amidst
the dying hippie counterculture of San Francisco. Moving from the
world of book publishing into data analytics and open-source software
startups, she was in the thick of the new excitement that upended all
business models—a world of virtual creations, operating on a summer
camp mentality. Job interviews seemed designed to determine the
applicant’s “culture fit,” demanding employees be Down for
the cause:
company loyalty was everything (wear the T-shirt; don’t
forget the hoodie with the company logo).
Her self-examinations grew more
frequent as Anna absorbed the freewheeling culture—the
youthful exuberance and authority, the disorganized meetings, the
expensive retreats, the jargon, buzzwords, acronyms. The economic
power shift. As fully invested as she intended to be on entering the
system, she felt apart with her traditional academic training, by
being a non-tech “civilian” in a tech environment, by shades of
sexism and misogyny, finally by creeping unease with unregulated
erosion of privacy. Perhaps no one could have written this book as
trenchantly as she did? Despite the underlying technology subjects,
Anna’s prose flows easily as her best skill. She’s a regular in
The New Yorker.
Words:
prelapsarian – before the mythical
fall of mankind
maieutics – Socratic teaching
method
metathesis – ion exchange between
two compounds OR two consonants transposed in a word
extropians – belief that science
and technology continually improve human life
chelonian
– turtle-type reptile
genomic – a study in genetics for
sequencing and analyzing the cell of an organism
asymptotic
– when an approaching
curve and line never meet
Teasers:
▪ He was jolly and hirsute,
wearing faded jeans and a company T-shirt that declared I
AM DATA DRIVEN. I resisted asking if it needed a hyphen.
▪ In a certain light, I tried to
convince myself, business analytics could be seen as a form of
applied sociology.
▪ As the tides turned digital, my
milieu was grounding itself firmly in the embodied, intangible world.
▪ Data collection and retention
were unregulated. Investors salivated over predictive analytics, the
lucrative potential of steroidal pattern-matching, and the prospect
of bringing machine-learning algorithms to the masses—or, at least,
to Fortune 500 companies.
▪ My job had placed me, a
self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless,
professionalized deference to the male ego.
▪ For nearly two years, I had been
seduced by the confidence of young men. They made it look so simple,
knowing what you wanted and getting it.
▪ I understood my blind faith in
ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft
suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It
had become a global affliction.
▪ The tech industry was making me
a perfect consumer of the world it was creating.
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