A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

Too much to say. Why we read novels! And a reminder that people are all we have. It took me until page 70 to get into it, but once I did, I was deeply deeply hooked. This book captures the heights of friendship and love in a way I don't think I've ever experienced before, and made me feel that to enjoy literature is to enjoy life. It's also a book filled with unbelievable trauma and pain, but it never feels gratuitous — the trauma makes complete sense in the characters' contexts. This book is definitely on the long side for me (>800 pages), but the positive was that I got to crawl into bed with stories of what felt like my best friends for nights on end.

Minotaur - Benjamin Tammuz

I couldn't put this down. Super easy page-turner about a middle-aged Israeli spy who falls in love (creepily so) with an English teenager. A lot of fun to daydream about bougie mediterranean life and watch the pieces of the disjoint story fall into place.

Fences - August Wilson (play)

Read this for Defector book club. Super fast read and it was fun to read a play! The dialogue is amazing, but you can tell how much an acting performance could shape the feeling between the lines. Would recommend looking up clips from Denzel Washington's performance.

Luster - Raven Leilani

I liked this book but it was also creepy and (most-of-the-time) depressing. About a young black woman who starts an affair with an older married white man and then gets sucked into his dysfunctional family life. Everything in the novel is a bit chaotic and it's hard to know what my takeaways are, except for that as usual, life is messy, and it's really hard to be a black woman in this dysfunctional country.

Ishmael - Daniel Quinn

Very cool book, similar vibes to Sapiens in some ways, but without the historical rigor and detail. I would describe this as a spiritual book about humankind and our relationship to the world. It argues that our human myth of the world belonging to [hu]mankind will be our ultimate downfall, and that we need to instead tell ourselves the story that we belong to the world, just like any other organism. Honestly very compelling and a good reminder that we are not necessarily the center of the universe. It splits humankind into Takers and Leavers (hunter-gatherers, etc.) and does a very good job of describing the Taker objective of overtaking the gods and asserting our own control over the universe. It's a good reminder that we will never fully be in control — there are laws of the universe that we cannot overturn, no matter how hard we try. Moreover, there is no right way to live that we can impose on others, and no matter how hard we try, we will not be able to find it. It does offer a hopeful future — that homo sapiens can be the first species which tried to play god and realized the error of its ways. If we can achieve this future and abandon our Taker myth, then this opens up future generations and species to continue the evolutionary process of life.

Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff

This was really good, but a bit too long and academic for me. I think the first few sections in particular are incredibly interesting, as she breaks down the history of Google and the choices they made (or were influenced to make) in building a surveillance capitalist empire, which was then repeated and intensified by Facebook and other SV companies. There were a lot of great a-ha moments and nice phrasings - a very incomplete list of things that lit up my brain include her diagrams on how surveillance capitalism operates off of behavioral surplus, the emphasis on certainty and flattening equivalence between all people/choices/outcomes, and this paradox between freedom and knowledge that surveillance capitalists are trying to break - they want freedom of the market, but complete control over it by predicting what we all do. I also liked her guiding questions - "who knows? who decides? who decides who decides?" She ends on a hopeful note about collective organization to reclaim our right to the future tense, humanity, and democracy, but (unfortunately) I'm not sure I fully buy it!

Leave the World Behind - Rumaan Alam

Really well-written novel about living in our broken age, which feels like we're hurtling towards the end of civilization. I really liked the start of the book and the way it set up its characters. Then the pacing got a little bit too rushed for me, and I tend to not like thriller-ish novels. But it's a captivating read!