There's a lot going on right now! My fiancé and I are in the final 30 days before our wedding, the world is full of conflict and change, and I'm trying my best to continue to read as much as I can. And avoid deep time sinks. And occasionally (often?) failing…
It's Saturday morning and the house is quiet, the road is quiet, the trains are (somewhat) quiet, but outside I can hear the springtime calls of the birds. Their excited chirruping heralds the true arrival of Spring! The cats are intrigued by the birds return and have spent much time staring out the windows, with their heads on swivels.
In February, I wrote about the non-fiction I had been reading and hinted about the two more substantial novels I had read. I'll add to the non-fiction list below, in a more "capsule" approach than typical:
- "Careless People" – Sarah Wynn-Williams was a former New Zealand diplomat and international lawyer. Her memoir is centered around her experience as an early member of Facebook's public policy team. I had heard that this book was incisive, painful, and revelatory. That's an understatement. Like Jacinda Ardern, the former New Zealand PM whose memoir I read in 2025, Sarah Wynn-Williams blends humor, pathos, frustration, horror, and almost polemic. She deftly paints an incredibly rich, revelatory picture of power, greed, id, ego, and ignorance that exposes the flawed surreality of rich and powerful people around the world. Her view from within Facebook is incredibly valuable for understanding the base mechanics of attention and money and fear of irrelevance that motivated, often to ill ends, that organization, but also apply more broadly to the world. I laughed, winced, and gawped as I read, often putting the book down to shake my head and mourn.
- "The Unseen Truth" – Sarah Lewis, an associate professor at Harvard University, comes to interrogate the racial regime from a completely unexpected perspective: visual. This book, like the academic works from last month, was challenging to read, especially due to its very specific language. Dr. Lewis points the reader to what was, and is, left out as evidence of the false foundations of racial hierarchy, stretching back to wars in the Caucasus and the U.S. Civil War. What does the term Caucasian even mean? How did it become synonymous with White? This book explores that and art, maps, photography, seeing, ignoring, conditioning, and more. An incredible synthesis of history and visual representation that exhibits some of the problems of academic writing but overall delivers the reader to a place of questioning and realization.
- "The Beginning Comes After the End" – Rebecca Solnit, a long time environmental and human rights activist, delivers a punchy, eloquent, and tight 131 page reflection (and partial paean) on the past 60-70 years of slow-but-fast transformation and societal change. Her core thesis is that the current rise of authoritarianism is a reaction to the stunning progress in rights for more people and environments. By the end of this book, I felt:
Hopeful
Recognition that our own commitment to justice and equity is important, no matter how "small" it feels
Inspired to be present
Excited to build a better future together!
So, what about those two novels I read? When did I even read them? What were their titles? Listing them below as a reminder… (I don't use a book review/book logging website right now, even though I tried to use The StoryGraph last year.)
- "Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution" by R.F. Kuang
- "Pachinko" by Min Jin Lee
I'll write about these two (around 1000 total pages) later. But I've already started reading the next six hundred page honker just yesterday evening.
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