Journal

Clunky, a missed opportunity.

The book had some neat ideas about first contact with aliens, but the execution was lacking. Characters were plot-driven and their motivations unconvincing. Various parts of the book read like a fan-fiction celebrating various parts of the science world (name dropping famous scientists, fundamentals of how computers work, components of physics)—but in ways that were distracting and took away from the plot of the novel.

I bought the entire trilogy on kindle—but I’m not sure I even care to read the rest.

Like most Murakami books, could be best described as an odd, incongruous, dream. It also is filled to the brim with all of the classic Murakami tropes including—but not limited to—cats, divorce, classical music, and cooking.

I wouldn’t recommend it as someone’s first Murakami book, but worth reading for those who have read many of his novels.

I did something recently that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: delete the mountain of emails in my archive that I’ll never revisit.

In total I reduced my Gmail archive from ~48k emails to a number I’ll pretend rounds to five hundred.

But why?

I’m sure many would think this is a bit odd, so here’s some background on the motivation.

I’ve long recognized my personal desire to minimize and only own what is necessary. This is easy to justify in the physical realm: more stuff means more to move, more to keep track of, more to lose.

In this physical space, I’ve long kept relatively few pieces of physical mail that come my way. Often it goes straight from my mailbox to bin or shredder. Sometimes important things are kept temporarily, very few permanently.

But with email? My default was to archive everything forever. Not seeing the huge piles I had created, I became a digital hoarder.

I began to wonder: why treat these differently? These digital piles were not providing me much value, nor joy. Just like piles of physical mail would provide me no value, nor joy.

Broadly I thought might need some of these emails later, but for many I could safely know that was not true. I was collecting junk. I was collecting emails that were once important but no longer.

It was time to dispose of the junk, the irrelevant, the old. And to me that is the primary driver here: to only keep what I need and truly want. No more. No less.

Any regrets yet?

There is one con in all of this. What is gone is gone forever. I’m sure there’s at least one email I’ll miss. I haven’t encountered this yet, but I’m sure there’ll be some at one point or another! Until then.

Severance is an entrancing novel that drew me in with short-and-sweet chapters. “Just one more chapter” I would find myself saying as I read more than I intended in any given sitting.

What interested me in Severance was the promise of another Station Eleven-like storyline. While this novel can’t quite live up to the masterpiece that is Station Eleven, it’s still really good and worth a read. If I had one complaint, it would be the pop-culture name-dropping. It’s just too much for me.

Severance is also surreal in the world of Covid. What if Covid broke society more dramatically. Would it go down like this?

The problem of mass incarceration has never really been about crime. It’s that the people who Americans are afraid of are subject to a separate set of rules. They live in a separate and altogether different social world, because they belong to a different political community. No social-service agency, no matter how well funded, can bridge the divide between these two worlds, nor can any of our criminal justice–policy reforms. We have not yet come to grips with our problems or imagined an adequate response because our assumptions about the extent and causes of crime have been wrong from the beginning. You cannot treat or arrest or, perhaps, even reform your way out of mass incarceration because mass incarceration is about citizenship, not criminal behavior, and citizenship is about belonging.

A narrative approach to telling the stories and struggles of those who are caught in the depths of mass incarceration. Miller writes eloquently about his experiences and those in his family and beyond.

Most novel – and horrifying – to me was the lengths and troubles parolees must go through to satisfy sometimes-masochistic parole officers. In such a world, it’s hard to imagine those on the inside truly want the inmates to be rehabilitated.

Frankly I’m more of a facts-and-figures guy. But this was a good book. And to those that like the narrative approach, I would recommend it.