Journal

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.

Well-written book documenting the rise and fall of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The book itself is semi-chronological, though it does jump back as necessary to frame the story.

The history that it covers is worth understanding and for that reason I’d recommend it to almost anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the tug-of-war around equal access to voting. It’s hard not to have a visceral reaction to the attempts at dismantling voting rights. The contemporary chapters at the end are especially upsetting since it’s clear how little has really changed.

The post-Shelby voting rights landscape most closely resembled the period before 1965, which the VRA was meant to end, when the blight of voting discrimination could only be challenged on a torturous case-by-case basis. The loss of Section 5, combined with an often hostile judiciary, created perpetual uncertainty when it came to protecting voting rights. Roberts’s long-held view that violations of the VRA “should not be made too easy to prove” was finally being put into practice.

I probably retained about 10% of the information (optimistically) – there’s a lot to learn from this book! This is definitely one I’d consider revisiting or referencing in the future.

Well-written overview of the history and current state of trash in the United States. The book only just scratches the surface of various focus areas and moves at a rapid pace.

One of the most interesting portions of the book was the chapter centered around the history of trash management. I especially enjoyed hearing about piggeries – a concept I didn’t know existed until I read about them in this book.

More than two hundred towns with populations over ten thousand built piggeries where raw garbage served as the feed, as what passed for waste experts at the time estimated that seventy-five pigs could dispose of a ton of garbage a day—and provide revenue and meat at the same time. New England led the nation in pursuing this waste-to-swine strategy; turn-of-the-century New Haven sent all its wet garbage, 5,400 tons of it a year, to pig farms, while Worcester, Massachusetts, proudly kept two thousand garbage-swilling swine at its forty-acre piggery near the city limits.

[Piggeries] persisted until the 1960s, when evidence that it could spread disease to both swine and humans became impossible to ignore.

Also interesting is the concept of using trash for energy, something that the United States appears to have mostly resisted. I’d love to learn more about the tradeoffs of this approach.

“Our behavior in the U.S. in this area is really quite irrational. And it’s irresponsible. We are throwing energy and money away every day, burying it in the ground.”

It would be interesting to see what a 2021 version of this book would say. Especially with our current recycling crisis in which many recycled goods can no longer be sent overseas.

I have trouble writing much about this book. I really struggled to finish the book due to its style. It felt like a trudge to get through what is overall a pretty short book.

The book is written in a clinical style – intentionally to appear like a report written by a medical professional. Unfortunately I found this style incredibly dry, making it hard to get into the story.

To me this distracted from the important subject the novel was about – the challenges of sexism that women in Korea face.

All this said, I admit that I am probably not in the right position to judge this book. For the right audience, it could hit differently. Maybe it’s better in Korean.