[book post] Humanist Reason by Eric Hayot

Like, I imagine, most of my peers, I entered college with a rather fuzzy idea of what the humanities are for. I wasn't a STEMlord, mind; I was pretty well equally divided in my interests between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and a coin flip could've pushed me in any of those directions. But if you had pressed me on what, exactly, was the value of an English degree versus a molecular biology degree, I probably would've echoed some of the vague university rhetoric about all subjects being equally good for "learning how to think," and, if pressed, I would've had some fuzzy notion that the sciences were more "empirical", and the humanities were more interpretive/personal/"artsy" (with math, our majestic queen, sitting upon some divine throne solidly in-between).

But I am not sure I would've used the word "true" to describe, say, the papers I wrote for my literature seminars, and that's a big problem, according to Hayot.

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[book post] January books

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley

Wow. Absolutely incredible; it's a must-read. What a hell of a life. What a hell of a guy.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I got rec'd this via some random tweet that was like "if you like any combination of Sylvain Gautier and/or Roy Mustang have I got a book for you." Last time I followed a random tweet recommendation along those lines, it was to the effect of, "hey did you always want post-canon Zutara where the two of them have to rebuild their countries and deal with The Legacy Of Conquest and shit, and also there's Pokémon," and I was like hell yes. That book was Steel Crow Saga, and it was exactly as advertised, and it was excellent.

Similarly, Tana French's Faithful Place indeed delivers on the tweet's premise.

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The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

This was a delightful brisk lil' goofball of a novel. Also: it's apparently a Newbery medal winner??? Which surprised me; I feel like most modern Newbery winners are Serious TM and have a Message TM or at least something kinda profound, whereas this book's plot is much more in the vein of "what if a really weird guy showed up [and demanded that some randos in an apartment building solve a murder]." But oh what a fun time they have with that. I found the mystery a little thin, but the ensemble cast was thoroughly delightful; between the weirdly-precocious day-trading elementary schooler, the fantastically vain and ridiculous Ms. Wexler, the obsessed-with-diagnosing-everyone doctor-in-training, and the delightfully crotchety restaurant owner, I think I was laughing every other page. It felt a lot like the 1985 Clue movie, actually, just a bit more kid-friendly. Worth a shot if you need a very fast read and you're into that kind of thing.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

I see why this book was popular: it's warm-hearted, it's cute (if never quite laugh-out-loud funny), and it's pleasantly readable. But I was a little surprised to see that it got a... Pulitzer?

Not that I know much about book prize committees or the like, but I'd always vaguely assumed that if a novel wins the Pulitzer, it must be Ambitious TM or Serious TM in some way, and this felt more beach-read-y on the whole.

Beach-read-y, and, on the twee side, which may mean I'm judging it more harshly than I ought—my allergy to twee is well-documented. The whole schtick is that Arthur Less is a gay middle-aged has-been of a writer, living in San Francisco, and moping over his much-younger hookup-buddy-slash-kinda-boyfriend's recent departure to go get married to some other guy. In an effort to avoid attending his ex's wedding, he decides to accept every speaking/teaching/etc invitation he's every gotten, and departs on a round-the-world trip for a few months.

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