Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

This month's bookclub book is Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I really enjoyed this highly original bit of sci-fi, which covers the period just before, during, and after a massive plague that wipes out 99.9% of humanity. Although many characters are followed over the course of the novel, it revolves most closely around the experiences of a loosely connected band of individuals - a famous Shakespearean actor (Arthur Leander), a child actress he once befriended (Kirsten Raymonde), his graphic artist ex-wife (Miranda Carroll), his current actress wife (Elizabeth) and son (Tyler), his close friend (Clark Thompson), and a paparazzo-turned-paramedic (Jeevan Chaudhary) who used to stalk him.

Station Eleven is a highly sensitive portrayal of human character, in all its beauty, ugliness, vanity, and complexities, and a compelling envisioning of what our post-apocalyptic society might look like.

I especially enjoyed the scenes with Miranda, whose magnum opus is the eponymous comic book series, Station Eleven. Her art is described in vivid terms, and its themes of isolation, longing, and exploration prefigure and contextualize the novel's broader themes.

Definitely recommend!

Madonna in a Fur Coat - Sabahattin Ali

For July's bookclub, we read Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat, a very interesting and enjoyable read, although a sorrowful one. Madeline recommended this book, after reading a piece on it in the New York Times ("A Once-Forgotten Novel Unites Turkish Readers in Troubled Times").

The novel's frame is a young man who becomes deeply interested in one of his colleagues, an older German/Turkish translator named Raif Effendi. Raif seems a perfect nebbish, always being berated by his superior and never raising a word of complaint. He piques the young man's interest one day, however, when he suddenly dashes off a quick sketch that brilliantly reveals his superior's brutish yet pathetically miserable ego. After that, the narrator becomes determined to understand the mysterious Raif, despite all obstacles.

The story is ultimately a love story, although a highly unusual one, due to the unexpected gender nonconformity of the protagonists. Raif is hobbled in 1920s society by his "girlish" innocence, and he falls madly in love with the titular "Madonna," a "mannishly" outspoken and independent painter woman he befriends. The two bond powerfully, but struggle to find a relationship that fits their needs.

Beautifully written and surprisingly poignant - would definitely recommend.

Astoria - Peter Stark

Our May bookclub book was Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, by Peter Stark. Nate recommended this one, and I really enjoyed it!

Astoria is a remarkable true tale of ambition, wilderness exploration, and hardship, recounting John Jacob Astor's efforts to establish the first American outpost in the Pacific Northwest, as a means of building a hugely profitable global trading empire. Astor was a friend of Thomas Jefferson's, and undertook the mission with his support.

While Astor remained comfortably lodged at home in his mansion in New York, he sent two parties, an overland and an oversea party, to try to forge a path through the wilderness, and meet up in present-day Astoria, Oregon (about a 2 hour drive northeast of Portland, on the Columbia River and coast of the Pacific Ocean). The story covers the 3 years of their expedition, from 1810-1813.

Astor was an incredibly far-seeing and enterprising person, and he did his utmost to select the very best men and equipment for his missions. Even still, the journeys were incredibly brutal, owing in part to the roughness of the unknown terrain, physical hardship and starvation, and constant stress from fear of Native American attack, and in part due to interpersonal conflicts and ignorance among the party members themselves.

A fascinating story! Definitely recommend, especially for Pacific Northwest enthusiasts.

The Gathering Storm

We watched Darkest Hour, a pretty good film about Winston Churchill taking the reins of the British government after the failure of the appeasement policy (with an astonishing, virtuoso performance by Gary Oldman as Churchill) – which made me interested in reading The Gathering Storm – the first of Churchill’s six-volume history and personal memoir of the period from the end of the first World War to the end of the Second World War.  Churchill was a masterful writer (he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, though for other writings, not the history).  

The book amply fulfills its stated theme:

HOW THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES
THROUGH THEIR UNWISDOM
CARELESSNESS AND GOOD NATURE
ALLOWED THE WICKED
TO REARM

Of course, Churchill’s stirring speeches are famous for their emotional power and The Gathering Storm includes some striking examples. Churchill first described post World War One Germany, after the allies imposed The Weimar Republic, as a tepid democracy “which was regarded as the imposition of the enemy” and then paints a vivid picture of the consequences:

Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast – Corporal Hitler.

Many of his conclusions and recommendations speak forcefully to the world situation today:

When three or four powerful Governments acting together have demanded the most fearful sacrifices from their peoples, when these have been given freely for the common cause, and when the longed-for result has been attained, it would seem reasonable that concerted action should be preserved so that at least the essentials would not be cast away.  But this modest requirement the might, civilization, learning, knowledge, science, of the victors were unable to supply.  They lived from hand to mouth and day to day, and from one election to another, until, when scarcely twenty years were out, the dread signal of the Second World War was given, and we must write of the sons of those who had fought and died so faithfully and well: 

Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light
 -Siegfried Sassoon

In addition to his unparalleled gift for rousing and emotional language, Churchill’s narrative and persuasive writing throughout is marked by simplicity, clarity and power.  A sad story, masterfully recounted.

The Big Short

Michael Lewis has an astonishing gift for finding interesting topics, usually related to economics and human behavior, and fashioning them into fascinating and lucid stories that absolutely explode with side-splitting anecdotes.  His first book, Liar’s Poker, was a huge success, chronicling his own experience as a naïve, fresh-out-of-Princeton, bond salesman at Salomon Brothers.  The Big Short is a sequel, of sorts, which tells the story of the Great Recession (officially 2007-2009, with effects that lasted much longer), triggered by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.  

The Big Short explains the origin and development of this market failure by describing, first, how the bubble grew: mortgage lenders signed up risky consumers who were almost certain to default when their low teaser mortgage rates converted suddenly to sharply higher rates, bond salesmen at several large investment banks found a way to repackage these subprime mortgages into bonds that somehow got rated as AAA (allowing them to be sold at premium prices) – with no one seemingly concerned that these instruments were doomed…except a handful of very smart, independent thinkers, who then bet against this market and, after a couple years, made truly vast sums of money when the mortgages went belly up.

One whip smart, colorful and abrasive character featured in the book was Steve Eisman. Eisman was in a constant state of fury over the practices of conventional Wall Street salesmen:

“Obsessing over Household, he attended a lunch organized by a big Wall Street firm.  The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation.  “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, “Turn off your tape recorders.” Everyone turned off their tape recorders.  And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people – in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.”Eisman asked, “Are any regulators interested in this?”“No,” said Sandler.“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor’.”

Eisman relished taking on big shots in public when he thought they were talking nonsense:

"There was now hardly an important figure on Wall Street whom Eisman had not insulted, or tried to.” ”Eisman had invited the bullish-on-subprime Bear Stearns analyst Gyan Sinha to his office and grilled him so mercilessly that a Bear Stearns salesman had called afterward and complained.“Gyan is upset,” he said.“Tell him not to be,” said Eisman. “We enjoyed it!”

Very interesting, lively read!