On a more serious note: this book, which is about the historical collapse of societies like the Greenland Norse as well as the impending collapse of everything else, will make you want to die. And sooner rather than later, because Jared Diamond’s message is very upsetting to amateurs (like myself) who don’t understand how problems of this magnitude could possibly be fixed.
People say that he overstates the number of starving people in the world, that his book is all doom and no optimism, but okay: Jared Diamond is brilliant, won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs and Steel (which is just as interesting and far less upsetting), won a National Medal of science, and speaks twelve languages: English, Latin (doesn’t count), Greek, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Finnish, New Melanesian, Indonesian, and some New Guinean language. He manages to parse thousands of years of history into a short list of the things that have led to collapse in the past (deforestation, water management, overpopulation, overconsumption, etc.) as well as the human-induced things that are leading to collapse in the present (climate change, toxins, energy shortages). He also manages to tell the story of each civilization in a way that you can understand but is clearly not oversimplified, which is a feat in itself.
But the most interesting and scariest thing about Collapse is the way he separates environmental destruction from economic, military or social destruction: he shows how a society can have everything going well (lots of money, defense, peace, law-abiding citizens, technological advances) and still have a brutal, apocalyptic collapse! Help!
I tell this story so much that I might as well just get it tattooed on my forehead, but I just want to announce to the world that I read this book in King’s Cross Station, eating a weed-infused blueberry muffin every hour on the hour and weeping my eyes out. It was the highlight of my life. But as the book was coming to an end (you know how you look at where your hands are in the pages and think 20% left, 15%, 10%, fuck)–the halls of the station was darkening, and the trains were leaving and the shops were closing down and I was turning the pages with some sort of hallucinogenic dread that the series was over. So, emotionally, kind of a mixed bag.
This is my favorite book after Prisoner of Azkaban, maybe because it features so much Snape–who is the best character of the entire series. I read this Salon.com review of the movie that called Alan Rickman’s Snape “sexy,” and I felt really validated, because although I wouldn’t really call Snape sexy I feel the same way about him that I would about a sexy person: basically, give me more.
J.K. Rowling said on BBC that she had wanted to kill off Arthur Weasley in this book, but couldn’t bear to do it. Thank goodness, because this is not the pleasantest one of the series: Harry runs around through most of it growling “What’s happening to me? Why do I feel this way?” as if Lord Voldemort’s brain-invasions are creepily equatable with wet dreams and puberty. But I have no dislike for this book, because of the…
Murakami has a very distinct surreal style, but it’s usually one kind of surreal (the surreality of boring daily life starting to slip away from you) versus the other (the acid trip surreal). This book is both, which is awesome. And supposedly it’s some metaphysical Hegelian dialectical blah blah blah all the way through, but when I read it in 2003 there’s no way I was really going to understand any of that, and I loved it anyway.
Emily Giffin made me start thinking about other books that you are likely to see sold at Target, like The Kite Runner, The Secret Life of Bees, The Lovely Bones, My Sister’s Keeper, etc: books which are not quite inspirational literature and not quite badly written, but close enough to both categories to be unnerving when viewed all at once on a shelf at Target. I wouldn’t be surprised if Target’s book-buyers decide to sell a book only if they can imagine a Dakota Fanning movie being made out of it. And while I do hold a special place in my heart for these Target books–they were my bridge between The Westing Game and the grittier world of “real” books–I am always skeptical about them.
Yes, these are two different books, but not really. Emily Giffin is not quite as bad as Lauren Weisberger–whose The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing, etc. feel like they are the exact same book with a day’s worth of search-and-replace work done on Word: fashion replaced with PR, green eyes replaced with blue, four-inch heels replaced with five–but still. To think of these books as two separate things would be teetering on the edge of the chick-lit black hole of thinking, where all of this stuff is told with such melodrama that it seems like an important life lesson, which it is not. Because both of these books tell the same story: two best friends, gorgeous bitchy Darcy and smart plain Rachel, get in a fight because Rachel steals Darcy’s fiance. Something Borrowed is from Rachel’s perspective, Something Blue from Darcy’s.
When I started reading this in 2003 I was really put off by how dense and crazy it was, so I stopped. But I think most of that was because I didn’t know who Margaret Atwood was and I didn’t know what to expect–I didn’t know that a sci-fi snowglobe full of genetic engineering and child pornography and videogames called Kwiktime Osama was kind of par for the course–and when I read the book again this year I was prepared for crazy shit.
