Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the first installment of The Broken Earth, a fantasy trilogy set on a vast continent called the Stillness, “which is not still even on a good day” (7). The inhabitants of the Stillness experience frequent seismic events and other natural disasters, including brutal “Fifth Seasons”––long winters lasting six months or more that […]
I. Grabbing the Wheel It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the […]
Summary: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a stunning and elegant work of modern fiction. Taking inspiration from an ancient novel by Antonius Diogenes that survives merely as “a few papyrus fragments” and a “ninth-century plot summary” (Author’s Note), Doerr weaves together three narrative arcs from different eras in humanity’s past, present, and future. One takes place during […]
Summary: Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict examines how individuals and groups get stuck in self-perpetuating and mutually-destructive conflicts, as well as how we can pull ourselves out of them. Ripley defines “high conflict” as “what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them” (4). Ripley claims that high conflict is “the invisible […]
Summary: Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow is a heartfelt book about how grief work is understood and practiced through what Weller calls “soul-centered psychotherapy.” Weller suggests that the act of living calls each person to “take up an apprenticeship with sorrow” that allows us to acknowledge the pervasive presence of grief in human life, including […]
Summary: Amor Towels’s The Lincoln Highway is a coming-of-age novel set in 1950s America. It follows a group of young men––and one delightfully-feisty young woman––through an improbable but not entirely unbelievable series of (mis)adventures that take place over ten days. Each character is seeking some version of their personal American Dream; sometimes these visions fit nicely together, […]
Summary: Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and […]
Summary: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is an exceptionally lucid and commendable contribution to popular neuroscience. In this series of concise, highly-accessible essays, Barrett synthesizes a huge field of academic knowledge in a fashion that any literate person can enjoy and benefit from. Her central thesis is that the brain is […]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with […]
Summary: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a fantasy book in which the titular character attempts to understand the fundamental nature of the “House” he inhabits. The House is a seemingly-endless chain of statue-filled Halls rising out of an ocean. As Piranesi learns more about the House and encounters other characters within its labyrinthine structure, he becomes increasingly skeptical […]