David G. Cookson's Blog

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Brain on Fire
My month of Madness.
Susannah Cahalan
4 stars.
Susanah Cahalan had a career, a boyfriend, and an apartment in the greatest city in the world. She wrote for the New York Post and at 24, was living the life she wanted…
And then one day she wakes up in a hospital room, strapped to a bed with a tag saying “Flight Risk.”
She has no idea how she got there but this is only the beginning of a harrowing journey through neurological disorders masquerading as mental illness….and a disease that was largely unheard of in 2009…
Susanah paints a picture of her lost memory through her dad’s journal and security recording of her treatment sessions…the person she sees, she does not recognize…she doesn’t even remember who this person is…retracing her journey brings her face to face with how close she was to succumbing to this…
And if not for a great catch by a real-life Dr. House…she might have died…
This is a naked and honest memoir chronicling the lost time that the autoimmune disease took from her…
The official name for it is autoimmune encephalitis.
And the book she has written has helped other people . The 10 years later section (for the 10-year edition) answers some of the questions a reader might have… her book was used to clue other doctors into spotting this…
Good read, quick read.





View all my reviews

The Nix by Nathan Hill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“I’m writing my mother’s story,” Samuel Said. “But I’m writing the true story. The actual events…”

“So it’s going to be like 600 pages and ten people will read it? Congratulations.”

Oh…well played, Mr. Hill…well played.

The Nix is Nathan Hill’s first novel (for the record it is 620 pages in hardcover) and this little nugget at the end is like the meta explanation for the story…I am not sure if the wonderful novel I have just read is true in any sense of the word, other than the truth that only art can bring…

A Nix is “anything that you love that one day disappears, along with a piece of your heart…” In Samuel Andresen-Anderson’s life, it is his mother who disappeared long ago…only to reappear later in the most chaotic of ways.

Samuel is a college professor who whiles away his down time playing a computer game called Elfscape…he finds himself at a career crossroads, teaching ungrateful kids the finer points of “things we will never use” and realizing the real world is much less accommodating than his fantasy world. He once had the whole world in front of him…he had a book deal but found he could never write that book. Suddenly he is no longer a promising young man but a floundering middle-aged man.

Now he owes his publisher a book…or he needs to pay back a whole lot of money that he doesn’t have.

And one of his ungrateful students is threatening to make his life hell….

Meanwhile…his long-lost mother reappears….and commits an act of violence against a blowhard potential candidate for president. And an opportunity arises…to tell the story of his mother (Faye) and how she disappeared and what she was doing all this time…we go back to 1968 and the Democratic National Convention…we go back even further and learn about her parents…and through this tapestry we see how one thing led to another and you know…it’s 620 pages and most of it works.

The Nix is a pleasure to read, the kind of novel that makes you stop and think about your own things that have been lost, and what could we have done to make them stay?



View all my reviews

Wellness by Nathan Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Is love at first sight real?
Is my life unfolding as it should?
What is love?
What is the right combination of words to make a person fall in love with you?
Is selling the illusion of a cure the same as actually selling a cure?
This is a loaded book…it’s 600 pages long.
I loved sitting down with this…I was burning through it in 22 days…
At the center of it all are Elizabeth and Jack….
who met before they met…
…in neighboring apartment buildings in Chicago, just across the way from each other….
she sees him…he sees her…
…and then one night at the club where some forgettable INDY band is playing…they run into each other….he makes his move with the simple words
“Come with…”
Then in the delightful expansive way that only a 600-page novel can, we learn about their parents, their kids, their past, the things that make them who they are….then in the future where their kids won’t eat what is in front of them,….the concerns of the middle-aged adult so far removed from the carefree days of their youth…
Adult problems drive a wedge between them…but is it all foretold? Is it fate? What is love? Baby don’t hurt me.
Why do people grow apart?
Why do people believe false things they read on Facebook?
How do people find each other and then become unrecognizable to themselves?
Loved it. Very satisfying. The problems are familiar. The questions are questions I would ask. There were many times during the reading of this book that I just recognized something in myself, in my family, in my life…I thought all about the picky eater section. I recognized the relative that you argue with online…I saw the miserable person who takes your happiness as an insult…These novel hits upon so many truths….and tho it is a paperweight of a book, it never drags. I read it in 22 days which seems pretty fast.
I went out and picked up the Nix from the library.
Hold my calls for the next 22 days.





View all my reviews

Prom Mom by Laura Lippman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Prom night, 1997. Baltimore.
Amber Glass passes out in a hotel, sick as a dog…
She delivers a baby alone…
Unattended….the baby dies…
Meanwhile, her prom date, Joe is off chasing after his ex-girlfriend…

25 years later….
Amber has done time, served a sentence and had her record sealed. She has spent the last few decades in New Orleans, building a life and trying to escape the past…
Until one day she decides to return home to Baltimore…
Where she starts a gallery of the works of convicted criminals…
Joe now lives with his new wife….childless by choice, and happy enough…his wife Merdith is a plastic surgeon, and Joe is trying to make a living in commercial real estate…all the while having an affair on the side…
And then….having another affair…as Joe reconnects with Amber… (I was screaming NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!)
And in the wake of a global pandemic….things get ugly…
At times I wondered who was going to come out ahead….or if anyone deserved to come out ahead…we bounce back and forth a little, getting snippets of backstory and then taking us through the more recent times of the pandemic and post pandemic…
Let’s just say you are in good hands…
I enjoyed this very much, it is the first time I have had the chance to read Laura Lippman, who colors her book with references to Baltimore and asks many of the same questions I do (what is up with the Wine Source being able to sell liquor on Sundays while no one else can?). Tight, well plotted…this is a fun ride down the streets of my adopted home.





View all my reviews

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It really sucks to be poor.
No matter how you may feel at any given moment, you are always at the mercy of conditions and whims of the investors and the faceless SHAREHOLDERS.
I believe the gig economy (convincing people they need a side hustle, bragging about how hard you work) is triumph over the human spirit, engineered by corporations who at best see humans as only mildly necessary.

Hu Anyan paints a picture of the gig economy in China, waxing philosophical along the way. He moves about China, taking work in megacities and living in small spaces, with roommates…riding a trike to deliver packages…working in retail, working in malls, doing whatever he could and always trying to maintain sanity and dignity.
He somehow manages to keep his head.
If nothing else, we can see that the whole world has become one where we are cogs in a machine.





View all my reviews

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



“the Future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed.” -- William Gibson…
Do you ever think about how many services in your life have NO obligation to be very good?
Do you remember when Facebook was actually not a flaming pile of crap? When Twitter was a fun place to kill time and connect with friends?

Do you remember when Amazon didn’t conjure up images of sweatshops and evil, or cost to damn much to be the only option?

I am a writer…

Perhaps unpublished. Perhaps self-styled…but whatever, I do this every day, have been doing it for over 35 years, It has to count for something.

In 2019 I bought this computer, an HP laptop and it was a rough year. That was when my car went up and there was one other thing and it was also the last time I worked Thanksgiving to make up all the cash I had to spend on things and then COVID hit and that was that…

But in 2019 I bought a version of Word and installed it on my then-new laptop and now I’m glad that I did because if I had to buy it now, I just couldn’t…

Because I couldn’t own it.

You can’t buy WORD or Word perfect outright anymore because now it only comes as a subscription, something you have to pay for year to year…

A fee…to use a product that you bought…that won’t work unless you pay for it again and again and again and again….and again.
And again. (I know I am being obnoxious right now; I’ll stop)

If I ever give up this computer (it’s 7 years old at this point…I don’t know how many more years it has) I will be forced to find a workaround…Google Docs? Sure…but they suck for other reasons…he talks about Google as a prime example of enshittificaton.) or simply give in and pay a subscription fee that I put in the pockets of Microsoft….not once, not twice, but every year…. (I’m looking at it now…about 99 bucks a year, every year.)
There is a word for this:
it has become
Enshittified….
*
Cory Doctorow has written a brilliant and scathing assessment of this phenomenon… it happens again and again: a company starts with a product or service that everyone loves (like Amazon….who DOESN’T love getting packages same day?) and then it begins the arc toward dominating the market, squeezing pre-existing customers, and then moving on to the business customers…
Doctorow begins with case studies of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter (now X), the iPhone and thoroughly dissects how the process of enshittification began there and how it continues unabated today…

And he takes us thru the process and why we need net neutrality and regulations and unions and all kinds of things that people actually like but don’t realize that they like….
We are not so far away from having a better world…
We can start with the internet.

And then we must reclaim the world…

This is a brilliant assessment, a very easy read, and definitely worth a look.





View all my reviews

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is a few years in the future and much of what has been set in motion now has come to pass. Women traveling out of state must submit to pregnancy tests… the March of the Hated (MOTHS), advocating for a constitutional amendment giving preferred voting status to people who could trace their heritage to the times of the Revolutionary War…an extension of the white supremacy that would seem to be the goal of the MAGA movement….

But this book is not about politics…it is about a child who lives in these times, Vera. Who learns new words and writes them in her journal. Who never knew her real mom, but lives with her father and Anne Mom.

She delights in making a new friend at school…she has an AI chess program that can translate Russian. Her dad may very well be a traitor. And her whole life may be lived during the last days of the American Empire.

It’s a quietly devastating little novel. How would a child perceive the fall of America? How would it impact her daily life? When things like grades and friends and finding your real mum are the only things on your mind?

This is a sensitive novel that doesn’t hit you over the head with its ideas but at the same time it is a not altogether implausible record of the end times to come.





View all my reviews

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Most art thieves steal for money, or they steal a single piece of art…

But for Stephane Breitwieser, it was a compulsion…and you can only roll the dice so many times…

“Four turns of the screw, maybe five. The carving to him is a masterpiece, just ten inches tall yet dazzlingly details, the first humans gazing at each other as they move to embrace….”

The author is describing a theft in present tense…the theft of a sculpture in the Reubens house, in same gallery as the more famous Adam and Eve (which would be much too big to steal…)
Breitwieser did not steal for profit…nor did he often steal the most important item of a collection…he did not stop at one theft or a dozen…. instead he stole things that struck his fancy, that would look good in his personal collection…and he did it a lot. With the help of his long -time girlfriend, Anne Catherine, Breitwieser committed over 200 thefts (from the late 90’s to about the mid 2000’s) amounting to over a billion dollars in losses for museums and collections all across Europe…not to mention the loss to the culture…

“The sound of ripping Velcro dissipated in the large room, and in a n instant the painting was loose…without hesitation he shoved it down the front of his pants…”

This reads like a fast-paced heist novel…short chapters and lots of details. Every theft is a risk; every job could lead to prison. Yet he persisted.

Why did he do it? What motivated him? By the author’s estimation, he is not a kleptomaniac, but there is a psychological reason behind all this, if only one could find it. It seems that Breitwieser stole as he breathed…he could have stopped at any time and he would have gotten away with it, lived a comfortable life living cheaply and displaying his works for his own enjoyment in his little attic room in his mother’s house. But it was a compulsion, wrapped in a genuine love of art and lack of concern for the public in general. Breitwieser didn’t physically hurt anybody or threaten anyone…but in his own way his actions led to incalculable damage to many works of art that were damaged or never recovered.

This was excellent. Highly recommended. The author had many conversations with the art thief, and at the end he is offered practical demonstrations of the skills that made him such a great thief: the sleight of hand, the speed with which he could stuff an item in his pants or in a bag…all with high stakes and no fear…

Great fun. You are almost rooting for him to succeed.





View all my reviews

Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Hair metal was a wormhole for every midwestern kid who was too naïve to understand why he wasn’t happy…I may have been a loser, but Vince and Axl and Ozzy were too cool for me. They allowed me to live a life I would never see, and I never had to leave my bedroom.”


Fargo Rock City is part memoir, part full throated yet mildly self-conscious support of heavy metal… growing up in a small town in North Dakota, the origin story is very relatable. And this is what is so much fun about all of Chuck Klosterman’s books: it’s like talking to a friend.

June 18, 1988: For the 6th consecutive week, George Michael has the no 1 album in America, holding off GNR, Poison, Van Halen and the Scorpions

He has opinions that would make you want to strangle him, he has a taste in music that would make the road trip music a bit of a battle for me…but it would be fun all the way, no doubt for all the music knowledge and music history he offers and the stories he could tell. Every chapter starts with a mention of some sort of obtuse event in the history of metal...

June 5, 1985: Axle Rose Fires guitarist Tracii Guns

I mean…I can’t get behind liking any of these bands that he likes. I have hated Guns and Roses forever simply because they reminded me so much of the shitty town that I left so many years ago…Poison sucks but it really doesn’t matter. Who is to say that one kind of music is better than another? What’s wrong with liking Mötley Crüe? (I mean…I went to great lengths to insert the umlauts). In the end, it’s the honesty, the lack of fear of liking something that may be outdated and maybe was never cool at all that makes this all worth it.

“I absolutely could not relate to Mötley Crüe. And that’s why I will always love them.”

Maybe some times you just have to be unafraid to like the things that you like. This is a book by a fan of a music genre that is an orphan, an outcast, never taken seriously by the mainstream, at least not anymore.
Yet heavy metal persists.

And as it says in the back of the book, No matter where you are, the kids wanna rock.
Terrific.





View all my reviews

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Down in the valley in the land of Shire
Lived a brave little Hobbit whom we all admire…

I’m certainly familiar with the quest…Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit. I saw at least 2 thirds of the Lord of The Rings trilogy, the Two Towers and the third one. I am aware that it captures the imagination at a young age…people love this book. They Love Tolkien, love it. love it. Love it… I still consider myself an outsider in this fandom. But there is still much to enjoy.
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit…not a nasty, dirty wet hole…it was a hobbit hole and that means comfort…”

Bilbo Baggins. 3 feet tall, about half your size (as we are told) lives in a Hobbit Hole in the land of Shire and values his home, his safety, his comfort; the boring consistency of life in the only space he has ever known.

Then because this is a Hero’s Journey, he must hear the call to adventure—the Wizard, Gandalf enlists him on a quest to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. His house is soon filled with unexpected guests: dwarves (or dwarfs, I forget) Oh dear….hobbits love guests…but they also value their space…

He must refuse the call…and then get dragged along in spite of himself. He must overcome obstacles…He must endure and discover inner strengths that he was not previously aware of.
He is one of a Middle Earth Style Ocean’s 11 gang of dwarves…with his as yet unrealized skills as a burglar. But Gandalf soon leaves the crew to their quest, telling them not to alter from the path they take through the forest…Where they encounter trolls, goblins, flying beasts and ultimately a dragon…with whom Bilbo has a little battle of riddles…he finds a magic ring that makes him invisible…the crew escapes certain death in clever ways…and ultimately it culminates in a battle for the treasure between the 5 armies.

And all that.

This is a year in an otherwise quiet life…and Bilbo shall return from his quest having overcome many obstacles.

Look…I’m not one to argue with the masses. And sometimes the best things come out of hobbit holes.





View all my reviews