Glorious Exploits: A Novel
by Ferdia Lennon
the play's the thing (5/17/2025)
This book pays homage to the ancient Greek playwrite Euripides who wrote more than 90 works, staged in Athens around 400 BC. If reading classics makes you yawn but you wish you knew a little more, this book is for you.
The action takes place in Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, where the invading Athenians have finally been defeated. Many are captured and imprisoned in a natural rock quarry where they will certainly starve to death.
Enter Lampo and Gelon. Lampo is a wonderful narrator, a compassionate goofball hero determined to stage Medea (a Euripides play) using prisoners. He is loveable, honest and bumbling. He is constrained by his humble class origins. He falls hopelessly in love with a slave girl who he plans to purchase.
I enjoyed the crazy fast moving plot, the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, and the uplifting theme of theater for salvation. The action is relentless. Sadly for the dynamic duo everything goes wrong.
The ending was perfect with a short chapter back in Athens. The final description of Euripides summarizes the theme: "his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story". Tragedy for a tragedian.
Absolution: A Novel
by Alice McDermott
Not Inconsequential Women Deliver Absolution (4/17/2025)
McDermott is a master story teller about the real lives of real women in a challenging time and place. The female American protagonists follow their establishment husbands to war adjacent Saigon in the early 60s. The epistolary narrative structure works so well to revisit that setting.
The women were shackled by cultural roles, foreignness and personal burdens. Despite these constraints, they tried to do good. On the surface they were all tea parties and gift baskets but underneath they were black market operators and rule breakers. Love that "don't ask permission ask forgiveness" characterization.
The world around them reminded them constantly: you and your work are inconsequential. McDermott makes a different point. The "little" contributions counteract a little bit of evil. Their work would absolve a little American guilt.
McDermott shares the women completely. Husbands are peripheral but claustrophobic long-term marriages are astutely observed. Charlene and Tricia, the friends at center stage, are beautifully understood. Charlene, the dynamo, was relentless in her pursuit of charitable works until the end. But she was never smarmy, she was so cool. Like my namesake Tricia, I would have been sucked into her orbit. Happily, at the dramatic surprise conclusion, Tricia stands up to friend and husband. Well done!
Playground: A Novel
by Richard Powers
AI Defeats Human Death but Planet Ocean Succumbs (4/8/2025)
This is the story of Planet Ocean. Powers has renamed it from Planet Earth. He describes the teeming life, the fantastical colors, the bizarrely unique life forms. Power’s setting is a teeny tiny atoll within a central Pacific archipelago. It is surrounded by vast ocean. We don’t need no continents. Take a deep dive and enjoy the view!
Playground's cast of characters is deeply realized. The story starts with childhood friends Todd and Rafi. We become intimate with their childhood dysfunction and psychological drivers. The guys are gamers, and although brotherly, they lock into an epic battle of one-upmanship. Todd invents a competitive social media platform called Playground, and becomes a billionaire. But that’s not why Rafi loses.
A small side criticism: I was not convinced that Todd’s so-called betrayal should have been so devastating. I guess it was the straw that broke the friendship. Clearly, Rafi had grievances piling up due to Todd’s privileged upbringing and racial naivete.
The ocean playground is anchored by the “liberated” Evelyne who is a master diver and oceanographer. She takes us under the sea for scientific and phantasmagorical touring, making friends with gigantic rays. She flames our grief for the polluted, overheated and destroyed ocean. Ina Aroita is the artist and romantic partner who produces massive sculptures from plastic junk picked off the beach. She creates beauty from waste. Ina brings us to her home in French Polynesia on the atoll Makatea.
In Powers prize-winning "Overstory", I got bored during the dozen introductory character constructions. But this time I knew I was in the hands of master. I let it flow. I allowed the masterful Richard Powers to take me on a character ride. I was rewarded in the finale where, as they say, he pulled it all together.
The character backstory leads to the central problem, given to us from an old text called “The Philosophy of the Common Task” by Nikolai Fyodorov. Starting from random elements, billions of years later evolution created life, then consciousness, then intelligence. Fyodorov posits that evolution will eventually tackle death. Hah! Lets go.
Powers suggests that there is hope for the human species. Forget Mars. We can “seastead”. Forget death, we can recreate ourselves with AI. He gives us a few tidbits of hope for the ocean itself, which has adapted to the mess created by humans. Shipwrecks become reef habitats. Species adapt to the heat. Don’t get complacent however, as Evie urges at the close of her book “without your love, the ocean will die”.
My head was spinning from the admittedly confusing ending and I had a lot to sort out. I read some analysis to help with that. I thought that AI had solved the problem of death and that we were resurrecting physical human beings. It wasn’t clear that they were resurrected in the alternate reality offered by Profunda.
I highly recommend this masterpiece.
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
Imagine Theres No Country (3/26/2025)
This is not a narrative-driven or compulsive book. It's a poetic and philosophical book.
It presents a set of vignettes describing the beauty of planet earth, meaning of life questions, some politics and some science. Instead of chapters, we have orbitals which is one spin around the planet earth. Each "spin cycle" has a little theme. This is basically a smart author thinking out loud about heavy stuff.
We share the emotions and inner philosophizing of the 6 astronauts who report their adventures. There are women and “Christian Americans”. Two of the “astronauts” are cosmonauts, that is Russian, which is weirdly (accurately?) a source of rivalry and separation. It immediately recalls the John Lennon verse "Imagine there's no country". Although national borders are not visible from space, the boundaries are clear on the space station. Too bad.
The magnificent beauty of the planet earth is described in an abundance of colors, which felt like a Crayola Crayon box of creative names. Very beautifully written. You can pull in a lot of science if you read electronically and Google everything. Orbital is not a technical book. I love the part where the lab mice learn to fly.
If you had trouble interpreting the orbital graphic, try this:
• The International Space Station moves in a prograde orbit, which means it is moving in the same direction as the earth’s rotation.
• The ISS travels at ~17K mph, so it is going faster than earth and is lapping it 16 times per day.
• The ISS is in low earth orbit a mere 250 miles above sea level. Musk’s 4500 Starlink satellites are around 350 miles high. (The moon is way out there at about 230,000 miles.)
• The ISS travels with about a 50-degree tilt. (Circling at the equator would be 0 tilt) The Starlink satellites crisscross the globe from about 50 to 90 degrees. We need Internet at the poles!
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