Delusions of Grandeur

Monica Byrne, The Actual Star (2021) DNF at 50%: High concept and impeccably structured but I had trouble connecting with the characters. For me personally the effort/reward ratio was not worth it (I read 300 out of 600 pages to be sure). There are three parallel timelines three thousand years apart; there’s bushel of big ideas wrt utopia and gender; there is copious, very graphic sex. This latter was a striking choice, since it clearly wasn’t meant to be titillating but it also wasn’t meant to make the characters look pathetic, the way in literary novels the sad sack-of-shit protagonist is always having unsatisfactory sex. The sex in this book reads like a medieval mystic recounting the ecstasy of divine visitation— makes you a bit wistful that modern folks are too inhibited to behave like this anymore.

Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business (2015) Chronicles one year as the owner of a small woodworking shop that specializes in custom conference tables. As much as I hate to give credence to the myth of the entrepreneur who creates jobs and is the backbone of the country, this book was fucking riveting. Downs is a craftsman who reluctantly dons a salesman’s suit, and while he struggles to turn a profit despite doing fine work, it sounds like he’s found success in his second career as a writer. He deserves it. Things I was utterly engrossed by: 1) The “why we can’t hire a decent janitor” saga 2) the Google AdSense saga. Wdym this man is paying Google six hundred dollars a day to run ads and he can’t even get a human on the line to tell him why a glitch in aforementioned ads is causing him to hemorrhage business??!

It helps that Downs is a man with an unimpeachable private life: drives a beat-up 15-year-old wagon; one son with severe autism and another accepted to MIT. Meanwhile, Downs goes to Germany and tours a traditional furniture factory and the view of German management is “….Ads? Huh. Why would you sell to people you have no prior relationship with?” Lol. Being exposed to other ways of doing things really makes you reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the American business model. Here is Downs touring a a Saudi Arabian factory and describing their shockingly labor-intensive business model:

Another thing his model has over ours: lots and lots of jobs. His factory gives two hundred workers a place to go every morning, a way to feed their family, and the pride of making good work. I would guess that the Stand-Around Guys are his B- and C-level performers, who wait for the moment the factory needs a large number of workers, irrespective of their skills. What does the future hold for B- and C-level workers in America? I don’t have any on my shop floor. And the next generation of robots may take out my A- guys, too. The end point of our trajectory is the elimination of people in factories. My biggest marketing struggle is convincing people that our product, which incorporates a lot of hand labor, is worth the extra money.

Being a boss sounds awfully lonely. His proximate problem is his sales are not covering his overhead but the bigger problem problem is he has no one to bounce ideas off of; no one else who can see the entire picture of his business and all the moving parts. In due course Downs joins a business group and discovers peer criticism. Wonderful! Why didn’t his artist wife suggest this ten years ago??

I did have a personal angle in choosing to pick up this book at this time. I (stay at home mom who occasionally bartends) and my husband (insane Italian chef who smokes an entire pig for our kid’s birthday party) are buying a catering business. It’s exciting and scary and one of my coping mechanisms is cruising Libby for business books when I have insomnia at 2am.

S.A. Crosby, Razorblade Tears (2021) Unfolds with the cinematic sweep of a geriatric buddycop flick. It features two ex-felon fathers—one black, one white—seeking vengeance for their murdered sons. I swerved out of my usual lane to read a thriller and it was the best thing I read this month. The barrier to entry is so low! By the first sentence you know exactly what kind of story you’re getting. This is the story of Ike, who since doing time has kept his nose clean and owns a landscaping business, and Buddy Lee, who lives in a trailer and is drinking himself into an early grave. Ike finds Buddy Lee grating and so do I, as he is the very caricature of a hillbilly redneck. Neither Buddy Lee nor Ike were particularly good fathers to their boys, and they were both homophobic as all get out. Now they have custody of a three-year-old granddaughter and the police have no leads on the murderer. Top-notch work, unqualified recommendation.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (2025) If you read the cover copy you’d think it was a divorce memoir, or a climate catastrophe story, or a chronicle of monastic life. It’s not not any of those things but what it is is weirder than I can convey. It’s mostly about a mouse infestation. This is the most Buddhist of Catholic books. Don’t pick it up if you’re after anything resembling a plot!

Such a disquieting book. It made me so uncomfortable I had trouble finishing it, even though there were multiple moments of genuine revelation. I’ve never read anything so visceral about schoolyard bullying, for instance. Yet the structure in which she presented these revelations wasn’t the traditional three-act structure we’re used to. For the first fifty pages I wondered, “Is this narrator just doing free association??” because the logic of her flashbacks defeated me. After a hundred pages of what seemed like random anecdotes that did not answer the central question ie. “why did she quit her nonprofit job and leave her husband to become a nun,” I began to see that in these small but telling incidents the narrator is almost never to be found on the side of moral righteousness. The narrator is implicated, just as we all are, in this fallen world. Can’t say I had a good time but I do think Wood is doing something meaningful and interesting.

David Weber, Field of Dishonor (1994)(Honor Harrington #4) Turns out it’s not socialism that sucks, it’s civilian oversight of the military. Probably we’d be better off under martial law. Representative democracy results in gridlock, ergo put the military in charge since at least they’re competent. If this is a misreading of the text I am BEGGING to be schooled. PLEASE. A month ago my global superhegemon of a country launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran and this has colored my reading. I wish I could talk about Honor more, because this is a real hinge point of a book for her character. Reminds me of other big pivotal books that send the series careening off in new directions like the Vorkosigan Saga’s Memory or Murderbot’s Network Effect or Dragaera’s Phoenix. I think I’m going to have to step away from the Honorverse, and this is not on David Weber, who’s always been forthright about what kind of story he’s telling, this is just me processing current events.

The Star Kingdom of Manticore is on the brink of war with the Peeps but the cowardly peaceniks in the legislature refuse to authorize a formal declaration. Oh noes, the war machine might be starved of funds!! Here in the real world, we rarely ask our elected reps to vote on anything; the Chief Executive merely points to somewhere on a map and commences “operations.” Every year when the Pentagon submits its budget, Congress invariably approves it and is in fact apt to give them more than they asked for. As a treat. Never mind that the Pentagon has never, ever passed an audit, so we don’t even know where all that money is going! Naturally, in the present conflict the Peeps are the aggressor, and Manticore is merely defending itself and its allies. This is absolutely fantastical, given that the last time the USA fought a just war was World War II. And then there is the way the Fourth Estate is held in such disdain, depicted as “threatening the Kingdom’s very survival just to increase their viewership”. Look, I’m not a fan of our existing media ecosystem but even I can see that the ideal of journalism that holds power to account is a worthy one.

TL;DR not enough space battles too much politicking

MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes (Remus/Sirius, 526k) Took me a while to clock what this fic was doing...and by “a while” I mean until Year Four of our seven-year stint at Hogwarts lol. It’s a queer coming-out story! And a very fine one, but how they are going to reskin this thing for tradpub is a real head-scratcher, since what makes it tick is 100% Hogwarts. Purportedly it got a seven-figure publishing deal. That’s the only reason I heard about it, given my own Marauders era was twenty years ago. It’s entirely third-person limited Remus POV, and while Remus is my favorite character even I got pretty fed up with him. The author chose to lean into the tragic, not the goofy side of Remus and Sirius. I’ve seen this fic comped to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, another story that is also very long and very sad.