cahn

I have now read the Hugo novel nominees, where by "read" I mean "DNF'd two of them" -- Ministry of Time, Service Model, Alien Clay, Tainted Cup, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (I read in this order).

In the reverse order of how much I liked them:

The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.

ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.

I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.

I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.

Major spoilers

I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.

I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?

The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...

I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)

All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!

Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.

Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.

Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay

Three people recced this to me after I posted about My Real Children, and the library had it, and then I was dragging my feet posting about it but then hidden_variable posted comparing My Real Children and Life After Life (post has spoilers for MRC, no spoilers for LAL) so, uh, here we are.

The idea of this book is that Ursula lives her life over and over again -- though she seems to learn a bit each time. She dies as a baby, strangled by the cord wrapped around her neck. Then she starts over, and this time (how?) the doctor comes and cuts the cord, but then she drowns as a small child. Then she starts over, and falls off the roof. And so on. Ursula doesn't remember anything exactly from iteration to iteration, but she does carry with her some kind of emotional response to her previous lives, so for example the next life after falling off the roof, she decides that going on the roof is a Very Bad idea.

I found the book fascinating as well as often rather hard to read (emotionally speaking). At some point I started flipping forward to find the next time that Ursula died so that I would know what I was signing up for in this iteration. (The life iterations do start getting longer once Ursula hits adolescence -- I guess there are more ways for small kids to die than there are ways for adults to die, although Ursula does manage to find a few.) The influenza section was particularly hard to read, because I guess it was just very likely for her to die from that, so there were a lot of lives, over and over again, where she would die from influenza, and often her siblings would too, and it just sucked a lot.

I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I didn't get it on first reading, which frustrated me. (I'm still not sure that I get it, but at least I have thoughts on what's going on.)

( Spoilers. )

Anyway -- well -- I will say that this is a hard book to read if you have any sensitivities around child death (I don't particularly, and I still found it hard to read in that respect!) but I liked it and it definitely made me think!

Doc put a new splint on so let's experiment with posting (and maybe even commenting?) a bit. Will still not be posting/commenting as usual for at least the next month, but Hugo deadline is tomorrow, so... here are my novel/novella picks in order.

Novel:
-Some Desperate Glory (but you all knew that)
-Saint of Bright Doors (I had issues with it but it was doing interesting things, which I value for Hugo voting)
-Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
-Translation State
-Witch King (did not manage to finish)
-Starter Villain (did not manage to start, but I'm sure it's fine)

Novella:
-Mammoths at the Gates (which I loved, and which moved me the most, after not particularly gelling with the other Singing Hills novellas after the first)
-Seeds of Mercury (I'm inclined to rate the Chinese nominees higher, and I thought this one was interesting)
-Rose/House (intriguing)
-Mimicking of Known Successes (*)
-Thornhedge (enjoyed)
-Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet (I kind of feel like I could have summed this up in 3 sentences and saved myself the trouble of reading it)

(*) I thought it was fine in general, but I discovered while reading it that while I really like having spectrum-coded characters as the POV character, I intensely dislike having that character as the love interest (or at least did in this case) because I can see how annoying one can be and I do not like feeling seen like that! :)

Okay, so, I didn't even try to write anything coherent about this book. Instead I had the idea to take quasi-real-time notes. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but of course it's somewhat thematic that I took notes during the actual events instead of writing it up afterwards as I did the other books... and also thematic that I was taking these notes because I was envisioning a dialogue with you, dear readers, but could not have that dialogue until I had finished the book (since the only other person I know who was reading this semi-concurrently, hidden_variable, had already finished reading it). (Also thematic that I often had to go back and revisit/edit my notes :P ) ( Notes: )

I'm very impressed by this whole series -- I really can't remember the last time I read a series that both was so thoughtful in its worldbuilding and so complete in the way it worked things out. With all these notes, I think it's less than half of the things I would have liked to say/talk about (if I'd really been taking real and constant live notes), there was so much! (I never even said anything about Carlyle, love them!)

I find it a series I find more impressive than lovable. I don't think that's an insult in any way, mind you: it's clearly setting out to do things in a way that is meant to engage me cerebrally rather than aiming directly at my tropes, for example. But wow there's a lot there and a lot to think about and I'm glad I read them.

So I read The Will to Battle, the third Terra Ignota book, on the way to and from IL on this last trip. I continue to be more and more impressed with these books as they go on -- I think they may be an acquired taste to a certain extent, and also it was hard to appreciate what Palmer is trying to do in the depth of, say, only one book (which is really itself only half a book). That being said, there was a part in the middle where I had the thought that I really wanted to read this and knew I would like it, but at the same time I also rather wished I had already read it and was looking back at all the things I'd found out. (I don't remember ever thinking this about a book before.) By the time I was at the end, I had forgotten all those thoughts -- there was certainly a lot of action at the end.

Interestingly, I don't think I liked many characters in this book, but I didn't even think about that until the end -- I think Mycroft has grown on me a lot (as I was told might happen!) which helped a lot, but more importantly this is the kind of book where the worldbuilding (which I did like a lot!) is basically the most important character.

Various random and spoilery thoughts:( Read more... )

More random thinking about Hives: Gordian continues to be the Hive I feel I have the most natural affinity for, by far (it was also the one I ended up with when I took the Hive quiz after reading book 2). Faust was my fave in this book (the bit where they tell Carlyle to look at 48 pictures of subjects eating bananas made me laugh out loud), and I think I'd get along better with them than with most people in this book (while other people I know, like my sister, would find them entirely irritating). Utopia continues to be the Hive I'm most intrigued by (and, like, I sort of wish I were the kind of person that could sacrifice complacency, but I'm definitely not) and I still want to know what their deal is! (I'll be reading the fourth book soon...) It also occurred to me that if I had to sort my actual real-life self, I would probably be in the Cousins Hive, not least (though not wholly) because my church is... in very many ways basically a big ol' Cousins Hive, and it's the biggest RL source of community and (voluntary non-work) responsibility that I have.

I've got the fourth book on hold from the library and probably will dive right into it as soon as it gets here!

A. really likes me to read books that he enjoyed, and will keep gently pushing until I do (including adorably setting up a little reading nook for me with a pillow and book holder), so along with many Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, I have now read the first Keeper of the Lost Cities books (and am maybe a quarter of the way through the second one).

I first became aware of these books maybe five years ago, when D's niece told me how much she loved them (which then led to a rather distressing conversation with D's sister in which she said she didn't see the point of fantasy -- I need hardly say that D does not share this sentiment -- and in which she was probably not expecting my passionate defense of fantasy; to be fair to her, she has not objected to my giving her daughters fantasy books for Christmas almost every year since then). I read the first chapter and could see the appeal. Sophie, the main/POV character, is a 12-year-old blonde genius with a photographic memory who can read minds; she has never quite fit in with either her family or her world. In that first chapter, she meets a mysterious and strangely attractive boy who reveals to her that she is not human, but an elf!!

Yes, it is basically every wish-fulfillment and Special Snowflake trope you could hope for, all rolled into one; I can see why it has such appeal for the middle-school age group (which this is solidly aimed towards). I stopped reading there. When E was in sixth grade these books swept over her class like wildfire, and even E. who is impervious to her peers tried them out and liked them; however, because E. does not care at all whether I read the books she likes or not, I didn't read more until A. wanted me to.

In subsequent chapters, Sophie is taken to live in the elven cities (it's not entirely clear to me or to my kids where these cities are... one of them is Atlantis but others seem to be sort of... on Earth but I guess hidden really really well or in a pocket dimension or something??) which feature the beautiful, super-intelligent, magical elves who all wear fancy clothes all the time, eat super delicious food all the time, and also where there are dinosaurs and other such exciting creatures. Sophie, of course, is Super Special even within elven society; her telepathy is so strong they've never seen the like before. I think my favorite part is the bit where Sophie has brown eyes, but it turns out that this is exotic in elven society, where everyone has blue eyes. (I note that the author appears to have brown eyes.) Anyway, she then goes to elven school ("Foxfire") where she takes classes, attempts to catch up to many years of living with humans instead of other elves, and makes friends with the other elven students, all while trying to figure out her mysterious backstory that other adult characters will allude to without actually telling her things except when she manages to figure out enough stuff to confront them.

(If this is giving you super Harry Potter vibes, well... yeah, I was getting those too.)

Elven society appears to be extremely classist. There are "nobles": whether you are noble seems to hinge on a) whether you can get into Foxfire, the school that trains nobles; b) whether you have a Special Ability (not all elves do; Sophie, of course, turns out later to have more than one); c) whether you can pass all your Foxfire classes. If you aren't noble, you have significantly less status, you can't be in the government and such, and other noble elves will be mean to you about it. Also, if your parents are a "bad match" (it has not yet been explained what that means), that also lowers your status dramatically. So maybe eugenics in there too? I don't know whether this will be followed up on or whether we're supposed to conclude from the fancy clothes and delicious food that everything is A-OK with the way the society is structured, though I suspect the latter. (There are certainly hints, and eventually more than hints, that the society is not entirely stable, although I don't think the instability has to do with the rampant classicism. Maybe I will be proved wrong in subsequent books, though.)

The target audience is definitely middle school, and an adult might, er, have other opinions (about elven society, say; or the parallels to HP) than the ones a middle schooler might have. But I will say that Messenger does write compellingly, and it wasn't nearly as much as a slog as I was fearing. Which is good because there are, like, 9 of these (so far), and I think A. wants me to read them all.

I have read Seven Surrenders!

I am glad that hamsterwoman mentioned in her Terra Ignota post that SS was really meant as the second half of Too Like the Lightning, because it really was. It's like TLtL carefully set up a lot of dominos, and SS... knocks them all down. It's pretty amazing to watch (well, read) and I'm glad I read it even though I suffered a lot from not reading the first one carefully enough (though I think if I'd read it as carefully as I needed to in order to catch everything, I'd never have finished, so it's just as well). Very curious as to what I'll think on a reread; this seems like the kind of series that well rewards rereads.

I don't have much really to say about it as a whole except "whoa, that ALL HAPPENED" but I have a few random thoughts:
-I feel like the prose is smoother and less, idk, irritating than I found the first book. Some of the mannerisms that annoyed me in the first book are toned down a lot in this one, like, Mycroft spends significantly less time explaining random Enlightenment stuff and praising Voltaire, and there are fewer times where he feels that, for example, he needs to have a literal conversation with the reader from his future. (Also, Émilie du Châtelet is namechecked in the acknowledgements, nice!)

-There was one point where Cornel MASON is speaking where I said to myself, "Palmer has read John M. Ford!" Now, I know she's friends with Jo Walton, and Walton has read JMF, so I'm not saying this in a vacuum either... but... yeah, I'd be shocked if she hadn't.

-After this book Utopia has now become my favorite problematic Hive, in the sense that I don't want to be a Utopian at all (it sounds completely exhausting!) but I am so intrigued by everything they do: their particular mode of surrender when confronted with the events of SS, their planning 150 years in the future (like... seriously?? modeling is clearly MUCH better in the future, lol!), their constant visor tagging of "how things could be better"... I would super like to know what's up with them. (The title of the fourth book makes me believe that we will find out more...)

Spoilers:

-BRIDGER! Gosh, poor kid. (I think I cared about him more than anyone else, as the only character who a) wasn't complicit in about five different plots at once and b) wasn't literally a god, even if he had godlike powers.) He even kind of says that he's fulfilled his element of the plot and now he's gonna off himself :(
(Mycroft, Bridger is not the protagonist as you said in TLtL, much as you would have liked him to be. He is the plot device :P Unless there's more about him later I don't know about :PP I mean, I guess we've had one resurrection already, why not two?)

There were two spoilery places where I was like, really?

-First: when Heloise talks about how they are super missing something in their society by not recognizing the old cultural constructions of gender, like the part where women are nurturing and men are manly, and they need to have a conversation about that. She says "Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that."

I've read this bit about ten times now, trying to articulate what I disagree with, and after about my tenth read I guess... I don't disagree with most of what Heloise says. (For what it's worth, it seems pretty clear to me that Palmer meant to present this in an intentionally shocking way that would inspire disagreement -- because I also think it's the process of having the argument that Palmer is interested in.) I can see a lot of her points: maybe in a genderless world you don't have a world where half of everyone is devoted to nurturing, peace, and charity (and I do get her point that culturally that's sort of the effect of gender, and I can definitely see that if you got rid of gender all at once that the default might tend to be sort of a leaning-masculine sort of persona and not a leaning-feminine one), and maybe that's a problem, and maybe you DO need something to bolster that.

I think my point of remaining disagreement is that Heloise says things like "...the words are taboo so no one dares admit [the Cousins are "feminine"], and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it's teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word 'Empire' and Gordian if we banned the word 'psyche'." I... don't really think this is how people and language work? People would come up with new words for the same concept. :P

Also, I feel like this ties into my wondering about the educational system and raising kids. Idk, I think either you have enough people who are "nurturing" that you are able to raise and educate the next generation, and then they also have role models who (one hopes??) teach them to be nurturing... or you don't? how does this society propagate itself at all if no one is nurturing enough to actually raise kids??

Heloise says, "Think of the Set-Set riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn't even be discussed!" I... do not agree with this AT ALL. First, any parent might think it inhumane to do Thing X to children. Also, there's another issue in there about "sanctity" of humanity and what we might think is humane vs inhumane that I think overlaps with this but which should be disentangled a bit, and which I think belongs more on the axis of conservative-liberal, if anything, than male-female.

Anyway, kudos to Palmer for making me so annoyed that I had to reread Heloise's speech several times to articulate the things I actually did disagree with, versus the things I thought Heloise was saying but that she actually isn't (for example, she never said that she thinks gender is necessary or that she thinks there aren't other ways of structuring society without it, but my first draft of this post assumed she did).

-Second: Madame being all "so, I did the amazing educational thing of raising a child with all philosophies/languages/beliefs at once and it produced Enlightened Man, which turned out to be a god." (Paraphrased, of course.) It's really unclear whether the narrative a) expects you to take this at face value b) expects you to believe that Madame's education made it possible for the god to appear in J.E.D.D. Mason, or c) is just something Madame is saying that is her belief but is actually not even kind of relevant to the god appearing and that we're not supposed to take at all seriously. I think (b). (I would prefer to think (c) but in that case I don't see any Doylistic reason why she's saying it to begin with.) In any case, this is the kind of thing where I honestly think Madame is deluded.

Because a) everything you teach is a choice. I don't care if you are being so very careful about giving all philosophies equal time or whatever, by teaching anything you are making choices about what you present and how you present it, that is just the way of things b) anyone, anywhere, who has ever been around kids KNOWS that kids literally have minds of their own and no matter how you construct their education, they are gonna come out with things that you didn't intend and that you didn't want to teach them (*) -- Madame thinks she's teaching disregard for social values by showing Jehovah "the people our world respects most, emperors and kings... fucking like animals," but honestly a kid is just as likely to get out of it something super unintended and possibly untrue, like "fucking is sacred" or, idk, "maybe only kings fuck, peasants reproduce via parthogenesis." Kids can come up with super weird things!
c) kids learn A LOT from other kids, and Madame said she could only do this once, so basically in order to run her experiment J.E.D.D. must have been isolated from any other children while he was growing up for this to work (because those children would have wrecked the experiment by being not steeped in this "all-philosophies" education). In fact, he must have been isolated from any other people who were not part of Madame's educational program. Which is NOT OKAY. Even Ferdinand of Parma was able to run away and have lower-class friends! Maybe the god was attracted to this poor kid because he was the loneliest kid in the world!

(*) All this makes me think of Ferdinand of Parma, or at least did once mildred_of_midgard reminded me what his name was, lol. To be fair childhood education has advanced a lot since then! Probably Madame did not beat her child! But... this is the kind of thing that can happen in real life in the Enlightenment Madame is so proud of, Diderot and all, when the kid doesn't end up thinking about things the way you want them to.

Anyway, I was satisfied by this one, and the question now is whether I will have to dive in to the next book (because I want to know what happens next!) or whether I will have to take a break first (because these books are also hard going!)

Or: Who is Miranda Sharifi?

Reread. Second book in the Sleepless trilogy, following Beggars in Spain. This is the last writeup I had for 2023 (there are a lot of books I never did write up, mind you).

seekingferret once said about Beggars in Spain that it was basically examining The Fountainhead in science-fictional terms, with Roger Camden [edit: not Leisha], the main character's father, as the Howard Roark analogue, and coming to its own conclusions. On rereading Beggars and Choosers, I had to laugh. It's a book about an America where everything is slowly breaking down and not working anymore. (Including a train!) As the breakdowns become worse, it highlights the divisions in society, how people are divided into basically three sets: a set who hedonistically enjoy life but don't actually do anything; a set who actually do all the work; and a set of geniuses that hide away from the world that is breaking down, not to be seen directly until late in the book... is this sounding familiar to anyone yet? Yep, Kress is very clearly patterning this entire book after Atlas Shrugged!

(Miranda Sharifi even gets a monologue at the end! Although it's not as long as John Galt's, by far.)

Of course, since this is Kress, she both has a deep compassion for all these sets of people and an SF-writer-worldbuilding eye to how all of this came about, so the set of geniuses are not just hiding away to be ornery, they're the genetically modified Sleepless and Supersleepless from the previous book who have a lot of history with prejudice against them, their own struggles with community, and in the Supers' case, a super-high intelligence that makes them all but incomprehensible to typical human beings and vice versa.

And both Kress and the Supers come to very different conclusions than Ayn Rand does. Although I suspect that one of Kress' other points is that everything is complicated and although one can say that Rand wasn't right when she simplified it in X direction, one cannot then say that simplifying it in not-X direction is right -- the ending (which is pretty great) makes sense as a happy ending, and yet it's also clear that it's a disturbing ending as well.

I remember not liking this much the first time I read it (in college or possibly early 20's), mostly because Leisha Camden, the protagonist of Beggars in Spain, is such a vibrant protagonist, and a) all these other random people who weren't in the first book showed up whom I was not interested in, and they were often even POV characters! and b) spoilery thing. Well, the spoilery thing wasn't a surprise this time, and also I enjoyed the random people a lot more knowing they were coming. Though on this read it was interesting to note that the POV characters are mostly there to watch the events unfold. There are mini-character arcs, of course, but it's very much subsidiary to figuring out what is going on and what the SuperSleepless (and their opponents) are doing.

I'm looking forward to reading Beggars Ride, which I remember absolutely hating for spoilery reasons. I suspect I'll still hate it (honestly I will be surprised if I can get over spoilery thing, it's like a heavy-handed deus ex machina in reverse), but I also suspect that I'll find it more interesting than I did on first reading.

These are three books my sister had me read, in reverse order of how much I liked them.

I am not sick! I don't need help! (Amador) - 5/5 - This is an awesome book, basically the idea of collaborative problem-solving applied to the domain of mental illness, which has the additional issue that the person involved often does not know that they are mentally ill. (The principle is the same with dementia.) The book first goes over anosognosia, the neurological condition in which the person is unaware of their mental illness (or other brain issue) -- which can be super frustrating as it looks a lot like denial, and it seems like if one just provided enough evidence that the person has a mental illness, the person would have to admit it.

Although I'd been familiar with the concept of anosognosia from just looking up stuff about dementia online, my previous online reading had only dealt with it from the perspective of "this is how it presents." The framing of it in this book as the person's self-concept not updating due to mental illness or other brain issues was new to me, and I felt like it made it much easier for me to viscerally understand why the person would continue to be unaware of mental issues even when a ton of evidence was presented.

And the author brings up examples of trying to convince the person that they're sick (his brother had schizophrenia) and how it fails and just makes everyone angry and frustrated. He shows how to instead use a more collaborative problem-solving solution, that crucially goes around the question of whether the person has a mental illness (because the two of you are probably never going to agree on that point) and rather focuses on how to agree on treatment.

It's written in very simple, easy-to-digest language, I expect because Amador wanted it to be accessible to as many people as possible, but it seems to all make sense and I didn't feel that it was too dumbed down or trying to make claims that were too large (see also the third book in this post). I also felt like there was a minimum of fluff, which I feel can happen with this kind of book -- there was a lot of "don't blame yourself," which I didn't need but which many people probably do.

This book strongly recommends that (say) mentally ill patients be treated, but provides conversational blueprints for getting them to agree to treatment even if they don't agree they're mentally ill. The idea is to think about how it would feel if everyone around you was saying you had a mental illness but you were convinced you didn't, and to use that as a starting point to find things you agree on, and build the relationship of trust so that you can tackle the problem of treatment. The acronym he uses is LEAP: Listen, Empathize, Accept, and Partner. (Yes, that's going to sound pretty familiar if you've read other collaborative problem-solving books. And Amador doesn't say he's reinventing the wheel, he totally says right up front that he's basically just presenting other people's work, he's just trying to give it a larger audience.)

I'd love for there to be a companion volume to this dealing with dementia specifically, because of course some of the issues are not quite the same, and it would be really nice to have specific blueprint conversations to work from. And I wrote that and I guess my sister did the next step of contacting the author, whose secretary told her that he has written a more general book about the LEAP method which includes one conversation modeling what to do with someone with dementia. So, uh, I guess stay tuned for that one, because I'm definitely gonna read that.

Highly, highly recommended if you're dealing with someone with mental illness or dementia or other brain issues.

My Father's Brain (Jauhar) - 3/5 - This is a memoir by Sandeep Jauhar, a doctor and writer, about his father's dementia decline (and eventual death). His father was a scientist, and so that decline was very harsh. My sister and I agreed that the author/narrator should really have read the LEAP book because wow does he fall into every. single. trap possible. I guess he's honest about it? It was well written and brutally honest, but I also found it rather frustrating to read because I kept wanting to yell at him to do things differently. I also felt horrible for Harwinder, his father's caregiver who really just did it all herself, and it really kind of felt like they were taking advantage of her.

The End of Alzheimers (Bredersen) - DNF. Okay... there is a fair amount to like about this book, especially the points that inflammation probably causes a lot of crap to happen in people's bodies and that having good nutrition and exercise and so on can really make a big difference in all kinds of bodily functions, including the brain. And it can't hurt to get a full battery of tests to make sure that there's no underlying condition like hypothyroidism, etc. However, by the end of chapter two I was getting a really intense vibe of "I'm here to sell you my patented solution that is super expensive but fixes alllll the problems in the world!" and poking around on the interwebs leads me to believe that, in fact, his solution -- especially the parts that depend on Super Special Supplements that only practitioners Specially Trained in Bredersen's method can provide -- is not properly studied and there's no particular reason to believe it will work any better than good nutrition and exercise alone, plus, sure, testing to make sure there's no underlying condition or any vitamin deficiencies, and those kinds of supplements when needed.