SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO, so very timely; so very deep; not very lovable

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO
RIE QUDAN (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon: a speculative, prophetic novel following a young and brilliant celebrity architect in Tokyo who takes on her most controversial project yet—perfect for readers of Klara and the Sun and Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis.

A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city’s new centerpiece but is filled with doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous—and much younger—boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…

The recipient of Japan’s highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new global voices. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an urgent and brilliant defense of the power of language written by humans, a moving exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send-up of our modern world’s unrelenting conformity.

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My Review: Short, intense, very very Japanese.

What do I mean by that?

This I liked less—his tendency to mansplain things I hadn't actually asked about. Was his smooth, polite facade really just an attempt to mask his greatest flaw—that he was, at heart, illiterate? For all his computational might, it seemed Al-built didn't have the strength to face up to his own weakness. He'd become so used to stealing the words of others without repercussion that he felt no shame, had no awareness even, of his own ignorance. The question of how humans had learned to use the word "discrimination," of the ordeals that had led us to it and which of us had suffered through them, was of no interest to him. He was incapable of curiosity. He did not thirst for knowledge.

"He", as you might surmise from context, is an LLM, or as we persist in calling them, an "AI", which does not exist...yet. There was a kerfuffle about the author using AI in writing a novel largely about AI that even the usually sensible Guardian sensationalized. Well, having read the piece at the link, the reasoning for doing what she did makes sense to me, and the hype likely did no harm to her sales. Not that this was likely...the deeply prestigious Akutagawa Prize gave this story its nod (and a million yen) in 2023. The Prize has gone to some excellent works available in English (see the list at the link) so I feel little concern for this affecting Rie Qudan's career taking off into the stratosphere.

Should it have done?

Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because we had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it as we each saw fit, so that before long no one could understand what anyone else was saying.

I think this novel's premise...what the hell do we do about AI in regard to the needs of humans...is not only timely but the angle chosen is so perfectly suited to my concerns it's like she got it from my head. I am, in other words, The Platonic Ideal of her reader. Sara Machina has my sympathetic attention from jump. She's ambitious, intellectually curious, and has strong opinions about language, its use, and its power.

Also, her boyfriend is gorgeous and twenty-five years younger than she is.

You go, girl.

Sara is, in this book-2026, in a different world from ours but only just. It's clear that the author chose to differentiate book-Tokyo from ours enough to enable we-the-readers to feel our real feelings but not pour them over, or incorporate them into, out-of-book reality. Sara's designing the titular structure, a prison-cum-asylum, and is conflicted about its kindly parameters versus its actual intent. (The synopsis clarifies this if you have not read it yet.) Sara also has some extremely Japanese concerns that require significant explanation to the US reader, regarding Japanese writing: transliterating foreign language is usually done using sound-characters called "katakana" to mimic the sound of the foreign word, instead of the Chinese import ideograms called "kanji".

Many are the switched-off brains, reaching absently for the browser tab next in line. I want you to know that it's not just fuss-and-feathers preciousness. It genuinely adds a layer of understanding to the heart of the book, the need to use language in ways appropriate to a given task; to use language as a human, conveying layer after layer of meaning, commentary, information plus context, all very much at the heart of Large Language Models and their masquerade as Artificial General Intelligence. The AGI you hear so much about is not there yet, it's still LLM, and see the first quote for why that very much matters in 2025. The algorithms are very sophisticated, the processing power is behind their use is *staggering* but generative and creative is not available. Yet.

Quite a lot of this read was only subtly conveyed. I went off to do research after it, because my spidey-senses told me there was a lot more to this than meets the eye. There was. Do I think that will give everyone the pleasure in poking around the internet that it did me? No. Will the read be as pleasant for those less thirsty for data than I am? Yes. The bone of speculative storytelling that pokes through is more than involving enough, the parallels among all the ways humans create, use, abuse the structures they create to help, harm, hurt, elucidate...all readily available without digging any deeper than the text.

I don't know if large numbers of speculative fiction/alternate-history readers will cotton on to those elements thus find the book; others put off by those elements will see them clearly and not like that they weren't informed they were in for that. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics occurring on schedule will throw some. A few will see the Zaha Hadid connection without prompting, but I was not one; I wish I had known in advance because I'm a giant nerd and would've savored the effect of that knowledge on my read. The in-text mentions of her sent me searching; better I should've had an endnote.

So you see why I gave no fifth star. I'm glad I read the book; I think it deserved the Akutagawa Prize; the way the author used Chat to enhance the text fails to rouse my readily roused ire should say a lot; but in the end I think this is a read I admired more than loved.

ANTOINE LAURAIN'S PAGE: THE PORTRAIT, firstborn fiction by the author; & FRENCH RHAPSODY, meditation on Les Jadis and how much today is the same

FRENCH RHAPSODY
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Middle-aged doctor Alain Massoulier has received a life-changing letter—thirty-three years too late.

Lost in the Paris postal system for decades, the letter from Polydor, dated 1983, offers a recording contract to The Holograms, in which Alain played lead guitar. Back then The Holograms had believed in their cutting-edge sound. However, the music industry remained indifferent, and eventually the band split up, each going their own way.

Alain is overcome by nostalgia, and is tempted to track down the members of the group. But in a world where everything and everyone has changed . . . where will his quest take him?

Antoine Laurain's new novel combines his trademark charm with a satirical take on modern France.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

In this rather odd tale, we go down the rabbit hole of missed chances. Every person this accident of fate changed came under Author Laurain's scrutiny in separate chapters, with life stories and so on. It made for nice reading...but what was I supposed to get from these stories? I know them but possess no framework to see what I'm to make of the fates of the post-The Holograms members. Maybe I'm insufficiently au fait with modern French society to get the full import of the meaning.

That said, I really resonated to the right-wing politician's trajectory, he who was the bassist. I've forgotten his name because I despise his politics (and his screed-spouting lectures) and, like Endora from Bewitched, I forget the names of those I dislike. Nonetheless, I thought it was very interesting to read about whatsisname's trajectory. How he got into it, what he does...all very timely. Especially for a book first published in 2015....

The others stuck with me less but were absorbing enough that I kept picking the book up to read more every time I put something else down. A clutter of wacky neighbors and hero's-journey cicerones detract from the central story's momentum, none of whom end up making a real difference. I found the ending...pat.

So I'm rating it only a tad under four stars. I got chuckles, I got angry mutterings, but I never got bored. That, my olds, is worth a lot in a literary month cram-jam full of heaps of nothing interesting.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE PORTRAIT
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A Parisian antiques collector finds himself in a case of mistaken identity after buying a portrait which curiously resembles him

While wandering through a Paris auction house, avid collector Pierre-François Chaumont is stunned to discover the eighteenth-century portrait of an unknown man who looks just like him. Much to his delight, Chaumont's bid for the work is successful, but back at home his jaded wife and circle of friends are unable to see the resemblance. Chaumont remains convinced of it, and as he researches into the painting's history, he is presented with the opportunity to abandon his tedious existence and walk into a brand new life.

Chaumont needs a fresh start—he and his wife fell out of love long ago, and the only thing that holds meaning for him anymore is his search for perfect objects. But this portrait is more than just a painting. The first night he owns it, Pierre-François dreams of another life, lived as the Comte de Mandragore, in a rural chateau, with a beautiful young wife. Awaking from the dream he’s determined to find this place—but it will take all his collector’s avidity, ingenuity, and unscrupulousness to make it his own. And when he finally has the chance to do so, will he be willing to pay the price to make it last?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

This is the novella that started it all. Told in first-person, it's as immediate as a récit but takes place outside the narrator's skull, so it's not one. It's a sweetly-smiling stab at modern greed, the lust for Stuff that fills the gaping emotional holes in many modern people.

There's a sharp edge here, a flensing eye that spares no one...the unloved, unloving wife, their circle of "friends", the man himself...no one looks all that good under the pithy judgment of Author Laurain:

Modern eyes? They have no soul; they no longer look up to heaven. Even the most pure are only concerned with the immediate. Vulgar lust, petty self-interest, greed, vanity, prejudice, cowardly appetites and envy. Those are the abominable emotions swarming in today’s eyes. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. That’s why the eyes on the portraits in museums are so spectacular; they reflect prayers and tortures, regrets and remorse.

What a pompous peroration! What a quiet proof that simply being misunderstood and softly maligned does not equal being Right.

It's an afternoon's read. It will keep you involved if, like me, you think Stuff is an addiction that speaks more loudly about what it is...about greedily stuffing yourself...than what it isn't...a fulfilling and worthwhile use of you one wild and precious life (that endlessly apt and beautiful phrase from Mary Oliver).

I think it's evident it's a first work, the sheer improbability of the plot is up there with Thorne Smith that whole school of magical objects that open portals from modern to ancient (ot just other) times. The characters are, as is almost inevitable in novellas, not developed beyond the necessity of moving the plot forward.

It's a pleasant and worthwile read. Maybe don't hunt for it everywhere, but if you have the budget and the device, download it of a dull Sunday afternoon to enjoy its real pleasures.

MIDDLE SPOON, enjoyable novel of throuplehood's pains and problems

MIDDLE SPOON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know that break-up letter you never sent? The one you found a while later when you were calmer? You remember how that felt, reading the minute-by-minute lavage of your just-lanced boil of hurt and anger?

Now it's a récit! A really long one, but that's what it is. Everything, not just the narration but every thought, feeling, event, opinion, is entirely the (unnamed, how much more evidence of it being a récit can one have?) narrator's. This is not entirely a good, or a bad, thing. It's fun when the narrator is processing why the departed party of the third part in the dissolved throuple, Ben, would just...dump him. (I have thoughts on this.) It's fun when he processes his rage at and hatred for the same groups I hate and rage over. Gluten-free food IS a satanic scheme to immiserate the planet further.

It is also, as a result of being so much up the narrator's tailpipe, a longer read than one would first think. I took a week to finish it. The intense angst, the ongoing anxiety issues...all are real, honest, told to us with sensitive thought before presenting them; and I want to shake this self-absorbed yutz until his eyes roll in opposite directions for being clueless and insensitive.

Well done, Author Varela! He evokes a very powerful reaction. Like The Town of Babylon, I had to reach into my reactions to fully experience the events portrayed...no surface-skating will do. Effort put in generates pleasure offered up, though. Ben never responds to these emails, written at the behest of the narrator's therapist but never sent; yet his text suggests he's either spoken to Ben or to his therapist to think through what Ben's reasons might be. I get it. It's the narrator's head, it's not meant to be in shared space. It's a récit!

But it's also the narrator. He is very much the guy you know who really doesn't realize how self-absorbed he is. He writes scathing letters to the Oscars showrunners because of things he doesn't like. Okay, he doesn't send them but—dude! I'm aware it's perceived as a man thing to be self-absorbed, but it's really a cultural universal far as I can see; still, what was Ben thinking? (We never find out.)

What else happens as a result of spending over 300pp in the narrator's head is that it feels like a hundred pages shoulda been condensed out of the count. It's a lot. It's fun, and the ending worked for my grinchly heart, but this is a time when a bit less would've said more.

A story I liked, a narrator I didn't much, and an ending I enjoyed. I call it another win for Author Varela.

THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (and His Mother), as usual a solid, fun, enjoyable Rabih Alameddine read

THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (and His Mother)
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Grove Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 paperback, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending October 27, 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize Shortlist!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

WINNER of the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction!

The Publisher Says: From National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction comes a tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother

In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.

When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.

Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One thing the gay youngest child learns early and often: "tag, you're it!" never ends. End-of-life care for difficult parent? "Tag, you're it!" It comes to us all.

And don't our siblings just love it. Our parents, well, it's complicated...and it never really uncomplicates. Raja grows up gay in a country whose religious majority strongly discourage public gayness. That right there's a novel's worth of coming of age, coning out, coming to terms with the world as it is. And what do you know! That IS most of the novel...just not in real time. Raja and Zalfa (his mom) interact as a function of their shared history. (Note to closeted boys: your mother knows. Your dad's more iffy, but your mother knows.) Their zingers and barbs all relate to the devastation of Lebanon, the loss of functioning civil society, and the endlessness of sneaking and hiding that gay lads insist is necessary when it mostly isn't. At home, anyway.

Since Zalfa is such a force of nature and since he's made responsible for her care in his tiny home, Raja thinks running away from that home sounds wonderful. (Never mind it's his own home.) As a novelist manqué, he never expected to get an offer from a writing program for a residency, still less one that will take him to the US...pretty damn far from Beirut. Bliss!

You clever readers! You already know that dodge absolutely never works. What happens in the US is best described as "madcap." If one were to write a gay version of Topper, with a seriously bossy mother in place of wife, and make the ghosts more numerous, it would be this story. (Side note to the Hollywood story editors who haunt my blog (snort): Buy this book! I have some casting ideas, too!)

What caused him to run away is what causes most gay sons to run away. His mother, who loves him and whom he loves, is the emotional center of his world. There is no room to expand, to rummage, to poke into the dark corners and see what's there, at the center of the family circle. Leaving Mother is a rite of passage that never gets skipped in a healthy life. Or even a complicated, eventful, not-always-happy one that only tangentially flirts with mental health.

Author Alameddine is a perennial favorite of mine. We're the same age, we're both literature and book lovers, we've seen a world utterly, completely up stakes and shift away from what we'd thought were Eternal Verities. I feel...at ease...reading his work because I recognize the assumptions, I get the emotional valences, and I like being there. I enjoyed the experience I had coming to the table with Zalfa and Raja, sitting down to listen to their conversation, and learning from each one's actions exactly how much they really love each other.

If I have a cavil with The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), it's that the nature of a novel of the memory, the inevitability of flashback in its use, tends to decrease the impact of the events so recalled. In this story's structure, there are not multiple timelines; there are memories recalled. In both of those use cases, as the timelines are each about Raja and Zalfa, I know for sure that I'm not here to find out what happens but how what happened felt. And feels.

It is a minor thing, but a real one. I'm hearty in my recommendation to get yourself to Beirut via Author Alameddine's memory palace. It is a very nice place to spend a day reading and thinking and laughing.

A THOUSAND WAYS TO DIE: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, proof the personal is political...again

A THOUSAND WAYS TO DIE: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America
TRYMAINE LEE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.

In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves three the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story—from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to exploring the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, and navigating the challenges of representing his people accurately in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.

In A Thousand Ways to Die, Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nothing is free. All actions have reactions, consequences. A causal chain has a beginning. Identifying that beginning is a challenge when the subjects are human beings.

Author Trymaine had a near-fatal heart attack at 38. There's a dramatic effect for you...but the cause...? How does a man tease out the causes of poor health outcomes like a heart attack in very early middle age? His five-year old crystallizes the question with the clarity of a child: Why? Why did your heart attack you?

If you're a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist like Author Trymaine, you look into the stressors of a life led in a high-intensity job, and start digging the roots now that you see the stems...and hope to grow the leaves. The heart attack made a lot more sense as the stress of life reporting on the truly terrible things people do to each other daily, without resting between awfulnesses, led him into the eternal source of human misery: Why? Why does a journalist always have an inexhaustible well of misery and cruelty and callousness to draw from? As Author Trymaine focuses on the Black community he lives in, why does that well so very often have a gun at the bottom of it?

Thinking of his own morality, he naturally thinks of those dead before him, those whose lives were cut short by gun violence. There are members of his own family dead too young because of guns. So answering why for himself means looking at the thing all of them have in common.

They live in a violent country rife with systemic racism. Watch your local news, notice the times there's a violent crime, the photos they choose to show. The criminal's a Black man? Picture of him, mugshot if possible. Perp's a white guy? Picture of the victim. Of course it's impacted all of us, but where is the hatred and the violence aimed? At minorities. The fields sown with hatred and violence are the places it grows. There's a lot of personal pain in this book, but none of it is paraded for the reader's sympathy or judgment. It tells of a system designed to oppress and Other those of a certain skin color that is "working" in that the targets have internalized the nastiness. It's no wonder Author Trymaine is a busy reporter with the amount of rage and hate there is heaped on Black people from outside bubbling and erupting.

The central problem is that systemic rage and hatred; it's the root of many, many evils, though, so if religion can't fix it neither can secular measures. What simple and effective tool is there to address the hideous societal and personal cost of this fact of human existence? What tried and tested means is there to prevent the incompetent, ill-intentioned, sociopathic from acting out their hatred?

Controlling access to the means to kill. Licenses for driving cars are harder to get than licenses to own guns.

Very simple, really.

In exploring the fact of his too-early heart attack with a journalist's training, a seeker's mind, and a father's heart, Author Trymaine lays bare the real, personal, intimate costs of failure. We've all failed. This world of 2025 was not inevitable. Author Trymaine shows us the ways we failed.

But while we are still alive, we can...and should...choose not to fail any longer.

THE NEW GLOBAL POSSIBLE: Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis, factual combat with soul-sucking sadness

THE NEW GLOBAL POSSIBLE: Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis
ANI DASGUPTA
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Global environmental leader Ani Dasgupta takes an honest look at lagging climate action and maps out what can be done to rebuild hope for the future.

In 2015, world leaders came together in Paris and signed an agreement to save the planet. Ten years later, we have made little progress on the ground, and the climate crisis is worse than ever. We’ve mostly figured out what we need to do, but not how to get it done—and time is running out.

In this groundbreaking new book, World Resources Institute President and CEO Ani Dasgupta explores how to orchestrate change at speed and scale. How do we get countries to keep working together on climate action when multilateralism is declining? How do we harness technological innovation to protect nature, rather than destroy it? How do we dismantle entrenched power structures and rapidly transition to a clean, resilient economy?

Based on conversations with more than one hundred leaders around the world, The New Global Possible weaves together stories of unusual partnerships, collaborative leadership, and lessons learned from failure. Mining the rich history of the climate movement, Dasgupta defines the narrow path to a hopeful future—one requiring all of our collective focus and determination—and offers a radical new practice for orchestrating change for good.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm always ready to agree with the old saw, "Cheer up! Darker days are coming," because in my own lifetime I've lost large numbers of people to plagues that could've and should've been stopped sooner than they were; seen my country pull the flush chain on decency and inclusion; and sweated through summers like the ones I knew in 1960s Texas...despite living in 2025 New York.

This is to let you know that I'm not the easiest to jolly-up among the audience. I respond to "it'll all work out fine" with a snarky rendition of "yeah, yeah, pull the other one" if I'm feeling polite. So I am what comedians call a tough room for optimism that isn't firmly grounded in facts and analytically robust everywhere I, with my knowledge independently gained, can push on it. Author Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, passes my pressure test. (The link is to their website, for your reference; it will verify you're a human, not a malware-spreading, dDOS-havocin' bot, so be patient a few seconds.)

Starting our tour of optimism in the wake of the 2004 tsunami...in flattened Banda Aceh, no less...seemed counterintuitive to me at first. Oh gawd, I thought, another every problem an opportunity sermon. While that is a surface truth of the book, it is not close to its affect, or its intent. One of the many weapons in the catastrophist's mental arsenal is, "well it's always been this way, what can you do?" 1) No. It has not "always been this way." b) You can do something...if you look, you can do a small thing like start buying rechargeable batteries for your electronics. "It costs too much! Those create pollution and damage too!" Yep. Initial purchases are more; but, like compact fluorescent lightbulbs in place of incandescents, you buy them once for every ten or fifteen purchases of the old ones; and stopping pollution/environmental damage also includes reducing your use of the trash to dispose of the old-style items. All of this kind of "yes, but" obstructive arguing is what Author Dasgupta is supremely adept at defusing and redirecting. (I can't read by LED lights so don't use them; but they're coming like it or not, and I don't, so I'm as much a problem as the louder naysayers. I have spare compact fluorescents....)

Which segues into, the more of these things you buy, the less capitalism charges for them. And here is where we discuss capitalism. The author's job in Banda Aceh was to administer the World Bank's huge pot of money meant to restore...even upgrade in the process...the tsunami's giant destruction of the area's infrastructure. Using regional governmental coordinating bodies, microcredit lending (think of the hugely successful Kiva.org system) to the affected, and capitalism's value-generating dynamo in balance, the author succeeded in doing what FEMA was prevented from doing post-Katrina.

The US has a terrible case of libertarianism, and refuses to learn that it is not an absolute theory of governmental everything, because there are no functional theories of everything. Ask a physicist. Nothing truer has ever been said than "perfectionism is the end of action." Requiring a solution to be perfect is the fastest way to perpetuating the status quo. (You've never wondered why leftists fail so very often in the US? Look at how their policies are picked apart, scrutinized, and flaws, faults, and problems get shouted about. Funny how much more muted the criticism of capitalism, authoritarianism, religion, and other regressive evils are, isn't it.)

The truth is there are people out there doing loads of practical good across multiple axes of needed change and succeeding at it. Want a dose of climate change real-life success? Follow Simon Clark on YouTube. Want to know what's worked, in reality, on the ground, in the world of positive change? Read this book. Climate Week 2025 is the 21st through the 28th of Sepember. Join the conversation in an informed, energized way.

Jane Goodall's blurb really sums it up best: “A compelling and hopeful reminder that change is not only within our grasp—it is already happening.”

LAMB: A novel in snapshots, what it felt like to be young and queer and there

LAMB: A novel in snapshots
TROY FORD
Sweet Flag Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: D is shaken when his mercurial friend Lamb vanishes just before they're set to move in together. The news of his death three years later shadows him like a ghost.

Sifting through Lamb's journals decades later, D uncovers a raw, intimate portrait of a sensitive misfit navigating a world that never understood him.

From their first meeting at an elite all-boys school to the chaos of 1990s San Francisco, Lamb's story unfolds in a tangle of tenderness and rebellion, anguish and adventure. Through journal entries, letters, poetry, and stories, Lamb is a coming-of-age in snapshots that captures the dazed spirit of young men searching for belonging in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.

A Tales of the City for Generation X—a dark afterparty of gay awakening both aching and unforgettable.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A very sweetly remembered lover from the first years of knowing you're queer will always call your heart home. It's this book that tells you why it did for Author Ford.

We all grow older with this kind of memory of our coming of age, if not always coming out. It's the nature of being adolescent in the modern world...finding one's tribe, feeling one's first romantic love (for most anyway) are very deep experiences. Bound up with our particular time and place, they're all a stew of heady, intense, immediate sensations and thoughts and things learned.

It felt very *right* to be in D and in Lamb's heads from the time just that crucial bit ahead of them.

You can't go home again; but you can remember it, you can summon the sensations thoughts feelings to your older self. There are times that is what you need and should seek out. This book will likely do that for boys born in about 1959 through 1966. It felt good to be young then, even if you weren't *happy* you felt you *could* be.

To all y'all born after 1980: I'm so sorry my generation fucked up so very badly. We did you out of this glorious sadness, and we're only ever going to pay for it.