Is it a good idea to read a book about a deadly contagious disease while staying at home to avoid a deadly contagious disease? I don't know about any of you but it did feel a little surreal.The Dreamers explores what happens when a contagious sleeping sickness strikes a small Southern California college town. The inhabitants are at first carefree and oblivious to the possible danger participating in daily activities and even celebrating Halloween trick-or-treating with abandon as the disease spreads from person to person. Who gets it and who doesn't, doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern.Since we are all amateur virologists these days, there were some technical aspects of the disease I expected the book to address which it did not. This is not a "Contagion" style book. This is a book that looks more at the societal collapse under a viral threat combined with a thoughtful contemplation of what it means to dream and what it would mean to dream for weeks at a time without the touchstone of reality to fall back upon.The beginning of the book begins with a quote from the book Blindness, by Jose Saragamo (you can read my review of that here), which I read several years ago and still stays with me at times. This book doesn't dip into the levels of depravity found in that book, but the cycle of the disease and the exploration of the citizenry is evocative of that novel.I was pleased to find that the writing and the narrative in The Dreamers was finer and tighter than The Age of Miracles, which I read a couple years ago but didn't enjoy as much as this one. (You can read my review of that book here).
3.5/5
Talk about putting someone through the mommy guilt wringer. While reading listening to this book, I vacillated between chastising myself for essentially ruining my children's lives and patting myself on the back for maybe not doing such a bad job afterall. The final outcome is that yeah, I could probably do better as a parent. And lucky for my kids, I'd like to try to do better. I won't always get there, but I will try. So they've basically won the parenting lottery right?Essentially, if I had to condense this book's advice into a single sentence, it would be, "Don't be an asshole." And really that's kind of it. But it's more nuanced of course, as all things parenting are. In effect, we must realize that "do as I say, and not as I do" is not an effective parenting technique. Children learn by watching adults, and for the large portion of their early lives those role models are their parents. When we yell and overcome them with physical force to prove a point or to punish, we are modeling to them the way we believe they should handle their own conflicts. NO WONDER WE HAVEN'T ACHIEVED WORLD PEACE YET! It also touches on a lot of the evidence from studies that suggest that children cognitively cannot pull their behavior into line with our expectations with the kind of regularity we would expect from adults. So give the kids a break, show them some love, understanding, and compassion, and move on from a punishment mindset. All in all some good reminders for busy parents. If you don't want to read the entire book, just check out the website where a lot of these topics are discussed. You can find it here.
4/5 Stars.
Whoops. This is an example of where going to a bookstore and flipping the book over to read a description is effective. Instead, since I love Aziz Ansari as a comic and I saw that the book was highly rated, and recommended to me by Goodreads after I finished and loved, Bossy Pants by Tina Fey (read my review here), I used my Audible credit to purchase this book.
I thought it was going to be about Aziz Ansari. I thought it was going to be funny. That's all I thought it was going to be. Whoops.
Modern Romance is co-authored by Ansari and a sociologist. And true to its title, it chronicles and examines romance in the modern age. How does technology (social media, smart phones, dating apps) effect dating today? And how does that manifest in the US and other parts of the world?
The book is really pretty good, even though I've been married for almost a decade and none of the subject matter even applies to me anymore. But Ansari is hilarious and a perfect foil for all the technical scientific and and study-related data. I found the section on modern romance in Tokyo especially entertaining.
I'm giving the book four stars because it was well written, researched, and presented. I just wasn't that interested in the subject matter at this point in my life. But that's my own fault for just assuming the book was something it wasn't.
4/5 Stars.
