Reading post: August

It's the last day of August, so I must quickly do a post. In August the plan was to read more biographies, specifically, to get caught up with my presidential biography reading for the year. But since everything I wanted to read had to be requested from other libraries, I started with more of the fiction I'd planned to read in July but didn't get to.

Books I said I'd like to read

The Fell by Sarah Moss (2021). For me, Sarah Moss is hit or miss: sometimes brilliant, sometimes irritating. This book falls more on the brilliant side, although it's about the pandemic. I've read a few novels about what it was like to wear masks, practice social distancing, etc., and they make me angry. Maybe because reading about it brings back bad memories, I don't know. But this is a decent book about Covid. Kate, a single parent, breaks quarantine to go for a hike, though if she is caught the financial penalty (in England) will be high. She falls and injures herself, triggering a rescue operation. That's the whole book, but it's kind of mesmerizing. Also, there's a raven.

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by David McLintock (1986/1995). Oh dear. I want to like Bernhard -- I liked Wittgenstein's Nephew -- but I'm beginning to think maybe he's not for me. This book is his magnum opus, and I just hated it. It's one 326-page paragraph (at least it's not one sentence, like Septology), and it's mostly just a rant from the estranged son of a wealthy Austrian family whose parents and older brother have just died in a car accident, making him the heir. He rants about Austria, his family, how he hates almost everything, he hates pigeons, he hates the Catholic Church (even though he now lives in Rome), he hates... I forget what all he hates. Some of his hatred is intelligent (e.g., Nazis), and some is very sus, to the point where I thought he was probably certifiably insane. So glad to finish it, not sure why I made the effort. Now I have to decide whether I want to read anything else by Bernhard. Hmm.

Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower by Kaye Summersby Morgan (1976). My second Eisenhower book. It was ghostwritten while Summersby was dying of cancer, and it's hard to know how much is really from her. However, it sounds very believable. It's fascinating how hard the Eisenhower machine has worked to erase her from his biography. She isn't even mentioned on his Wikipedia page, except that under "See also" there's a link to her page, and she's listed as "chauffeur and secretary." Her page says:

It is generally agreed that Summersby and Eisenhower became extremely close during the war; some writers have suggested a sexual relationship between the two, although people who knew both of them at the time have rejected that claim, as have most of Eisenhower's biographers.

But Jean Edward Smith, who wrote the best biography of Eisenhower (the one I read) absolutely accepts the claim. I think Summersby's getting a raw deal on Wikipedia, just like the raw deal she apparently got from Eisenhower, when he dumped her with no warning and no explanation.

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin (1987). My first JFK book. I am planning to read three in all -- we'll see how that goes. This one is really a history of his family, almost a genealogy book, and it's very interesting. It was also hard to obtain. None of the local libraries had it, so I had to get it from the Regis University library via Prospector. The text was 817 pages and it took me FOREVER to get through, but it was worth it. I imagine the other books I read about Kennedy will also talk about his mother's and father's families, but this one went into so much detail. I would have liked to read more about JFK's younger siblings, but I learned a lot about his brother Joe and sisters Rosemary and Kathleen. When "Kick" died, the life went out of the book in the same way it must have gone out of the Kennedy family. 

 

Books from the New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" reviews

The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why by Jeff Sebo (2025). So, ever since AI began to explode and there's all this talk about how it's going to take over everyone's jobs, etc., I've been thinking a couple of things. First, general annoyance because it sounds as though AI is very good at doing exactly the kinds of things I'm good at, organizing and sorting and whatnot. Second, I've started thinking about other species and where they fit in. If AI is gradually going to get much much smarter and more capable than us, won't human exceptionalism go by the wayside? (as it should) and then will we become just another animal, like bears and wombats and dragonflies? This philosophy book is about why we ought to expand our moral circle to include everything that's conscious -- possibly including robots, in part because we need to train them now to include us in their moral circle. I'm OK with accepting insects into it, but shouldn't we include trees too? Sebo argues against factory farming of animals and insects, but if plants are also conscious, is it OK to factory farm them? Anyway, a very interesting book, lots to think about.

Other reading 

Your Kid Belongs Here: An Insider's Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children by Katie Rose Guest Pryal (2025). My eighth autism book (I didn't read any in June or July). This was a very good book, one I would recommend to parents -- but it's a little late to be much help for me. It's mainly about parenting school-age autistic kids. And oh how her stories and comments rang true. Some of them, anyway. I never had a principal accuse my kid of provoking other kids to bully him. When Teen B was being bullied, the teacher and principal worked with us to find a solution. I think it really helps to have your kids in the same school, same district, all the way through, to have the other kids in the school live in your neighborhood, to volunteer in the school so the staff have a good feeling about you. But also be flexible: sending Teen A to Hillside School for his dyslexia was the best decision we ever made. I was also lucky enough to find a parent network group to support me through the preteen and teen years. But it was still always really hard to be "that mom," and I think a book like this would have helped me.

One quibble: she recommends "unschooling," which I am 100% against, based on the experience of some people we know. But otherwise there's a lot of good stuff in this book.

The Dry by Jane Harper (2016). The NY Times recently published a list of "the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century so far" and this was #24. I studied the list carefully, but didn't see many that I haven't read and would like to. I had already read 10 on the list (and with this book, 11) and there are maybe 5 more I'd like to read. Anyway, this book is more of a mystery than a thriller and for a debut novel it's quite good. It's set in rural Australia, a five-hour drive from Melbourne, so probably somewhere in the middle of New South Wales, which appears from the map to be the middle of nowhere. Federal agent Aaron Falk comes home to the drought-stricken town he and his father fled from 20 years ago, for the funeral of his former best friend who has apparently shot and killed his wife, young son, and himself. But are things really what they seem? Harper has written other books, so I may check them out too.