Simpson's Paradox

What You Are Looking for is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama, and translated by Alison Watts, is a book of sweet and gentle interlocking short stories around a library where the reading recommendations are always just what each reader needed to find. This book has the overall vibe of the gentle healing of Before The Coffee Gets Cold, but with a magical realism hint, instead of full-on time-travel fiction. It has all the quiet warmth and gentle realizations of a good Maeve Binchy novel, too.

The basic Hatori Community House offers everyday resources like computer classes and meeting rooms for locals. The librarian, Sayuri Komachi, gives personal reading recommendations and a charming felted bonus gift to patrons. These readers might think they’re just looking for a regular how-to book about playing Go or building a website, but these special recommended books have a little bit extra, opening new perspectives for the readers.

Each story is about a person feeling disappointed in their life. We first meet a twentysomething retail worker, who’s proud of making it to a job “in fashion” in the big city, but also wonders if the repetitive, lonely work is all there is for her. When she visits the library to learn more about computers and maybe improve her career prospects, she also checks out an old favorite children’s book, which starts to unlocks new ideas, new perspectives, and new habits for her. It’s a charming and gentle transformation, without any insta-makeover or too-easy conclusions.

So I read What You Are Looking for is in the Library at exactly the right time for me (but honestly, aren’t we always learning to better cope with setbacks?) and as I was reading, I could sort of feel that this book is about to be big. It’s very easy to read, with a warm, gentle atmosphere in each short story. The stories have positive resolutions, but not overwhelmingly so, so there’s a wonderfully relatable feeling, as if the same kind of hopeful, warm perspective is just a book away for all of us.

Another visitor to the library has a private dream of opening an antique store, and being surrounded by beautiful treasures all day, but fears leaving his stable, unexciting job for a completely new venture. An unemployed and lonely young man faces the deeply relatable situation of being creative and skilled enough to get into art school, but not skilled enough to land the great jobs his classmates got after graduation.  New mother Natsumi has lost her career path and her free time when her daughter was born, and she tries to make sense of being the default parent for a thousand tiny concerns, and finding her once-meaningful work on the mommytrack. And after these stories of work and identity, a newly retired man wonders what his life and identity will be without his career at the center.

Without too much of a spoiler, I have to say that I loved one character’s path to a new career. In fiction, we often find a great new job opportunity, and the deadline to apply is almost here! Then the character takes the risks and goes for it and of course they get it, right? So I particularly liked that even with the magical realism of the library, our character didn’t automatically get the first job she applied to.

What You Are Looking for is in the Library is short and spare, with more implied than shown directly to readers. With these short, interconnected stories, the book introduces us to complicated and relatable characters, and shows them struggling to find contentment and fulfillment. There is also a theme of being kind to others, of being a good friend or a loving parent or child. This is a warm and encouraging book for any reader.

Jason Rekulak’s The Impossible Fortress is full of fun ’80s game-programming nostalgia, but that’s not the only reason to read it. This world of mix tapes and floppy disks definitely unlocks retro memories, but the overall story is fresh and original, with YA vibes.

In the late 1980s, teenage Billy and his two best friends, Alf and Clark, spend time at Billy’s while his mom is out working, the three friends rent movies to re-watch the sexy scenes and having meander debates about who would win in hypothetical fights. I felt like I definitely went to school with these guys.

In the 80s, in their working-class neighborhood, a computer is an extremely rare find, but Billy’s mom won one in a raffle so Billy has access to a Commodore 64. He starts making his own simple games, despite being a pretty mediocre student. When he has the interest, Billy has the brainpower, and the rest of the book is sort of a YA story about how he’s going to use his brains and what kind of person he’s going to become.

At the same time, Billy, Alf and Clark have come up with a scheme that will make them popular and earn them cash. They plan to steal and photocopy a Playboy, and sell copies to all the guys at school. All they need to do it get their hands on the first copy, but obviously there’s no online shopping (or there would be, ahem, other online activities and no need to steal the magazine) and the proprietor of the town’s newsstand is definitely not going to sell Playboy to kids. There’s a heist element in this novel that’s pretty far-fetched, but plays into the overall theme of how Billy’s going to use his brain.

I went into this one on a friend’s recommendation (Thanks, Jerry!) so I knew it was going to be a retro story with an interesting girl game programmer from the start. Even knowing that Mary wasn’t going to be a booth babe character or the token programming girl in a guy’s story, I still wasn’t prepared for Mary’s storyline.

I loved the YA elements, as Billy’s life changes from his usual hanging around with Alf and Clark, to programming with Mary after school. How his mom really believes Billy can do better in school, but in the anti-helicopter way of the 1980s, she’s at work most of the time and just sees his quarterly report cards. There’s a distinct young adult vibe, as Billy faces a major question of who he’s going to be, which mixes so well with the retro programming vibes.

Overall, The Impossible Fortress is a wonderful nostalgic look at early programming and early PC games of the1980s, but that’s not the whole reason to read it.  This is a coming-of-age adventure, with relatable, memorable teenagers and unexpected turns.

Without even realizing it, many internet users mistakenly assume that cyberattackers follow conventional rules of behavior. People try to reason with trolls or appeal to their better nature. These responses are similar to how you might approach a friend who’s inadvertently insulted you, or a family member who disagrees with you about something important. But trolls are not like your loved ones, and research shows that these strategies are ineffective because they misapprehend a troll’s true motives, which are usually to attract attention, exercise control, and manipulate others.

Many people who engage in online harassment are not what most of us would consider to be well-adjusted. In 2019, scholars writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences surveyed 26 studies of internet “trolling,” cyberbullying, and related antisocial online behaviors. They found significant associations with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and narcissism, in that order. In other words, just as you would conclude that a stranger attacking you in person is badly damaged, you can conclude the same about a stranger attacking you on social media.

Source: How to Deal With Trolls by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic

I usually enjoy Brooks’ column. Sure, there are some offnotes when it’s too clear that author’s job is to think about happiness, and he doesn’t quite realize how goofy his suggestions are for anyone in the working classes.  But usually, each article presents a way to think about what we choose in our lives, and often about the gap between what seems like happiness and what’s actual contentment.

This article, all about trolls and why there’s no way to resolve with bad-faith hostility, is a particularly good one. I’ve thought about it a lot of times since I first read it. As Twitter becomes a trash fire, with not just endless sockpuppet attacks but actual cash prizes for outrage engagement on the worst, most hostile takes possible, I’m thinking about it again.

So I feel ridiculous complaining about this apartment in any way, because we’ve wanted to own something for ages, and it’s been a long, excessively stressful process to save, and then a long, excessively boring process to get a mortgage. The pedantic tedium of financial paperwork and approvals, interspersed with wild anxiety of accounting and justifying freelancing income.

But the thing is, if you get a pretty good deal on an apartment because it’s a fixer-upper, you then have to fix it up. No major or structural issues, just years of cheap repairs and decor. (The pedantic tedium and wild anxiety of inspections, too.)

We must imagine Sisyphus happy, in the repetitive absurdity of painting and repainting, in the constant discovery of something else that’s just a little bit broken, too. In choosing, repairing, and installing, with the associated decision paralysis. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, in the absurd and constant awareness that I’m not doing a great job at any of this, but it is happening.

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older, was the kind of book where I wanted to read faster to discover the mystery (and Pleiti and Mossa’s relationship mystery), but I also wanted to read more slowly to stay longer on future Jupiter.

When a man disappears off a remote train platform, Investigator Mossa is assigned to see whether he fell or was pushed into the swirling gases below. It’s a mysterious, not-gory death (my favorite kind!) because we never see any guts, the characters all know that a human body couldn’t possibly survive the atmosphere and storms of Jupiter. Trains are the only method of transit between platforms, and platforms are the only places that can support life on Jupiter, so he couldn’t have wandered off.

I liked this from the start — a dramatic, not-gristly hook, and an intriguing character investigating that hook. We rarely get to see women being single-minded, dedicated geniuses in their work, and a bit socially awkward outside. There are 10,000 Sherlock Holmes reinventions where a man gets to be the antisocial genius, but I rarely read about a woman single-mindedly solving a mystery.

The story is told by Pleiti, Mossa’s ex-girlfriend, and her story begins when Mossa shows up asking for help in the investigation. Pleiti is definitely the Watson in this mystery, but she’s a pretty solid character and researcher herself. Pleiti is another familiar archetype, but again one I don’t see enough in a woman, and definitely not a woman in space! Pleiti is a scholar at Valdegeld, Jupiter’s university, studying Classics, which (sadly for me) doesn’t mean Romans, but old Earth ecosystems, from back before climate collapse. She reads ancient literature, like Watership Down, and tries to cross-reference the animals mentioned to understand how Earth’s ecosystem’s worked, back when there were ecosystems on the planet. Eventually, hopefully, someday, maybe, she’ll be part of rebuilding the planet enough to allow humans to return there.

There was one small issue for me, which is that so much of the book is worldbuilding, it was impossible to guess or predict the mystery for me. There was no way to guess ahead because I was discovering the rules of life on Giant. It was OK, because I loved discovering the Jupiter outpost, I just also wanted to understand the mystery earlier. Basically, Pleiti would notice Mossa’s reaction to something or someone, and I’d file that away, a-ha! a clue! There’s something important about that! but I couldn’t put it together because I was still working out how the world worked for most of the novel.

Without giving spoilers about the plot or the ending, there are heavy questions about what we owe to each other. What do we owe to other people, when we think they’re impossibly wrong?  How can humans coexist in shared spaces, whether that’s a society or a relationship? It works with the characters we’ve met, though, and adds additional depth, especially to the slightly-robotic Mossa. Some  heavy questions linger in this delightful scifi escapism.

I recently read The Siren, and blogged about how it had so many elements I knew I’d like. Some of that could be true for how I went into The Mimicking of Known Successes, too. I knew this book would be a not-gross murder mystery, set on Jupiter, with developed, complex women. All things I expected to like reading about! I just didn’t know that I’d like a gaslamp gas giant mystery, because I has no idea it existed.