Bookpost: Some nonfiction and some calendar war

[roadrunnertwice]

It has been an approximate eternity since the last bookpost, so let's see what I've got in the queue.

Alfie Kohn — Punished by Rewards

Aug 12

I was tweeting about an (excellent, tangentially related) article by Alfie Kohn, and my friend Audrey said that this book changed her life, so I put it on hold immediately.

Sure enough, it rules. It's eye-opening and challenging and surprising, and also occasionally a fist-pumping delight to read.

Apparently, there is overwhelmingly strong experimental evidence that manipulatively directed rewards and incentives don't actually motivate people to change their behaviors in the medium-to-long term, and in fact can create aversions to the behavior they were intended to reinforce. This is a book about that paradox, the bizarre and persistent societal refusal to believe the evidence of said paradox, and the fucked up non-linear effects of both.

This material could have been presented several different ways and still been interesting, but what really won my heart is that Kohn is serious about anarchy; like, if this guy'd been born on real live Annares, he'd still be constantly rocking the boat and making everyone uncomfortable with hard questions. It’s just so refreshing to read pop nonfiction from someone who’s willing to openly say that trying to dominate and control someone else for your own convenience or comfort or profit is actually fundamentally corrupt.

David Graeber — Bullshit Jobs

Dec. 24

I read this months after the Kohn, but it still felt like a continuous dialogue of some kind. Guess 2019 was a good year to think hard about anarchism.

This book kicked ass, and I spent some months recommending it to everyone irl. Now I'm recommending it to you! It's an excellent exploration of some fundamental shit in our culture and politics and economy that is plainly observable but genuinely seems to make no sense, and it starts the project of making some sense of it.

The bits about the bullshitification of legitimate work and the divisions between the caring and administrative classes have proven particularly fruitful for understanding how certain infuriating things happen. (Cf. for example this post about the staggering amount expertise necessary to be an underpaid preschool teacher.)

Yoon Ha Lee — Ninefox Gambit (re-read), Raven Strategem, Revenant Gun

July 19, Aug 17, Aug 29

Yoon Ha Lee is a writer I've followed for quite a while because I'm fond of his short stories, and I remember several years of blog posts he made about the long process of writing and re-writing what sounded like an absolutely un-writeable space opera trilogy, which involved math, psychopaths, military tactics, an RPG-like system of excessively codified societal factions, and, for some reason, geese.

Well, somehow he successfully wrote it, and it's amazing.

This series is imperfect and bizarre; at many times, it feels like it's barely holding together against the internal forces working to pull it apart. It has some outlandish tonal shifts, and much of the third book reads like some combination of gonzo horny fanfic about the prior canon and an extremely bad dream. But there's nothing else like this series anywhere, and I love it.

Comments

[sporky_rat]

You know he's on Dreamwidth, right, Yoon Ha Lee?

[roadrunnertwice]

yup!