MADNESS: a bipolar life by Marya Hornbacher

Author of WASTED: a memoir of anorexia and bulimia, Hornbacher, tells the rest of the story. A little precious, a bit self-indulgent, much as her life, there is good content here. However, I didn't feel the depression the way I felt the mania. Perhaps, unable to write during the lows affected the ability to convey them emotionally. Understandable. The mania was well represented, making for an engaging read of well-bred midwestern neurosis gone wrong.

Sort of like Orange is the New Black, I don't doubt the author's depth of experience, but there is some glamourizing of what must have been devastating consequences to self-destructive choices. I guess my main disappointmet is there doesn't seem like there was a growth in self-awareness other than learning to take the meds.

The links to mental health organizations was a nice addition at the end, as was the other research information. It's good that the subject is being explored. Silence continues to be one of the roadblocks to public acceptance.

Orfeo

By one of my favorite authors, Richard Powers.
Quotes:
The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

We're either hungry or dead.

Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.

Life is an escaped experiment, say the artists, and the only real safety is death.

Dave Eggers' THE CIRCLE

A near-future cautionary tale...
Does a "matrix of preferences" represent you?
How has social networking come to define you?
Extrapolation of everything you've ever entered into a computer (or been entered about you) becoming meta-data shared indescriminately with everyone...
Not sharing, or attempts at privacy, as anti-social behaviour...

Eggers explores extremes while encouraging us to consider outcomes of current trends when utopian intentions become co-opted by bottom line bottom feeders.

Librareome, Librarian Militants, Dangerous Knowledge and haptics

Vernor Vinge's RAINBOW'S END has a lot going on. Multiple plot lines initially confuscate the deeper story of how in the near future we are doing battle for books, the real hold in your hand with warp and weight kind versus the plug in and access digitally kind. Interestingly, Vernor doesn't come down in support of either side rather suggesting room for both. However, he does indirectly warn about moving too fast and destroying print resources unnecessarily. As an academic, computer science and mathematician, he is well placed to see the threat to print as libraries are becoming digitized and books warehoused and shelf space converted for computers. On some level, Vernor is mirroring current trends toward de-valuing print as inconvenient and stodgy. When all the world's knowledge is at your fingertips, quite literally in Vinge's haptic interface scenarios, why would we want to encumber ourselves with print? Vinge somewhat cryptically implies that linguistically our ability to communicate will change without the written word. With a former poet as protagonist, we learn to value true creativity and not limit it to the lyrical. There is art in everything.

This simplifies the message. However, there are mixed messages in the novel. The protagonist suffers from the loss of an ability to weave words into poetry but discovers the poetry in networking multiple inputs into a coherent collaborative creation.

Rainbow's End also includes bio-chemical terrorist threats along with the inevitable play for world domination but I read this more as a plot device to move the story along. Vinge includes lots of tech projection of near future possibilties to support the cyberpunk tone I relish. But there is a human story here beyond the genre that makes the novel more:

"...there's something you have to learn as you grow up. Some people make their own problems. And they never stop hurting themselves and messing up the people around them. When that's the case, then you shouldn't keep hurting yourself for them."

Good bibliotherapeutic advice whether on a personal, communal or global scale.

Cory Doctorow's Homeland

In the sequel to Little Brother, we find our hero amping up, politicking with a purpose. And with the same theme: things are bad and might well get worse. Marcus gets wise advise from his childhood friend Jolu, advice easily usable, harder to actualize but worth mastering:

"Jolu was right: I just neede to take a step in the direction I wanted to head and stay flexible enough to keep moving that way no matter what happened."

For all ages, the young, the still young, the once young-Doctorow informs, entertains, educates us and keeps us hungry for more. A prolofic writer, he makes every effort to satisfy the obsessive/compulsive reader. But my appetite is only whetted...can't wait for the next one. Doctorow twitted Down & Out Magic Kingdom might be due for a prequel. Bring it.

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

"You define a tree and you do not see what it is; it becomes its name. It is the same with woman and man. Everywhere ... one or the other, male or female, abandoned by the other."

Canadian author explores gender and "otherness" in story of hermaphrodite identity crisis. Do we know who we are apart from how we are defined by others? Winter lyrically deconstructs "know thyself."

Revolution World by Katy Stauber

First novel by a biochemistry/mathematics major. Dystoptian comedy? Only Texas setting could satisfy sustained disbelief that makes for this delightfully weird Mona Lisa Overdrive meets True Blood, but with comedic layerings, bio/cyber scifi adenture.