2019 in Books

Literature

Normal People - Sally Rooney

I first heard of Normal People after a 5​⭐ review by Vox. After just her second novel, Rooney was already being hailed as a great Millennial writer. So I succumbed to the hype and bought Normal People¹. The plot revolves around two characters Marianne—a well-to-do anti-socialite—and Connell—a working class soccer player—as they revolve around each other throughout the last year of high school and college. At first Connell is the popular kid, an athlete, while Marianne is a weirdo. They begin seeing each other, but Connell hurts her when he doesn’t invite Marianne to the Debs (a school dance). Once both attend Trinity College Dublin, the power dynamics have reversed. Marianne has made many friends with some well-connected students, while Connell is now the reticent one.

The on-and-off relationship between Marianne and Connell is rich. You can feel each blow in their conversations. No quotes surround the dialogue it merges with the rest of the text. Rooney details every vacillation and significant event in their relationship in flash forwards. They get together at the end of their first year of university, then drift apart. Marianne becomes the victim of abuse; Connell dates nice women but is unsatisfied. Normal people would probably drift apart at this point, the forces of life pulling them apart. But like opposing charges, Marianne and Connell are drawn to each other. I don’t like the book as much as the reviewers, but that is more a fault of my background than the book. I have never been in a romantic relationship. The actions of Marianne and Connell often seems irrational to me. But it is a good book, even if I am hesitant to call it a great one.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live - Joan Didion

I actually finished the essay collections in this collection of collections last year (I have not read Salvador or Miami) but, as this blog did not exist in 2018, I decided to count it towards the 2019th year of the Common Era. I first learned of Joan Didion while in high school due to an assigned reading of her essay “Los Angeles Notebook” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It was a welcome departure from the vocabulary and grammar of 17th, 18th or even 19th century “Modern” English. She was like no writer I have ever read, or read ever since. Her phrasing and word choice were so precise yet so off-kilter compared to any journalism I had encountered. Didion would include specific yet seemingly specific details with such casual commentary that, like iconic movies, filled her essays full of hard-hitting, quotable sentences.

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the storied I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.

Didion’s habits make more sense after hearing her biography. She began her career writing copy for Vogue, filling in the print for clothing and furniture ads, which explains her attuned eye for these things in her work. In her spare time, she wrote her first novel Run, River along with other magazine assignments. In these early years, the conservatism of a Silent generation Goldwater voter shines through the pages. Didion is critical of Communism, of progressive think tanks, of the so called hippies gathering in San Francisco. The comfortable, individualistic 50s were her kind of decade. By 1970 and beyond, you can see her thinking evolve. She is critical of narratives and appearances in general, even those of the Reagans, successors to the movement initiated by Goldwater. By the 1980s, Didion was openly political: writing about electioneering and the Central Park jogger.

Yet there was a special emotional undertow that derived in part from the deep and allusive associations and taboo attaching, in American black history, to the idea of the rape of white women.

These habits are not universally beloved. Her non-alignment can strike some as nihilistic and self-obsessed. Her attentiveness to clothing and decoration is merely a “bag of tricks”. Didion is style over substance. Her words often dizzy more than they reveal, often because “writing has not yet helped me [her] see what it means”. Such criticism can also be directed at Didion the person. The chic cool image on the cover hides a nervous reality. She can be incredibly socially inept². Didion is not a normal woman nor a normal author. She certainly is different, and that is why her work is so adored.

Programming

A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout

A Philosophy of Software Design derives from Ousterhout’s attempts to teach software design to students at Stanford. From 3 iterations of CS190 comes a few general and coherent principles. A Philosophy of Software Design is not only a philosophy; there are some helpful rules of thumb towards the end. But the main contribution of the book is a perspective, synthesized from teaching experience, on good software design and how to achieve it.

1. Software design is about managing complexity. Complexity is defined as anything that makes a program difficult to understand. Good software design becomes a purely conceptual activity. Good software design elegant like a good physical theory explaining a wide range of phenomena with few universal constants.

2. Program strategically. Design programs multiple times to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each architecture.

3. Modules should be deep. The best modules provide maximal functionality with minimal interface. They hide implementation details while being general purpose.

4. Define errors out of existence. Returning 0 exceptions is better than returning 1 is better than return 2 and so on, because exceptions are part of a module’s interface, and complex interfaces leads to shallow modules.

Some of these contradict other bits of advice floating around. For example, most programming best practice books advise that modules should be kept short, often proposing 20³ (or some other natural number $n \leq 100$) lines as an upper bound for functions. To fulfill (3), however, often requires functions and classes be long. While (4) may be the superficial consensus, in practice, exceptions are almost always thrown up the software stack.

Social Science

Privilege - Shamus Rahman Khan

Privilege is an in depth study of St. Paul’s boarding school in the Northeast, the same high school he attended back in the 90s, as part of a sociology study on the making of a new type of American elite. What characterizes the new elite is privilege, a set of skills and experiences that helps students navigate social hierarchies with ease. Privilege is how elites pass down advantages in an open but unequal world. For Khan, privilege is primarily cultural; only the last chapter is devoted to academics. Instead, he spends the majority of time examining the dynamics of this little society and the influence of class, race, and gender on them. Much of it is conventional high school drama: dress, dating, and dances. The gender dynamics Khan describes exist in most American high schools, heightened perhaps by the cloistered environment of the boarding school. Much of the dynamics are specific to an elite institution. Many students from non-elite backgrounds are forced to rationalize their experience of the school.

By the end of the book, I feel that I have a good understanding of how St. Paul worked in the 2000s, but not how it relates to the larger story of inequality. Inequality in the US has been rising since the 1970s despite the opening of elite institutions. Is privilege why the top 1% have accumulated an increasing share of American wealth? Is the lack of privilege why the median household income hasn’t improved since 1980? Even when elite institutions were closed off in the first half of the twentieth century, wages and living standards for the Average Joe were rising. The decoupling of wages from productivity improvements is a major chapter in the story of inequality. Of course, this is beyond the scope of a single book or even sociology. What Privilege does make clear is how the game of meritocracy—supposedly fair and open to all—is in fact rigged towards the children of existing elites, and how those from non-traditional backgrounds still don’t fit in.