Social Class | Book Chatter

Too Like The Lightning
By Ada Palmer
Tor Books, January 2017, 448pp.

The Short of It:

This was a wild read to ponder. Good discussion book.

The Rest of It:

“Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer–a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.”

What sucked me in was the premise. What kept me going were the questions.

The story is told from Mycroft’s POV. The problem? He’s a convict, slightly annoying, and an unreliable narrator. Everything he says, including those moments when he speaks directly to the reader, has to be taken with a grain of salt. Truth or fiction? With Mycroft, you’re never quite sure.

Religion has been done away with. Countries are no more. Instead, there are Hives, communities of like-minded individuals who can move from Hive to Hive as they see fit. Which raises the question: who’s in control? I couldn’t help but compare this world to the one we live in now. Certain people are still considered elite. You can take a guess who those people are.

Is it really utopia when there are so many social constraints? Who gets to rewrite history? As Mycroft navigates this world and ends up protecting the one kid who could upend everything they know, we’re pulled into questions about what it means to be a society. Even with familiar social norms gone, isn’t it still the top tier calling the shots?

My book club chose this for October, and although it was dense in places and sometimes hard to navigate, the world building and the questions it raised kept our discussion going. This is the first in a four-book series, and it feels like we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Recommend. It’s sci-fi, but it’s also politics and a whole lot of philosophy.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

Hillbilly Elegy
By J.D. Vance
Harper Paperbacks, 9780062300553, (Paperback) May 2018, 288pp.

The Short of It:

An important read, even if you think you won’t be able to relate to it.

The Rest of It:

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis–that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. – Indiebound

I had been avoiding this book when it was selected by my book club. Truthfully, I wasn’t interested in it because I knew it would hit too close to home, and it did. I didn’t grow up in the same region as Vance but I could identify with nearly everything Vance encountered growing up: addiction, abuse, poverty, and having what seemed like no other options for living.

But I could also identify with a need to belong, a need to succeed and the well-meaning intentions of some of the folks around me. Vance tells his story with brutal honestly but his story is peppered with hope throughout, which makes this memoir a very interesting read about the long-term effects of class decline on future generations and it begs the question, how can we fix it?

The full impact of this memoir didn’t hit me until the last third of the book. That is when Vance gets to the point. The never-ending cycle of poverty for some, make it impossible for them to rise above it. How could they without the realization that there is more out there? If the norm is poverty and abuse, and it’s all they see, what motivation exists to change their situation for the better?

I know some people will argue with that logic. That people have a choice and they choose to be poor but for many, they grew up that way. They were never shown or given the opportunity to live differently. Vance suggests that the people who manage to pull themselves out of this cycle are the ones who were introduced to something different. I agree. It’s the number one reason why I work with teens and the homeless. I had people in my life that showed me a different way and that made all the difference. I want to be that person to someone else.

Hillbilly Elegy is a powerful read and if you don’t want to read it or think you can’t relate to it in some way, try, because it’s important to know how other people live. For our society to flourish we need role models to show us a better way because no matter where you stand politically, brokenness is evident all around us if you look.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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