The Collected Somewhat

This book is hard to pin down, and because of that it suffers a bit. It would seem that not a lot of readers possess the unique qualities and experiences that form the foundation of the theories touched upon in this book. Authors (of Novels), authors (of code) a.k.a. programmers, and people with a deep historical knowledge of indian culture and mythology.

The author possesses all three in spades, he is an indian novelist who coded on the side to make ends meet. He is very smart and seems a good novelist and probably coder too. His writing is eloquent enough to cover all three of the seemingly disparate topics, he makes a case that perhaps they are not so disparate after all — but it still seems despite the authors best efforts that there isn’t an audience for this all encompassing thesis.

Still I applaud the effort – there are some gems in there – even if for me it didn’t quite come together, and it seemed to be in need of some editing (by an outside editor, is this self-published?) in the middle to rein it all in a bit. I hope the author found some peace in putting his thoughts and theories to paper, and I appreciate him letting us in on the workings of the mind which can get messy with flashes of brilliance.

P.S. I also suspect as it did me that the title can mislead, even though the book is non-fiction the title is applied more like a work of fiction – meaning the poetic lyricism is more important than the literal meaning and I suspect geek is such a loaded/coded word right now that readers might be doubly surprised by the literary tone on the inside.

Wow this book goes there and back. Apparently the premise that language shapes your thinking, worldview, possibilities is quite widespread, quite old and apparently utterly untrue.

At least that is what Guy Deutscher would have you believe towards the beginning of the book but by the end he comes full-circle and acknowledges that indeed it can color your thinking – it just doesn’t limit your thinking like some cultural theorists would have you believe in the 17 and 1800’s, they would use it support their “theories” about “less evolved” cultures and things like that.

The book starts out with the bizarre color associations in Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad what with his wine-colored sheep and green colored eyebrows. What to make of that? And it ends with an interesting language and culture of the Guugu Yimithirr which does not have “egocentric” coordinate concepts such as Left or Right, instead it only uses “geographic” coordinates so that speakers must always be aware of North and South no matter if they are in a room without windows or jumping out of a sinking boat in shark infested waters – they will always know which cardinal direction they swam to escape and their children always know which direction the tv was facing because Punch might have been to the West of Judy.

For someone who takes painstaking pains to back up his theories with evidence – the final pages of the book go into some wild hyperbole and flights of fancy and in fact the ending chapters somewhat unravel as if the author ran out of time or grant money or perhaps missed his children and just wrote some stuff to get the damn thing finished.

Overall I learned some stuff – but it wasn’t the book on language I was hoping for. And the author’s final revelation that naming things in a particular language is what actually carves up reality for us and not how reality is indeed divided, he presents as the ultimate revelation. Unfortunately buddhist monks have known about this for years.

Well that’s a wallop of a book. It’s about DEATH. Specifically about dealing with it with parents who live well into their 90’s. But it’s a really, really great read. A very insightful, funny, poignant and unfortunately sad read. But that comes with the territory and unfortunately as people live longer and longer, it’s something many of us will have to deal with. Which is why I appreciated this book so much.

It’s a one of a kind non-judgemental, un-edited, tell it like it is, look into someone’s personal way of experiencing this situation and I loved it. All told through Chast’s one-of-a-kind drawings, hand-lettered text that feels like you’re reading her diary and interspersed with family photos, like a scrap-book.

Admittedly I picked up this book because I thought it would be hilarious. And it is, especially in the beginning but things quickly take a turn for the worse. Funny, personal, nyc-centric and geriatric quips abound and you keep going until the inevitable end, as Roz had to to do with the situation in real life.