Category: Books

The Nuremberg Trial

For being a 25-hour-long audiobook about post-World War II, The Nuremberg Trial by Ann Tusa and John Tusa was surprisingly interesting. My favorite section of the book, about the first third, was dedicated to explaining the many complications of executing a fair trial against 22 German military and political leaders. The first decision was who would judge the Germans. The Polish were ultimately excluded, leaving the trial to be overseen by French, English, American, and Russian judges. This required enough collaboration between the four nations, Germany, and their slightly differing views of fair judgement. The Russian view was the most troubling as it came with a preconception that the purpose of the trial was to exact punishment, not determine guilt. That Germans had knowledge that they were committing crimes against humanity throughout the war also had to be established for there to be grounds to even hold a trial. A location needed to be found for the trial to take place, somewhere with prison facilities to keep the defendants secure and comfortable accommodations for lawyers, judges, attendants, and viewers of the court proceedings. Germany was the most appropriate place, but much of it was war torn and destitute. After much reasoning with the Russians, who insisted the trial take place in Berlin, Nuremberg was chosen for its historical significance and for being fairly intact. Lawyers willing to defend the defendants needed to be provided. Food for everyone needed to be provided, of which American provisions were the best. Someone needed to pay for all this. The judges even had to decide such trivialities as what to wear. Wigs and dresses? Military uniforms? Black gowns? After all the previous decisions and coordination, it’s not surprising that they settled on wearing whatever they wanted.

The most interesting complication, however, was solving the language barrier. The trial was conducted in four languages: English, Russian, French, and German. All documents associated with the trial had to be translated into all four languages, which was more difficult to accomplish for some languages than others. For live court proceedings, the trial used IBM’s universal simultaneous translation system. The first time I heard this term, I thought the narrator was going to tell me about some Star Trek-esque futuristic device. In reality, everyone in the court room was provided a set of wired headphones. The listeners could switch between four channels, each connected to the microphone of a human translator for that language. The translators were seated in isolated compartments within the courtroom where they could hear the court proceedings but minimize the noise of each other’s translations. Judges, lawyers, defendants, and other speakers in the court room also had visibility to two lights. Yellow was an indicator from the translators to slow down. Red indicated to stop speaking to allow the translators to catch up. I thought it was an impressive use of technology for the time period but also adorable for its primitiveness.

After all the introduction, preparation, resolution of conflicts, and coordination leading up to and continuing throughout the trial, it’s amazing that this trial happened, and as fairly as it was, at all.

Pride and Prejudice (Lulu Raczka Adaptation)

If Pride and Prejudice took place in the modern day, so much drama would happen through text messages instead of letters. The characters spend so much time writing and talking about letters.

Also, the protagonist’s love interest Mr. Darcy made me feel very old fashioned when he justified his behavior to Elizabeth by writing a long and thoughtful letter rather than sitting her down and having a conversation. I have done this multiple times through emails, long messages, and even physical letters to try to resolve a conflict, voice a complaint, or tell someone something important. I also appreciated that Elizabeth took the time to read it and understand him even though she was angry. It pisses me off when I write a long message to someone, and they don’t bother to understand it or they reject it.

Overall, Pride and Prejudice features my kind of communication! I’ve never read the book (although I would like to now), but this audiobook/radio play adaptation was much better than the 1984 adaptation at least.

1984 (Joe White Adaptation)

Big Brother would approve of this audiobook/radio play adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. 75% of the words have been replaced with heavy breathing and lip smacking.

On the subject of what content is there though… In some ways, 1984‘s world still parallels common conservative criticisms of modern socialist and big governments. The fictitious totalitarian superstate Oceania restricting language and spreading propaganda as facts, for example, eerily parallels real governments’ tendencies to emphasize certain views and suppress others.

Some of George Orwell’s other predictions for the future, however, haven’t aged as well. For example, the citizens of Oceania are encouraged to have children for the good of the Party. Having sex out of love or for pleasure is forbidden. In today’s reality, conservatives are more likely to complain that sex for pleasure, devoid of its biological purpose of procreation, is celebrated and used by governments to distract the first-world population from their replacement by third-world immigrants.

Red Letter Media gave another example of 1984 showing its age in the course of a somewhat relevant discussion about AI and dystopian futures. George Orwell imagined that, in the future, the government would place cameras everywhere to watch everyone. As the future has actually unfolded, today, almost everyone has a camera almost at all times, built into their smart phones at their own request. Everyone is watching everyone else, ready to record inappropriate behavior and use those recordings incite public ridicule or other life-destroying consequences. We did it to ourselves! We are our own Big Brother!

The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

In The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, Mark Boyle relates how he created a lifestyle without electricity, plumbing, and other technological commodities. To demonstrate the practicality of living this way to the reader, he builds the cabin he and his wife live in, an outhouse area, a garden, and interestingly, a natural hot tub powered by firewood, presumably on a piece of land he owns and has enough money to pay taxes on for at least the one year he wanted to experiment with living this way. He makes allowances for some technology like pencils and paper for writing but rejects other tools that would make his work easier in favor of more primitive tools or doing the work by hand. I can’t remember specific examples from the book, but as a generic example, rather than using a wheelbarrow to move stones, he would carry stones by hand. Seeming to contradict his purpose, he indirectly makes use of cars to hitchhike to visit his parents, the local pub to visit with his neighbors, and the modern mail service to send and receive letters.

I don’t think the point of the book was to strictly live without technology though. The author’s purpose was rather to connect himself more to nature and people. His selective use of technology seemed to be for the purpose of forwarding those goals. I related to his rejection of the Internet and phones the most. In our ability to connect with people around the world, we’ve forgotten about the people immediately surrounding us. The convenience of speaking to loves ones over the phone means, conflictingly, visiting them in person less. Despite their appearance of creating connections, these things have separated us from people by being too convenient, too far from our immediate reality, and too difficult to resist.

Ironically, the author’s wife left him toward the end of the book. I can’t say I’d want to live like this either. I don’t like living in reality. 😛 Although, I suppose the author also doesn’t like living in reality, the one where humans are naturally inclined toward progress and efficiency. Still, Boyle has some interesting perspectives nurtured by his enjoyment and sense of purpose in living this lifestyle.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Near the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion promises that you will experience what she did in your lifetime. Specifically, she was referring to the feeling of disbelief following the death of someone dear. For example, following the sudden death of her husband, she described feeling that as long as she thought certain ways or didn’t acknowledge certain things, her husband would come back. She knew he was dead today but wondered, “What about tomorrow?” She saved her husband’s shoes with the thought that he would need them when he came back.

I can believe her promise and relate to her sentiment. Even five years later, it doesn’t seem real that I’ll never see my mom again. My cat Jiji passed away in June this year. I held on to a box of food I bought for her for months. I still have a baggy of her medications in a closet. These things are “special” in some way, a part of her, and can’t merely be thrown away.

A rant about smut and experimental writing

A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.

It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.

I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:

In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.

I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.

I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”

Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.

I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.

400 Things Cops Know

I’ve been reading cop-related books lately for some writing research. Here’s a few relevant things I learned while reading 400 Things Cops Know by Adam Plantinga:

To kick open a door, kick it immediately beneath the knob.

Mediation Clinics offer mediators, often law students, to help resolve disputes between family members, tenants and landlords, neighbors, and other people outside of court. I had created a concept like this in a book I’m writing and was surprised that such a thing actually exists!

Cops don’t advertise that they’re cops outside of work because it attracts the attention of people who don’t like cops. This potentially puts the cop and/or their family and friends in danger.

Police are required to read someone their Miranda rights only after they are in custody, and they have begun interrogating them. They don’t have to tell them their rights immediately, contrary to what commonly happens on TV. What suspects say prior to being read their rights and interrogated can still be used in court.

The best TV show about cops is The Wire created by David Simon.

The best book about cops is Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.

The Madman’s Hotel

In The Madman’s Hotel by Niall Breslin, a descendant of Julia Leonard, a former patient in the now-abandoned St. Loman’s Hospital, reaches out to Niall, a mental health advocate, for help finding Julia’s body after almost all markers and crosses are removed from the hospital’s graveyard by Ireland’s health department, the owner of the hospital’s grounds. Julie’s determination to bury her great-grandmother’s remains next to her grandfather is surprising and remarkable given what little information she and her grandfather had about Julia.

It’s an interesting story that wants to be like other audiobooks where the narration is interspersed with snippets of interviews, but its bizarre editing style hampers and distracts from it. The audio editor frequently cuts off an interviewee’s answer with a hard fade while the narrator takes over speaking for them or over them. Sometimes the narrator even speaks over himself in his own interview. It’s as if the producers assume the listener doesn’t have the attention span to listen to the interviewee’s answer in their own words.

Alternatively, it’s possible the interview audio was so bad that it would have been distracting to use more of it. The interviews often sound as if they were conducted in an echoey room without the proper equipment to pick up clean audio. I’ve listened to audio books like this in the past, and they can be annoying and difficult to listen to. Even if that were the case, however, My Mom’s Murder’s approach, where the narrator repeats what the interviewee said when the audio is difficult to decipher, would have been a less distracting choice.

30 Days to Thrive with ADHD

I frequently listen to Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, on the Healthy Gamer YouTube channel. As a monk-turned-psychiatrist, his lectures, video essays, and Q&As cover topics in psychology and Eastern medicine, meditation, and practices.

His latest book 30 Days to Thrive with ADHD is an Audible exclusive and narrated by him. It’s much like listening to one of his YouTube videos/podcasts except more structured. The book features thirty strategies for managing common challenges those with ADHD face. The strategies and reasoning for them seem practical to anyone who has problems in the areas they address though. For example, if you can’t sleep because you’re restless, you may have missed your window for going to sleep. This window is when you’re tired enough to go to sleep but not so tired that your frontal lobe can’t control your thoughts and impulses to allow you to sleep.

I often wonder when watching videos on ADHD, autism, introverts, personality types, etc., are these symptoms, solutions, or tendencies really specific to this group? Or are they specific to unique individuals with or without a formal diagnosis in this group? Dr. K has more credentials than other random YouTubers and the misinformation they spread, but I still found myself asking these questions once in a while. Regardless, he shares practical tips that seem applicable to everyone!

My Mom’s Murder (Seasons 1-2)

My Mom’s Murder and My Mom’s Murder: Season 2 follow Lauren Malloy in her investigation into her mother’s unsolved murder after she was contacted by a stranger 30 years later. The audiobook is composed of Lauren’s narration and recordings of interviews she’s conducted in the years since her investigation began in 2020. Many of the recordings are of low-quality phone conversations, but Lauren does a good job of repeating what the interviewee has said when it isn’t clear.

At first, Lauren struck me as a journalist who happened to discover this bizarre event in her past. She is contacted by Louise, supposedly her mother’s best friend in childhood, who tells Lauren that her mother didn’t die of natural causes as she had been told her whole life but had been murdered. Lauren’s inclination to begin recording her calls with Louise almost immediately seemed like someone hunting for a story, and she so happened to strike gold in her own life. She also seemed adept at interviewing.

I also had theories that perhaps Lauren was a TikToker trained to find and record content to gain attention. This theory came from her mentioning that she shared her investigation and frustrations on TikTok. Occasionally, she has discussions with her best friend, who seems to be in the audiobooks only for Lauren to talk to (because a podcast is often more entertaining with two people than one). Lauren has also attracted the attention of the news in the past when she found and reunited with her long lost siblings or step-siblings several years before the events in this audiobook series. Perhaps she’s an attention seeker… but if she is, it’s for the purpose of tracking down her family’s mysteries.

It turns out she wasn’t a journalist or a social media influencer; she worked somewhere in the tech sector, and may still. What she does as a non-journalist, however, is impressive. She doesn’t trust Louise, often suspecting her of lying and even of being her mother’s murderer. Despite this, she talks to Louise as if they are friends for more than a year, all to coerce as much information out of her as she can. She treats other suspects and interviewees similarly, acting as their friend but secretly acting as a journalist, undercover cop, or detective. She built a large social media following for the purpose of forcing the police to take her seriously and reopen her mother’s cold case. Along the way, she built an organization to help others seek justice for deceased family members. She seems like she genuinely took all these roles out of a need to understand her family history, which is a common trait that’s impressed me about the narrators or interviewees of other audiobooks I’ve listened to recently like The Secret Daughter and The Madman’s Hotel.

At times, the audiobooks, particularly Season 2, feel more like a family gossip fest. Before the latest DNA results are revealed, let’s hear more gossip from Louise and everyone else who has an opinion on the latest turn of events! But perhaps this is because the murder is officially unsolved and the listener is invited to form their own theory from the conflicting evidence presented.

While Lauren judges all these people–who’s lying and who’s telling the truth?–as a listener, I’m also judging her, and like Lauren’s, my judgments changed quite a bit throughout the two audiobooks. Very meta. 😛