May books - technofeudalism, tuberculosis, polyamory

Sunday June 01st, 2025

Tags: blog, books, review

Sick Little Monkeys

by Thad Komorowski (❤️❤️❤️️️🖤🖤)

I wrote about this book here. I've been thinking it over, wondering if 3 is the right score, and I think it is. It's a perfectly fine book, especially for one that seems to be the work of only one person. I disagree with a lot of the author's opinions, and sometimes found the way he expressed them frustrating. I wish he had at least explained and tried harder to justify them, but it doesn't bring down the story as a whole.

Technofeudalism

By Yanis Varoufakis (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

I heard good things about this book from various sources, and was mostly inspired to read it by dr. molly tov's glowing recommendation. It's a short, very digestible book about how capitalism is being replaced with something worse. The author, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, is extremely knowledgeable but forgoes complex technical jargon in favor of a plain-language explanation as if he were having a conversation with his father. It's a bleak book, but also somewhat inspirational, because we still have the choice to reject this new system. In very brief summary, the premise is that an economy based on providing goods and services is being phased out in favor of a technological feudalism-like system in which the corporations are the landowners and the rest of us are digital serfs, providing value in the form of our personal data, unpaid labor and unwilling engagement. It's a compelling argument. If I hadn't already cut ties with every major corporate tech platform (except google, I still can't quite exist in the world without a phone) and started my own website, this book would've gotten me fired up to do so.

Everything is Tuberculosis

By John Green (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

I put a hold on the audiobook at my library as soon as I watched Dr. Angela Collier's video about it back in March. I hadn't yet got back into my reading habit and thought the audio version would be easier to digest. It's short, about 6 hours long, and it's read by the author, who's also a public speaker via his own youtube channel, so the narration is excellent. This isn't a science book, it's about people and systems. It's about how tuberculosis, thought of in the west as an "old timey" disease that we've pretty much gotten rid of, is in fact still the most deadly infectious disease on the planet. It killed 1.25 million people in 2023, mostly in the global south. We have the capacity to eradicate the disease¹ and we don't, because the people it kills are deemed less worthy by the technocratic medical establishment and the treatments are deemed "not cost effective" because the people it kills are mostly impoverished black and brown people. The book follows the story of Henry, a man in Sierra Leone with drug-resistant TB, struggling to get lifesaving treatment isolated in underfunded, resource-scarce, prison-like hospitals. Green does a good job of centering Henry and his family without inserting himself into the story and turning it into a white savior narrative, which is always a risk of this sort of book. It also goes into the history of TB and how it was so rampant in post-industrial Britain that it perversely became seen as fashionable, how TB patients were viewed as noble sufferers whose quiet, dignified deaths were imbued with a kind of tragic beauty. It's a fascinating part of our history, and a good reminder of the ways we trivialize and normalize the unthinkable.

More: A Memoir of Open Marriage

By Molly Roden Winter (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

I promise I didn't intend to read nothing but 5-star books this month. I went into this fully expecting not to like it, because I watched a youtube video completely roasting it. I don't want to link to the video, because having now read the book, I consider the youtuber's summary tacky and misleading. She cherry-picks the parts of the story that make the author and her husband seem unlikable and irredeemable. She presents a straightforward "the straights are not okay" narrative about a man trying to manipulate his wife into an open marriage purely for his own selfish benefit, and his long-suffering wife in complete denial about the situation, with an unearned happily-ever-after ending that comes out of nowhere with no character growth. That's not what the book is at all, though.

I started reading the book because the excerpts the youtuber quoted were salacious, and I wanted to see the whole messy story. I went in expecting to dislike the author and her husband, and I experienced a complete 180°. It's a beautifully-written memoir about a woman on a journey of self-love and her complicated relationships with men, her mother, and society.

The inciting incident for the open marriage is Molly meeting a younger man at a bar, flirting harmlessly to get some free drinks, and giving the man her number. She had gone out for an angry walk after a stressful evening at home, happened to bump into a former colleague, and accepted her offer to go out for drinks despite not having her phone and wallet. She had a great time, and when she got home, her husband Stewart questioned her about where she had gone and who she had met. He saw the text from the man on Molly's phone. Molly said she had no intentions of further contact with the man, but rather than being upset, Stewart encouraged her to pursue a relationship. This is something they had discussed before: Stewart gets sexually excited by fantasizing about Molly with other men, and is into the idea of opening the marriage. He also thinks it could be good for Molly, who didn't have as much sexual experience as Stewart when they got married, and so Stewart suggested it could help build her confidence. Nothing had ever come of these conversations before, but this time Molly agreed to try it.

She enjoys her time with Matt, the man she met at the bar, but still isn't quite sure if an open marriage is for her. Stewart likes hearing about Molly's extramarital sex, but Molly's conflicted. She's unsure if she actually enjoys the sex on her own terms, or because it's satisfying her long-held people-pleasing tendencies. She feels emotionally unsatisfied by her experiences, but is unsure if a strong emotional connection is something she can or should be looking for. Her fear is that if she allows herself to fall in love with someone else, it'll cause irreparable harm to her marriage, which in spite of its problems, she wants to save. Molly and Stewart have two children, and she's afraid of the ways the open marriage might harm them, and her relationship with them.

Things get more complicated when Stewart, having enthusiastically accepted his wife's sexual adventures, asks about reconnecting with an old flame of his. Molly, who hadn't thought through the logical ramifications of what opening the marriage might mean, gets upset. Her feelings go beyond mere jealousy approaching a kind of deep existential panic. Her behavior towards her husband feels unfair and immature. They agree to a system in which Molly tells Stewart about her affairs, but Stewart doesn't tell Molly about any of his. It's an uneasy truce, and Molly harbors deep resentments about Stewart's affairs, his motivations, and his perceived lack of dedication to their relationship.

Both parties behave in ways that are unlikable, and if this is all the book was, I can see why the reviewer in the video I watched didn't like it. Stewart worked long hours at his office and "didn't have time" for many of the household maintenance and child-rearing duties that should be expected of him, but suddenly had time for multiple sexual partners, which I agree is suspicious. The universal consensus seems to be that Stewart was cheating on Molly prior to the opening of their marriage, but I don't think that's a given. There's no direct evidence of cheating, Molly never brings up the possibility, and once they do open the marriage, Stewart seems open and honest, and he respects the rules and boundaries Molly needs to feel comfortable. My impression is that Stewart was missing joy and a sense of purpose in his personal life, and that he was trying to fill the hole with an unnecessarily intense focus on work. Workohol is, despairingly, still a socially respectable coping mechanism, and it's easy to justify selfish behavior when it's in service of the cult of hard work. I could be wrong, but I think it's unfair to assume he was cheating all along.

That doesn't mean Stewart is blameless: he was shirking his duties, it was making Molly's life harder, and him barely showing up at home and rarely helping with the kids was straining their relationship to its breaking point. I don't think opening the relationship was a good way to deal with these problems, but nonetheless it was the catalyst for change. Molly started talking to a therapist, and eventually they started seeing a marriage counselor. They both had a series of sexual partners. Some of Molly's partners were awful, with no redeeming qualities, but most of her relationships were complicated. She had some beautiful, fulfilling experiences with other men, which compounded her internal sense of guilt and shame. It was a messy, complicated arrangement, and she's shockingly open and honest about her feelings and behavior. She doesn't sugarcoat or tiptoe around the parts that make her look bad, and she doesn't sensationalize the parts that make Stewart look bad. It feels refreshingly true.

While all this is going on, Molly is also reconnecting emotionally with her mother, who's suffering a health decline due to Parkinson's Disease, which is only correctly diagnosed after a lot of suffering. Molly questions her mother about her open marriage, which Molly learned about as an adult but which was never discussed. Molly's mother got involved in a health cult when Molly was a child, and had affairs with members of this cult, which Molly's father accepted. It was one of those hippie 70s cults that eschewed "modern medicine" in favor of orthorexic beliefs about diet and exercise, not unlike the beliefs that eventually killed Steve Jobs. Molly had a lot of unexamined resentment towards her mother, but once they started talking about it Molly realized that her mother was a victim, that the cult members exploited the same people-pleasing tendencies that Molly herself struggles with. Molly's mother now accepts modern medicine, and with treatment her Parkinson's symptoms start to improve. They have a beautiful bonding experience at a writer's retreat, which helps Molly rediscover her love of songwriting and (it's implied) her mother rediscover her love of poetry. Molly realizes that this is what was missing from her life: things that bring her joy and personal fulfillment outside of the context of any sexual or romantic relationship.

The video I watched doesn't talk about any of this, which was the most humanizing and redeeming part of the story. It's pretty shocking in hindsight how deceptive it was, and I'm glad I read the book for myself. I'm surprised how many people who've read the book have a negative opinion of it. It was acclaimed by mainstream critics, but it has some scathing reviews on goodreads and storygraph. It's true that there were parts of the book that made me roll my eyes, become annoyed, wonder how anyone could be this naive and illogical and self-centered, but the gradual story crescendo in which Molly learns to love herself, center her own needs and unpack her emotional baggage, I thought, was masterfully told. I went in expecting to hate it and by the end, 5 stars was the only honest score I could give it. I think if you go in desiring a simplistic narrative with a hero to root for and a villain to hate, you're going to be disappointed. The story's as messy and as complicated and as real and as beautiful as life is.

In progress

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I read this book in the early 2000s, and remember liking it, but I don't remember a lot about how it ends. After I finished Everything is Tuberculosis, I looked for another audiobook avaiable through my library, found Cryptonomicon, and figured it might be worth a re-read. It's an eye-popping 42 hours long, which could be good or bad. I got burned by the audiobook for Reamde by the same author, which is a similar length, but I found an interminable slog I couldn't finish. I'm enjoying Cryptonomicon a lot more, and I'm shocked to find out that the last thing I remember about it happens at around the 25% mark. Either I never actually finished the book, or my reading comprehension was a lot worse than I was even aware of. It's embarrassing to think about. Anyway, Stephenson is notorious for not being very good at endings, so we'll see how I feel when I finish it, but I've gotten a lot out of it so far.

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. This is another reread, one that was prompted by another Angela Collier video in which she discusses when unlikable protagonists work and when they don't. It's delightful, and again, I'm shocked by how much more I appreciate it now, with the knowledge and reading comprehension skill I've accumulated since my early 20s.

It reminds me of this paper I read recently about how a shocking number of English majors lack basic reading comprehension skills. I'd like to think that I wasn't quite as bad as some of the students quoted in the study, but I definitely relate to passages like this:

The majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble comprehending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage, they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand, but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.

I have memories of reading challenging books, struggling to piece together meaning from allusions and language I didn't understand, and trying to at least come away with a general feeling about the text when I was unable to truly understand it. A lot of ACoD is essays written by Ignatius, the protagonist, given to demonstrate his pseudo-intellectual reactionary narcissism, and I don't think I really got any of it the first time I read it. I was still entertained, but my takeaway was more "haha this guy is nuts" than a meaningful understanding of the satire. I wish I could better articulate what happened between then and now to make me a better reader. "Age and experience" is the obvious answer, but it feels like an unhelpful cop-out that doesn't really explain anything. I had the internet when I read these books. I could've looked up the stuff I didn't understand. Why didn't I? Why was I content to stumble my way through with guessing and vibes? Did I think this is what reading is supposed to be like, or did I just assume and accept that I was deficient in some way? The past is truly a foreign land.

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