Book Review: ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The Question of Questions wasn't 'Why are the stars in the sky?' but rather 'Why is anything anywhere?'"

I dove into the 3rd Booker Longlister's ocean of melodic phrases, swam amidst its memorable characters and emerged excited for the possibilities of language, especially its ability to preserve the fleeting flash that is one human life.

In ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley, our heroine (a lawyer with literary ambitions) is a divorced English woman who revisits a Greek provincial town after 9 years. The first time she was there, she met some of the townsfolk, healing a broken heart through the pursuit of human connection. The second time, she seeks a similar salvation through conversing with these same people: an old lover, a poet/philosopher, and the former waitress-turned-owner of the local tavern.

The story is simple enough, and yet there is a great deal unsaid, a lot of the story shimmering beneath the surface. What is the real reason behind the mysterious injury of the town poet? Did the random stranger confessing to planning murder actually carry out his revenge?

And through it all, thoughts of the female lead's dead parents arise. How she longs to share her experiences with her beloved mom and less beloved, yet dearly missed dad. How absence is presence, the blessing of memory. And how transitory a human life is, brilliant in its brevity until we all go "into the great indifference."

The novel becomes very meta towards the end, as all throughout the writer reinterprets her experience as she records her thoughts in her diary, later submitted for publication. I smiled as the editor (himself a Booker Longlister, who rewrote his book five times) suggested ways by which our heroine might try "increasing the 'narrative torque.'" But she lets the seemingly ordinary holiday remain as is, without embellishment. Because even in its most banal, a life truly lived (talking to people, looking at the sunrise, and being in the moment) is already an unearned abundance.

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Book Review: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished this book on the day that a high school student shot a fellow student in Nueva Ecija, mere months after two knife stabbing incidents in local schools. Our children are not OK, and this book helps explain why, and offers a course of action.

I’ll just go out and say it: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION is perhaps this generation’s single most important book for parents, educators, and policy makers. Necessary and timely, it’s for anyone who has fallen asleep and woken up only to reach for their phone to check social media notifications, for everyone who has spent an inordinate amount of time online.

Social psychologist, parent, scholar, and professor Jonathan Haidt has written an extremely alarming book on “the psychological damage of a phone-based life.” The accessibility of his language in presenting scholarly findings makes it so that his message comes across even more urgently.

He presents scholarly research on how the deadly combination of underprotection of children online (unsupervised access to screens with Internet for hours), combined with overprotection of children in real life (preventing them from gaining feedback through overcoming meaningful challenges) has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in our youth. And the evidence he shows points to social media as the cause, not as a correlate.

Smart phones are “experience blockers,” Haidt explains, and the current epidemic of mental health goes hand in hand with too much screentime and too much helicopter parenting. From reducing our students’ interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience (I remember a student asking me what’s the point in going on a field trip to listen to World War II veterans when she can just watch a YouTube video online), to mass social media - induced illness (kids claiming to have Tourette’s after a German influencer who really had the condition went viral, or the sociogenic spread of gender dysphoria)... the book covers a lot of ground, but every page is important.

The book provides a historical background of a cultural shift towards “Safetyism” as well as a timeline of the rise of smart phones and social media companies deliberately targeting psychological vulnerabilities, or what he calls “The Great Rewiring.”
His closing chapter offers suggestions for collective action, on what parents, schools, and governments can do to fight this global crisis.

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us… There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble or elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”

The irony is not lost on me that I am posting this on social media, but perhaps this is the start: recognizing the evil that the algorithms have done in the past, yet using these same tools to spread awareness, to shed a bit of light in an ocean of doom and gloom.

And after posting this, I shall turn off my gadget and read. Or play the piano. Or do countless other life-giving activities offline.

In the book, Haidt quoted Thoreau: “The cost of a thing is the amount of… life which is required to be exchanged for it.” Life cannot and should not be lived online. Here’s to not spending a single minute on social media, more than is absolutely necessary.

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Book Review: AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

Audition by Katie Kitamura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I was used to people armed with tremendous will, I was frequently with people whose job consists of imposing their reality upon the world."

First of the Booker 2025 reads done and whoa, what a good start!

AUDITION is in two parts. The book is basically two different novellas, each featuring the same trio of characters, but changing in relation to one another.

We have the aging actress, her writer husband, and a mysterious young man, magnetic and beautiful.

It's a wonderfully written novel full of sharp observations and insights into relationships, the tells and minutiae of behavior that reveal the pecking order in our social lives. Kitamura writes unbelievably detailed yet piercing sentences on the power dynamics and interplay of desires that make up human interaction.

It's a reminder on how the quality of our existence depends on how we are treated by others, and how we are complicit in the narratives people tell of themselves. For in the telling of their stories, ours, too, is given meaning.

"What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?"

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