The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: Complete Collection

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: Complete Collection by Lydia Davis

Often with short story collections, I will try to list the titles of the stories. However, that would go on for pages with this collection. There a lot of stories in here. Some are long, while many are just a few words long. For the short ones, the overhead of the audiobook is distracting. The story and narrator are announced. The few words of the story are read. Then it is announced that the story is complete. There is more "overhead" than story. I feel reading would work better for these.

The long stories can also be fairly unconventional. One "story" is a detailed analysis of letters written to a young classmate who has been injured. The different closings for the letters are tabulated. The length of letters are compared and grouped by gender. Other various components and mechanics are analyzed in detail. It seems a long exercise in something that is not typically analyzed.

While there are some duds, the super short stories do often hit their mark. Why go on for pages, if you can get the same thought out in a few words? Some of the stories feel at least partially autobiographical. Others have inspiration from some everyday event or correspondence. Some of the Kafka influence can be seen. 

Trust

Trust by Hernan Diaz

At the outset, I wasn't sure if this was a biography or a work of fiction. It is cleanly set in the real world of the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the supporting cast is recognizable. However, I had never heard of the main characters. After a while, it became clear that it was not just a work of fiction, but a work of fiction within a work of fiction.

The first part of the book is a fictional story based on the life of business leader. He had started life as a precocious child. He was born into the family that had made a multi-generational fortune in tobacco. However, he did not smoke. He was intrigued by numbers and business. After the passing of his parents, he eventually sold of the family business and focussed on his own business. He was married to a woman that also had a precocious childhood. He made a great fortune and managed to get rich when everyone was failing. He even had great short positions at the outset of the 1929 stock market crash and made even more money there. He would later help prop up the economy and aid others. Eventually, his wife slid into insanity. He tried to bankroll therapies, but she was not cured, and escaped from the asylum.

The novel then pivots to the "real world". A young family is struggling during the depression. The dad is a printer and an anarchist. The daughter has skill typing and writing. She seeks employment and makes it through a few rounds of interviews at a Wall Street firm. She then discovers that her task will be to help write the autobiography of the "real" man that felt he was slandered in the fictionalized life. He especially is concerned with the way his wife was portrayed. She had died of a tumor, not insanity. He desired her to be portrayed as a faithful companion.

There are a few conflicts in the writing process. Then the businessman dies suddenly, meaning his account is never published. The girl later returns to the primary sources and discovers a secret diary that the businessman's wife wrote in during her final days. There she discusses her pain in the treatment as well reminiscences of her past. We learn that she had significant musical talents and experience. Her husband had taught her about finance and by looking at it from her music background, she was able to gain new insights in the market that would become immensely profitable. The couple were a great combination, making huge amounts of money. She also observed the arbitrage opportunity with the inputting of transactions by clerks. She proposed they pay one off to get this data and thus make huge gains.

The book leaves us with multiple accounts of the life of the businessman. What is the truth? All accounts are considered truthful in the eyes of the teller. The wife's account appears the most reliable. (Though you would think the paid off clerk would eventually squeal.) This would provide a good example of using "other sources" and going against traditions to gain advantage. It would also put the "honesty" to question. However, these were also reminiscences by somebody on their deathbed. Can we even have a fixed truth?

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

The Cult of the Dead Cow is a hacker group based in Texas. They started back in the early days of dial up modems and BBSs. Activities have been closely related with free speech and finding vulnerabilities. Members are of various different political persuasions, with not all agreeing on political activities. There have also been members from affluent and poor backgrounds.  They have found vulnerabilities in Microsoft products, and sought out to have those fixed (much to Microsoft's chagrin.) Hactivism activities have been carried out against those seen to stifle free expression. (Unlike Anonymous, they are not a fan of denial of service attacks as those disrupt speech.) The book also describes what these members have done as they have "grown up", many with tech jobs, though Beto O'rourke has become a politician.

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data

Statistics can be powerful, but also mystical. This book attempts to take the mystery out by building up knowledge from the ground up. Statistical topics are developed using real world applications and then analyzed from a "brute force" method. Then the math is applied as an "easy solution" to the problems. The author also pull from his experience using statistics in various cases. One that is covered multiple times is the doctor that had killed is patients. Naive statistical analysis could have caught him. However, it would also have caught innocent doctors. It is important to do more thorough statistical analysis as well as look at the real world conditions. The book concludes with an analysis of statistics and the state of scientific research. P-values have been taken as gospel and many "tricks" have been used by researchers to get publishable results, even if these are not really meaningful.

Snow Crash

Snow Crash takes place primarily in the "metaverse". However, it was written long before the current Meta company ever existed. (Zuckerberg would have been in elementary school!) There are software engineers, pizza delivery guys and mafiosos. Religion can be spread by a virus. Ancient Sumerian culture appears frequently. The novel feels surprisingly contemporary, despite being three decades old.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat covers odd neurological conditions. The eponymous man was a music professor that could communicate great with music. However, visually he was lost. He could not tell the difference between his wife and a hat. He had difficulty with all things visual, but no problem with music. Another man was stuck in 1945. He would forget anything new that happened more than a minute ago. There were also tales of people that lost their sense of "self". A man would find a foreign leg in the bed and throw it out, only to throw himself out of a bed. A woman lost her sense of self, and only with great difficulty would force her body to move. However, unlike losing the sense of sight, she did not appear to be so disabled, and thus suffered from harassment from others. There is also the tale of twins that were very low on the intelligence meter, but could identify large primes and calculate the day of the week over thousand year time spans. One man used his nervous ticks to improvise on drumming. When medication helped him not have the ticks, he skipped taking it on weekends so he could continue to have the creative impulses.
With many of these people they have lost some basic ability that we see common, yet they still have other areas that they can contribute to society. We can help them to utilize their special talents. Society has this narrow understanding of "normal". We like to pride ourselves on accepting "differences". However, these differences seem to be in the narrow band of standard behavior. Some of the more extreme differences may make it much more difficult for us to interact with others. However, these could also provide positive experiences for the people and society as a whole.

Earth Abides

Earth Abides is an optimistic post-apocalyptic novel. Some disease sweeps through earth and wipes out almost everyone. It manages to happen very quickly, yet orderly. We just have to believe the author on this one. The narrator was out in woods when things happened, and nobody else seems to provide details. It seems there was time to properly bury everyone, but not to shut down stores or bring cars home.

Utilities were also still running. The hydroelectric power and plumbing still kept chugging along for a while, even without anybody to attend to it. Roads were still usable, though gradually tree-falls and floods cut off some routes. (However, long distance travels were still possible.)

The few people that remained tended to stay by themselves. Nobody seemed to ask why or engage in serious conversation. At first, they were mere scavengers trying to gather what they could and live off the working utilities. Eventually, things broke down and they found themselves returning back to nature. However, they do take shortcuts. Instead of going all the way back to stone arrowheads, they use the metal found in coins.

The new generations soon lose all contact with "civilization". They have become hunters, obtaining their sustenance from nature. The stored up knowledge of society had been gradually eaten away by nature. The old ones that remembered the civilization are treated as deities.

The novel seems to be attempting a connection between "savage" lifestyles and our more modern society. Perhaps the "natives" that had been encountered by Europeans had had advanced societies, but saw them quickly disappear due to the diseases that were brought in. By the time there was large-scale cultural contact, they had fallen into a pure survival mode.

The book paints the new society in an optimistic way. Rather than roving bands of thugs, we have people that want to work together and be happy. The one "bad guy" that they do encounter is quickly removed. People can still be happy even after the fall of society.