Unraveled Wednesday: 1/17/24

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers with the same old Funfetti Hitchhiker, looking much the same except for the addition of eight or ten teeth. There are four or five inches of snow on the ground and I couldn't bring myself to go out and arrange the Hitchhiker for a photo in the snow. The best picture I could manage was the Hitchhiker in a pile in front of my snow day baking yesterday (two loaves of zucchini bread and one cheese bread to go with chili from the crockpot).

I hope to finish the Funfetti fun soon, but I'm not going to make any promises or even educated guesses. 

I finished two books before I started on the many books I requested from NetGalley over the holidays. Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and House Love were both three-star books for me. If you'd like to read my reviews for them, you can click on the book title in the Read section in the right-hand sidebar. The first ARC book that I finished for NetGalley was a bit of a mindf**k but in a good way. Fluke, by Atlantic writer Brian Klaas, deals with chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters. In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy wrote “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” I've considered that on several occasions in my life, but after reading Fluke I may have to consider that luck might not even exist. The author wonders "whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.” Klaas opens the book with the story of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen to be bombed, and it comes down to the fact that Henry Stimson, US Secretary of War, had visited Kyoto and took that city off the list so Hiroshima was bombed instead. Clouds covered Kokura which had been the target of the second atomic bomb but cleared over Nagasaki at the last possible moment.

The many examples in the book can mess with our views of "everything happens for a reason" and be a bit disconcerting. Klaas writes that "the natural world seems to seesaw between contingency and convergence." "Convergence is the “everything happens for a reason” school of evolutionary biology. Contingency is the “stuff happens” theory." It turns out that very little is in our direct control and that idea is somewhat freeing. Klaas is not recommending that we all just wait in bed for stuff to happen to us because, in a world full of flukes and random occurrences, we can still have an effect: “What you do matters. But it also matters that it's you, and not somebody else, who's doing it.” Fluke provides a readable, interesting way to think about (and maybe even better understand) our infinitely complex world and our role in it. The book will be published January 23, 2024. 

What are you making and reading this week?