This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
Just not my kind of book. DNF
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January 2026
Just not my kind of book. DNF
Three hours start to finish and I laughed out loud the whole time.
John B. Keane is the pride of Listowel, Co. Kerry—near where my dad grew up!—and with good reason. This collection of very short fiction includes stories that range from utterly charming to sad to shocking. Squeeze them in between longer reads and and have the satisfaction of having found and finished something totally surprising in one sitting.
I found the idea of binding together the peninsula's biggest and saddest national news stories--The <i>Golden Venture</I>, 9/11, the crash of Flight 587--together intriguing, and telling it all from the perspective of non-natives (in the form of the Glassmans) is a far more interesting take than having a bunch of people from Rockaway talking about Rockaway. But I think the author's decision to incorporate characters from her 1987 novel threw the entire book off balance. Just about every member of the old lifeguard shack crew made an appearance--seemingly without having matured in even the most rudimentary of ways since we left them off. Their presence here is distracting--they pull at the edges of the story and drag the whole thing down. A tighter focus on the relationships among the Glassmans, the decisions/circumstances that brought them to Rockaway, and the story of the "murder house" would have made for a far better story. <br/><br/>The descriptions of post-9/11 Rockaway felt out of touch, too. The air in Belle Harbor was so thick with sadness during that first year or two, it was as though every member of the community was either being crushed under the burden of grief, or walking on eggshells around someone who was more directly suffering from it. None of the local characters felt real. Do lifeguards really still think of themselves as lifeguards ten years after they stop being lifeguards? Did teenagers really make 9/11 jokes just months after the attacks, while their friends' parents were waiting for the remains of loved ones to come home, piece by piece, if at all? So much of it just rang false to me. <br/><br/>Overall, I think Eisenstadt had the bones of a good story here, but failed to step back and edit it down to essentials.
A quiet little novel, just the story of a life. Only Alice McDermott could pull this off.
Roddy Doyle is one of my favorite writers ever. This dark and disturbing novel shares little with the light charm of his 1990s Barrytown Trilogy, but it is incredibly compelling. A completely unexpected twist made it hard to shake.
This book offers a thorough examination of a scarcity of resources--of time, of money, of workers, of hospital beds--leads to bad, often terrible outcomes. Offering insights from psychology and economics, the authors build an "empathy bridge" that connects the time-strapped lives of the wealthy to the cash-strapped lives of the poor. Anyone who has felt that they don't have enough time, enough money, enough space, enough staff at one time or another will recognize some of the key concepts that they explore.<br/><br/>The "bandwidth tax" is the cognitive price you pay when you're truying to make too many decisions in the face of scarce resources. The authors talk about time, and money. Personally, I couldn't help but thinko of when I became a new mother, with a new and demanding task (keeping a whole other human alive overwhelming me, and finding my attention and mental capacity suddenly unable to handle things I had done before with ease (like finishing a book or even a long news article).<br/><br/> "Tunneling" occurs when scarcity causes us to focus in a single-minded way on the most immediate need, pushing other decisions and tasks further down the road. It explains how people who are stressed for resources can so easily sink further into debt (financial debt and time debt). <br/><br/>Finally, "Slack" relates to how failing to have a little extra--extra space, extra mental bandwidth, extra staff, extra time in a schedule--is a recipe for disaster. Reading this in April 2020, this last factor was particularly jarring: The consequences of "just-in-time" supply chains and "lean" management techniques (both of which are essentially planned scarcity) have led to shortages of everything from toilet paper to hospital beds. And it made me look at my own career differently: As a freelancer, I am the "slack," a resource tapped to provide the "extra" help needed when schedules are tight (or blown), but also the first person cut when things are too loose. That is a role that I generally relish, even if it is somewhat volatile.
An ok read, but I found myself distracted by how foreign the place she was describing is from the Rockaway I've lived in my whole life. I am willing to allow artistic license, but the reference to the A train traveling "under" Jamaica bay suggested artistic laziness. The author may have spent a little bit of time on the westerly end of the west end, but she really didn't have much of a feel for anything beyond that. (less)
A story about love and relationships that is intimate and sad and sweet, deeply Irish and specifically male. It’s so rare to hear men talk about love this way, but here it is—in classic Roddy Doyle style—presented almost entirely in dialogue, over pints. At times it moved so slow, I grew impatient, exactly the way one feels while waiting for their increasingly inebriated friend to just get to the damned point. And when it was over, I felt the way I feel after drinking too long and saying too much and listening too little to someone I loved. That’s good storytelling. <br/><br/>This started out as a ⭐️⭐️⭐️“liked it” but i upgraded to ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “really liked it” and eventually ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️as I thought about it more.