READING AND RE-READING
Some people I know are frequent re-readers. If they have a favorite book, they will read it again several years later and then again. I, on the other hand, shy away from reading any book a second time. I make exceptions for great literature like the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, or Henry James. I have read Jane Eyre several times, Jane Austen’s Persuasion is one of my all-time favorites, and Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors are James novels that stand up well to a second or third reading.
My current book club selects both new and older works for its monthly discussions. I have read about half the titles already and, in general, will skim rather than fully re-read the book. A recent exception to that is the memoir that follows.
WHAT MAKES UP ONE’S IDENTITY?
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
I first read Inheritance in 2021, about two years after it was published, for my Florida book group. I found it a stunning story then and probably focused most on how Dani Shapiro was going to deal with finding her biological father and whether she would ever get to meet him in person. I gave it brief mention in a blog post.
This time, I read it more carefully (again for a book group) and more fully appreciated how jarring it was for Ms. Shapiro who had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home with a very observant and religiously devoted father to discover that her roots were also Christian. She had always felt like something was off in the way that her three-person family interacted, and at various times, relatives or strangers told her she couldn’t be Jewish because she was blond and blue-eyed. At age 54, her sense of identity wasn’t challenged but fractured by her DNA results. She felt disoriented and adrift.
As a coping mechanism, she reads widely: philosophical works on the soul and selfhood, and medical works on artificial insemination in the 1960’s. She consults family and experts while struggling to unearth the circumstances of her conception and the motivations of her parents. She aims for facts that might be unobtainable and ultimately, has to accept an incomplete or partial picture of those events.
Overall, Shapiro’s memoir is candid (written as events unfolded), thoughtful, and probing. In learning her story, the reader is prompted to think about one’s own identity and how it is shaped by family history, culture, and assumptions. Highly recommended!
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: FRIEND OR FOE: A NOVEL
Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
Bruce Holsinger is an English professor, a medievalist at the University of Virginia, who also writes fiction. Several of his earlier works received praise and prizes. His latest novel, Culpability, is very much a 21st century work with artificial intelligence (AI) a key presence.
Told mostly in the first person by Noah Cassidy, a lawyer, husband to AI genius and university professor Lorelei Shaw, and father of three children, Charlie 17, Alice 13, and Izzie 9, it is a story of a family in crisis. The family car, thanks to Lorelei’s insistence, is a self-driving minivan with all the latest features. On the superhighway in Maryland, Charlie is driving, and his father is writing a memo on his laptop, while Lorelei and the girls are in the back seat. Their vehicle collides with another one in a horrible accident and two people die. Who is responsible and what will happen to all of them?
Charlie is a star athlete who’s been indulged and cossetted, Izzie ends up with a broken leg, Lorelei has a concussion requiring a neck brace, and Alice, shaken up, seeks refuge in an AI pal. When the family takes a getaway week at a house on the water, their next door neighbor turns out to be an ultra-rich tech mogul with a gorgeous daughter. Charlie is captivated, but something in the interactions with these folks doesn’t seem quite right. This subplot provides some intriguing twists and turns.
Interspersed between Noah’s account of the family’s life in the year after the crash are fragments of Lorelei’s writings on AI and transcriptions of Alice’s conversations with her new “friend” who may not be as helpful as either one of them believes.
The novel is gripping and thought-provoking and raises questions about how we parent our kids, what secrets we keep, the power of wealth, and the sometimes-ambiguous role of smart computers in daily life. Who is to blame when a hands-free vehicle crashes? When, and to what extent, are we as individuals culpable for technological glitches? Provocative, complex, and highly recommended, Culpability is also an Oprah’s Book Club pick for 2025. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Autumn photo ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)
