Spieluhr thank you for the Sarah Moss heads-up! I find her a genuinely interesting writer, so am looking forward to hearing what she says about Iceland - fits in so well with the things she writes about, the layering of ancient and modern, the important of landscape on our psyche, the complex nature of gender roles and relationships between men and women.
33. Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener
Loved this. As the book opens, Wiener is young and frustrated, working in a poorly paid job in the New York publishing industry. Via a short-lived role at a book-sharing app, she finds herself catapulted into the heart of Silicon Valley at its most hubristic. The scandals, the exposes are just bubbling under at this point, and Wiener, who is proud of her disinterest in tech, is unaware of the ramifications of the work being done by the data analytics company she works for. She describes their world in lively prose, the open plan offices full of squishy furniture and techy toys, the teams who communicate mainly by emoji in chat rooms, the high end San Francisco restaurants whose customers dress in technical outdoor wear as though they were about to hike up a glacier. Wiener's viewpoint makes the book both accessible and fascinating - she obviously knew nothing about this world before she joined it, and she looks at it all with interest and some cynicism, but equally she comes to it without prejudice and, at least at first, enjoys working with clever ambitious people in technology that is genuinely shaping the world.
Gradually, the shine comes off - she starts to question both the companies themselves and the ethics of their leaders. Her portrait of the drip-drip of patronising, sexist "micro-aggressions" is painfully perfect - if you've worked in that world, you will know how it feels to hear the same joke at your expense or the same awkwardly worded misconceptions about what you bring to the team, all made by people who you know mean well. You can rarely put your finger on an occasion when someone has disrespected you but two years later you look around to find that all of the young men who started with you in the company seem to be leading teams and moving up the ladder while somehow you have been encouraged sideways into a less technical customer-facing role with no management potential.
^The Customer Success team was small: just me and a former account manager, a newly minted MBA who dressed in button-down shirts and polished leather brogues. A manager told me that he expected the MBA and I would make a great team. I agreed—I liked the MBA and his dry, cynical humor. “He’s strategic,” the manager said, beaming. “And you love our customers.”^
I'd read a couple of articles based on this book which hadn't particularly interested me, to the point where I almost missed out on reading the book. It's only in the long form that you properly understand the arc, Wiener's growing understanding of the tech culture, her love-hate relationship with it. I couldn't put this down (although I did think the ending was a bit limp - I guess its a memoir and real life doesn't often have a big cathartic ending scene).
34. Not that Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham
I didn't know much about Dunham before reading this book. I know she's written and starred in award-winning TV but I haven't seen any of it so I came to this with no preconceptions.
Impressions:
- she can write
- she's incredibly self-obsessed
- she's very talented at capturing what it's like to be young
- sometimes she writes about times when she knows she's being a dick, and other times she writes about herself being a dick but I don't know whether she knows
I found her more annoying than likeable and I don't think that was an age thing, although if I were younger I might forgive her annoyingness more because I identified with her. The chapter on the older men who demand attention from young women in Hollywood was excellent, so astutely written and subtle.