Sometimes when navigating a flurry of deadlines, which are totally uninteresting, the work appeas, which is interesting, with any luck. The latest: for Flavorwire, my review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.

If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget, his first book.

It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?

I really like that Lanier, the father of virtual reality, is a brilliant programmer who makes his case without making a straightforward linear argument. He hops from idea to idea, which is frutrating in places, but ultimately serves to force the reader to engage with his ideas dynamically, having space to think of counterarguments or make connections.

And now: coffee. Plus another deadline.

My review of Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less appears in today’s LA Times. Here’s how it starts.

Macy Palmer would be living the life of a normal Midwestern 16-year-old girl, if only the Scythians hadn’t driven her family from their Minnesota home. Or perhaps the blame lies with the spreading plague, or the rival Imperial army — it’s hard to say.

Exactly who or what is the cause for the chaos in “Total Oblivion, More or Less” is not as important as how it reshapes Macy’s world. She’s a smarter-than-average teenager with a mildly dysfunctional family. Her flirtatious older sister, Sophia, plans to skip traditional college and become a midwife, not exactly the path their father, an astronomy professor, might have chosen. Her younger brother, Ciaran, enrolled in classes for troubled children, has a sinister intelligence. Her mother drifts through days, particularly after discovering that she’s pregnant again.

Hello, 2010!

Possum Living was published in the late 70s as a sassy guide to anti-consumerist living. Mostly ideology-free — unless you count a cheerful curmudgeonliness as an ideology — the book, written by the pseudonymous 18 year-old Dolly Freed, has just been reissued by Tin House. And I wrote about it for Boldtype/Flavorpill yesterday:

Dolly’s practical lessons are presented with an irresistible wiseass grin: “We usually leave on the head, tail and fins for the simple reason that the fish looks nicer that way; and it means less work,” she writes. “Also, many fish have considerable amounts of meat in their heads — just like some people.”

Dolly lived with her father on a half-acre lot in suburban Philadelphia off just $5,000 a year, which was perplexingly cheap enough in her day to get her on the Merv Griffin Show. Her dad earned the little cash they needed doing odd jobs during winter, but the book is about everything else it took to live like possums: the gardening, the scrimping and shortcuts, the “merrily gurgling” home still.

What’s remarkable is how prescient, or smart, or just plain no-nonsense Freed’s advice was, because so much makes sense today. Not only do they ditch their car and ride bikes instead, but she warns against getting overly expensive bicycles — see ya, fixies — that might get stolen. Like my neighbors, she uses her yard as a vegetable garden, which she plans carefully (she explains how). She grows herbs and preserves the extras in vinegar. She makes pickling sound simple, cooks over an open fire when she can, buys clothes at Goodwill, and has plenty of time left over for playing chess on the porch.

Some of the projects are harder to imagine adopting. She and her father purchase wheat, soybeans, and potatoes in bulk from a feed store — there are still feed stores around, it turns out, but how many of us will make the time to clean and grind our own wheat? Freed made moonshine with a pressure cooker, some copper pipe, and rubber tubing, assembling the pieces with dough. OK, that’s inventive, but would it be so terrible to buy a gasket or two? Winemaking is easier in the final stages — once you put it all together, you just let it ferment — but even with Freed’s fruit-and-sugar measures supplied, calculating it all gets pretty complicated.

But the real challenge is the bunnies.

This is where Freed is awesome in her punk rockness: like a band that knows it will offend, she puts the hardest track right up front. She raises chickens and bunnies; the chickens provide eggs. The bunnies? They provide meat.

There’s more (more!) and I swear, even if the byline bears the editor’s name, it was written by me. And now I’ve got to hop offline to buy some bunnies soil to see if I can get a garden going.

It’s been a long time since I read the NY Times book review. Chalk it up to business and professional disinterest — I never have enough time to read everything I’m supposed to, and most of what I read feeds what I might write about for Jacket Copy at the LA Times. But I can’t spend my Jacket Copy days writing about the NY Times, so I’ve been giving it a pass. Until today.

I’m so glad I did. Because Tom Bissell’s review of Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi is not to be missed. After explaining, “What it is not: surprising, involving or at all interesting. What it lacks: any occasions of arresting language or appreciable drama,” and elaborating on its other faults, Bissell writes, “That more or less ends the laudatory portion of this review.”

The negativity seems, from the review, well-deserved — but it’s the deadpan delivery that kills me.

But hey, aside from a big, promising yet not-great work in translation, I have to wonder: where’d the fiction go?