Sonia Connolly

“Orwell’s Roses” by Rebecca Solnit

March 31, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: It’s by Rebecca Solnit!

Rebecca Solnit starts from an encounter with rosebushes planted by George Orwell almost 100 years before, and expands with her usual grace and skill on his life as an essayist, activist, soldier in the Spanish Civil War, gardener, husband, and father. From there, she delves into his research into coal mining and its disastrous effects on the miners and on the environment; Stalin and his atrocities in the name of communism; Colombia’s greenhouses growing roses for export, with disastrous effects on the growers and the environment; and many more discursions on roses, beauty, totalitarianism, and history.

She shows that Orwell balanced the darkness in his writing and worldview with a joy in the natural world. He grew much of his own food, in addition to roses, in rural England.

Sometimes [Orwell] celebrated what was meant by the roses in “bread and roses”: the intangible, ordinary pleasure, the joy available in the here and now. [Page 92]

Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature.” [Page 100]

Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to [Orwell], and pleasures. […] Clarity, honesty, accuracy, truth are beautiful because in them representation is true to its subject, knowledge is democratized, people are empowered, doors are open, information moves freely, contracts are honored. That is, such writing is beautiful in itself, and beautiful in what flows from it. [Page 231]

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a twelve year old on a ten-hour flight between New York and Tel Aviv, alternating between reading a few more horrifying pages and staring blankly at the 747 bulkhead. I have avoided George Orwell ever since, even though the last few years have proved him more and more prescient. Rebecca Solnit fills in the background of how he came to write such a dark book shortly before his death from tuberculosis at 46, and shows him as a whole, extraordinary person.

Recommended to anyone who wants to be a better, more informed citizen of the world.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“99 Bottles of OOP” by Sandi Metz, Katrina Owen, and TJ Stankus

February 23, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Design

Recommended to me by: Sam Livingston-Gray

This book creates and then refactors (edits to improve) code to generate the “99 Bottles of Beer” song. (When I was a kid on field trips, we started at 100 Bottles.)

I read most of this book in 2015, but didn’t finish it, so didn’t add a post for it here. Apparently the initial “Shameless Green” code (straightforward code that makes the tests succeed) stuck with me, because I mostly reproduced it in the half-hour recommended to attempt the problem before reading the rest of the book.

There are lots of great points about object-oriented design and recipes for refactoring. The Ruby code that results at the end is elegant and easy to modify, although its readability benefits from the step-by-step walkthrough to get there. I will probably refer back to the book for refactoring tips when faced with Ruby code to improve.

Recommended for people wanting to improve their object-oriented coding skills, especially in Ruby. There are now editions available with code examples in PHP and Javascript as well, and the beverage can be beer or milk. Now I’m curious to see their code that generates the different versions of the book!

The book’s page and Sandi Metz’s website.

Available at SandiMetz.com.

“Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby” by Sandi Metz

February 19, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: An Agile Primer

Recommended to me by: Sam Livingston-Gray

I first read this back in 2012. It struck me as friendly rather than condescending this time, which is an interesting shift.

In 2012 I was just learning Ruby and focused on deciphering the example code as I read. Coming back to it after having programmed in Ruby for three years, I could read the examples fluently and focus more on the general points in the book, even though I haven’t looked at Ruby code in a while.

Some points that stuck with me this time:

The purpose of design is to allow future changes in code, since requirements and circumstances keep changing.
In object-oriented design, pay attention to the messages passing between the objects.
Each object should have a single responsibility. (I’ve seen a downside to this, where you have to chase through a mass of fine-grained objects to find where something is actually done.)
Manage dependencies to reduce risk. An object should depend on objects that change less often than it does.
Inject dependencies, use Ruby’s duck typing: Send in an object as an argument that responds to the needed message
Delay design decisions until you have at least three examples of what a class needs to do. (Two, if pressed.)
Good design is TRUE: Transparent, Reasonable, Usable, Exemplary
DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself.
Law of Demeter: Don’t chain calls through many objects, since that entails knowing too much about the insides of other objects.
Isolate risky bits of code inside a wrapper, so they can be improved easily later.
Test an object’s public interface (messages it responds to), and command messages it sends (messages with side effects).
Use Ruby Modules to share code and tests.

Highly recommended as a guide for both general design, and how to write maintainable, flexible Ruby code.

The book’s website and Sandi Metz’s website.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“What Fresh Hell Is This?” by Heather Corinna

February 15, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You

Recommended to me by: Captain Awkward

This book is for anyone with a uterus who is moving toward or in menopause, whether due to aging or medical procedures. Heather Corinna’s writing is funny, profoundly inclusive, and tends to run long, as seen on her teen sex ed website Scarleteen. She likes to cover all the possibilities and include all the possible disclaimers.

She writes about the history of how menopause has been perceived and treated (or not) in the past, mostly by men. She interviewed experts (mostly women, many BIPOC) on a variety of topics and includes quotes from them, opening up a cornucopia of further reading.

She makes self-care suggestions along with compassion for their difficulty. She acknowledges the irony of recommending better sleep to help with hot flashes which often disrupt sleep. Stress and trauma tend to worsen perimenopause effects, adding another reason to reduce stress and work on healing trauma.

She covers both negative and positive effects of menopause. Contrary to popular myth, it does not bring life and love to an end. It does prompt an evaluation of what is and isn’t working in one’s life and can lead to sweeping changes.

Highly recommended to anyone who might walk this road or knows someone who is walking it.

Heather Corinna’s website.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Being In My Body” by Toni Rahman

January 29, 2022 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: What you Might Not Have Known about Trauma, Dissociation and the Brain

Recommended to me by: a client

This book covers a lot of ground, and does it well. Toni Rahman summarizes current research into developmental trauma, CPTSD, dissociation, emotions, attachment, and polyvagal theory, as well as sharing some of her own story and client stories. She applies this material to parenting, inhabiting the body, and healthy adult intimacy.

Some of the many ideas in the book:

We are designed, from birth, to take refuge in the trusting bonds we have with others.
What children need from their caring adults is flexibility and openness balanced with a strong enough sense of self and one’s own limits, with curiosity about who this child is.
Regression is leaving the present moment and reliving the past instead. This can also be called an emotional flashback.
Feeling an emotion is acknowledging it, allowing it to be in the body. Emoting is acting it out: yelling, crying, etc.
Via Karla McLaren, event trauma happens not just from something difficult or overwhelming, but from not being welcomed back into the tribe afterward. A full initiation includes both surviving challenging circumstances, and being received with adequate attention, empathy, and care afterwards.
For an infant or small child, chronic or prolonged parental misattunement without adequate repair represents a traumatic threat to life.
Feeling threatened by a parent who is also a source of care is a problem in itself, compounded by not having support to express or resolve the problem. This is disorganized attachment.
For someone with unhealed disorganized attachment or CPTSD, intimacy is triggering and terrifying rather than soothing and nurturing.
How your body responds to intimacy is an echo of your early experiences.
We can approach our own bodies with care to build secure attachment and intimacy with ourselves.
You will know what you like because just thinking of it will make you feel soft, relaxed, and light, not restricted, guarded, or confused.

There are a couple of distracting textual errors in the book: duplicated client quotes, and at least one misspelling of a place name.

Overall, highly recommended for anyone interested in trauma, inhabiting the body, and healthy intimacy.

Toni Rahman’s website.

Available at Amazon.

“North to Freedom” by Anne Holm

January 21, 2022 by Sonia Connolly 2 Comments

This is one of the books I’ve carried from place to place since I was a kid. I took it down from the shelf to see if it was time to pass it along, and ended up reading the whole thing. I didn’t remember much about the plot, but a few fragmentary scenes had stayed with me. It was published in 1963 in Danish, and translated into English in 1965.

A twelve-year-old child named David has been raised in a concentration camp, escapes with the puzzling help of the Commandant, and is now crossing Europe alone to get to Denmark. He is sturdy, quick-witted, and speaks several languages, having learned them from various fellow prisoners.

The writing is emotionally authentic without trying to terrify the reader. David talks about his fear, and also how he has learned to calm himself. He passes through hope and despair. He learns to be more present in his body, and connects passionately to the beauty of the land around him. He also connects tentatively, warily, with other humans.

People see him with compassion and help him on his way, and also see the strangeness in him. With his mix of social ignorance and calm self-possession, it’s obvious he hasn’t had a normal childhood.

In passing, David is noted as a rare name, which was surprising since it has been in the top 35 names since 1880 in the US, and was ranked first in 1960. I have been in a mid-size software engineering organization that literally had more Davids than women. Apparently it was less popular in Denmark in the 1960s.

When I last read the book, I was around David’s age, and simply accepted the plot. Now I see the underlying social and religious messages (added with a light hand), and the overall metaphor for healing from abuse and reconnecting with people.

David values intelligence and devalues people for being “stupid.” I could see a twelve-year-old boy having that attitude, and I wish the author had made it clear that intellectual ability does not correlate with intrinsic moral value. There is also some borderline fat-judgment. David tends to see people as all bad or all good. The plot does engage with the ambiguity of people who are both.

Highly recommended, despite those caveats.

Available at Powell’s Books.