Reading Roundup: May 2023

The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin. Just as good as everyone says it is. Bold, boisterous, appreciative of all the things that make cities incredible and frank about the things that make cities difficult or that do harm. I really loved how the narrative balanced the impossible (how can a city be a person? what happens when parallel universes converge?) with the gritty, concrete, believable reality of moving around the five boroughs. Also, somehow I had missed the heads-up that this book overtly engages with H. P. Lovecraft’s ideas about what makes cities dangerous and weird, so I was surprised and delighted by the way the author re-envisions that lore; this book will join The Ballad of Black Tom in “Stories I think you should read instead of anything by Lovecraft because it’s 2023 and we simply don’t have time for racist xenophobes.”

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton. I literally sat down and read this in a day. I did not mean to; I had other things to do. But I became so invested in the lives of the family at the heart of this book: a girl born in a hurricane, the haunted men who love her but are preoccupied with saving their dying town, the neighbor who teaches her how to take care of herself. The focus on the emotional lives of this family and the lovely lyrical language might give this book the nebulous distinction of “literary fiction,” but unlikely other lit fic forays into speculative fiction or climate fiction, this is not doomerism. The author has a firm grasp on both climate change impacts and biology, and that allows her to do something I’ve seen few novels do–which is painstakingly chronicle the transitional period between the world we know and a speculative fiction–and also envision a place for resilience and adaptation in the near future.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook. Just as an example of how hard this novel goes: it opens with a woman having a stillbirth and burying the child alone in a field as coyotes circle. The woman and her husband and child are among a small group who are living in a protected wildlife area–as an experiment, to see if humans can return to nomadic living and avoid impacting the environment. Most of the people who come to the Wilderness State are desperate: they cannot thrive in the Hunger Games-like zones (the City, the Mines, the Manufacturing Zone, etc.), their children are sick and dying from air pollution and other dangers, so they opt to face the unknown dangers of the wild. Their choice is not romanticized. Members of their community die from large predators, bad water, fast-moving rivers; they mourn deaths, but mourn the loss of good rope even more. They are meant to be a leaderless community, but leaders emerge and jockey for dominance. Their lives are brutal and they become brutish, although arguably not more so than the cruel Rangers who hound and harry them across the Wilderness, making it impossible to thrive. It’s a long, bleak story, but I was riveted and kept turning pages, looking for those flashes of beauty and strength.

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff. I have such mixed feelings about this book. It came warmly recommended by some writers that I love, but I almost returned it to the library after the first few pages, which are dripping with fatphobia that doesn’t ever really get resolved (the fat character get a redemptive arc but her fatness never does, if that makes sense). And the way the book deals with sex, violence, and revenge feels very young, if you know what I mean; not very lived-in, more sensational than perspicacious. Yet, I was intrigued by the women of this microloan collective in India, their friendships and village dynamics, and the ways they help and harm one another. And the book is funny, suspenseful, and compulsively readable–I finished it in a day–so there’s that.

For Publishers Weekly, I read Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle by Jonathan Crary and As Figs in Autumn: One Year in a Forever War by Ben Bastomski. You can read reviews I collaborated on for Nobody Needs to Know and Tricks of the Light.

Here are some short poems and prose I loved:
Sanctuary by Jade Jones
Accidental Girls by Chloe N. Clark
Want by Joy Sullivan

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Elsewhere

I’ve been following the WGA strike with great interest. I hope they get everything they ask for! There is so much great television happening all the time, and it simply wouldn’t happen without writers.
Why Are TV Writers So Miserable? (New Yorker)
Writers Like Me Have Shut Down Hollywood. Here’s Why. (The Nation)

I’m always interested in how worlds are built and space is designed in games: Why There’s No Room for Suburbs in Open-World Games

Dark cozy games!

Another New Yorker article, but one worth jumping to another browser for: Ted Chiang explaining how ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.

Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

And this long but IMHO really interesting article at my university’s magazine covered some of the use cases for AI in a university setting–how English students are using it vs MBA students; what it can and cannot do.

Researcher Meredith Whittaker says AI’s biggest risk isn’t ‘consciousness’—it’s the corporations that control them

This book is on my TBR fr: Katy Hessel Kicks Men Out of the Western Art Canon

As someone who recently cut back on caffeine, I was extremely interested in this Esquire article that sort of explores both sides of caffeine consumption: pros and cons, theories and evidence.
Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good?
Do not worry–this article does not set out to persuade you that it is time to quit coffee for good. Nor will I! But I will say that it took less time than I thought to adjust to my reduced caffeine level. I was drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day, plus the occasional cup of black tea, which I think is pretty moderate! But I did depend on my morning coffee (starting exactly 30 minutes after I take my daily thyroid pill, if I could manage it) and if I had to go without, I was really miserable: headaches, brain fog, irritability, the works. I tried weaning myself slowly during April, and now drink 0-2 cups of half-caf a day. On the days I simply never get around to drinking coffee, I feel fine. It remains to be seen whether there are any other benefits to cutting back, but it is nice not to be so dependent.

I like these quilts, the aesthetic is like the Liminal Spaces twitterbot meets Monument Valley.

Minutiae

This month was remarkable in that I frequently received goods I did not request or pay for. The late night taco truck around the corner from my house gave me a slice of chocolate cake with my order. The smoked fish shop threw a few challah rolls in the bag. I had two rounds of drinks with two longtime friends, and the bar only charged us for half. My shoe repair guy gave me a discount for taking an unusually long time to repair my shoes, and since he physically handed me the cash back, I spent that money on Long Island iced tea slushies for myself and a friend on one of the first summery days of May.

I spent a weekend in Pittsburgh for the first time since before the pandemic, hanging out with my family. I spent a weekend on the Hudson River for the first time ever, staying in a lovely old house with my college best friend, cooking and writing and reading tarot and drinking wine and periodically exclaiming at how beautiful the river looked in the sunshine, in the rain, at night. In the last long weekend in May, I went on long meandering strolls: to find treasures, to get ice cream, to sit in a quiet cemetery and watch some of the city’s oldest trees thrash in the river breeze.

I turned 42. I had my first mammogram, which was unpleasant, but then I read “Sanctuary” by Jade Jones (which is about goats as well as mammograms!) and I felt seen. I got jumper’s knee–from ballet jumps, possibly, or perhaps all those long strolls–and rewatched Severance while I recovered. In general, though, I continue to really love being A Woman In My 40s. On my birthday, I filled my house and yard with people (with all the windows and doors open) and talked and laughed until my throat hurt. I feel lucky and loved.