Reading Roundup: December 2023

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei. While I was devouring this book and trying to explain it to friends, my short pitch was pregnant women solving a murder in space. This is a gross oversimplification. For one, not everyone pregnant on this spaceship is a woman, and not everyone solving the murder is pregnant–but most of space crew are, because one of the prerequisites of this desperate interstellar journey is a womb and the potential to grow the population once a new planet has been settled. This book interweaves a locked room murder mystery with the story of how and why these womb-bearing space travelers were trained and sent into space; both stories are riveting, and there are no loose ends, even the speculative elements that I thought were just aesthetic inclusions.

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee. I inhaled this deeply weird, bleak yet somehow lush and gothic novel. Harried along by the kind of voicy, bossy narrator that I adore when it is done well (and I think, in this case, it is!), the titular Abernathy finds himself attempting to pay off insurmountable debt by indenturing himself to an agency that cleans up dreams. The why and how of this dream industry is not that important, even when its unsurprisingly evil capitalist heart is revealed. What makes this book so readable and gloriously ambitious is its voice, which regards its hapless characters with an unflinching yet humane eye. When Jonathan Abernathy falls into doomed love, when he attempts to befriend an unfriendly coworker, when he lashes out in ways that harm others, it’s easy to pity him–but difficult to feel that we would behave differently or better under the same impossible circumstances.

Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels. I saw the author speak on a panel about AI and writing, arguing that writers should be able to use any tools they see fit to bring their creative work to life. But I didn’t get particularly curious about the book until I learned that he trained a large language model on the poetry of Marianne Moore to produce the lyrical stylings of Charlotte, a fictional generative AI platform. In this book, aging poet Marian Ffarmer is hired by a major tech company to collaborate with Charlotte on a long poem. Ffarmer’s character is inspired by more than Moore’s poetry: Like Moore, Ffarmer is an amiable recluse in a codependent relationship with her mother, an odd duck who is known as much for her cape and tricorne hat as for her poems. I’m no Moore scholar, but I worked in a museum that houses her faithfully reconstructed study, and it was both enjoyable and unsettling to see flashes of Moore’s familiar-to-me history made unfamiliar in the character of Ffarmer–perhaps similar to the way it can be enjoyable and unsettling to see an AI program write poetry in real time.
I thought the novel would be gimmicky. It is actually lovely, with Ffarmer’s late-life whims and worries rendered with dignity and humor, and all the questions raised by her AI co-poet/co-pilot treated seriously and thoughtfully. They are, this book demonstrates, the same questions raised about poetry even without AI: what is the work of poetry? what is it for? who is it for? why do we read it, or don’t we? why are some poets elevated by fame while others are forgotten? when we are driven to create art, what do we owe our art and what do we owe to others? I may regret it, but I think this book leapt onto this year’s list of Books I Love.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai. I stayed up too late reading this doorstop of a murder mystery during the busy week before Christmas, but I couldn’t put it down. I appreciated every thread of this tangled web: Bodie’s good and bad memories of her time at boarding school, the doubled vision you get when you return to the formative places of your adolescence or reconnect with old classmates, still seeing their youthful beauty and energy within whatever changes time has wrought, the constant noise and threat of violence against women on the news, on true crime podcasts, everywhere. A riveting read and satisfying in some unexpected ways even though hardly anyone gets justice.

I started rereading The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel on my travels, and I will close out the year with it although a surprising stack of library holds became available just after Christmas. I was also gifted a digital copy of The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir, which I sometimes read on my phone when I don’t have a physical book handy. It’s a little less sympathetic to the wives than I expected, but makes an interesting companion to Mantel’s work.

Some short poems I loved:
Reading Poetry in Illness by Anya Krugovoy Silver
Urban Tumbleweed: From a Tanka Diary by Harryette Mullen

Elsewhere

I had the pleasure of hearing Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa speak about their book His Name is George Floyd at the Virginia Festival of the Book, and found their approach to be thoughtful, deeply researched, and carefully told. When their book was effectively banned in my hometown Memphis due to state-level guidelines against teaching what people think is Critical Race Theory, which limited how they could talk about the book with the majority Black student populations they were invited to speak to, Robert Samuels recounts and contextualizes his experience with the same measured approach.

I found this insider look at naming apartment buildings intriguing from a marketing standpoint, and from the standpoint of understanding how we form relationships to home and region.

I liked this reflection on Anaïs Nin and how we perceive and react to “art monsters”–and it helped push me a little further in my own exploration of that idea, which was one of the themes of the writing class I took back in the spring.

I’ve kept updating the links on my What Writers Need to Know About AI post, but I realized it might make sense to call out new research in my monthly roundups too:
Most readers want publishers to label AI-generated articles — but trust outlets less when they do
ChatGPT Replicates Gender Bias in Recommendation Letters
ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis
How to stop Dropbox from sharing your personal files with OpenAI
Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Minutiae

December is a busy month for everyone, isn’t it? For me, the month had its fair share of drudgery, grading and making travel plans and getting holiday gifts together. But I got to do so many fun things as well. I went to PAX for the first time ever and wore my feet out exploring just a fraction of the games and toys on view; most of the events filled up before we could get into them, but my gentleman and I did manage to get into a session called Social Dancing for Nerds. (It was rather like dancing at the goblin ball in Labyrinth, since so many of our fellow revelers were decked out in horns, elf ears, and cloaks.) I also went to the orchestra with my gentleman, and we went to an anniversary party for my favorite bookstore and got our tarot cards read. I cackled through French Kiss (1995) during a virtual watch party. I took a train to New Jersey and saw my college best friend’s daughter perform in a play (she did amazing!). I put on my sparkliest ballet clothes and danced to music from The Nutcracker with my ballet class; we exchanged gifts–a surprisingly fun white elephant exchanged–and toasted one another with champagne. And then I hopped on a plane to Memphis and spent a few days relaxing with my family, watching Christmas movies and playing games. And now I am home, trying to fulfill all the promises I have made to myself and others during the year.