Reading Roundup: January 2024

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter. This is exactly the sort of read I wanted to kick off the new year: short, moody, a hint of magic in the mundane. The title story was originally published in Harper’s and won a fiction prize, and it is still a perfect modern fairy tale: mysterious, wonderful, bleak. The next three stories are linked to the first, to various degrees, and they make the implicit explicit: the mechanisms of the original story’s speculative element are explored, references to extinction (literal and figurative) multiply. This was interesting and fairly well executed, but made me miss the allegorical feel of the original story; some texts are richer and more complex when they are simpler.

Wednesday’s Child: Stories by Yiyun Li. I enjoyed every story in this melancholy collection. Nearly every character is drifting or going on a journey, feeling strangely disconnected from the people around them; often they are pursuing the markers of middle class while remembering a life of poverty, or finding American or European cities at odds with their early life in China. Every character seems indelibly marked by some distinct grief or failure, yet most refuse to respond in the manner expected of them: a mother makes a spreadsheet after losing her son, a sister travels to Paris after losing her brother. Little happens in the stories themselves, but so much has already happened to these characters that their conversations and observations ripple with tension and sadness. Their particular woes feel specific and singular, yet relatable.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith. I could not put down this novel, which contains so many stories folded up tightly inside. At first, it seems to simply be smart, deeply researched, engaging historical fiction in the manner of Hilary Mantel. The main point of view character is a widowed woman who joins the household of her cousin-by-marriage, who happens to be the prolific and (for a time) successful novelist William Ainsworth. Severe in appearance but slyly witty, Eliza is both an insider and an outsider to this clan, and it is a pleasure to read her accounts of the rowdy literary dinners at the Ainsworth residence, the surprising arrangements for love and sex in that household, the passionate political and religious causes available to take up in this era of enslavement, colonialism, and industry.
But as much as I loved inhabiting Eliza’s point of view, I was riveted by the chapters narrated by Andrew Bogle. Bogle is a formerly enslaved man and a key witness in the trial for a man who claims to be a lost heir to a noble title and fortune; many reviewers have drawn parallels between The Claimant and a certain rabble-rousing ex-president. But the Claimant’s pull on the public, the media circus that surrounds him, and even Eliza’s own multi-decade story seem pale and flimsy in comparison with the searing section of the book that is Bogle’s. His narrative is as shrewdly observant as Eliza’s, simmering with as much untapped potential, yet at far higher stakes–his story has cost him much more.

Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb. I got interested in road ecology during my field trips last summer, so of course I eagerly anticipated this book. Its topics were more wide-ranging than I expected–there was a chapter I loved on benefits and challenges of planting milkweed by roadsides to provide food and habitat to monarch butterflies, but there were also chapters on the history of Americas roads, a great many chapters about roadkill and various mitigation strategies such as wildlife crossings, and some tantalizing trivia about noise pollution and necrophages. It was a serendipitous read for this month, when my volunteer group has been doing water testing to check chloride levels in waterways before and after snowfall and road salting. I wrote a little about it for our newsletter, and learned that the amount of salt we use on roads in the US has doubled since the 1970s. That’s partly because there are more roads, but also because the roads are open all the time and there is the expectation that snow and ice won’t slow down travel or commerce. That’s what’s interesting to me… the ways in which we treat a road as a right and a fact, while we consider environmental phenomena like snow and animal migrations to be inconveniences (if we consider them at all). I did really appreciate this book and do recommend it, although I also complained to friends about the writing style (a little contrived, especially in the beginning, or perhaps I just got used to it).

The End of Drum-time by Hanna Pylväinen. I started reading this during the first snowy weekend of January. It opens in a remote Scandinavian village in the 1850s, Finns and Swedes and Sámi reindeer herders all crowding together in a church while snow falls softly outside. This world has its hardships, but the book pays a lot of attention to the comforts of butter and coffee and smoked meats and warm furs; immersing myself in it while wrapped in blankets as snow flurried outside was an incredible reading experience. It also turned out to be an interesting complement to Crossroads: reindeer are migratory, and the Sámi people traveled with them from the Norwegian coast to the Russian marsh–at least until Russia closed its borders, asking the Sámi to keep their reindeer on one side or the other, which would starve them. This shattering conflict arrives late in the book; up until that moment, the various communities are rattled mainly by alcohol and impropriety.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle. I was attracted to the book’s premise of exploring the lives of women who homesteaded in the American West without men. It is a Victor LaValle story, though, so you know some spooky shit is going to go down. I didn’t love this story as much as I’ve loved some others of his–even Big Machine, as weird as it is, felt a bit more adult and nuanced–but it is nonetheless a cracking good story and a fast read with some delicious atmospheric spookiness built into the already-haunted lands of Montana at the turn of the 20th century.

Elsewhere

A lot of folks have been sharing this article, which uses personal narrative powerfully to illustrate its themes: “The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” A matter-of-fact, unsparing account that nonetheless serves a searing indictment of our healthcare system and a reminder of why accessibility matters.

Just a lovely little meditation on carnivorous plants.

Really enjoyed this conversation between Virginia Sole-Smith of Burnt Toast and Kate Manne, a philosopher who has a new book about fatphobia. Not since the days of Shapely Prose (which gets a shout-out here) and other early aughts feminist blogs have I seen such an incisive deconstruction of how fatphobia and misogyny intersect.

Hate this title, fascinated by this issue: The Plagiarism War Has Begun
A little more context: Claudine Gay’s resignation had nothing to do with plagiarism

AI in the news:
Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon (Wired, January 10, 2024)

Minutiae

I spent a snowy weekend in the Poconos with friends, which was the coziest thing imaginable. For a brief time, I had nothing better to do than to sip a hot toddy and work on a jigsaw puzzle, and it was glorious. A surprising amount of snow defined this month; we hadn’t had much for a few years, so we’d gotten out of the habit of arranging our lives around serious snowfall. I had scheduled a fondue dinner with friends mid-month, but the ice was still treacherous at night so we rescheduled for February. My college BFF visited that weekend and we went on very slow, purposeful walks in the daylight only.

I spent about a week deeply obsessed with a game called Spiritfarer, which bills itself as a cozy management sim about death. It is absolutely lovely, for the most part. You ferry your boat across the rose-tinted waters of some liminal space between life and death, growing food and cooking meals for hungry spirits who are trying to wrap up some business before oblivion. One of your first shipmates is a chain-smoking deer named Gwen who subsisted mainly on black coffee and popcorn, since I didn’t know how to cook much else when we met; she guided me to the resources to harvest for my floating farm, including a nighttime swarm of golden jellyfish that showered my boat as dramatic music soared. It’s gorgeous, but as the game drags on, it gets significant less charming–you are joined by companions with far less whimsy and charisma, and explore islands with less delicate beauty.

This month I started my new degree program (discussed previously). I enrolled in two classes and for a short time was doing lots of homework, but I opted to keep just one: Public Environmental Humanities. So far we’ve been reading some great writing about what art and literature and philosophy have to offer climate change discourses–you can see why I am excited.