Reading Roundup: February 2024

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto. I inhaled this book, which was darkly satirical and so much fun to read. It centers on the Rubin Institute, a neoliberal fever dream of a university where disgraced public figures are exiled after being fired for saying or doing something unforgivable in the public eye. Helen is a brilliant physics grad student and her mentor is an irreplaceable genius; they believe themselves close to making a breakthrough that would decelerate climate change, so when her mentor is invited to Rubin after sleeping with another graduate student, Helen feels compelled to go with him. Life at Rubin is pretty plush, the sort of palace a billionaire might design for his pleasure when he is ejected from polite society: there are parties, expensive food, unlimited resources and amenities, no rules. Reading about it is great fun–most of the institute exists within a phallic tower called, hilariously, “The Endowment”–but living there brings Helen and her husband to the brink.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. A good thematic pairing with the above: In How I Won, the narrator pursues her research alongside privileged assholes at a luxurious island resort; in Land of Milk and Honey, the narrator cooks for privileged assholes at an even more luxurious and isolated mountaintop resort, one of the few places in this speculative future that gets sun after a mishap with cloud seeding, and also one of the only places in the world where extinct species are grown, bred, cultivated, and ultimately consumed in ultra-elite dinners. Both narrators confront their own complicity in these problematic milieus, but ultimately shrug: what else could they do? Yet, once in the promised land, every decision is a negotiation of morals and conscience.
Aside from the serendipity of these things, I thought this was an astonishing book. I am both grateful and regretful that it didn’t exist when I was writing a dissertation about food, because this slim volume explores so many dimensions of meaning in what we eat. Dinners at the mountain resort are necessarily conspicuous consumption, with the world’s richest and most influential invited to taste the abundance grown in secret labs while the rest of the world goes undernourished. But it’s more than class disparity. The dinners are designed to woo, awe, intimidate, or even threaten the guests; meals include the last dates from a family orchard in Iran and a syrup made from the blood of an extinct turtle. There’s shame and guilt and pleasure in consuming what was lost. The meals are not even always delicious–often enough the diners gag or protest, and frequently they seek expiation or absolution for what they have tasted–but they can’t deny the demonstration of power. It’s a fascinating and nuanced look at eating for pleasure in an era of extinction.

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle. I adore George Eliot’s fiction, but I only knew a little of her biography: I knew she was born in a provincial town and later traveled the world and lived a literary life; I knew she lived as a wife to a man who could not marry her because his first wife was still living, and that this created some scandal, but eventually she was admired and elevated as a great novelist; I knew she wrote and published her first novels in her 30s, not writing the virtuosic Middlemarch until her 50s. In other words, it’s easy for someone like me to see what I want to see in someone like George Eliot.
I picked up this volume expecting an in-depth biography, but that’s not exactly what it sets out to do. The author does examine Eliot’s books, letters, and diaries as well as those of her friends and family to piece together a fuller picture of her life, and I did revel in these details. But the author is not a historian or a literary scholar; she’s a philosopher, and her goal is to position Eliot as a philosophical thinker, an erudite reader who translated philosophical texts from German to English and a writer who explored ethical and existential problems in fiction. This made for some tonal oddities–there are a few close readings and interpretations that don’t sit well with me as a literary scholar–but I actually really love the project of exploring philosophy through literature, and of positioning Eliot as a great intellectual and philosopher as well as a great novelist.

Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Everyday by Dan Nott. I picked this book up to satisfy the “Graphic novel” category of the environmental reading challenge. It won me over in the very first section, which is about the internet: it actually starts by looking at some of the figurative ways we imagine the internet (the cloud, the series of tubes, etc.) and then comparing that to what the internet is actually made of (enormous warehouses of physical computers, undersea cables). He does mention some of the environmental impacts of this infrastructure as well as how unequally internet exchanges are distributed globally; he doesn’t go deep into those topics, but I’m glad they are mentioned. The themes of environmental justice and how our invisible infrastructure contribute to climate change also emerge in the sections on electricity and water, and each section goes into the history of those systems–which is where I personally learned the most, especially in the electricity section, as I knew little of how individual experiments by Edison and Tesla became companies (in one case, contributing to the stock market crash of 1929) and eventually utilities. I think the graphic novel format is really well-suited to this topic; literally dividing the page and the text into large and small blocks allowed the artist to move between global scale to regional scale to individual scale, showing (for example) regular people using electricity to plug in their personal devices, then the plants that generate that power (which differ by region), then zooming out to look at the systems that support individual use.

Whalefall by Daniel Krauss. This is an excruciatingly graphic book about a young diver who gets swallowed by a sperm whale while diving. It is also nominally about other things–like the diver’s relationship with his father, and about respecting whales despite having been accidentally swallowed by one–but those elements, along with the workmanlike prose, are just whale horror delivery vehicles. Did I enjoy it? No, not really. Could I stop reading it? Also no! I stayed up too late to finish it.

Some short poems and prose I loved this month:
Always repost To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio
Metamorphoses by Sabrina Bustamente
Tiring the Ghosts by Ella Mei Yon Harris
Kinds of Silence by Elisabeth Murawski

Elsewhere

I pay for a few newsletters, and some of those are hosted on Substack. Do I want to support Substack, a company that sees no problem with profiting by platforming Nazis? No!!! Do I want to support writers whose work I do value, especially while creative and analytical writing is criminally undervalued by the world at large? Yes!! I hate that this is a decision any of us have to make. In the meantime, here are some newsletters by queer writers that are NOT on Substack.

Inside the Censorship Scandal That Rocked Sci-Fi and Fantasy’s Biggest Awards

Oh, how I love a literary essay like this: Is trans literature a genre? If so, what characterizes it and how might those characteristics be shaped by cis editors and readers? How do certain stylistic choices affect how we perceive a trans narrative?

I also love big sweeping essays like this one, which looks at today’s big cultural moments (Barbie Oscars snubs, Taylor Swift and football) through the lens of what was going on culturally ten years ago.

Generative AI in the news:
AI Companies Lose $190 Billion After Dismal Financial Reports (Futurism, January 31, 2024)
AI is supposed to make us more efficient – but it could mean we waste more energy (The Conversation, January 26, 2024)
AI is producing ‘fake’ Indigenous art trained on real artists’ work without permission (Crikey, January 19, 2024)
‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says (The Guardian, January 8, 2024)
AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants (BBC, February 16, 2024)
Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret (Nature, February 20, 2024)

Hey, here’s a good literary application of technology. I find this project so funny and yet so poignant. As I texted my grad school BFF, what did I get a PhD for?
“Whalequest sorts the sentences in Moby-Dick by their semantic similarity to the word “whale”, with the least whaley sentences at the beginning and the most whaley sentences at the end. The novel is thus reordered into a quest through semantic space for the whale, with the reader progressing closer and closer to the ultimate object of their quest as they read.”

Minutiae

February was a short month of highs and lows. I finally had some friends over for our belated New Year fondue dinner, which filled my house with laughter and screaming. Then my old cat got a nosebleed, and the vet prescribed nasal drops. I went to see the new Mean Girls movie, which wasn’t that great, but it was a lot of fun picking apart why it wasn’t great. (Good movie musicals exist! We have the technology!) After a few days of improvement, my cat had another nosebleed, and the vet prescribed antibiotics. I planned a romantic date for Valentine’s Day and got reservations at a hard-to-get-into noodle house, but instead my gentleman and I took my little old cat to the ER. Her prognosis has slightly improved for the time being–she had a nasal tumor, but part of it came out when the vet flushed her nasal passages, so she is breathing a little easier and so am I.

Entertainment this month has mainly been a deck-building game called Slay the Spire, until things got serious with my old cat and I started replaying Stardew Valley for comfort. And Abbott Elementary is back on, so that’s a high note for the month. Also I made a silly joke on Bluesky and it was reposted by Kelly Link and Celeste Ng, so that’s a high note for the year.