Reading Roundup: March 2024

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. This book is constructed of short, thoughtful essays that each look at a handful of “art monsters” from film, music, and literature, connecting them to a few different themes: what it means to love art made by terrible men, why we grapple with the biographies of artists and geniuses more than ever, how the very question of “what do we do with this monster’s art” outsources the solutions to individual consumers rather than examining the systems and beliefs that enable monstrosity. I found it breezy reading despite the heavy matter; it’s a question I’ve had to return to again and again as a person who loves literature, and the author doesn’t linger too uncomfortably on any one monster. But the book really begins to shine when she moves on to contemplating what we think makes women monstrous–and bringing in her own biography into that, not simply as a fan who wants to enjoy art but as a mother, a recovering alcoholic, a person realizing that loving art is as messy as loving people.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. A quiet, thoughtful first contact story set in a cautiously hopeful future. A damaged alien ship lands in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where they are met by a blended family whose work concerns watershed health and who were inspecting the impact of spaceship pollution. Obviously, I was very excited to read a story that not only centers water resources but actually imagines a future world where communities are organized by watershed–it makes so much sense! You are bound not by national borders but by where water is impacted by your community! Truly, there was a lot for me to love in this book: in addition to the tense but careful negotiations with the visiting alien species (who do not intend to harm or colonize Earth, but who wish Earth residents would willingly join them in space because they feel technology is fundamentally incompatible with planetary life), a great deal of linespace is dedicated to explaining the cooperative community organization and nontraditional family structures of this future Earth. Despite the crisis posed by an alien visit, this book is written in urgent or gripping prose, so I read slowly although I struggle to pinpoint what exactly it is about the writing that falls short of a pageturner. Regardless, it is a really intriguing thought exercise, explored with care.

North Woods by Daniel Mason. This is a novel about one specific house built in the forest in Western Massachusetts, from the exiled Puritans who built it through its eventual destruction. Each short chapter is narrated by a different inhabitant or visitor of the house–an aging British soldier and his daughters, a Transcendentalist painter, a puma, a beetle–and written in wildly different forms, including lyrics to folk music and letters or journal entries as well as traditional narratives. I felt skeptical at the beginning, at first because (as I have said) I don’t think many authors can pull off this range ; then, when it became clear that the author was pulling it off, I worried it might be all style and no substance. That’s somewhat true in the earlier chapters, but the narrators who exist closer to us in time start to feel more fully realized and individual. And I do admire the attention this book pays to the changing ecology of this patch of land, noting with intense scrutiny how the invasive weeds and tree disease found their way to the remote grove, and how period-appropriate additions to the house and land irrevocably altered the landscape.
I think I loved this book, even as I rolled my eyes at the ghost stories (I love ghost stories but they really feel like an afterthought in this case) and raised my eyebrows at the super-sped-up final chapter that gestures at a climate future without really committing to it. In any case, I think it offers an intriguing example of telling a story from the point of view of the land, and in any case it was a really fun read.

I’ve been really enjoying and appreciating the 2024 Environmental Reading Challenge with my Discord community–it’s been good for me to think outside of the box a bit with my reading selections, and I love hearing what everyone else is reading each month. But the recovering academic in me still bucks against assigned reading–even self-assigned!–so I took a couple of days to absolutely devour some Diana Wynne Jones. First I reread Howl’s Moving Castle (previously read in 2019), then I read one of its companion novels: Castle in the Air, which at first seems to take place in a wildly different time and place, but ultimately reconnects with the country of Ingary and its Royal Wizards and their sensible, magical wives. It was an odd read, dabbling in a bit of Fantasy Arab orientalism that reminded me of the kingdom of Calormen in the Narnia books: in both cases, the books take a lot of pleasure in the lavish setting and formal culture of their desert kingdoms, but ultimately the main characters find their true homes among plain-spoken people in the fresh green country to the north. So, a little troubling, but nonetheless a quick and tasty read that satisfied my itch for familiar fantasy.

Then I picked up The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, which is weird and dark and gory and like nothing else I’ve read…. except a little bit The Locked Tomb series, Gideon the Ninth and its sequels. Its characters inhabit a grisly world of secrets, arcane knowledge, and blood sacrifice–but in this case they live right alongside our own world, housed in a remote community not too far away from Virginia highways and bars, and only the main character has the ability to pass more or less successfully as a regular person. It has all the pleasures of a murder mystery and a heist film, with clues to follow and an ambitious plot that seems impossible to pull off–but then it doesn’t stop there, and just gets weirder and wilder.

I didn’t mean to squeeze in another read in the final rainy week of March, but I’ve had A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Antony Marra checked out of the library for awhile, so I read a few pages and then fell deep into the narrative. It is a stunning, scintillating book, despite (or more likely because of) the bleak setting of Chechnya during two periods of wartime, with glimpses of horror–occasionally unflinching stares of horror–amid moments of connection and humor.

Elsewhere

It’s been a dreary month, and I’ve spent far too much of it scrolling Instragram. I finally put timers on to curb this, but not before I started falling down a seasonal color analysis rabbit hole. So I needed this gentle but firm reproof from Defector: Only You Can Find Your Best Color

Just a lovely little interview with Philadelphia editor of a new queer journal about plants: ‘We’ve always been here’: A Q&A with Nanticoke and two-spirit editor, Sarah Clark

On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters (the ones she sent, not any she received)

#careergoals: Meet the cosplaying paleontologist who teaches Jurassic Park fans about dinosaurs

In AI news:
Here’s Proof You Can Train an AI Model Without Slurping Copyrighted Content (Wired, March 20, 2024)
As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find (The Guardian, March 16, 2024)
Report: Artificial Intelligence A Threat to Climate Change, Energy Usage and Disinformation (FOE, March 7, 2024)
AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation – report (The Guardian, March 7, 2026)
The Scariest Part About Artificial Intelligence (The New Republic, March 5, 2024)
On AI images and climate change photography (Climate Visuals, March 6, 2026)

Minutiae

In March, spring softened up a few days and made it lovely to walk around again, so I did a lot of walking. I started waking up the container garden on my patio; the mums and roses are stretching out after a wintry nap, and the chokeberry shrubs and salvia are starting to put out new leaves. I got rained out of some volunteer work in the park. I went to New Jersey to see one of my favorite little people just before her 9th birthday, and took my gentleman friend out to dinner for his birthday. I went to see When Harry Met Sally in a theater, which was magical, and Love Lies Bleeding, which was very scary (but fun). But mostly I kept to myself, reading, sleeping a lot, appreciating the pleasure my old cat takes in her comfortable life after our difficult February.