Reading Roundup: July 2024

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Sometime, I missed reading this in high school or college. I mostly knew Thoreau as the butt of a joke: the man who went to live in the woods but still had his mother nearby to send him food and do his laundry. But I learned more recently that Thoreau’s bird observations still contribute to science today, particular the study of how seasonal migrations have changed over time, so I’ve been curious to read the work for myself. I got a library copy annotated by climate writer Bill McKibben, hoping to get a little more context for the science. The annotations were more historical, focusing on what Walden Pond was like in 1854 versus the present day.
The book itself is both more and less compelling than I hoped. Thoreau’s writing style feels expansive and bombastic to me; he reminds me of the sort of man who will corner you at a brunch party, a loud talker with a lot of opinions but not a fine grasp of social cues. A lot of what he writes feels like hot air, but then every now and then he lands such a solid point that I have to put the book down sit with it. Why is housing so inaccessible (and has been, apparently, for centuries)? Why do we toil all our lives in debt (and have, apparently, for centuries)? How can it be a good thing that we harvest fibers over here and weave them over there and sew them into clothes in yet another location, and cut railways through the countryside to ship these goods to and fro as fast as possible? And while the natural world is only one of Thoreau’s interests in these essays–he has a great deal to say about the social world and the built world–the passages about the plants and animals around him are quite lovely. I like the list of sounds he can hear from his isolated abode (train whistles and bells as well as birdcalls). I love his reflections on the pond itself, how it might have been formed, how people have used it over time.

Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary by Harryette Mullen. Tanka is a short form of poetry, usually a single sentence of 31 syllables, and (like haiku) captures a moment, a snapshot, an impression. Mullen is not too strict with the form; her tankas vary in rhythm, but they are all three lines long and capture observations from her walks in and around Los Angeles (not a city known for walkability). Her overarching question is “what is natural about being human?”, and the pages of brief moments accumulate into an inimate portrait of a landscape featuring native and introduced species, wild and manicured green spaces, the built environment in varying stages of decay, and human interactions with the above all in one sprawling city. You would think that a collection of very short poems would get wearisome to read after awhile, but I found myself eagerly reading on for pages at a time, and underlining images and phrases that seemed particularly beautiful or poignant to me.

The Hunter by Tana French. A pile of my library holds came in at once, so I dropped everything and read the one I knew I wouldn’t be able to renew. I didn’t realize this book was a sequel to The Searcher, a book I felt ambivalently towards; I thought the narrator Cal lacked the finely drawn psychology of a typical Tana French protagonist. Arguably that’s still true in The Hunter; the psychology that interests French in these recent novels is the collective psychology of the small Irish village where Cal has chosen to make his home. Two years after the events of The Searcher, there are still secrets and grudges and reluctant alliances simmering in the little town, and Cal and his new friends simply have to live with that if they want to stay, or have to stay. That is a very interesting premise, and the book was still an absorbing and atmospheric read even if it lacks the snap and polish of the Dublin Murder Squad series.

Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg. This book has gotten a lot of attention for its depiction of a fat protagonist as a human being–and rightly so, because it’s honestly quite shocking how rarely that happens. But the parts that absorbed me the most were about art and relationships–being attracted to someone for their art, making art together, being better together but also a little bit less yourself. And while the road trip section of the book is compelling and well-paced, I couldn’t help but love the front end of the book that focused more on the dynamic of living in a group house in West Philly: the parties, the thermostat rules, the eclectic furniture and strange intimacies.

Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world by Naomi Klein. I had no idea that this was going to be a compulsively readable book that I would want to recommend to everyone. I picked it up out of gossipy interest. Having been guilty of confusing Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf until someone came up with an handy mnemonic device (“If Naomi be Klein, you’re doing fine” etc.), I thought it would be interesting to see how one well-known author negotiated the hassle of being mistaken for another feminist writer who has lately gone deep into conspiracy theories and antivaxxer nonsense. What this book actually does is take the inexplicable descent of Naomi Wolf and make it explicable. To understand why someone who once advised Democratic Party leaders would become a regular guest on the podcast of someone who once advised Republican Party leaders, Klein looks at the many, many failures of the state in recent decades–the failure to take sufficient measures to stop Covid, the failure to adapt to and mitigate climate change impacts, the failure to reckon with surveillance and how our data is manipulated by tech corporations, the failures of the myths of individualism and exceptionalism–and points to the ways those failures are exploited and/or misunderstood by conspiracy theorists. Klein has a lot of sympathy for her dopperganger, but she is also very clear and precise: climate change is real. corporate conspiracies to raise prices and consolidate wealth are real. vaccines causing autism or injecting trackers in your blood are not real. This book does so much to clarify and make sense of the chaos of the last few years. Reading it reminded me of the way I felt after reading Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister a few years into the Trump administration: I’d been there, I’d marched in the marches and voted in the elections, but so much had happened that it all felt like a confusing blur, and it was both comforting and galvanizing to have someone lay it all out logically.

I haven’t been sharing a whole lot of what we’ve read in my writing workshop, I suppose because last month it was mostly poetry (and then In the Dream House). But we read lots this month: Housemates as mentioned above, Pad by Steve Zultanski, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by George Perec, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Daniel Spoerri, and excerpts from Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck. We’re back on poetry now, winding down. It’s a tough pace to keep up, the reading and writing and peer reviewing and discussing, but I’ve loved the experience.

Some short pieces I loved:
I Tune My Body and My Brain to the Music of the Land by Natalie Shapero
A Blessing by Samyak Shertok
The Way by Cynthia Cruz

Elsewhere

Cathartic read: Beware the People Who Claim “America Isn’t Ready for a Black Woman President”

The only clarification I would make to this piece is that not only did pro-Trump protesters stand outside the convention center as the 2020 election ballots were counted in Philadelphia, but ALSO an enormous number of counter-protesters showed up and had a full-on socially-distanced dance party in the streets as their ballots were counted inside. I was there and I will absolute dance outside the convention center again for three days or however long it takes to count our legally submitted mail-in ballots this November.
Pennsylvania presidential election results could again take days to count [gift link]

The first time I ever heard of Hillbilly Elegy, it was because my nutritionist at the time was reading it with her book club. I expressed some dismay about the title, and she assured me that it was ironic, and that the book itself was a sensitive portrayal of a fragile community. I asked her if she had ever visited Appalachia, or anywhere in the southeast US. She said no.
I wonder how she feels now, as the author makes time in his busy political schedule of blocking environmental regulation by joining a presidential ticket.
Anyway!
Opinion: J.D. Vance’s book ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was a con job. Don’t let it slide
J.D. Vance Never Was and Never Will Be the Voice of Appalachia
Also, both relatedly and not:
Guess News Organizations Shouldn’t Have Fired All Their Fact-Checkers, Huh?

One of my writing workshop classmates wrote a piece about dating apps, which reminded me of an absolutely brutal passage in Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts that skewered how desperately we all try to express our unique selves, and how alike we all sound in the end. I didn’t love the book as a whole, but I still think about that passage. I went looking for a way to share it with my classmate and found an excerpt of that chapter on Bustle.

I did watch the new season of Bridgerton, which was fine, and as you might imagine I am finding all the discourse about “mixed weight relationships” to be inane and unworthy of notice. Yet I do really enjoy Lyz Lenz to absolutely roasting someone or something into cinders, so I appreciated when she elected “mixed weight relationships” as Dingus of the Week.

God, I love art drama. The ~aesthetics~!! These Picassos prompted a gender war at an Australian gallery. Now the curator says she painted them

Ugggghhh AI news, I guess, still:
When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind. (R&A IT Strategy & Architecture, May 27, 2024)
Opinion: What’s behind the AI boom? Exploited humans (LA Times, July 12, 2024)
ChatGPT Isn’t ‘Hallucinating’—It’s Bullshitting! (Scientific American, July 17, 2024)
Video game performers are going on strike over AI concerns. Here’s what to know (July 25, 2024)
The antithesis of the Olympics: Using AI to write a fan letter (NPR, July 30, 2024)

Minutiae

I started a second summer class while my first summer class is still in session, and it also happened to start during the week I attended a marketing conference and then flew to Memphis. This was pretty exhausting. But the weekend in Memphis was hot and sunny and my family spent most of it floating in my mom’s pool and cooking together and scream-laughing while playing tabletop games.

While I was away, I received a notice that my Xbox Gamepass membership would be increasing in price, and I cancelled the subscription in a fit of pique. Then I cancelled all my subscriptions. It felt so freeing. Instead of staying up too late watching not much at all, I put on some low music and pour a glass of sherry and read. I’ll renew one or two subscriptions at a time in the fall, since there are some TV shows and movies I do want to see, but in the meantime…. peace and quiet.
However, before my Netflix subscription lapsed, I did watch The Decameron and found it absolutely delightful. I haven’t read the source material but it came up a lot in my undergrad literature classes. There are a lot of obvious departures from the original to make the plot and characters fit into a suspenseful mini-series… but the vibes feel right, idk.

This whole month was a precarious balance of hectic and peaceful. I spent a few scorching weekend afternoons bobbing in a public pool with friends from my ballet class. I watched fireworks from one rooftop and a sunset from another. The latter rooftop party was attended mainly by librarians and library-adjacent folks, who as a group I could spend hours and hours talking to, and did. I lay on a picnic blanket with a wonderful friend and watched As You Like It in a bowl-shaped park that was once a reservoir. I spent one morning enjoying free dance workshops, and that same evening danced so hard at a wedding that my date split his pants. That wedding was a joyful occasion but also a beautiful and serene one under the trees along Wissahickon Creek. I went to see The Never-Ending Story on the big screen with some favorite movie-watching buddies. I made pitcher after pitched of iced tea. I cuddled my friend’s and family’s pets and brushed them with deshedding tools. I took one (1) nap and lived to tell the tale.