Reading Roundup: August 2024

The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill. A slim, creepy, and evocative novella about the tolls that art and love can take–on the ones that make them and the people around them. I got interested in the crane wife story back when CJ Hauser’s wonderful essay was going viral: the appeal, in the folktale, cranes are understood to be beautiful, elegant, and free, and it is a sin to trap them. In The Crane Husband, cranes are predators, violent and hungry and unpredictable, and it is the crane who entraps and injures and makes demands of the household. In some ways, the crane is associated less with the wild than with the unnamed conglomerate that owns all the land around the narrator’s home, and farms with robots and drones. The beauty and elegance here is in the gestures of tenderness between the narrator and her little brother, in the lessons she learned from her deceased father, and in the wildly inventive tapestries created by her weaver mother.

The Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. Another slim, spooky book. It takes place in north England, not far from the eastern shore, where a group of students in an experimental archaeology class have set up a camp to try to reenact the lifestyle of ancient Britons of the Iron Age. The narrator, Silvie, is the teenage daughter of working class parents whose father is obsessed with ancient Briton heritage, and whose self-taught foraging and hunting/fishing skills have secured him a place as a guide alongside the graduate students and professor who are basically LARPing in the wilderness. It’s fun and games to the students, but deadly serious to Silvie’s father and, consequently, to Sylvie. In such a short length, this book elegantly raises questions about what can be considered essentially British–but it is also, necessarily, a book about eking out survival day by day, although several characters point out that, however, daunting, the sheep-grazing moors and small hilltop woods would have looked radically different when the Celts were foraging for bilberries and burdock root. The book reminded me a bit of A New Wilderness by Diane Cook for that reason: both make the case that there’s a good reason we developed modern methods of cooking and medicine and clothing, because making your own out of the fruits of the earth is arduous and sometimes dangerous. And in both books, danger comes not only from the environment but from social hierarchies and human fallibility.

American Ex-wife by Lyz Lenz. I have never particularly wanted to be married. Even when I was a child, my favorite Barbie and Ken maintained separate lives; if I ever put a wedding dress on her, she never quite made it through their vows before respectfully dissolving the engagement. Yet I am, for some reason, deeply drawn to tales of divorce! I’ve enjoyed Lenz’s newsletter for the last few years, which includes essays drawn from this book, and I devoured the book in one weekend even though it doesn’t have as much humor and sparkle as the newsletter. The book is more serious for a reason: beyond the author’s personal stories and the stories shared with her by other women, it comes armed with studies, statistics, and scholarship to demonstrate that the institution of marriage is unequal by design.

White Magic by Elissa Washuta. A strange, layered collection of memoiristic essays. I struggled to find my way at first, I think because I kept expecting the book to be something it isn’t. I thought it would be about magic, that is to say I thought it would explore and critique how modern witchy practices are represented and influenced and exploited and all that. I hoped it would also be about the natural world, as the jacket copy alludes. But it is memoir, so it is always and only about the author; in this case, it is about a span of the author’s life that was defined by heartbreak, loneliness, addiction, and recovery. That is not a criticism; once I accepted the terms, I could roll with the twists and turns of these essays. My favorites included “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and Shades of Death” with is about growing up in North Jersey, where wildness coexists alongside suburbia and black bears can just amble into your yard. I loved “Oregon Trail II for Windows 95/98/ME & Macintosh,” in which the author revisits the classic game and ruminates on how it does and does not echo her experience of moving to Seattle, near where her Cowlitz Tribe ancestors once lived. And I was moved by the meandering progress of “Centerless Universe,” where the author has a writing residence in a strange small office high above the Fremont Bridge, where she intended to write about the serpent spirit a’yahos but became really interested in the movements of the bridge and canal, and the reshaping of the land around the water. Throughout each of these are glimpses of unsatisfying relationships with men at various points on a scale from “ain’t shit” to “actively dangerous.” The men haunting the essays made them harder to read, but also relatable–who among us hasn’t squandered the hours of opportunity by overthinking relationships?

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez sounded like a fascinating read, from its intriguing title to its jacket copy promising political and literal storms. And it was interesting enough to finish; I was particularly moved by the chapters that dealt with Hurricane Maria and its aftermath, and the way some of its characters envision a better society rising from its ashes. That is really a very small fraction of the book, and it is wrapped in several other books involving family drama and conventional romance. This made for a lot of jarring tonal shifts, inexpertly handled, and the writing itself wasn’t gripping despite the high stakes.

The Overstory by Richard Powers. As I explained to my ecofiction book club, I read this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel expecting it to fall under the “books you hate or disagree with” category in our 2024 reading challenge. I figured I would enjoy reading it–I know Powers to be an exquisite writer with a particular gift for sensory detail–but that I would find its treatment of humanity distasteful.
I did not hate it. I was mesmerized by the opening stories that introduce us to each of the main characters, and loved the image of the aspen colony to explain how these individuals were connected at the some unseen root…. even though those connections did not fully materialize by the end, at least not for all the specified characters, and even though most of the characters were exiled from conventional society for various reasons. The chapters about eco-activism were gripping, even though the supernatural story behind one woman’s conversion was flimsy and not well done. (You could say that about many of his female characters; they tend to be completely selfish or completely selfless, particularly toward the male characters who swear to protect them.) And of course I loved all the tree facts, particularly deployed in a lyrical and expressive way. This book will not help you understand people, but it will help you love trees.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. I’ve had this book on my shelf for awhile, and it seemed like a good follow-up on the matter of trees. Each of its short chapters offer an accessible, gossipy look at how trees create or react to their ecosystems. Much of the information was not new to me–I may have learned it in Tree Tender training or from The Overstory–but it was always interesting to hear about how the author, a forester, observed tree behaviors in his own arboreal experience. I found myself referencing it more than once while I walked around a damp coniferous forest in the Adirondacks.

My summer classes ended this month, but we squeezed in some interesting reads at the very end: Discipline Park by Toby Altman was a visual and intellectual feast, Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley includes challenging but evocative poems.

Some short poems and prose I loved:
End of December by Ashjan Hendi
Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachael K. Jones
At the Museum of Empress Livia’s Garden Room by Pimone Triplett
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island
by Nibedita Sen

Elsewhere

This is not new, but I just heard about it and it’s cool: Star Wars translated into indigenous Ojibwe language

This is a joyful read, and literary-focused enough that I wanted to include it here rather than the climate roundup: The Imitative Impulse: Henry David Thoreau and the meaning of metaphor

Metaphor is both an explanatory literary device but also the most profound truth. Taking a walk is like living and also is living. If we know both, we can experience rightly (“live intentionally,” as your yoga teacher might say today). 

Why Does Every Netflix Show Look the Same? An Investigation.

AI, again:
First Drafts In The AI Era (Rhetorica, August 9, 2024)
The same author, Mark Watkins, also has some good ideas and resources for instructions wanting to help their students navigate disinformation: Our Era of Generated Deception (Rhetorica, August 23, 2024)
Students Worry Overemphasis on AI Could Devalue Education (Inside Higher Ed, August 9, 2024)
Mayoral candidate vows to let VIC, an AI bot, run Wyoming’s capital city (Washington Post [gift link], August 19, 2024)
What is ‘model collapse’? An expert explains the rumours about an impending AI doom (The Conversation, August 19, 2024)
This is a very good interactive look at model collapse, and a great companion to Ted Chiang’s wonderful Chat GPT is a Blurry Jpg of the Web essay: When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself (New York Times [gift link], August 25, 2024)

Minutiae

Last month I cancelled my Xbox Game Pass subscription and several of my streaming services, and I continue to really enjoy how that restructured my evenings. I read a lot, as you can see. I did enjoy a little TV and gaming, though. I started watching We Are Lady Parts with a friend, which is incredible. SO funny, and the music slaps. I kept falling asleep during A Discovery of Witches, which I read a long time ago; it has enough library stuff and magic stuff to intrigue, but perhaps not enough to fascinate, and the central romance is a real throwback to the Edward Cullen style of watching you sleep and trying to protect you by controlling your movements. I started playing Kentucky Route Zero, a quiet and melancholy puzzle.

I felt like a video game character myself when I donned a black mask and wandered around in Life and Trust, three hours and five floors of a theatrical experience that evoked stories about Faustian bargains through dance and exquisite detailed set design. As I walked around picking up letters left in lush boudoirs or peering into the mysterious contents of bank safes, I was reminded of What Remains of Edith Finch–especially with the slight sense of menace hanging over every dark hallway and silent interaction–and Strange Horticulture, mostly through the apothecary and spooly woods vibes.

I wrapped up my two summer courses at the beginning of the month and had a little time to catch my breath before the fall term began at the end of the month. On various nights, I went to a rooftop gathering at sunset, had a cozy dinner party at a friend’s house, and played truth-or-dare Jenga on a louche night out with my partner. With some of my fellow watershed stewards, I paddled a kayak down the Poquessing and out onto the Delaware, which is very wide and tidal where we were, north of the waterfront I usually visit but south of Trenton. The water rose and fell like the ocean, and we were just sitting on top of it on our wide flat pieces of plastic. In the last week of the month, a grad school friend dropped in for a short visit. It was so hot in Philadelphia that week, and then I went north to a surprisingly chilly weekend in the Adirondacks. It rained off and on, but there were streams and lakes and bogs and cool damp forests to explore, lots of fungus and wildflowers to identify, and a few wild encounters with birds and newts.