Reading Roundup: September 2024

Natural History by Andrea Barrett. I put this recent National Book Award winner on my library holds list as soon as I finished her 90s-era collection Ship Fever. This collection has all the elements I liked about the earlier work: elegant, understated storytelling; focus on how ordinary people asked and answered questions before the internet; female characters who may have extraordinary interests in science and discovery but who defy exceptionalism by being deeply embedded in their communities and families. This collection even had a few callbacks to characters from Ship Fever; some characters return, or their descendants do, and there is a detailed family tree in the back that only highlighted for me how distinct and well-drawn her characters are.

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz. I picked up this poetry collection to ruminate on water and land; her poems “The First Water is the Body” and “exhibits from The American Water Museum” in particular suggested ideas and images that I want to reflect on for my own work. (The latter strikes me as speculative poetry, not something I see everyday.) But the poems range across more topics than that, from love and sex (some of these poems are very horny) to basketball, addiction, language, and Mojave folklore. They are challenging poems, fierce and layered with meaning, which I sometimes needed to read twice to really apprehend.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà. An astonishing book that accumulates short narratives from the entities who live in and around a mountain village in the Pyrenees, which add up to a dazzling mosaic of life and death over time. Each chapter is narrated from a different point of view and often in a different literary style, which was enjoyable adventurous to read even though it usually took me a moment to find my footing in each new story. Sometimes the narrators are people who live in the nountains, including people who were children in an earlier chapter but are adults with children of their own in a later chapter. Sometimes the narrators are out of towners, who don’t see the mountain the same way. Sometimes the narrators are witches or literal water sprites. Sometimes the narrator is a dog, a roe deer, or a group of black chanterelles. The opening chapter is narrated by a thunderstorm, and a later chapter by the mountains themselves, with sketches to show how tectonic plate movement led to this formation. Like North Woods by Daniel Mason, the stories add up to create a rich landscape with many points of view, a geologic sense of time and a prey animal’s sense of urgency. It’s impressive, but it’s also fun–I haven’t enjoyed a book that much in a month or two.

Parade by Rachel Cusk. I think the audacious and destabilizing style of When I Sing put me in exactly the right headspace for this book, which I’ve seen described as brilliant and pretentious (but not at the same time). Each chapter (except one) juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated stories about unrelated groups of people, except there are a few unsettling similarities: this one is about a male painter called G and his wife, called only G’s wife; that one is narrated in the 1st person by an unnamed woman who attends a retrospective for a female sculptor also called G. Artists abound in these pages, and reluctant mothers, and wives who hate their husbands, and adult children who must visit their dying parents; their circumstances are similar not not alike enough to suggest continuity between the stories. The cities and countrysides where the stories take place often have no names, giving them a folktale-like generality: the idea of a museum, the idea of a mountain. Yet the book is capable of exquisitely sharp detail at times: a few characters get finely drawn physical details; I yearn to visit the lushly described hidden restaurant where named and unnamed chaacters have the philosophical dinner conversation of your nightmares; entire paragraphs are dedicated to the beauty and ruin of the mountain village. The narrative can’t quite do away with beauty, or awkwardness, or gender. But the inner conflicts and personal journeys of these characters, thought often quite painful and particular, could belong to anybody; their struggles as individuals blur together. The result reminded me of absurdism: Why do any of us do what we do? Why make art? Why marry or have children? I think I would enjoy rereading these stories with the endless iterations of G already in my mind, leaving the questions to speak louder.

The Morningside by Téa Obreht. I loved Inland, so I was excited to nab this book off my university’s new release shelf. I had no idea it would also fit nicely into my environmental reading challenge: The Morningside is an aging apartment building on the upper half of an island city, in an unnamed but not too distant future when the rising sea covers roads and homes on the lower half of the island, meat is forbidden, and people displaced by war and scarcity are shuttled in by the Repopulation Program to take shitty and dangerous jobs. The narrator is a young girl for the key events of this novel, and she has never known another kind of world–but her elders do, and the narrator pieces together from their stories (or refusal to tell stories) leads her to believe in an unseen world simmering just beneath the world she can see. In more ways than one, she is not entirely wrong about that.

Currently reading

Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead. I am making my way through this essay collection slowly; the writing is gorgeous, at times poetic, but the subject matter is often painful. Some essays are intentionally difficult to read; in one, the author incorporates words from his tribal language (Cree, I believe) without defining them; in another, he does define the first time he uses each word, but uses Cree syllabics for that word thereafter. It is challenging, but in a way that I think is meaningful–it shouldn’t be too easy for me, a random white lady, to be as spectator to his life. And it is rewarding; I appreciate his insight on land, on being human, and on sex and love (especially as a Two Spirit person).

The Book of Love by Kelly Link. I’ve had this book for many months, but it is a brick and I’ve been prioritizing books for the Environmental Reading Challenge. Still, when I realized I needed something less intense to read between essays in Making Love with the Land, I thought this would be the perfect choice. And it is–which is not to say that it is a light or inconsequential read, especially considering that it opens with a character mourning the death of three teenage friends, and then the friends themselves realizing they are dead. But it is an easier read, both because it is intriguingly spooky and because each POV chapter, though short, enjoys a more sprawling, spacious prose style than I am accustomed to from Link’s short stories. 

Elsewhere

I appreciated this fact checker’s take on Trump’s lies, and why they don’t make the news more often: he repeats the same lies over and over, so they aren’t actually news. Analysis: Trump is still telling lies he told eight years ago (CNN, September 3, 2024)

Ah, this is too bad. I used to sing the praises of eShakti in the days when I needed to dress nicely for work events; I loved being able to get conversation piece dresses customized to my measurements for a pretty reasonable price. But the company seems to have shut down. What’s Going on with eShakti: Delays, Money Back, and Alternatives PSA

Smaller, shorter books aren’t the only way to make publishing more climate friendly.

I love a scathing review, but this Current Affairs takedown of The Atlantic is magnificent. The Atlantic has been a platform for some fantastic writers, like Ed Yong and Ta-Nahesi Coates (both mentioned positively by this article, and both of whom have moved on), but it has also been a platform for reactionary nonsense cloaked in “just asking questions” faux-reasonable form, and it’s so satisfying to the mechanics of this kind of writing deconstructed and critiqued.

Why Are All the Characters in Sally Rooney’s Novels So Thin?

Hey don’t stop being careful out there: What Repeat COVID Infections Do to Your Body, According to Science (Self, September 24, 2024)

I said what I said about generative AI in my last post, but if that’s tl;dr, here’s this month’s news in terrible ideas. It’s long because I participated in an AI panel at Flights of Foundry which resulted a lot of great shared resources.
Some Thoughts on NaNoWriMo (Stone Soup, September 6, 2024)
Inside the Heated Controversy That’s Tearing a Writing Community Apart (Slate, September 11)
Challenging The Myths of Generative AI (Tech Policy, August 29. 2024)
GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation (September 3, 2024)
Forget jobs. AI is coming for your water (Context, September 5, 2024)
AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds (Crikey, September 3, 2024)
America Needs an Energy Policy for AI (Heatmap, September 12, 2024)
Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? (The Guardian, September 15, 2024)
OpenAI Hires Former Coursera Executive to Expand AI Use in Schools (Bloomberg, September 18, 2024)
A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots (The Washington Post, September 18, 2024)
Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change (MIT Technology Review, September 28, 2024)
Back from the dead: could AI end grief? – video (Guardian, September 24, 2024)
Will A.I. Be a Bust? A Wall Street Skeptic Rings the Alarm. (New York Times [gift link], September 23, 2024)
AI can generate recipes that can be deadly. Food bloggers are not happy (NPR, September 23, 2024)

Minutiae

Where did September go? I got back from the Adirondacks at the beginning of the month, and the very next weekend went to New Jersey to help my college BFF throw his birthday party. I started attending my fall class, which is light on writing assignments but rich with great readings in queer theory and urban studies. We have field trips now and then: to Rittenhouse Square to talk about public sex, to the William Way Center to look at their archive of queer Philadelphia history. I went to a few in-person talks, one on concrete and one poetry reading. I went to a few Fringe plays: one about learning ballet in your 40s, one Carmilla set in a nightclub with fierce dance numbers, one dance performance that led the audience the entire length of Cherry Street Pier. I staffed a table at the Delaware River Festival and attended as much as I could of the Flights of Foundry that same weekend; I spoke on a panel about AI and moderated a panel about climate solutions. I’ve been watching Slow Horses, Rings of Power, and My Brilliant Friend as they drop new episodes week to week. And I had a little feline roommate for two weeks while her people traveled. She was skeptical at first, but eventually made herself at home, and it was odd but pleasant to have a creature in the house for a short time.