Reading Roundup: November 2024

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt. This is such a short book–more of a novella or a long short story–that I read it all on the drive from Philadelphia to the Poconos. And it was a delicious read, deceptively light and frothy, with a connoisseur’s attention to fine material things and a con man’s flair for misdirection.

I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol. This is the memoir of one woman’s month in Paris enjoying food, sex, and friendship; I picked it up because I wanted unctuous passages about baguettes and French butter and seduction, and I suspected it might make me want to run away to Paris myself. I was surprised by how anxious this book made me. It takes place during the so-called Hot Vax Summer, which I remember very well. Like the author in Paris, I went out to drink up sunlight and shared meals and outdoor activities with a kind of desperate thirst; I too was testing the waters of dating after more than a year of no contact, hungry for touch yet strangely out of touch with my own desires. Going through this transition in Paris is only superficially sexier than doing this anywhere else in the world, it turns out. I did find the book a breezy and mostly pleasant read. I appreciate the author’s mission to represent the fullness and satisfaction of a life without marriage or children, which (as she says) you don’t see too much of on the page or screen. There is plenty of joy and contentment and other shades of pleasure in this memoir, but there’s a sense of loneliness and melancholy too–and, while that is very much the flavor of 2021 in my memory, I wasn’t ready to relive it.

Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River by Beth Kephart. A strange but compelling read. The author set out to write an autobiography of a river, featuring lots of short prose fragments in which the river (as a first person “I” narrator”) reflects on its journey from a natural body of water to a channelled, bridged, and horribly polluted river to the slightly cleaner, healthier river today. I don’t love having a river as an I-narrator, and this river is a little too attached to specific humans (would a river really mourn George Washington? would it recognize or care about individual people?), but by the end I had to concede that it was very moving to see the river as a being sickened by and recovering from mistreatment. And I like the structure: Each fragment has an evocative title and a short footnote connecting the lyrical “autobiography” text to historical and ecological fact.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. My gentleman recommended this book to fulfill the one category of the environmental reading challenge I hadn’t yet completed: A book you hate or disagree with. And I do disagree with this book, although it’s complicated. I was really moved by the author’s description of decades of climate protest, beginning in the 90s; I am relatively new to environmentalism, and it is humbling to consider the longer context. I do not disagree with the author’s fundamental premise that acts of property destruction should not be consider acts of violence–and if they are, they are not more violent than the corporate emissions that cause global warming and extreme weather. But it is a jarring read, not because of its central argument but because of the dripping contempt with which the author writes about nonviolent movements and their figureheads, the frankly weird historical analysis of other civil rights movements, successful or not, and the zigzaggy logic that doesn’t quite hang together. I heard the film is good, though.

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister is pleasingly weird, atmospheric, and unsettling all the way through. I was reminded at times of Ghost Wall, lush in its descriptions of the environment where hapless characters attempt to live anachronistically off the land, and The Library at Mount Char, with its odd family of recluses and their rituals. But The Bog Wife is its own story, deeply mired (ha!) in the ecology of the West Virginia mountain bogs where it takes place, preoccupied with the festering resentments of its own too-close family, and blindsided by betrayals both supernatural and mundane.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken. A strange, melancholy novella about the zombie apocalypse–told from the perspective of a zombie. I picked this up after it won the Le Guin prize for fiction this year, since I really enjoyed the last two winners (Arboreality and House of Rust). This one didn’t give me as much to chew on, pardon the expression. It felt more like a collection of odd images and tableaux than a story or even a well-considered thought experiment.

I drank up The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue fast, like one of the too-sweet cocktails you drink in college. It is a fun read, thanks in part to the sure hand of the narrator, who is reflecting on events that took place in her early 20s from the safety of her 30s, married with a baby on the way. She is forgiving but realistic about her younger self, admiring but not envying the dingy glamor of the life she made with her best friend. It’s just the sort of book you want to distract yourself from your final projects: big feelings, big drama, but no one’s life gets ruined forever.

I didn’t mean to read Liars by Sarah Manguso in one day, but I did have the day off and it is difficult to put down. Written in short fragments that reminded me of The Dept. of Speculation, there are few breaks as this story barrels from a doomed couple’s first meeting to their divorce. The fragmented style is great for divorce stories; all the hurts and grievances accrue page by page until it’s hard to see why they were together in the first place.

I’ve been reading The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft on and off all month. I am enjoying it: there’s mystery, there’s ecology in the protected Bialowieza Forest between Poland and Belarus, and there are interesting textured layers about translation (the story takes place in a summit of translators for one particular prize-winning author, and is framed as a record written by one of those translators and translated into English by another). For the same reason, it’s slow going; the English translator describes her colleague’s sentences as “haunted houses,” complicated by traces of other languages, and the writing is intentionally overwrought in a way that is fun to read and think about but sometimes makes me feel like I must reread the paragraph I’ve just finished to understand it.

Elsewhere

What to Do Before the Trump Administration Takes Office in January

Two things can be true at the same time:
The Republicans’ Project 2025 is Disastrous For Books (November 6, 2024)
Books like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘1984’ are flying off the shelves after the presidential election (CNN, November 7, 2024)

But hey, at least the literary scandal discourse was juicy this month:
Leaving Cormac: Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy
An Interview With the Vanity Fair Writer Whose Cormac McCarthy Scoop Went Viral for All the Wrong Reasons

This richly reported story about a lawsuit between “clean girl” influencers interested me, not because of the aesthetic (bc what is that?) but because this is one logical outcome of making yourself a brand, and basing your social media brand on a brand of consumer products.

AI in the news:
Heretic directors say A24 supported their anti-generative AI position (AV Club, November 5, 2024)
ChatGPT is transforming peer review — how can we use it responsibly? (Nature, November 5, 2024)
US Unions Take on Artificial Intelligence (Jacobin, November 8, 2024)
Is AI dominance inevitable? A technology ethicist says no, actually (The Conversation, November 8, 2024)
Burn It Down: A License for AI Resistance (Inside Higher Ed, November 12, 2024)
AI Won’t Protect Endangered Languages (The Dial, November 14, 2024)
The US Patent and Trademark Office Banned Staff From Using Generative AI (Wired, November 19, 2024)
ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom (Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, November 22, 2024)

Minutiae

I don’t know what to tell you. It was a shitty month to be an American.

Here’s what was kind of good. I started the month with a short weekend away in the Poconos. We wore sweaters against the chill and read books in front of the fire and looked at the autumn sun glittering on cold water. So that was nice. I spend one morning tidying up a little park in my neighborhood, even though our eyes were watering with the smell of wildfires from New Jersey. I put my garden to bed, better late than never.

It’s been awhile since I had a publication to promote. I wrote this fragmented flash essay a few years ago, with the last embers of my fury and heartbreak over being dumped during lockdown. My class liked it, but it took awhile to find a home for it. Now, I actually wish I had held onto it for a little longer and revised it one last time post-election. Anger and grief had receded into the distant past; now they feel real again, although for very different reasons.
Metamorphoses in Reverse | South 85 Journal

I joined a virtual writing group to encourage me to make time every day to work toward my projects. And I did, except for two days: Election Day, when all I could do was scroll, and the day after, when all I could do was sleep. I had a crisis of faith; why bother write at all? Isn’t there something more important I could be doing? And the answer is yes, actually, but writing is important too. Creativity is important. Being in touch with beauty and feeling and meaning is important.

So I wrote. I went to a zine fest to get ideas for my final project; it was overwhelming, yet energizing, to see so many people writing and making art. I sat in on writing sessions with strangers, with classmates, with my partners. One evening, I went with my class to a gorgeous old Victorian in West Philly that the owner had transformed into an art studio and library. It was lush with pillows and textiles and art on the walls, and there was food and wine. My class joined a second class from another university, along with some friends and neighbors of the workshop leaders; there was a short lecture about fantasy architecture, or imagining spaces and places where you can grow and thrive, and then small groups where we brainstormed and shared experiences, and then a companionable half hour during which we chatted and drew our own fantasy spaces. I drew my own block but curved, with wide tree-lined sidewalks, green stormwater infrastructure, and a stream instead of a street.

I watched a lot of television, I admit. Many days I just wanted to turn my brain off after work and ballet and dinner. I started watching Game of Thrones for the first time, from the beginning. I found it pretty absorbing, even during the sprawling early seasons when there are so many armies to check in with. (But then, I also like Rings of Power, which many criticized for those very qualities.) It’s interesting to think about what has changed since the show first aired–in the 2010s, an era of political hope and grim cultural fascination with sexual violence–and what has stayed the same. I watched weekly shows as they aired: the final season of the beautiful My Brilliant Friend, which I can’t quite bring myself to finish. Disclosure, which I loathed and yet kept returning to, because if you put a stunning 50something actress in a stunning coat, give her some family drama and a little light murder, then film her unraveling elegantly in a series of beautifully lit rooms, I will watch. I’m mad that it works on me. I dutifully tuned in weekly for The Franchise, which I did not like, and for the return of Shrinking, Silo, and Bad Sisters, which I did. There’s a lot on television to distract oneself with. But I did read, too, even if mostly short books. And I wrote.