Reading roundup: December 2024

OkPsyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro is a surreal, melancholy novella that follows a trans woman in her 40s, aching with loneliness after divorce and losing parental custody, trying and fearing to make friends and meet dates. There are surprising dreamlike moments that somehow feel natural to the world the unnamed narrator inhabits: she has conversations with people who aren’t there, receives a boyfriend in a box that she keeps unassembled under her bed, and receives advice from mysterious and seemingly magical mentors. Rather than feeling out of place, these speculative elements feel earned and meaningful to the narrator’s introspective journey, which ultimately tilts toward hope and finding connection.

Hum by Helen Phillips. This book takes place in a near future that’s like ours but a little bit worse: advertising is even more integrated into daily life, same-day deliveries of unnecessary purchases is even easier and more pervasive, and humanoid robots take over many tasks like driving, medical procedures, and even therapy. It’s clearly a bad world, but the book seems ambivalent or unclear about what it wants to say about it. The main character, a former programmer who made herself obsolete and a mother who yearns to give her children a less algorithmic experience of life, ends the book with more or less the same conflicts she begins with. There’s not quite enough plot to make it a thrilling journey, nor enough depth to make it a reflective read.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I was excited to read this slim book, because Braiding Sweetgrass was such a transformative experience for me, and also because I am obsessed with serviceberry trees. Serviceberry (or shadbush, or Juneberry) was once a popular choice for sidewalk trees in Philly, and every June I start eyeballing them for berries, which taste like a blueberry touched with almond essence. Unfortunately, most of the serviceberries near me are afflicted with cedar rust, and inedible. Despite that I liked the central image of a tree as the center of a gift economy: from free light and air, the tree makes an appealing gift for people (who cultivate the trees) and birds (who disseminate the seeds) and other creatures who enjoy a ripe berry. The book is really more of a long essay, illustrated and beautifully packaged to be ideal for holiday gifting, which would be a bit cynical except that the proceeds are being donated toward land preservation. And it would be a nice gift, perhaps for someone eco-curious in your life who doesn’t already think about the carbon cycle and ecology when they see a tree.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. What a delicious, crackling surprise of a novel. It was exactly what I wanted to read in the spiraling final days of the semester. The first third sizzles with meanness and the tense, miserly way the main character stewards her home and her family relationships. The middle third pushes through all that tension and bursts into a puddle of lust. The final third is heartwrenching. I loved it and I would read it again in a heartbeat.

As Far as the Light Reaches: a life in ten sea creatures by Sabrina Imbler. This is the kind of memoir I can get into: each chapter alternates passages from the author’s life with information and anecdotes about sea creatures including the Pacific octopus, sand striker, butterflyfish, and whales. I’d read an essay just about the creatures in Imbler’s careful, evocative prose, but their personal stories work so well to draw out themes and ideas: how we think about predators, why we apply taxonomy and classification to people and animals, what salp colonies and cuttlefish can teach us about queerness and community.

I read Event Factory by Renee Gladman in one sitting on a long flight, which in retrospect is not the best way to experience this novella–it’s more like prose poetry, nebulous and allusive yet semantically dense. Perhaps, like the narrator, I felt a little wrongfooted in the world of Ravicka–an imagined city in a series of books that seem to be unequivocally beloved by writers I admire. On the other hand, this book shares some of the formal qualities of The Employees, which I loved, so I think I will need to revisit and take my time.

In contrast, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell by Sy Montgomery was a fantastic book to read in the airports and on the planes–not to mention in the weird unseelie week between holidays at the end of the year. The book covers about two years of time, starting shortly before the pandemic, when the author and her illustrator friend started volunteering at a turtle rescue in their home state. The rescue organization picks up sick or injured turtles–usually damaged by cars, but sometimes by dogs or ammunition–and even some pet turtles who are no longer wanted. They give every turtle a chance at life, even if a vet would recommend euthanasia; in quite a few instances, with time and pain management and plenty of hydration and a few creative assistive devices, the turtles make a full recovery. (Sometimes not, so I did cry a little on the plane.) As they care for the turtles during covid lockdown, the author considers what turtles can teach us about the passage of time. Most turtles can live for many decades; it’s not just that they live long lives but that they don’t age, per se, so the life of a 100yo turtle is not that different from a 50yo turtle. And they are remarkably adaptive and able to bounce back from many injuries, although they are not always able to in the suburban and highway-skirted environments that pop up around their ancestral wetlands. And so a creature who might have lived 150 years can be snuffed out by a passing car.
This book makes a good companion to Road Ecology by Ben Goldfarb, which I read earlier this year: where Road Ecology takes a big picture view of roads and wildlife, Of Time and Turtles zooms in on a specific region, its specific turtle ecologies (often suburban ponds and wetlands endangered by development), and one specific team of carers.

And at the beginning of the month I finished The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft, which is absolutely bonkers. In the end, I enjoyed it and admired all the different threads held taut by the author–the translation within a translation, the allusions to diminishing biodiversity, the implications of both on the ecosystem of creativity–even though they did not braid together in a satisfying way.

A few poems I liked:
Fade Away by Amorak Huey
Plant Parenthood by Emily Skaja
I Went Out to See All The Downed Trees by Sasha Debevec-McKenney

Elsewhere

On December 3, a number of LGBTQ+ writers published articles with the title “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.” Here is the master list if you want to read them.

This is kind of a heartening perspective on the cabinet of blunders: A Political Reckoning Will Come for Trump, Too (NYT gift link while it lasts)

This is a long, long newsletter (the estimate says 42 minutes!) that I read in stages, but I kept coming back to it because it felt very true and paired well with the shitty future world imagined in Hum. Ed Zitron does what I have to call a close reading of terrible tech experiences–the slow, belabored, and overly branded process of setting up a new computer or visiting certain websites–and connects them to his theory of the Rot Economy, which he differentiates from Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification. I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to curb the time I spend on rotten apps; this newsletter may help me finally get there.
Never Forgive Them

This is the sort of thing I would have read or even written when I was still a food writer, and whenever I encounter things like it, I feel grateful that I can just read about food without having to do work.
How cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger became the scents of winter holidays, far from their tropical origins

This I could not write, but enjoyed and appreciated as a collard greens lover: How Collard Greens Became a Symbol of Resilience and Tradition

I always love a scathing book review. Here’s several!

AI in the news:
UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges (November 16, 2024)
Why We Don’t Know AI’s True Water Footprint (Tech Policy Press, November 26, 2024)
The Terminator’s Vision of AI Warfare Is Now Reality (Jacobin, December 6, 2024)
Godot Isn’t Making it [about the failure of “advanced AI” to appear] (Where’s Your Ed At, December 3, 2024);
To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT (Boston Review, December 10, 2024)
Air Pollution and the Public Health Costs of AI (Caltech, December 10, 2024)
There’s No Shortcut To Publishing A Book (Defector, December 12, 2024)
ChatGPT is bullshit (Ethics and Information Technology, June 2024)

Minutiae

The first half of December was a blur. I worked on my final project and presentation. I graded midterms, and then two weeks later I graded finals. (Accelerated course!) I had changed from brand name to generic synthetic thyroid hormone earlier in the fall, and by December I got so tired that I stopped going to dance classes or even leaving the house some days; at my binannual appointment, I learned that my body simply wasn’t absorbing the generic as efficiently and I needed to increase my dose. (Thanks, health insurance, for refusing to cover the meds I need!) I struggled to meet all my responsibilities in and out of work, but I more or less did it, and then I got to go on vacation.

The second half of December was a fog, but in a good way. I took a few days off before winter break–this is the blessing of being university staff, we get a paid week off between holidays–and went to my hometown to hang out with my family. We spent a few unhurried days making excellent lunches and decorating terrible gluten-free dairy-free cookies and playing games, and I never had any idea what day of the week it was.

For the last few years I have done a whole post about my intention for the new year. I won’t do that this year because I haven’t zeroed in on one specific intention. There are so many things I want to accomplish. I’ll probably finish my second graduate degree by the end of 2025, culminating with an essay collection I hope to publish. I plan to apply to writing retreats in the summer and fall to help get this done. I’ve missed environmental stewardship, and I have ambitions to be more regular and intentional about my volunteer work. I hope to finally pay off my credit card debt, which was started and sustained by vet bills. I’d like a different job and a new apartment. I suppose, if anything, my word for 2025 might be ambition. There is a lot to worry about in the coming year(s), and I feel exhausted already. But I also feel hungry to change my life.