Reading Roundup: January 2025

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. I loved Robinson’s delicate, elegiac Gilead, and I’ve been meaning to pick up more of her work. When I opened this novel and met its orphaned sisters, moving into the eclectic house built by their grandfather by the glacial Idaho lake that swallowed an entire train, I thought I knew what I was in for. I thought of We have always lived in the castle and settled in for a cozy read. I was extremely mistaken–although the early chapters, when the sisters are young and mostly making observations about their new circumstances. But a meandering, reflective consciousness rises up in the narrator–the way the lake rises and floods even their hillside house one spring–and delicately, elegiacally dismantles what a house is even for, and what it means to keep it in an unforgiving mountain town like Fingerbone.

Woodworm by Layla Martínez (translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott). This is a delicious, gory snack of a book: short, punchy, spooky. The chapters are alternately narrated by an old woman who lives in a deeply haunted house–not in a cute way–and her granddaughter, who is returning from being detained for a crime that she sort of didn’t commit. There are several mysteries at play–what did the granddaughter do? what happened to her mom? is the grandmother a witch? why is the house so hungry?–and only some of these questions get answered. But there’s nothing vague or unsatisfying about this story, where the shadows of the dead are terribly real and generational trauma can be seen and tasted.

Troubled Waters by Mary Annaïse Heglar. I’ve long admired Heglar’s essays on climate change and her work on climate writing projects like the erstwhile Hot Take newsletter and Not Too Late. The novel doesn’t have the confidence and nuance of her essays; it’s written in a sort of conventional “book club fiction” prose style that doesn’t do much for me. I appreciated aspects of the story more than I enjoyed reading it: I like that it’s an intergenerational story, that it depicts both climate anxiety and climate activism, that it focuses on southern Mississippi River (along with its oil industry and vulnerability to climate impacts), and that it centers Black activism and experience.

The Empusium: a health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk. I loved Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, so I was primed to relish The Empusium. And at first, it was a delicious read; Mieczyslaw is a winsomely naive young man who moves to a spa town in Silesia (ruled by Germany at the time of his story, now in Poland) to recover from vague ailments. His compatriots at the gentleman’s boarding house are charmingly eccentric, his promenades and pastries in the city center are appetizing, and the lakes and lush mountainside forest circling the town are mysterious and gloomy. All good fun. But this is also a novel of ideas; the boarding house gentlemen constantly argue about turn-of-the-20th-century ideas about art, gender, health, and politics, which is all kind of interesting from a humanist’s point of view but pretty tedious to read.

Utopias of the Third Kind by Vandana Singh. A slim collection of short stories and a few nonfiction pieces, including the title essay, which calls for utopic visions that are grounded in local geographic and cultural context and also reflect consciousness of planetary systems and connections.

I also started but did not yet finish a couple of books related to my research project: Underground Philadelphia: From Caves and Canals to Tunnels and Transit by Harry Kyriakodis and Joel Spivak, which is pretty interesting although not very well-written, and The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers by Martin Doyle.

Elsewhere

Everyone says that this Vulture article about Neil Gaiman’s pattern of abuse is a must-read. I agree, so if you’re out of clicks, then try searching for the URL under “I want to search the archive for saved snapshots” on archive.today.

I love this for book gossip reasons: The vapid world of America’s top book influencer Zibby Owens offers a tonic for the ennui of upscale strivers

Charmed by this Defector essay about visiting small art museums. It’s no news to me–I grew up loving the Brooks Museum, a small but mighty collection that used to reside in Memphis’s Overton Park, and when I used to travel for Penn Press I always made a point to stop by museums in the cities I visited. But it’s infectious to read this writer’s discovery.
P.S. Defector is an employee-owned website. You do have to log in to read their essays, but you can subscribe for free and they do not send you daily annoying emails like some billionaire-owned newspapers do.

I still haven’t seen the new Rohan movie and it’s been eons since I read the LOTR books, but I enjoyed this deep dive into the history of Eowyn’s character and the opportunities of adaptation.

What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction?

The Dos and Don’ts of Mutual Aid

Parable of the Sower Offers More Than Prophecy

Love a nice, succinct explainer. Here’s a nice, succinct explanation that the existence of billionaires is a policy failure. 

AI in the news:
AI is guzzling gas (HEATED, December 19, 2024)
Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies (CNN Business, January 3, 2025)
Schools Using AI Emulation of Anne Frank That Urges Kids Not to Blame Anyone for Holocaust (Futurism, January 18, 2025)
AI set to fuel surge in new US gas power plants (Financial Times, January 13, 2025)
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem (LA Review of Books, January 19, 2025)
The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It (Wired, January 25, 2025)
A lengthy exploration of what DeepSeek means for OpenAI: Deep Impact (Where’s Your Ed At, January 29, 2025)

Minutiae

I rang in the first day of the new year by going on a slow, chilly walk in a wetlands park with my gentleman and a few of our friends. Afterward, a few others joined us at my place for the traditional lucky foods (black-eyed peas, collards, cornbread, etc.). It was my first year making them without butter (since I can no longer tolerate dairy) or ham hock (since many of my peers are vegetarian), and it wasn’t too bad. Some dishes more successful than others. There were few leftovers, anyway.

January was snowy and icy, which canceled some of my social plans: a fondue party, a museum hangout with my writing group. The snow didn’t hamper my environmental stewardship committments, however. I’m taking on a more central role in the care of a rain garden in a schoolyard near me, so I’ve been in meetings and sending emails about that although we are months away from planting. I spent MLK Day pulling invasive vines off of trees and out of the ground at my favorite park; about 80 people came out despite the snow on the ground and ice on the lake, and it was galvanizing to work together on small piece of the much larger puzzle of tending a park. On another weekend, I took a shuttle to Cobbs Creek for the first time and trudged around in the snow picking up trash and taking photos of the icy creek.

I’ve been comfort replaying Stardew Valley. I reached perfection in one playthrough and immediately started a new one. On the new year, I fell into a rabid XCOM 2 binge-play and spent about a week powering up my army against the alien dictatorship. I dropped it just as suddenly.

There was a bit of a lull in television until my beloved Severance returned, so I watched movies. Nightbitch was not bad. I loved the gallery scene near the end, and didn’t mind the ending, which I thought offered the narrator some resolution for her desire to be seen and understood as a mother, lover, animal, and creator. (Another writer I admire disagrees strongly, and honestly, I think their assessment is also smart and fair!) My Old Ass was funny and sweet. Lee, about the photographer and professional fascinating person Lee Miller, was pretty good, and strangely timely for a nearly hundred-year-old story. I rewatched the new-ish Dune, which surprisingly hits very different now–the chosen one plot feels less harmlessly sci fi and more uncomfortable–and then started watching Dune 2 in short increments.

I started a new class this month–the last course credit for my second graduate degree, apart from a thesis writing credit next fall. This class is really more of an independent study with classmates, so I’m slowly working my way through the notes and sources I amassed in 2024. Time to get this project moving.