Reading Roundup: February 2025

I guess that when the going gets tough, I read. Fortunately, the heat at my library was fixed and an avalanche of holds came in at once.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield. I loved this moody, melancholy, rain-drenched book. It centers around three sisters after the death of their father, an architect who specialized in building homes for a flooded world–even before the sea level rose and overtook a London-esque city, forcing everyone to crowd into high rises and use boats to navigate between work and home. The prose is lyrical, evocative, and confident enough to hold the family drama and the speculative future plots together as the sisters work dead-end jobs, fall in love for the first time, try to hold a shaky relationship together, and so on. Just a gorgeous, sexy, and meditative book about life in the rain apocalypse. With a spooky, suspenseful undercurrent that becomes a dangerous wave.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. I love Sofia Samatar, and this novella is no exception, although it is subtantially different both in location (a fleet of generation ships, traveling through space and mining space rocks) and in tone (heavily allegorical, to the point that the two POV characters don’t have names). It is a rich, satisfying allegory, which feels very much like a real and lived-in world even as you can see glimpses of the past and present. For example, there is a pretty brutal critique of higher education here, which reminded me a bit of what we discussed in my Environmental Humanities class last spring–and, indeed, the acknowledgments shout out The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, which is one of the books we read.

Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. This short book is more of a long essay about the author’s visits to Homer, Alaska. It’s similar in style to her fragmented essay “A Clear Presence” which explores LA’s racial history alongside its swimming pools; we discuss that essay every year in the class I TA, and it’s a stunner every time. Likewise, Borealis reflects on what it feels for the author (biracial and queer) to move around various indoor and outdoor spaces in Alaska, putting her own experiences in conversation with artists, historians, and writers living and dead. It gives the essay a sort of collaged feel–and actually, she works on collage art during her self-imposed retreat and return to Homer, and reflects on how that art form works and doesn’t work to capture a feeling or place. She also references “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris” by George Perec, and you can see how she uses some of Perec’s tactics: describing snatches of conversations overhead in Homer, what people are wearing, what animals she sees. I loved this essay for all its references–even the ones I wasn’t familar with, like Lorna Simpson’s paintings of glaciers–even though there’s something intentionally off-putting about that kind of work, especially when the author admits to simply being bored looking at all this nature and open space.

James by Percival Everett. A propulsive read. It’s been decades since I read any Mark Twain (despite or because of growing up alongside the Mississippi River) and I didn’t remember the story of Huckleberry Finn very well, but you don’t need to in order to appreciate the work that this book does to overturn and reimagine the inner life of a Black character originally created by a white man to prove a point.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger. I really enjoyed this, and found it accessible and readable even when it gets into plant physiology on a molecular level. Makes a good counterpart to books like The Hidden Life of Trees, which anthropomorphizes plants, and Braiding Sweetgrass, which connects botany and ecology to animism and indigenous folklore. The Light Eaters is neither anthropomorphic nor animist, but shines with love and appreciation for the weirdness and wildness of plants as their own form of life.

I am about halfway through Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which won the Booker Prize last year, and which is so achingly gorgeous. It covers a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station–for an artificial value of day, as the station rotates around the earth 16 times in 24 hours. As their day unspools in mostly mundane tasks, made utterly strange by the absence of gravity and planetary time, the narrative reels woozily from past to present, with each astronaut reflecting on their lives and what it means for them to be in space. It’s thoughtful and moving, and accompanied by ecstatic paeans to the physical Earth spinning below. Its national borders aren’t visible from space but both its natural beauty and its anthropogenic scars are.

Elsewhere

I always enjoy seeing Andrea Long Chu eviscerate authors who try to build a brand on intellectually shaky foundations, and it’s been a delight to see book people celebrate her roast of NYT columnist Pamela Paul. If you’re paywalled, it’s worth looking it up on archive.today.

Interesting read on branding–why does it feel like every product or service is designed to look playful and nonthreatening?

‘Gulf of America’ Order Has Mapmakers Completely Lost

Why am I crying about this anglerfish that found herself in shallow waters??

I love art heist stories, so I can help but be a little delighted to learn that upwards of 85 public artworks in Philadelphia have gone missing.

I really enjoyed getting 28 Days of Black History in my inbox this month. Every year I forget that I signed up, and then I’m surprised when these short readable missives appear. Here is a link to their end-of-month summary, which this year focused on labor issues intersecting with women’s, disability, and queer rights.

Unsurprising but useful to see the numbers laid out like this: ‘Explicit’ Sex Claims ‘Exaggerated,’ Black and LGBTQ+ Characters Overwhelmingly Targeted, New Book Ban Analysis Finds

AI in the news:
Purely AI-generated art can’t get copyright protection, says Copyright Office (The Verge, January 30, 2025)
AI is bad for the environment, and the problem is bigger than energy consumption (Science X, January 29, 2025)
DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all (MIT Technology Review, January 31, 2025)
DeepSeek claims to have cured AI’s environmental headache. The Jevons paradox suggests it might make things worse (The Conversation, January 31, 2025)
OpenAI Says DeepSeek Used Its Work Without Permission to Create an AI That’s Stealing Its Job, Which Is Blatantly Hypocritical Since That’s Exactly What It Did to Human Artists (Futurism, January 29, 2025)
AI’s Illusion of Reason (Rhetorica, February 9, 2025)
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US (Wired, February 11, 2025)
Is AI making us stupider? Maybe, according to one of the world’s biggest AI companies (The Conversation, February 13, 2025)
Utilities want to power Big Tech’s AI ambitions with natural gas. These are the data centers they’re betting on. (Business Insider, February 13, 2025)

Minutiae

One of the most personal pieces I have ever published came out this month.
Commencement | phoebe journal

I felt busy during this short month, and when I went back to look at my calendar, I was surprised to see how much time I had been able to make to nurture friendships and buoy my spirit. I spent the first weekend of the month in New Jersey with my chosen family, which was relaxing and nourishing in ways that I needed to recharge and face The Horrors. I hosted a small fondue party which crowded into my small kitchen and filled my little house with laughter. I went to see art, danced ballet to love songs for my studio’s annual Valentine’s party, and met with my writing group every week. I kept my partner’s cat for a week while he was out of town, and the cat turned out to be very fond of laps.

The class I am taking this term asks us to conduct research using means and experiences other than reading, so I took a day off and went to FDR Park to hack down phragmites with the volunteer coordinator. There was ice on the lake, but it was warm in the sun while we chatted and sliced at the tall dry reeds with a curved blade. For another creative research experience, I signed up for two segments of Walk Around Philadelphia, which is an exploration of the city’s perimeter broken up into 5-7 hour long segments. I walked around the airport, which meant a detour down into Tinicum County and a walk along the undeveloped shores of the Delaware River, which sparkled on a gorgeous sunny day. I also walked from the Navy Yard up to Cherry Street Pier, which included a stretch I knew well from my StoryMaps project.

On a few different occasions, I joined a group of demonstrators and yelled outside of our useless Senators’ offices or marched along main roads with signs. I find it galvanizing, being among others who are angry. I hope others find it galvanizing to see. Sometimes, cars give a friendly two beeps as they drive by, and we cheer and wave. Often, pedestrians stop me to say hello or good luck when they see my sign. Once, a woman leaned out of her high-rise building and banged on a pot in time with our chant.