Reading Roundup: March 2025

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. An odd book that I simply couldn’t put down. In some respects, this is a straightforward coming-of-age story focusing on a girl growing up in North Philadelphia in the 80s and 90s; it follows her shames and triumphs as a gifted yet poor kid, a waitress who drops out of community college, a woman who reconnected with her best friend while both are living in New York and finds beauty and humor as well as strangeness in her surroundings. At the same time, the narrative insists, this girl is not ordinary at all: she is a member of an alien society who exist in plural rather than individual bodies, and intuit rather than speak. They sent her to report on humanity and communicate with her via a fax machine that her terrestrial mother found in the trash. In her dreams, she finds herself in an alien classroom to learn about her purpose on earth. The narrative shimmers effortlessly between the supernatural and the mundane. It is told in long chapters composed of short fragments, which is part of why I couldn’t stop reading for two days–I wanted to read just more gem, and then another, and then another.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor. This tome was published shortly before ChatGPT became a household name, but it is pretty incisive about artificial intelligence as well as the rise of corporatocracy and the disposability of both human and animal life. It’s a long read, in part to balance its three or four braided plots and to give various characters (a hacker, a marine biologist, an AI expert, and a fully conscious android among others) room to voice their perspectives on sapience, memory, and communication. But it’s uneasily suspenseful in a way that reminded me of Arrival and other first contact stories I’ve enjoyed, so I also found it a surprisingly fast read.

The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris. A collection of lovely essays that explore ecology in lonely places–airports, roads, disturbed wetlands–as well as the author’s own loneliest places, grieving a beloved father and struggling to make long-distance relationships work. The structure reminded me of As Far as the Light Reaches, which I think is more successful in balancing memoir with nature writing, or perhaps the personal stories are just more compelling on first read. But Age of Loneliness is worth a second look; I was particularly interested in an essay about the Back Bay Fens in Boston, which is relevant to my interests in urban wetlands, and as I revisiting it to take notes, I found a lot to think about and some fruitful ideas for my own nature writing.

Woodworking by Emily St. James. A breezy, readable story of friendship between two trans girls–one 17, one 35 and just starting to come out to herself–in a small South Dakota town on the cusp of the 2016 election. Which means that in addition to being funny and heartwarming, it’s also a deeply sad story as these women and their peers struggle to both find themselves and find their place in a largely unfriendly community. St. James is a TV writer, and you can see that experience shaping some of the place-setting and internal monologue–especially in 17-year-old Abigail’s chapters, which are written in 1st person POV. But novels let you experiment with perspective and point of view in different ways than television, and this book explores all of them as the characters figure things out.

I finished Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which I started at the end of February. Instant Book I Loved for 2025. Gorgeous, meditative, lonely but joyful prose. And I reread Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for no reason other than the comfort of familiarity.

Unusually for me, I have several books in progress that I haven’t yet finished. I’ve been meaning to read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, so I picked it up for my watershed steward reading group (our theme for March was biodiversity). To tell the story of the current extinction we’re experiencing, the author tells the story of previous extinctions–the famous meteorite strike, the disappearance of megafauna, etc.–and also the story of how science came to understand the history of life and loss of species. I’m really enjoying the science history, which reminds me of the stories in Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett, following the dangerous and controversial progress of 19th century science. But it is a mournful book, saturated with grief for the species that have disappeared or are disappearing in our own lifetime.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to alternate chapters of The Sixth Extinction with stories in Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead. I found Whitehead’s own memoir gorgeous but heartbreaking, so I was interested to see that this book explicitly focused on stories that envision queer utopia and survival. I’ve enjoyed the worlds conjured by these short stories and feel recharged by reading them.

During a lazy morning at a friend’s house, waiting for half the household to return from rehearsal, I picked up their copy of Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and drank up the first three stories in one go. It’s a scorching read with all the delicious wickedness of roasting the worst people you know, but each story bubbles uneasily with the potential for something much worse. And there are no heroes or innocents–not even the razor-sharp witty group chat or the diners lined up for the bistro that serves meatballs but not spaghetti. I immediately placed a hold at my local library, but I was number 70 in line for a copy at that time, so it may be awhile before I get to see how it all comes together.

Some short poems and prose I loved:
Playing Super Mario 2 with My Kid on My Old Nintendo by Abbie Kiefer
Of the Empire by Mary Oliver
Mary Ruefle Drives Me to the Dentist by Kelly Luce
Darkness Rushes Out of Itself by Sophie Hoss

Elsewhere

RIP the voice of Space Ghost, a cartoon that was weirdly important to my teenage self.

Interesting to get an inside look at How an Audiobook Narrator Organizes Her Days.

!!! Sale of Ellen Raskin Estate Reveals Unpublished ‘Westing Game’ Sequel

As one of the internet’s many “hot girls with stomach issues,” I feel compelled to share this survey of indigestion in literature.

AI in the news:
OpenAI’s Sam Altman Thinks This ChatGPT Short Story Is Beautiful, but It’s Just Trash (Gizmodo, March 12, 2025)
OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use (Ars Technica, March 13, 2025)
AI search engines cite incorrect news sources at an alarming 60% rate, study says (Ars Technica, MArch 13, 2025)
AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism (The New Socialist, February 9, 2025)
OpenAI’s Sora Is Plagued by Sexist, Racist, and Ableist Biases (Wired, March 23, 2025)
The Great AI Art Heist (Chicago Magazine, March 4, 2025)
How is Meta Getting Its Hands on Advance Digital Galleys to Train Its AI? (LitHub, March 27, 2025)

Honestly, one of the most damning testaments to the harms of foisting AI everywhere and in everything is how enthusiastically the current administration has embraced it. There are valuable applications of large language models–identifying and counting species, for example–but the applications we’re seeing are AI at its worst: arbitrary, biased, generic, aimed to replace human labor yet unable to carry out qualitative tasks meaningfully.

Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ (Wired, March 13, 2025)
“On March 7, DOGE got one of the things it seemed to want most from GSA: a chatbot that could automate work previously done by federal employees. The tool rolled out to some 1,500 employees at GSA, with an agencywide launch planned a week later. An internal memo about the tool touted the ‘endless’ tasks it could help with: ‘draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.'”

Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models (Wired, March 15, 2025)

Minutiae

It was a good month for environmental learning. I went to a lecture about mushrooms and a play about the wildfires in Australia. I sat in webinars about invasive insects and watershed mapping over lunchtimes. We had our first workday for maintaining the rain garden behind a school in my neighborhood, and I spent another morning in FDR Park just because I needed to get outside and touch some grass. Afterward, I walked around the perimeter of the 300+ acre park to get a better sense of how it fits into the landscape–something I would not have thought of doing if not for the adventure of Walk Around Philadelphia last month. I didn’t realize how close my park is to the Navy Yard and the southern border of Philadelphia, or that the I-95 expressway runs through (not just next to) the park, or that some of the old runner’s trail is still intact although fenced in during the installation of playing fields.

I went to NJ for a weekend to help my college BFF throw a slumber party for a 10(!)-year-old. The kids stayed up late, hyped up on candy and games and a homemade unicorn cake. The adults also stayed up very late, drinking martinis and gossiping about our friends.

This month went by so quickly, but I can’t point to much that made it busy. I mostly just tried to keep up with regular engagements–friend hangs, writing group sessions, and so forth. It was a mild March, more lamb than lion, and I took down my backyard plant tent early in the month. Most of my containers are still sleeping, though, except for a few bulbs I was given last fall, which are starting to poke up their green stalks.