Book Burning

[bookburning]

The Librarianist

Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough—that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know how to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone. After I had already finished this this book, I recommended it to a friend who looked it up and read me back the publisher's description of it as a "document of the introvert's condition." This was a bit of a jolt because I had previously thought the book was about the human condition. No matter how many times I remind myself, I never to seem to remember that some portion of the population—perhaps most of it?— is not like this. What do such people think about all day? They seem so much less likely to write it down in easy novels that it's possible I may never know. 🥲

[bookburning]

Orlando

“To fall from a mast-head,” she thought, “because you see a woman’s ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be a slave of the frailest chit in petticoats, and yet to go about like you were the Lords of creation. Heavens!” she thought, “what fools they make of us—what fools we are!” And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her.

Of the ... many things about this book I found confusing, chief among them was how the hell Woolf managed to get this published in 1928. An effect of my own vantage point, I suppose: almost by definition, a regressive era will never seem in the moment half so regressive as it actually is.

[bookburning]

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Hölderlin (while it is clear that Hölderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaners (though it was settled that the blue slack shouldn’t be ready before Thursday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording.

... lol goddammit This book is the biggest flex I've ever read in my life. The reading experience redefined the word "mindfuck" as something, shall we say, rather more literal than I thought possible and additionally made me embarrassed to have ever seen anything in Cloud Atlas. Calvino is a sadistic tease. It's been a year and I still can't think about this clearly. I have the urge to tag this post "Italian men." Somewhat related: Calvino anticipates our current AI hellscape by a half-century, even correctly identifying its root cause as techbros mad that women cheat on them with artists. Marana dreamed of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. If this idea had succeeded in imposing itself, if a systematic uncertainty as to the identity of the writer had kept the reader from abandoning himself with trust—trust not so much in what was being told him as in the silent narrating voice—perhaps externally the edifice of literature would not have changed all, but beneath, in the foundations, where the relationship between reader and text is established, something would have changed forever. Then Ermes Marana would no longer have felt himself abandoned by Ludmilla absorbed in her reading: between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence.

[bookburning]

The ABC Murders

“What is often called an intuition is really an impression based on logical deduction for experience. When an expert feels that there is something wrong about a picture or a piece of furniture or the signature on a cheque he is really basing his feeling on a host of small signs and details. He has no need to go into them minutely—his experience obviates that—the net result is the definite impression that something is wrong. But it is not a guess, it is an impression based on experience.” When I was very young a teenage babysitter put on what I think was the 1989 version of Ten Little Indians and possibly scarred for me life: this is my earliest clear memory of emotional distress caused by Art and it gave me the idea—which somehow persisted all the way up until I read ABC Murders, as a brain-break after Mrs. Dalloway—that Christie mysteries were heavy and dark. This of course is not the case, and so the primary effect of reading this book was to make me concerned about what other minor but totally incorrect ideas I'm still walking around with unchallenged in middle age. (Also, I see now that I mentioned Ten Little Indians in another review recently—so clearly it really did get in my head as a kid. It's probably a goofy-ass movie, too.)

[bookburning]

Mrs. Dalloway

As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship ..., as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners ...; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting, and spoiling human lives, were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.

Good lord. This book is not long but took me months to read, was such a struggle; I hardly ever had any idea what was happening or to whom. I persevered (quite unlike me) for two reasons:

I was told that Mrs. Dalloway was the favorite book of an acquaintance I find intimidating and inscrutable; and

Every other page contained a sentence that seemed the truest thing I'd ever read.

And I found that somehow, at the end—though I could clearly remember finding the book tedious the whole way through—I still loved it? In at some point completely breaking my will to keep track of characters or identify a plot, Mrs. Dalloway introduced me to a different way of reading, something more like swimming or dreaming, something I know I'll use again.

Was that the point? An effect carefully achieved by a master craftsman? Or if you're smart enough, can you just read Mrs. Dalloway like a book?

[bookburning]

Howards End

I read this because I'd long suspected myself of misunderstanding and misusing "only connect," and I thought it about time to find out what Forster actually had in mind. It was something much bolder and better, of course.

I had for some reason thought Howard's End was just a sort of drawing-room drama, so most surprising to me was how much it has to say about money. Like the book as a whole, it's so relevant, and so right, and none of the people who need to read it ever will.

“I hope to risk things all my life.”

“Oh, Margaret, most dangerous.” “

But after all,” she continued with a smile, “there’s never any great risk as long as you have money.”

"Oh, shame! What a shocking speech!”

“Money pads the edges of things,” said Miss Shlegel. “Gold help those who have none. ... You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”

“I call that rather cynical.”

“So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those who they love no longer. We rich can." ...

... “That’s more like socialism,” said Mrs. Munt suspiciously.

“Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one’s hand spread open on the table. I’m tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand about eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed—from the sea, yes, from the sea. And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we don’t want to steal umbrellas ourselves we forget that below the sea people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and what’s a joke up here is down there reality."

[bookburning]

The King of Torts

This is a paperback thriller I pulled out of a free box. A week later it transpired that would be in a mass tort myself, and thanks to this book I knew all sorts of things about them. Gee, thanks, Mr. Grisham; you make learning fun! 🌈

[bookburning]

The Extinction of Irena Ray

Maybe, as Robert Frost said, poetry is what gets lost in translation. People have interpreted that phrase to mean translation is necessarily flawed and flawing, but I understand it in a different way. To me, poetry is concision, refinement, the effect of considerable loss. Lose, from any page that’s filled with words, all the ones that do not matter, and you may find a kind of poem.

To the extent that such a thing is possible, Irena Ray is a unique book. There are of course many recognizable elements: I saw Ten Little Indians, the archetype; I saw The Overstory and its various spores (mycelium being so trendy these days). But still, this is a clever, inventive book and I'd never read anything quite like it. [There is a second paragraph to this review that for some mystifying reason Tumblr refuses to display, even if I remove the paragraph break. Is this meta?]

The ending isn't well paced, and in places Irena Ray wanders too far into magical realism for my personal taste—but overall I enjoyed the journey and the prose. This book helped me think more about translation than my bumpkin, monolingual ass ever had cause to before, and along the way introduced me to a few new favorite poems and some bonkers trivia about Salman Rushdie. Solid!

[bookburning]

Either/Or

"The social novel gave meaning to historical events, by embedding them in a historical order. Baudelaire wrote something about flâneurs, and Walter Benjamin wrote something about Baudelaire. The flâneur on his walk both observed and constituted urban life. This was Hegelian."

I loved The Idiot and was excited to read this sequel, but the older Selin's pretty-girl problems are not so relatable, and at a certain point the patter of her quirky questions about them grows tedious. That Selin's inner logic is so uncannily similar to my own ought to make me more tolerant; instead I just resent the character for getting away with being Like This better than I can, and the author for (clearly) precluding me from writing my own book about it. As if there were any possibility of me ever doing that!

[bookburning]

Purity

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search engine optimization.

This was my second time reading Purity and it will be my second time dodging a Proper review of it: the book is still too big, too real, too much. But as a longtime apologist—for this sort of writer, this writer in particular, and in particular, the plausibility of this particular writer's female characters—I will say I find a lot of the complaints about this book unfair. I suspect the people griping that the characters are unlikeable and one-dimensional don't live in the Bay Area. I do, and I assure you: these exact characters absolutely do exist here; I know several of each of them; they are as excruciating as they are written and they are very much real.

[bookburning]

I Cheerfully Refuse

When I asked about the promised war and how we ought to get ready, she pulled the car over and looked in my eyes. Her kindness was like water over smooth stones. She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

I Cheerfully Refuse was my top pick for 2024 (I'm very behind on these notes, as usual). A year later—and oh, such a relevant year later—I'm still pushing it on everyone I know.

The dystopian world in this book is not sci-fi; it is a documentary preview of a place I will inhabit in my lifetime, very soon. I already suspect my only hope is to work for an astronaut; I already know I'll die a squelette. And in spite of that—of how it physically hurts to look at Enger's lyric pictures of what's coming—this is a book that somehow made me feel better about it. It offers a framework that turns my contrarian instincts against the weight of my dread. It sets an example of how we might go on living—resourcefully, bravely, together—come what may.

[bookburning]

Long Island Compromise

He had reached the part of the emergency where he could finally exist as himself. He spent most of his life trying to warn the world that destruction was imminent, that the fail-safes were gone, that the walls were flimsy. And here, where he was faced with what was absolutely and incontrovertibly an emergency—one that no one could argue with—this is when the world finally started making sense to him.

Perhaps my new favorite among contemporary fucked-up-family dramas. Without ever becoming caricatures, each sibling represents a different way one might crack—along the general fault lines that run eventually to what we now tend to call ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Brodesser-Akner's thesis that her characters might have avoided all this were they not so soft and rich does not make me personally yearn for a tougher childhood, but I found the book relevant and entertaining nonetheless.

[bookburning]

The Sisters Brothers

Now, we got two oxen pulling three carts, and what do you think happens next? The oxen die, starved and thirsty, with whipping wounds on their backs, and now it’s me and Daddy and Uncle Jimmy, and the horses are pulling the carts, and the money’s going quick and so’s the food, and we’re looking at one another and we’re all thinking the same thing: Dang.

Such good fun. I read this before I knew there was a movie—I would have cast it differently, with Luke and Owen Wilson.

[bookburning]

Bliss Montage

Poetry didn’t bring him to me. The poems I read listlessly were only beacons reflecting my feelings. They were sirens that wept the same way I wept. Plus, [he] didn’t read poetry.

As also evidenced in Severance, Ling Ma seems to have secured the sort of relationship with her publisher in which she is not required to bring her stories to any sort of resolution. It's excruciating—edge play, violin notes hanging in the air for long, fraught minutes. Bliss Montage as the heading for this reading experience is a cruel joke. But it's worth the pain of all the for the pleasure of inhabiting Ma's twisted, vivid imagination, somewhere I for one feel entirely at home.

[bookburning]

Things I Learned From Falling

I first heard Claire Nelson's story—of surviving a horrendous near-death experience while solo hiking in the desert—on a podcast. The episode auto-played at random on a long drive home from the very same desert, where I, too, had been happily exploring alone. Needless to say, this freaked me the fuck out.

Nelson herself is relatable and inspiring, but the writing in this book has the cadence of a LinkedIn post and is, regrettably, not good. Still, I count the book a success in that it did nudge me up to new level of diligence in my own safety measures. At a time in my life when I'm prone to thinking I have most of my outdoorsy practices dialed, it was a timely reminder that every other Sensible Precaution may prove useless, in the end, unless somebody knows where you are.

—which is not to say that the real danger lies outside.

Twitter Feeds. Instagram posts. Always updating, always fresh, always pulling the attention from real life—the good and the bad—and into the sweet relief of something and somewhere else. … In the end I wore my smartphone like a boredom prosthetic and used the internet as a stopgap for thought. Digital Polyfilla in the spaces where ideas might have bloomed. Day after day I was hungrily digesting information I didn’t even care about, barely retained and sure as hell didn’t need.

Unrelated: Reviewers accusing Nelson of failing to achieve sufficient emotional growth from her ordeal (?!) can fuck all the way off. The prevailing insistence that everyone experience and express emotion in the same way is precisely why some of us need to spend so much time wandering around in the desert by ourselves. Go record yourself crying for TikTok, damn.

[bookburning]

The Custom of the Country

In addition to Wharton's usual savaging of ambitious women, the institution of marriage, and life in general (a "witless dangling of limp dolls"), The Custom of the Country includes an additional line of attack on people who identify as writers but never actually write anything. All of it is of course dead on.

Then the moon rose, unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and Ralph, leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle distance, felt his spirit enlarged and pacified.

For the first time, as his senses thrilled to the deep touch of beauty, he asked himself if out of these floating and fugitive vibrations he might not build something concrete and stable, if even such dull common cares as now oppressed him might not become the motive power of creation. If he could only, on the spot, do something with all the accumulated spoils of the last months—something that should both put money into his pocket and harmony into the rich confusion of his spirit.

“I’ll write—I’ll write: that must be what the whole thing means,” he said to himself, with a vague clutch at some solution which should keep him a little longer hanging half-way down the steep of disenchantment.

I felt personally attacked from all angles throughout this book from start to finish. Five stars!

[bookburning]

The Wapshot Chronicle

Deluded by this thread of cold air he would rise in his bed thinking passionately of boats, trains and deep-breasted women, or of some image—a wet pavement plastered with yellow elm leaves—that seemed to represent requital and strength. I will climb the mountain, he htought. I will kill the tiger! I will crush the serpent with my heel! But the fresh winds died with the morning dusk. There was a pain in his kidney. He could not get back to sleep and he would limp and cough through another day. His sons did not write him.

I have both read and "reviewed" this before, but today it's ten years' more important—and more frustrating, more painful, more difficult—to find my way to some sense of compassion for old men.