#dktreads2016

[greenpeugeot]

Book 59 of 2016. Modern Lovers, by Emma Straub.

Modern Lovers is set in Ditmas Park, a neighbourhood in Brooklyn that I'm often in. It's fun to read about streets you know and places you go, even if they're the slightly-off-from-real-life versions. (For instance, there's a neighbourhood blog in the book, called "The Q at Ditmas." In real life there's a blog called "The Q at Parkside" that covers a neighbouhood slightly north, and one called "Ditmas Park Corner" for the area in question. Whatever). It's about two families with teenage kids living on the same block; 3 of the 4 parents went to college together and their adult lives are all still wrapped up together. I didn't really like Staub's previous novel, The Vacationers so I was suprised by how into this one I was. It was fluff, but kind of sweet and smart fluff. I read the whole thing in one day, on Christmas, which included a lot of lovely time drinking tea on my mother-in-law's couch.

[greenpeugeot]

Book 58 of 2016. Stories of Your Life, and Others. By Ted Chiang.

Walking home from seeing Arrival PT and I stopped into Greenlight Books in search of any worthwhile addition christmas/hannukah presents, and I picked up this book, which contains the short story that Arrival is based on. The story is remarkable -- spare and thoughful, and a lot more explain-y than the movie: it's really intersting to watch and read in such quick succession and understand the different ways a story can be told. I also really enjoyed reading a series of sci-fi stories by the same author, set across all sorts of times and places (from victorian-era robots to modern-day aliens to frustrated math professors); one gets a really great sense of the kinds of ideas that Chiang thinks about.

[greenpeugeot]

Book 57 of 2016. In Defense of Housing. By David Madden and Peter Marcuse.

This is my academic book club's January pick. David is a friend of mine and Peter is a former professor. This book is a clear and passionately logical argument for protecting housing as places people live, not just vehicles for investment. It is not an argument I particularly needed to read because I am already on board, but this is a book I'm glad has been written by two very smart scholars!

[greenpeugeot]

Book 47 of 2016: Felicia Kornbluth, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America.

Read this for my academic book club, but it was my pick. It's the story of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a movement of mostly black welfare mothers, organizing to make demands on the welfare system. It's primarily a New York City book, and the welfare deparment that these women were fighting was the one that I now work for, albeit with a new name and a very different federal context.

The position of the welfare rights activists is one that is hard to imagine today. They wanted more welfare, more generous benefits, more humane caseworkers. They refused to be told that they were not deserving of the general comforts of modern America -- Kornbluth makes links to Liz Cohen's writing about the growth of consumer society in the United States and how participating in consumer culture was integral to citienship. Women were campaigning for decent school clothes for their children, for winter boots, for sturdy furniture. This was possible becuase the welfare departmen had lists--that they kept secret--of "minimum standards" that families should have. Getting copies of the lists and making them public so people knew what they were entitled to was an important part of the campaign. A second important plank was fighting work requirments for welfare. At a time when white women were fighting for their place in the workforce, these black women were advocating for the right to stay home with their children, what white women had always been told was their duty. This really highlights the need for a racial lens on feminism.

This book wasn't excellent, it was sort of dry, and didn't tell you anything about the day to day lives of the movement's leaders whose names are often mentioned. But it made for excellent book club discussion, so a highly successful pick.

[greenpeugeot]

Book 46 of 2016: THE KID: What happened after my boyfriend and I decided to get pregnant. By Dan Savage.

Dan Savage is so excellent at balancing the personal narrative of a situation and also talking about what it means more broadly about society. That's what makes his advice columns so worthwhile, and it makes this very sweet and personal book have some resonance outside Dan and Terry's adoption story. There's a lot in here about how gayness is reflected agains the infertility stories of the other folks in their adoption workshops -- while people are somber as thework to accept that they won't have their own biological children, Dan and Terry are grinning ear to ear about living in a world where they can adopt kids.

And about gayness: this book was written in 1999, and some of the things that Dan says offhand are so totally dated that it's amazing: stuff about not being able to serve in the military, and the totally impossiblity of same sex marriage being legal in the US. It was a nice reminer of how much progress has really been made.

[greenpeugeot]

Book 38 of 2016: The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. By Albert O. Hirschman.

A book club pick. A.O. Hirschman is an economist, but this book is an intellectual history of the idea of capitalism, and how thinkers longing for an alternative to monarchy and feudalism envisioned capitalism as a system that would tame man's interests in power by replacing them with a more benign interest in accumulating wealth. It is an interesting project to look at how people understood something before it was impossible to imagine life without it. What I really learned, though, was not to read a book with "arguments for capitalism" in the title in public if you don't want men to talk to you about how smart they are. Ugh.

[greenpeugeot]

Book 36 of 2016: Black Man in a White Coat. A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine. By Damon Tweedy.

This was a great mix of memoir and social analysis -- Tweedy writes about his own time in med school and working as a black doctor, but also about his patients, and racial health disparities in the USA. What stuck with me was the clear-eyed approach he takes to "lifestyle" diseases like obesity and heart disease. He understands that these conditions affect poor people of colour disproportionately and doesn't blame poor diets and lack of excercise on individuals (laying the blame on racism and poverty, where it should be). He still coaches people to eat better and excercise more, of course, but it isn't the fat-shaming moralizing that comes from those who are concerned about your health.