Reading Roundup 2024

Hello hello! I have a longer essay I’m working on, but I wanted to get a note of thanks out to all of you before the end of the year. That you invite me into your email boxes once a month, and allow me to think out loud is such a privilege, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

Now that I’ve “retired” from my day job, I’m going to try to do one of these recommendation posts per month in addition to the essay posts. It’s fun to talk about the things we’ve loved!

Podcast

Between the Covers with David Naimon: If there’s a podcast that inspired this essay project, it might just be Between the Covers. David Naimon does the most extraordinary, in depth interviews with writers. Sponsored by Tin House, these podcast episodes run between 90 and 120 minutes, and are notable not just for the breadth of talent he’s spoken with — everyone from Max Porter to Naomi Klein, Kate Zambreno to Carl Phillips, Kate Briggs to Nalo Hopkinson — but for the depth of research Naimon does and his deeply generous readings of his interviewees’ works. He makes connections across works, asks other writers to record questions for the interviewee, and creates an atmosphere where everyone is welcome at the table, a space where it feels like we are all collaborating on the most important work there is — creating art together.

Fiction

I began as a fiction writer, and one of my goals for this writing year is to see if I can jumpstart some ideas, see if I can light up that side of my brain again. I have nonfiction work I am deeply dedicated to completing, but I’d like to start thinking in stories and characters again. Here are three books I read this year that made me want to start writing fiction again:

Hagstone, by Sinéad Gleeson — Set on an unnamed island in the North Seas, the novel follows Nell, an artist who works with sound and surf, who makes art characterized by impermanence, and who is commissioned to do a piece celebrating the anniversary of a self-defined and closed community of women who have been on the island for decades. The book circles around questions of what it means to be free, to be an artist, to choose one’s own fate, and how the ways we are bound to, and dependent upon one another, give our lives meaning. It’s beautiful and sexy and strange.

Scaffolding, by Lauren Elkin — Two couples, two timelines, the same apartment in Paris (Belleville, the neighborhood where I stayed last spring). An examination of what it means to love and to desire, to mourn and to be an artist. A very thinky novel, where characters are invested in questions of feminism and freedom, where they discuss Lacan and the redecoration of apartments. This is such an immersive fiction experience that I was tempted to begin again as soon as I’d finished. (Also, do not miss Elkin’s recent nonfiction work, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.)

Held, by Anne Michaels — I’ve loved Anne Michaels work since Fugitive Pieces, and this fragmented story of the repercussions of war as they ricochet through several generations is mesmerizing, the kind of book from which you find yourself coming up for air, as though you’ve been someplace else entirely. When searching around on Alibris.com (my favorite place to order books, you can even order new books and the authors get paid), I found that she’d done a book with John Berger, my writerly north star and I’d also send you to Railtracks — an odd, romantic, collaboration between these two writers.

Nonfiction narratives

From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire by Sara Jaffe — one of the motifs running through my work in progress is the Mexican Calavera, those little skeleton people going about their normal activities, but you know, they’re dead. There’s a way in which being deep in grief feels like being one of those skeletons, as though you’re a mere shadow of a real person, as though everything you’re doing in your day to day life is fake, a dream, unreal. For Sarah Jaffe, it was her father’s death, a death she couldn’t “work her way through” that brought home to her the inhuman nature of American capitalism. Nothing must clog up the machine, not even those whose lives, like that of her father, were eaten up by it. Jaffe’s a writer and reporter who has been working on labor issues for decades, and this book, which examines the social crisis we’re all caught in through the lens of her own grief, was that special thing, a book that helps put into context what so many of us have experienced as individual, and solitary, and too often, shameful.

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson. If one of the core interests of this project is materiality, growing and cooking and preserving food is one of the core practices through which I’ve been working out my thinking on the subject. Crystal Wilkinson’s reckoning with her country childhood, and the legacy of Black Appalachia, is a love song to her ancestors, and to the practices that helped them not only survive, but thrive. It’s also a grief song for the grandmother who raised her, who taught her to cook and to survive, and who loved her with all her heart. Wilkinson is one of our finest poets, and this book, it made me weep for my own lost people and home place, and felt like the kind of story we want to be writing now — stories of women and how they didn’t just survive, but built worlds around themselves, took care of their kids and their menfolk and their gardens. It’s a stupendously beautiful book.

The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith — This book is a global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history over the last 500 years — and what I loved about it is that the history it tells does not center Western nations as “civilizing” forces who “discovered” the rest of the world. Amrith grew up in India, and teaches at Yale, and in much the same way as Amitav Ghosh in his trilogy of ecological histories (The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg’s Curse, and Smoke and Ashes) Amrith begins with the trade history of the Indian Ocean. He discusses the Mongol invasion and the Ottoman Empire not as threats to the West, but as self-determined actions and historical forces that had real ecological consequences. And through it all runs the thread of the twin destructive forces of capitalism and Christianity. This book was difficult at times, because the destruction of the natural world, and indigenous peoples, in the service of short term profit is a tragedy, but it’s also so clear, and lucid, and really, for a book covering this much history, it gallops right along. My copy is full of sticky flags and underlines and it’s going to be a real keystone reference for me going forward.

I’ll leave you here, on the shortest day of the year, with this little list, and again, my thanks for coming along on this journey. May everyone have a holiday, and a rest, and connect with the people they love. Here’s hoping we can recharge for the new year, and find ways to hold close the things and the people who are dear to our hearts.