This started out as a quick list of books I read in 2022. I have notes because I read almost everything on an ereader and highlight and all that gets auto dumped into a note-taking program. That would make it quicker? Somehow? Also a chance to review and process what I read. Shouldn’t take long.
Actually, it started out long, with almost mini-reviews (for some reason? it really was meant to be a list) and then got random, and then increasingly it became a list again. I started writing it over a month ago. It was still a good learning process and I will try to do it again next year, but maybe I will be less ambitious this time.
I read 51 books this year. Listed here are 50. The other book was an draft of my friend Sara Flannery Murphy’s new book The Wonder State which is out this spring and is clever and touching and about being from a small place and the complicated magic of being from a small place and I keep meaning to write a proper review of it but that seems like way too important a task for someone like me. You should read it though.
1. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell (4/5)
Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.
I am writing this on vacation. I spent the morning texting with a colleague. Most days I start work at 7 and by 9 feel like I’ve already failed at the day. I know this is absurd but I still feel it.
I came to this book because of my own issues with overwork, burnout, and the never ending growth/flow of my information feeds. A deep look at what’s happening to our attention in the “surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality” we’ve found ourselves in, and an investigation of what it would mean to stop, to rest, to do nothing.
what I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.
2. The Swarm, by Frank Schatzing (3/5)
The Swarm is a big seething smelly oceanic mess in which whales attack whale-watching tourists, naked couples ride motorcycles through swarms of crabs invading the eastern seaboard, and scientists are all Goldblumian. It’s at least 3 different books, plus a couple of movies, in one. In turns it’s joyfully absurd, dreadfully boring, and horribly cliche. I sort of loved it but wish it was 2/3 the length.
3. The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband, by David Finch (3/5)
4. Out of Office: Unlocking the Power and Potential of Hybrid Work, by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen (4/5)
Work will always be a major part of our lives. What we’re suggesting, however, is that it should cease to be the primary organizing factor within it: the primary source of friendship, or personal worth, or community. Because when work envelops our lives, our intimate community shoulders the consequences. We give and receive less: less care, less intentionality, less communication. But genuinely flexible work—and the de-centering of our jobs that accompanies it—can liberate us to recultivate and restructure our relationships with ourselves and our community.
Looking through my notes I realize this book had a bigger impact than I initially thought. A few months after reading it I became co-chair of our department and the staff I oversee directly would grow from 2 to 3 and come to include 7 student workers. I can see in the focus on de-centering work our lives and giving people the time/space to figure out for how they work best some of the principles I’ve been trying to implement in my own practice.
There is a lot in this book. though it’s mostly relevant for knowledge workers and management (and it knows this). It’s wide and shallow and written at a moment during the pandemic when it felt like anything might happen. I fear that mostly what happened is some people can work from home now and I wish that instead we had used that time to build supports and guardrails that stopped people from overworking or LARPiung work in ways that causes them to burn out while also making others anxious about keeping up.
One idea I liked was about how GitLab uses transparency as a way of respecting workers different ways of communicating and working:
Employees are also encouraged to create detailed “README” pages, which include a full description of what their job is and how they do it and a personal “About Me” section. From there, the README can get very granular. Darren Murph, GitLab’s head of remote, has README sections like “how you can help me,” “my working style,” “what I assume about others,” “what I want to earn,” “communicating with me,” and “work from home office setup.” The responses are thoughtful and friendly. They aren’t demands or even instructions, but they offer a guide to collaboration.
5. The Windup Girl (4/5)
Hock Seng shies away from the poster as if it is a blister-rusted durian. He knows in his bones, knows as surely as his clan is all dead and buried in Malaya, that it’s time to run. Time to hide from tigers that hunt through the night. Time to plunge into leech-infested jungles and eat cockroaches and slither through the mud of the rainy season as it gushes in torrents. It doesn’t matter where he goes. All that matters is that it’s time to flee. Hock Seng stares out at the anchored clipper ship. Time to make hard decisions. Time, in truth, to give up on the SpringLife factory and its blueprints. Delays will only make it worse. Money must be spent. Survival secured. This raft is sinking.
6. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler (5/5)
Why did I wait so long to read this? How does from 1993 feel so fresh and urgent?
“Do you think our world is coming to an end?” Dad asked, and with no warning at all, I almost started crying. I had all I could do to hold it back. What I thought was, “No, I think your world is coming to an end, and maybe you with it.”
Fashion helps. You’re supposed to be dirty now. If you’re clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you’re showing off, trying to be better than they are. Among the younger kids, being clean is a great way to start a fight.
Every one knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it.
alone, full of books and ignorant of reality
7. Emergent Strategy, by adrienne maree brown (5/5)
I read Emergent Strategy in the midst of trying to build a new service and team while also going through a contentious tenure and promotion process. Six weeks earlier I’d been stuck in Vancouver for 10 days due to climate-change caused flooding. Everything felt impossible and uncertain and I had no idea if anything of lasting value could be built in these conditions.
How do we prepare not just for suffering, but for sharing and innovation? How do we resource the local and still honor our nomadic tendency, our natural migration patterns (which we deny by trying to stay in only one place), our global interconnectedness? How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible? To be abundant when what we consider valuable is shifting from gold to collard greens? How do we articulate a compelling economic vision to sustain us through the unimaginable, to unite us as things fall apart? How do we experience our beauty and humanity in every condition?
In this short book I found a guide that seemed to reconcile my worries and wildest hopes while managing to be somehow both clear and direct but also fragmentary, exploratory, and kind of weird. I read it a second time later in the year.
Emergent Strategy: was, initially, a way of describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found in the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler (and others). then it grew into plans of action, personal practices and collective organizing tools that account for constant change and rely on the strength of relationship for adaptation. With a crush on biomimicry and permaculture
This is not the place to fully explore the thinking in this book. I highly recommend you read it if this sounds like your thing. I will just share the core principles (words taken directly from the book):
- Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)
- Change is constant. (Be like water).
- There is always enough time for the right work.
- There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have.? Find it.
- Never a failure, always a lesson.
- Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).
- Move at the speed of trust.’ Focus on critical connections more than critical mass-build the resilience by building the relationships.
- Less prep, more presence.
- What you pay attention to grows.
8. Attention, by Casey Schwartz (1/5)
9. Becoming Animal, by (3/5)
If we rarely notice such transformations today—if we seem to have lost our sense of the earth’s audacious and metamorphic magic—it is likely because our depth perception has become impoverished. After all, our sensorial engagement with the ambiguous depth of our world has been largely overcome, in the last half century, by our steady involvement with flat representations of that world.
How do I describe this book? A plea for us to pay attention to the world around us, a world of which we are wholly (holy) part? A destabilization of how we understand our place in nature? A book about attention, perception, intelligence, nature, stories, magic, and shamanism?
Accustomed to peering at flat representations, we’ve begun to take the palpable world itself as a kind of representation—no longer a limitless field in whose boisterous life we’re participant, but a set of determinate facts arrayed in front of us, upon which we gaze like detached and impartial spectators. We no longer peer into the enigmatic depths of a terrain that encompasses and exceeds us; the land has now become something that we look at.
This book probably deserved a higher rating that I gave it at the time. I was too busy and tired to allow myself to take it as seriously as it deserves. Parts of it keep coming back to me and I should probably read it again.
There are innumerable distinctions to be drawn between the palpable phenomena of this world, yet each particular presence partakes of a common mystery: the unfathomable upsurge of existence itself. Each thing expresses this mystery in its own manner and style, yet each is equivalently outrageous, a clump of dirt no less than a roaring, marauding brown bear—each enacting its own tenuous and improvised way in the world, each gifting its own rhythms to the riot of life that surrounds it.
10. Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman (4/5)
when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.
Maybe the best productivity related book I’ve read, read in a year of trying to abandon productivity culture (a year where I also got more done and read more than ever before). Starting with the observation that the average human life-span is just 4000 weeks, and the well-known issues with productivity culture Burkeman explores how to take these constraints and use them to have a more peaceful and meaningful life.
Some random stuff:
Procrastination of some kind is inevitable: indeed, at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done. So the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community
in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. ^h1icd1
There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them.
In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude—with the anxiety-inducing truth that this is it—is to treat your present-day life as part of a journey toward becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to become, in the eyes of society, a religion, or your parents, whether or not they’re still alive. Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.
11. Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD, by Thomas E. Brown (3/5)
The primary problem for most individuals with ADHD, especially as they enter adolescence and adulthood, is a wide range of cognitive impairments in the management system of the brain. All of these impairments are linked to various problems with emotion.
12. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab (2/5)
The premise got tiring after awhile.
13. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman (5/5)
This is a great book to read if you are interested in Autism and neurodiversity but like me your understanding was stuck in the 2000s or earlier. As the title suggests it provides an overarching view of autism and then an introduction to the neurodiversity movement. Well researched and well written.
14. Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney (4/5)
I have mixed feelings about books that I subjectively enjoy reading and feel moved by, but am objectively unsure if I understand or agree with.
To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together—if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.
Jesus. I should give this another read.
15. Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life, by Cynthia Kim (3/5)
16. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (2/5)
I just find these books so emotionally empty that it’s nearly impossible for me to enjoy the whoa-look-at-that-cool-science stuff. I am likely just not the target audience for this type of science fiction.
17. The Assertiveness Workbook: How to Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships, by Randy J. Paterson (4/5)
Assertiveness isn’t about building a good disguise. It’s about developing the courage to take the disguise off. It’s designed to help the other group of people. The ones who have already tried wearing a mask and have found they can’t breathe very well with it on. They want to go out into the world nakedfaced, as themselves, but not defenseless. They want to be themselves in a way that doesn’t push others off-stage
18. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin (4/5)
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
19. Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera, by Bryan Peterson (4/5)
20. Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary: Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (no rating)
Reconciliation must become a way of life. It will take many years to repair damaged trust and relationships in Aboriginal communities and between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Reconciliation not only requires apologies, reparations, the relearning of Canada’s national history, and public commemoration, but also needs real social, political, and economic change. Ongoing public education and dialogue
21. How to Look At Photographs, by David Finn (3/5)
22. Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, by Tanya Talaga (4/5)
The first book I listened to as an audio book this year. A story I’ve heard parts of before, but never the full detail.
It reminded me of a lot of the things I heard about and saw where I grew up.
23. The Hunger, Alma Katsu (3/5)
24. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (4/5)
Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.
A beautifully written and deeply personal book about indigenous ways of knowing, ecology, modernity, family, history, science, education, and much more. I think about this book when trying to find ways to make the Makerspace a place that encourages reciprocity and mutual respect, a space that builds community. How do we build a space that encourages respect towards the land, users, staff, the environment, etc while still meeting the goals of students, faculty, and staff? How do we say “nothing here costs anything and we won’t tell you what to do” while also encouraging users to be more conscious of what they use and how it might impact other users?
A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I’ll wear them when she visits even if I don’t like them. When it’s her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return. As the scholar and writer Lewis Hyde notes, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”
All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.
This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?
25. Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler (4/5)
Prescient. Tragic we don’t get the rest of this story.
I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.
26. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, Tiago Forte (3/5)
27. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood (5/5)
The second audiobooks I listened to this year, consumed in a fever dream during a single sitting while driving home across the province.
28. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (4/5)
Another book where I feel the need to compulsively read it, and I enjoyed each line/page/chapter, yet I don’t understand why.
Also this man is obsessed with the size of breasts.
29. Oval, by Elvia Wilk (4/5)
“The force of the letdown hit her as she climbed. There would be no final confrontation, no closure. Closure was a myth. There was nothing to close. The object of affection was no longer itself. An orange that did not smell like oranges. A plum that did not taste like a plum.”
30. The Overstory: A Novel, by Richard Powers (4/5)
A story about trees. Well written. I probably have too much hippy-boomer-parent-trauma to love the characters as much as I should have.
The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years. And whatever enough people say that all these vanishing trees are saying is what, in fact, they say. But the question interests Adam. What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.
31. This Is Your Mind on Plants, by Michael Pollan (3/5)
Plants that change consciousness answer to other human needs as well. We shouldn’t underestimate the value, to people trapped in monotonous lives, of a substance that can relieve boredom and entertain by sponsoring novel sensations and thoughts in the mind. Some drugs can expand the contours of a world constrained by circumstance, as I discovered during the pandemic. Drugs that enhance sociability not only gratify us but presumably result in more offspring. Stimulants like caffeine improve concentration, making us better able to learn and work, and to think in rational, linear ways. Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.
32. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1), by N.K. Jemisin (5/5)
Ugh these books are so good. SO GOOD. There is so much in these books, about love and grief and racism and colonialism. I am on the third one now and just being given the information needed to understand some aspects of the completely original world Jemisin has created, and yet from the start I found the characters sympathetic and story immersive.
Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”
33. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (5/5)
Another classic I finally read this year.
The king was pregnant
34. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna Haraway (4/5)
An impossible book to summarize. Along with Emergent Leadership, this was one of the books I read this year that is giving me glimpses of a new way of seeing the world and my place in it.
We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. So do all the other critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking speciations and knottings. Other words for this might be materialism, evolution, ecology, sympoiesis, history, situated knowledges, cosmological performance, science art worldings, or animism, complete with all the contaminations and infections conjured by each of these terms. Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.
35. The Art of Living, by Epictetus (4/5)
A re-read.
People don’t have the power to hurt you. Even if someone shouts abuse at you or strikes you, if you are insulted, it is always your choice to view what is happening as insulting or not. If someone irritates you, it is only your own response that is irritating you. Therefore, when anyone seems to be provoking you, remember that it is only your judgment of the incident that provokes you. Don’t let your emotions get ignited by mere appearances.
36. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (5/5)
Another terrific series I started this year, along with The Broken Earth books, and also about love, grief, racism and colonialism, but set in an almost polar-opposite world.
37. Conflict Is Not Abuse, by Sarah Schulman (4/5)
One of the most important books I read this year, and the frame with which I think about a lot of the excesses of so-called cancel culture. More importantly, a way of thinking about conflict and anxiety and forgiveness and community.
My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve. I will show how this dynamic, whether between two individuals, between groups of people, between governments and civilians, or between nations is a fundamental opportunity for either tragedy or peace. Conscious awareness of these political and emotional mechanisms gives us all a chance to face ourselves, to achieve recognition and understanding in order to avoid escalation towards unnecessary pain
Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.
The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means that we are alive.
38. The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth Book 2), by N.K. Jemisin (4/5)
Second book in the series.
39. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber (3/5)
I wish this book had been 2/3 as long and I know that is shitty but its true.
Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises.
40. Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald (2/5)
Not nearly dirtbag enough for me.
41. Fruiting Bodies, by Kathryn Harlan (5/5)
A collection of terrific short stories. I loved every one.
These things make you afraid, love and proximity to the unknown.
42. Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (4/5)
Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.
You can have all sorts of craziness in your head and people will walk right by you as if you are a normal person.
43. Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh (4/5)
Now this is how you be a dirtbag. More seriously, I love everything Moshfegh writes, but fuck if I understand the message. Definitely some toxic aspects of my personality reflected in loving her so much.
He didn’t trust men so clean. They only understood the surfaces of things, which was why they appeared so perfect.
44. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (4/5)
45. Unmasking Autism, by Devon Price (4/5)
Another terrific books about neurodiversity. Read this with NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman. This one is more personal and more focused on the Neurodiversity movement.
Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It’s also a radical act of self-love.
46. Critical Play, by Mary Flanagan (3/5)
More historical and theoretical than I was probably looking for, but interesting. I’ve been thinking about how to combine some of these aspects into the Makerspace.
Critical Play is built on the premise that, as with other media, games carry beliefs within their representation systems and mechanics. Artists using games as a medium of expression, then, manipulate elements common to games—representation systems and styles, rules of progress, codes of conduct, context of reception, winning and losing paradigms, ways of interacting in a game—for they are the material properties of games, much like marble and chisel or pen and ink bring with them their own intended possibilities, limitations, and conventions. Artists have indeed “revolted” effectively before, transforming popular culture around the globe for the last century and a half. Critical Play documents this promise of large-scale transformation.
47. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (4/5)
The second book in the series after A Memory Called Empire.
48. The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan (4/5)
The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me—not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach—that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it. Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School (1996), writes: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.”
And a quote from bell hooks:
In an essay from 1999, “Embracing Freedom: Spirituality and Liberation,” bell hooks commands teachers to ask “How can I love these strangers, these others that I see in the classroom?” The love hooks is referring to isn’t the exclusive, jealous, dyadic love of lovers, but something more distanced, more controlled, more open to others and the world. It is no lesser a love for that.
49. Liberation Day, by George Saunders (4/5)
A wonderful book to finish out the year, written by an author I respect and who can therefore settle my ego enough to listen to their wisdom.
50. All About Love: New Visions, by bell hooks (5/5)
I especially like the idea of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (from Erich Fromm) which defines love in a way that can be applied beyond romantic relationships. I like how non cynical this book is, while still being open-eyed about our own, others, and society’s many problems and issues with love.
I have personal reasons for reading this book, but there are also ways I connected this with my work life. This past couple years I’ve realized that the most rewarding parts of my job involve mentoring others, and how much I both like and struggle with that responsibility. There is much to be said for the idea that work cannot love you back, and loving work is a recipe for burn-out. But at its best our work in academic libraries is often about nurturing other’s growth (spiritual, intellectual, political, cultural, personal, professional, etc.) and the joy of being around people who are actively pursuing growth. There is love there.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wisely observed: “Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work . . .” The essence of true love is mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are.