october 10
hello again my friends! Another week has gone by, which is wild to consider, but here we are, well into October. I hope you are celebrating the season appropriately, enjoying your spooky times even as at least here the weather is not quite Fall (though I did drive through a swirl of fallen leaves yesterday and it was truly delightful.)
Tomorrow (presumably?) I start my new job, and I’m excited and a little nervous. I’m trying a new sleep schedule to see if it gives me more energy over the course of the week and I had to lay it out for myself to make sure I’m still getting All My Book Time in (because god forbid I have fewer than 5 different slots for reading per day…) but doing so made me feel better about “losing” an hour a day. I’m aware that things will be slower for me in terms of reading, as I won’t have unlimited hours to, say, read my ebook in the morning (and in fact will be on a pretty tight schedule, limited to max a half hour of that before I have to get up properly and get ready to leave) but! I’m trying to make the most of it, to still do what I want to do. (And at this point, as we’ll see, I’m pretty close to my goal, so I’m not actually afraid that I won’t finish the last seven books in the three remaining months we have.) In fact, I’m less afraid that I’ll be able to keep reading as much as I want, and more afraid that I won’t be able to write as much as I want—that I won’t be as good at getting reviews out and keeping this up! We’ll see, but if there are gaps, well, we’ll roll with it. This newsletter has kept me company for two and a half years at this point, and I’m hopeful I can keep it up!
But all of that job babbling isn’t exactly the point of this, so let’s move to
Books I Wrote About This Week
Uh oh folks here comes a Big Ole Series By a White Man About Mostly White Men! Yes I did watch the film first and yes it did inspire me to read this book series, or at least the first one and yes I was weirdly captivated by this book that spends like a massive amount of time trying to teach me about boats, something I refuse to absorb.
I think I take Big Historical Fiction like this—I had a similar experience with Wolf Hall, and though I wouldn’t necessarily call it “historical fiction,” Moby Dick—where I just sort of sit back and let it wash over me and enjoy myself. I’m not invested in how accurate O’Brian is, though apparently people swear by these books as a great depiction of life in the British Navy during this period. (Terry Eagleton I’m sure has things to say about this idea of the realism of these novels or realism in general, but given I’m not even invested on that level, I’ll leave that commentary to your imagination.) I’m invested in CHARACTERS: I want to know what my friends Jack Aubrey, Stephen Maturin, and my friend the sodomite Mr. Marshall, are all up to, their conflicts and how they resolve them.
It’s fascinating too because this book is BONKERS in terms of pacing. The movie, which combines some features from different books but absolutely is mostly taken from this one, is over two hours long (ABSURD) and has what feels like four different stories jammed into it, and reading this book now, it all sort of makes sense—O’Brian jams all of that AND MORE into his book, and frankly includes long stretches of relative inaction and not as much like interpersonal drama as you might think. Like it’s IN there but it’s also just… cram full of descriptions about how boats move in water (again, I don’t really read and certainly don’t retain those parts—I let my eyes kind of skim over them, and that really helps me not learn a single thing about boats.) And all of that suggests that I would hate it, but I didn’t, I had fun—it’s fun to just see what happens, for me, and not try to evaluate this book on any other grounds. (Yes there is something going on here with queerness, on-page representation with Mr. Marshall notwithstanding, but I have a feeling I need to read more books to really expand it and get a wider sense of all of it and what O’Brian does with it. Homosociality, yes, boats with no women on them, yes, but something else and I’ll keep reporting as uh I keep reading I guess. (Yes I did already put in the library request for book two.)
So as a person who has now read three Eagleton books in fairly quick succession, I will say so far this one is not my favorite. (I mean, we can’t expect a man to reach the heights of Radical Sacrifice every single time he writes a book! I would feel blessed to reach those heights even briefly.) And it’s not my favorite not because it’s not GOOD, because I do think it’s good. It’s not my favorite because I’m a historian of a certain bent, and the larger argument of the book basically is the same thing that I as a historian am always yelling: context is important, including and especially the context in which ideas appear. (No I’m not an intellectual historian but I AM waiting for an intellectual history of British feminism so we can have a chit chat about British TERFism and the way it’s different from American TERFism. That’s for another time though.)
But I do think this book does stuff really well: for one, now I have a lot of books of Marxist literary theory to read! But also it breaks down these major movements of literary theory, which in some ways is what Eagleton is best at, taking apart other people’s arguments and making them more legible to me, a person who is not very smart or well-educated in these areas. And in doing so, he’s able to talk about how the specific historical moments in which these theories appeared deeply influenced them, and how that makes them political even if they are not maybe as obviously explicitly political as the Marxist or feminist theories he discusses in the conclusion.
All of that makes me grateful, once again, that I’m trained in history and not other fields; not that I think that Eagleton is necessarily the only person making these kinds of interventions that matter in the field of literary studies, but the fact that it IS an intervention speaks so much to the politics he speaks about in the book. Honestly the part that made me take this up from 4 stars to 4.5 is the conclusion, where he goes after liberal humanism in the Best Terry Eagleton fashion. How do we articulate that these forms, however we define them, matter, especially when they are challenged as extraneous or without value—and how do we do so in ways that resist capitalism’s iron grasp on “value” and in fact take our insistence on literature’s value as a way of resisting the dominant narratives of capitalism? Why does, or does, literary theory matter, or what does it offer us?
The debate isn’t settled by a long shot, but I think it’s fascinating to juxtapose Eagleton’s arguments against ones I see most consistently (and which often apply to discourses about diversity in books) which are that books are valuable for two reasons: they cultivate empathy for the Other (which, Eagleton notes, is not necessarily true—we can understand a person’s pain to some degree and not be moved to help relieve that pain, or to stop causing them pain ourselves,) and because we See Ourselves Reflected in these narratives—which is also not fully true, and also doesn’t constitute like an ethical reason for books to exist (and I think we’re watching the limits of this as we see debates around when #OwnVoices is valuable and when it becomes an imposition on the private lives of authors or opens people up to criticism fo not reflecting our personal experiences or, worse, for not presenting a Correct or Good version of our identities.) It’s something I’m still trying to chew on, as I do things like consciously sign up for the Author Identity Challenge, about why I think these practices do matter to some degree. And Eagleton doesn’t seem to have an answer as to why doing this work is valuable on a larger cosmic level, or even ethical level (if there is such a way of reading ethically.) But this book did make me think about and confront those debates in ways I hadn’t before, which was also interesting, and which I will continue to chew on as I read and write more!
The Reading Situation
100 books: I’m at 93 out of 100 books! Like I said, I’m feeling okay about most of that, and I’m pretty confident that even if I slow down considerably in my reading, I will still hit my goal by the end of the year!
Author identity challenge: 14 out of 18 prompts completed, or 78%! Here’s an interesting question: what do I do with an anthology that has a wide variety of racially diverse authors? Do I include all of the authors or do I instead just do the editors? (I have done the editors for now.) Also interesting: of the four remaining prompts I have yet to fulfill, 3 are categories of non-binary authors. So I will just blame it on publishing.
Currently reading: I’m about halfway through Sword Stone Table, nearly halfway through How to Read a Poem, inching through Women’s Liberation, tabling Burn It Down to finish Women’s Liberation (the latter is a library book while the former is one that I own, and I’m out of renewals so it’s taking precedence,) almost halfway through Ideology, and in the very beginning of Sexual Justice. All good places to be!
HMU
And that’s it for this week! Thanks for hanging with me as I continue to just pour my thoughts mostly unfiltered onto a page. (Yes, I’ll be honest, I don’t do much editing of this newsletter, so what you get is kind of just whatever I’m chewing on, which has its advantages and its disadvantages for sure.) If you want more of my unfiltered thoughts about Star Wars, or to see me try to convince everyone not to boycott products without striking workers asking you to do so, you can follow me on twitter @fadesintointent. If you want to see my friends’ art, I’m trying to share that more on my instagram story, @sonofahurricane. If you have any recommendations for books by non-binary authors who aren’t white or Black, please let me know! (Comics count!) And, as always, take care of yourself, and each other. <3