october dispatch
spooky scary skeletons
Happy Halloween, friends! I hope you are having a good Halloween. Did you dress up this year? I am too lazy to dress up, and I didn’t even read anything particularly scary because I’m too lazy to plan that kind of thing. I did read a LOT this month though, and that felt good and spooky! I’m also a chickenshit so I don’t do scary things or read scary things, so sorry if that’s what you were excited about when you opened this newsletter. I do spend a lot of time thinking about a SPOOKY topic, like “what happens when you don’t enjoy a book that everybody else loves?” That’s something I’m still chewing on for sure, and would love to hear from you about!
Doin’ the Numbers
I finished fourteen books this month (WILD), eleven of which I started and finished this month; I started thirteen books total during the month of October. I also read two articles this month, and of things I started and finished this month, I read 3,440 pages, 3,408 of which were from books. So far this year I’ve read ninety books (only ten left until my goal of one hundred!!!) and read 27,517 pages total, 26,550 of which have been from books.
Biblical Dispatch
I finished Elijah this month! We’re inching ever close to the New Testament, folks! I have, because of illness, dropped off on this quite a bit, but I’m hopeful that the new month means we’ll work our way back up reading the Bible on the regular.
What I Actually Read
You know when you don't know what to say about a book because you don't want to say the wrong thing? That's how I feel about this book. It was... so good, and I appreciate so fucking much of it even though I'm a white nonbinary person, not a black man who has to live with the threat of death and the reality of police violence every day. But I am obsessed with death in my own ways (personally and also um it's my work as well) so seeing this--honestly like. I needed this collection when I was slightly younger; the poems age, and I know we can't like talk necessarily about the poet as the narrator of poems in every case, I think there's definitely a Thing going on here about aging in the face of death--not just about surviving, because there is no escape from the constant threat of death, but there is a changing relationship to it. I dunno, maybe I'm blowing smoke out my ass and appropriating Black pain, but it is so powerful and in some ways was exactly what I needed not all that long ago, and hopefully will be able to return to in the future.
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, by Michael W. Twitty
I took a class on food history in early 2017, before this book was published, but boy would I have loved to read this with that class, because I think we could have appreciated it together in a way that other people approaching it seemed, according to the reviews, to not. It seems like it was initially marketed as some kind of cookbook? Because many people were complaining about how few recipes were in it, and even more were upset at the way that Twitty incorporated so much of his personal history and genealogy into the text. (I also struggled with the DNA testing portion, mostly because I'm critical of using DNA testing to claim indigeneity, especially in a North American context where that is so often used by white people to undermine Native sovereignty, but my issue isn't truly with Twitty per se.)
This is just such an immense undertaking, and I think forces me as a white person especially to think about things like the fact that I very well may be related to Black people, and that food I enjoy is not without a specific history--something which I do think about, I am a historian, but I think is a thing that maybe I could do with more care to specificity. I'm obsessed with specificity, and Twitty does this in spades, paying such careful attention to the geography of foods, spaces in which they're grown, and the specific peoples who were moved who developed these foods and cultivated that land. So even when I was trying to finish this book quickly (I thought I had to finish it in five days, turns out it wasn't due until later but I still tried to finish it,) it was so well-done that I appreciated every minute of the time spent on specificity in ways that maybe it could very much have been grating or too much. I think especially if you enjoy watching like Paula Deen, you should read this book, and then I'd love to talk about it.
(Confession: I picked this up primarily because musician and rapper Noname has a book club, and this was the first book she picked. I did not go to any meetings about it because the copy came in late for me, oops! Love to be an antisocial reader; I do this newsletter instead of book clubs!)
Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative, and Radical Perspectives, by Michael W. Flamm and David Steigerwald
Sometimes when you teach, you have read boring books that are not particularly useful to you or your students. I'm always reading with an eye towards teaching, wondering what might be useful to students at varying levels, but sometimes you gotta get down and dirty and just read a goddamn textbook. And oof was this ever a textbook. And not even a particularly good one; I know for a fact (based on student emails) that the first half of this book left my students confused. It was so boring, but also it was short so I still get that sweet dopamine hit of having finished yet another book and mostly keeping my current speed of two books a week (based on my September numbers.) So I'll do whatever I can, I guess, to move things forward!
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, by Adam Hochschild
First off: I'M FREE FROM HOCHSCHILD BOOKS! Yes, when I bought three of them like two years ago, all of which I read this year, little did I know I'd be on the emotional roller coaster of a lifetime. I'm being dramatic, of course--they weren't that terrible, even as I did definitely like. Feel very uncomfortable with King Leopold's Ghost, and irritated at the lack of historical imagination in the other one whose title escapes me now but I'm fairly certain I read last month so you can look at my review there. OH I JUST REMEMBERED. Spain in Our Hearts. (Says a lot, maybe, when I can’t remember a book title.)
This one was less painful than the other two; in mostly just restating the work of actual scholars on the subject, Hochschild is kind of at his journalistic best. He's a journalist, not a historian, despite what the wikipedia page says; not to sound like elitist about it, but there are specific frames and tools that historians use when writing history, and you can tell he doesn't do that. And that's fine! He takes the work of many historians of the history of enslavement and its abolition, and makes them flow narratively with skill. That's sort of the job of a journalist, or at least one of the jobs, right? Communicate from experts to nonexperts. Of course, it also helps that I have very little emotional stake in this; I don't know as much about this process as I do about like how to write about colonization, or left political histories. So I'm sure people who know more about this would probably like. Enjoy it way less than I did.
So that's part of it, right? How do we interact with books based on what we previously know versus when information is new. How do I, as a person training to be a historian and a scholar, interact with books about history written by journalists? Honestly, with some suspicion, maybe unfounded; I worry about what books like Hochschild's previous books do to the field in terms of building expectations about what our students and non-academics expect "history" to do as a project. But I'm often proven right; I will say I think this book, where he restates (well!) the arguments of other historians, is his strongest book. I'm not sure if others agree with me on that point--if maybe people consider it more boring than something like King Leopold's Ghost. But it feels safer, somehow? Something to interrogate further, I'm sure, and I'm sure there is no end of me reading books like this, even as I'm cautious and on the defensive every time I do it. (I also find it embarrassing, though I'm fairly certain I've talked about that before, about how I find reading popular history books to be more guilty reading than ANY OTHER reading I do, including like high fantasy garbage and deeply indulgent fanfiction.) So I'm sure we will return to this topic at some point.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, by Eli Clare
The real tension I had with this book is that it's been cited so heavily that I found so little of it new. This is I think both a good thing and a bad thing, right--obviously it's so powerful that the work of a queer crip author gets cited so broadly that I can go to his book and know most of the points. That's exciting. But it also leaves me feeling a little empty, and also unsure what to do with my own reaction. It's not that I need every book I read to be NEW and GROUNDBREAKING--I've explored that before, about where work can be about retreading ground, or what it means to return to sites where the thought that I already know was first laid out. I find it valuable and important to actually read critical works, because in my line of work, we are often under pressure to cite works without having read them. I'm like 90% sure I have cited this book before, without reading it; there's a practice that is valuable here, just to hold like honesty with my readers and say "hey no I've actually read this and here is what I think is important."
The tension of course being, what does it mean when a book is exactly what everyone says it is? When I've encountered what I think is important about this book in other forms, does that mean I'm reading too heavily with the eye of the people whose work has cited this? Am I being lazy for not feeling like this book has absolutely shaken my ground? Or is it a case that I just didn't read this book at the right time? That because I read it with the pressure of a library due date, I couldn't enjoy it and really linger over it the way it deserves? I wouldn't say any of the fault for my reaction to this book--which, I will state, is still that it's REALLY good, and you should read it--lies in Clare's hands. It's not his fault that his book is so heavily cited and was so groundbreaking that much of this feels like repeated work I've encountered before. But I'm left... maybe not underwhelmed, but sort of perfectly whelmed, and so a little disappointed in myself. (Plus we can talk about the singularity of citational practice--why is Clare's book the one that gets cited so heavily? Is there some citational tokenization going on there?)
Anyway, that's what I'm struggling with walking away from this book. Maybe I will try it again; maybe I will ask for it for Christmas or buy it for me (though we need to have a Conversation about the cost of books that were initially published through smaller, feminist publishing houses and then were later taken up by university presses to keep them in print but they are now exorbitantly expensive--the accessibility of knowledge is a real fuckin issue and I'm not super thrilled that these are so fucking expensive. Yes, libraries are great, but sometimes the pressure of a library means I can't engage a book the way it deserves! That's a tension we have to hold!) But for now: I've read it, and that also means something, for this moment.
So I feel like I'm missing something about this book; people whose taste I trust LOVED it, and I'm left feeling like... oh it was okay I guess? It was amusing? I didn't go in with any expectations, so it's not like I'm disappointed, but I wasn't like over the moon in love with it, or even frankly impressed. I can see like "oh it's a clever book" but it didn't necessarily grab me or move me in any real way. And that makes it harder to talk about this book--I always am anxious to write something about a book when it feels middle of the road to me, because there's nothing to say about it! I just want to shrug and be like "it was fine? It was fine." But then there's the peer pressure of people, of your friends, being like "no I loved this book, it's one of my faves." It's definitely not one of my faves, though it wasn't BAD. It just didn't click, and there's no real reason I can point to for that. I guess we can all blame it on the fact that I had to read it under pressure to return to the library as soon as possible, and that doesn't always cultivate the best reading experience--sometimes turns a book into a chore. But I didn't feel hugely that this book was a chore, and have loved many a book I've read under pressure of a looming library due date, so who knows. Maybe I'll try again at a later date, and will look on current me and be like "what an idiot! This was amazing!" Maybe not! Maybe it's just not my jam and that's okay. But it does create a kind of anxiety, a weird sort of fomo when I've already done the same thing as everyone else but not had the same experience. Who knows!
Again, that issue where you read a book that you LOVE (remember how much I loved The Goldfinch?) so you read a book by the same author hoping to recapture that magic and. I mean, the idea of recapturing the magic is bonkers, generally, and not actually helpful; we have to take books as they are, especially when they're not like academic books or the conversations they're a part of are not central to the text itself. (Right? I went to write that claim and immediately came up with LOTS of reasons why it wasn't actually true...) Anyway, I did still really enjoy this book; the ending didn't feel as ham-handed in some ways as The Goldfinch (as in there wasn't a character just saying things... now that was still important to me! But y'know was a major complaint of many people I know who also read it.) It was like deeply oppressive in atmosphere, almost suffocating, but also just like moved along at a clip, and I think did a great job of portraying the helplessness and limited agency of children in a way that is rare for books, without totally stripping them of that agency or interiority.
I did feel like... you know when you're like "I'm not sure I get the ending..."? I'm not sure I got the ending; this is a book I would have LOVED to have read for a book club, so I can hash it out exactly with other people who read it. You should hash it out with me, please, because I Do Not Get It. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it! But I Do Not Get It.
1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Okay so yes I want to acknowledge first that this is a Beast of a book in terms of length, and that's a whole other thing, about ways to approach long books, especially because there's a kind of dread associated with it, given the way I tend to read books, more often in shorter bursts than long sequences; I often read for anywhere between a half hour to an hour at most at a time, because I'm just catching minutes where I can read in between other stuff I have to do. And I'm aware that for some books, that's not sufficient--to be fair in approaching some books, you have to be able to sit down for hours at a stretch and finish it. And sometimes I do manage to pull that off, but rarely, and definitely not with this book.
But it wasn't the length of the book, or the style of reading it, I don't think, that made me have deeply mixed feelings about this book by the end (even though I did still end up giving it like four stars!) The thing that made me have mixed feelings was the Bad Writing of Women. I know I already ranted about this in my review, and I'm not going to go into specifics here because I already did and also a lot of it is related to spoiler-y material, but I do want to talk about the slow grind of misogyny in a book this long, and when enough becomes enough for me. The weirdness about women was relatively obvious to me in the first few chapters--I literally was tweeting about it like very shortly after the book, like I had to check back in with women to be like "hey I know I have like Dysphoria and stuff, but women don't think about their boobs like this, right?" And then it kind of backed off, or rather, I decided to just ignore it. But it's all still there? And it continues to seep through the story? Until, due to spoilers, it's like it came rushing back into me.
I will be real: I'm SO SCARED that I'm blowing this out of proportion. There's something about the bad writing about women in this book that makes me feel gaslit; like I said, I had to check to be like "women aren't really like this, right?" And that I find kind of scary. I'm not sure if it's because I know people whose taste I trust who LOVE this book, who never mentioned it to me. But I don't know how to approach it without gritting my teeth and just bearing the grind of it until I literally can't any more. And that's taxing on a reading experience in a major way. I don't expect perfection, and I'm certainly no like Arbiter of Misogyny; it's not that I decide what is and isn't misogynistic. It's just that there's something about how highly venerated this book is that makes me feel crazy when I feel uncomfortable about it. I do know I'm not alone; I glanced at a review that mentioned something about how this is like a weird feature of Murakami's work (ew?) and I know some other people who have commiserated with me about this. But I'm left kind of like reeling after all of it. Maybe I just haven't been paying close enough attention, and people were actually warning me all along, but I felt kind of blindsided and then just... like I had to endure it until I couldn't ignore it any more. And like where does that leave me? I don’t know.
God you know when you absolutely know that a book is hitting you in all the right places, when you know that you're reading it at the correct time in your life? That's how I feel about this book. It really made me dig so deeply into my own thoughts and ideas about cure, recovery, and repair, the impulses I have towards those ideas, and what it might mean to imagine a different world, or a different relationship to them. I'm just so blown away by so much of it; I read a library copy (thanks, local public library, for making me finally sit down and read this) and now I'm like "shit I need to own this because I have to mark up the shit out of it." Like I know I'm going to want to return to this book again and again, you know? And I want other people to read it so much--I want to hand it off to people and say "look these are issues I want us to be able to hash out together, or at least begin to think about alongside one another." So I guess you know what you're getting from me for Christmas this year, folks who celebrate that! (I probably can't afford multiple copies, but libraries are a thing! Thank goodness!) Really, I would love for more people to read this and talk about it with me, so see if your local library system has a copy!
Confession: I'm like extremely bad at reading mysteries. I'm not smart, I'm not a person who can like pick out the solution to a mystery. I loved the Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid, but I was not interested in trying to solve the mystery by myself; I'd just flip to the back of the book and read the solution on my own. (It didn't occur to me, actually, that you were supposed to try and SOLVE the mysteries yourself.) So this one, I was fully tricked by the red herrings and stuff that Christie put in, and was getting annoyed by the narrator failing to see that the wrong person did it. (Like I said, not very bright.) And in some ways I was frustrated by the format; I don't like to be trapped in the POV of a person who is not the smartest person in the room for mysteries, even though I know that there's a point to that storytelling trick. I don't like to be kept in the dark as a reader, and I'd much prefer to be inside the head of the person who is going to solve the crime. And that's because I'm not interested in being tricked; I like the comfort of a familiar narrative. (I know, it sounds so boring, but especially in this sort of genre I'm not reading it to like sharpen up my own skills!)
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy this book; I really actually did have a good time, and the complaining here is more probably about not being as familiar with the genre as other folks might be. And that's why we read more books like this! So I can figure out how the conventions work and get that sense of comfort I like from books like it. And besides, it's good to work out my own tastes and preferences!
Brain candy is so nice these days, my friends. I feel like I've been in a weird rut of books other people LOVED but I didn't care that much for, so much so that I was a little afraid that I was in some kind of slump or depressed--I mean I am, but in a way that robbed me of the ability to specifically enjoy books. Nope! Just needed brain candy or something to take the pressure off. Like this is so stupid to say, but almost always love Star Wars books. It's so fun and escapist for the most part, and that's a thing I need right now I guess. It also moved SO QUICKLY; I'm in the middle of a lot of long books (or just finished, if I'm not currently in the middle of) and so I felt like I was just slowly slogging through for a while, but this specifically was such a quick read.
It's a good reminder that for my own health, I need to vary what I read. It's good to read for fun, and not just necessarily for my Education or Betterment or whatever. Like I think a lot about the defending of reading we do, when we claim that reading certain books makes us better. And yes, it's good to do that, but also it's good to just lay back and put words into your eyes about a stupid blue man outsmart the people around him. It's good to give your brain a break from the stress and pressure of whatever is going on. So read a stupid book--sorry, that seems harsh for people who are like Really Into Thrawn; but this is not a book we read to better ourselves. Some of the suggested highlights on Kindle made me roll my eyes, but we can move on from that. It's good to just have fun.
You know when a book is speaking to you but you can't understand it yet? Like you're in the wrong place, or not giving it enough attention, or not approaching it under the right circumstances? That's how I felt about this book. I read it under bad circumstances, with breaks in between visiting it, and it just took me a long time to figure out the form of the book. Unlike other books that I've gone 'well hm,' about this year, it wasn't that I'm too dumb (read: not versed enough in the discourse the book is participating in). Instead, it just wasn't the right time. It's like I knew the book was saying important things to me but I couldn't understand it. Sometimes it would leap out at me and I'd be like "oh fuck!" But overall it seemed to slip away from me.
So we'll add this to the "revisit" pile: I will revisit it at a different time, under different circumstances! In the meantime, I'd love to hear about books you have to revisit (or to hear your thoughts about this one!)
This was SUPER hyped, and I enjoyed a lot of it--the world was super interesting and cool, I wasn't confused for very long (despite a lot of the reviews that say they found it too confusing to enjoy,) and the characters were fun and interesting for the most part. But there's a thing--I think it was John Green maybe who said that he never uses like references to real things in the present when he's writing, because it will age the book, and I have mixed feelings about Green's stuff but that seems like smart advice to me, especially given that the memes that Muir uses as dialogue for some of her characters (mostly Gideon.) They felt aged in 2019, mere months after the book was published, and while I don't have a problem with the sort of casual, 2019 language for a fantasy book, I did felt weird having that language feel dated by 2019 terms. Is this making any sense? I feel sort of crazy, but it shook me out of the book in ways that so many other things did not. But I still mostly liked it? But clearly it bothered me enough that I couldn't get past it the entire time. So let me know--I know a lot of folks read this pretty quickly after it came out, and I'd love to talk about it!
The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide: Role-Play the Best Game Ever--No Matter the Game!, by James D'Amato
Confession: I know the author, and that's always an awkward thing. If you thought the pressure was on when you read books that your friends like, imagine what it's like to read a book your friend WROTE! Thank goodness this book is actually really cool and very interesting (and you should buy it through your local bookstore or have your local library order it, wink wink nudge nudge.) But for real, I'm always nervous about reading a book by someone I like and respect, and it's always such a relief when it turns out good, because even if I'm sometimes harsh (or come across here as harsh,) I don't mean to be harsh! I totally acknowledge that all authors are people, not just the ones who are my friends, and they deserve to be taken seriously and treated with respect (unless they've written something wildly racist or sexist, in which case I'll go a little harsher.) But my friends are obviously closer to me and I like to support them the same as I support any small artists. (Yes I do try to be like some what political in my book purchasing, it's not always just "do I need this book for work?")
So love and support your friends but also like be aware that sometimes you might not like their stuff? But in this case I did! So sometimes it's worth the gamble. And buy James's book ;) (but I seriously did really like it, not just because I like him. I really do think it's smart and funny and so interesting and insightful into narrative storytelling, in such an accessible way.)
Perusin’ Periodicals
I read “The Cost of Getting Better” by Jasbir Puar, for my own work. It’s a really interesting piece, about the different registers of the death of Tyler Clementi, and while it was less helpful outright than I thought, it was certainly thought-provoking and pushed me to engage in my own work in a different way, which is what the best kinds of articles can do. Super interesting stuff for sure.
Best Recs of the Month
Probably the best rec I have this month is Brilliant Imperfection; it really pushed me to think about my own life, and it was so interesting and compelling. Really, really should read it yourself, because I want to discuss cure and our relationships with cure with people!