Maggie Jaris

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What I'm reading this month (...and last month)

 

January

Finished
Citizen, Claudia Rankine
All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister

February

Started
Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
1968: The Year that Rocked the World, Mark Kurlansky
Glass House, Brian Alexander
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

Finished Field Notes from a Catastrophe

I hadn't realized my February reading was so restless. I'm still figuring out how to make reading a more regular part of my life, so that may be part of it-- trying to walk the line between glut and avoidance. Part of it too, surely, is trying to carve out the time for books like Citizen and Between the World and Me, books that have been on my list for a while, books that I start and immediately realize should be read with full attention, and not, say, before bed or on the elliptical at gym, two places where I've done much of my reading over the last year.

(I like reading at the gym, although I'm also a bit ashamed of it. I know that I'm probably working about as hard as I would be if I was watching television, and that I work out longer when I read than when I listen to music, even if it's at a lower intensity, and that above all, if I like doing it and it's not hurting anyone at the gym, then it's fine -- but still the shame remains.)

I started Citizen during the last few days of 2016 and find myself coming back to it again and again. It's on my list to re-read. I knew Citizen was poetry, going in, but hadn't read enough about it to be prepared for the ways that Rankine plays with form or how effectively. I had heard the buzz, but now that I've read it, really and truly, Citizen is vital and necessary and something to return to in the coming months and years.

 

I had intended to read All the Single Ladies in 2016, but wound up locked on a waitlist from last fall until this January and by the time it arrived I had forgotten I had put a hold on it at all. I started reading it on the elliptical at the gym on a Friday night and wound up frantically pedaling and texting a friend who had recently read it, desperate to convey my excitement at hearing a stranger express the same disappointment I had felt as a girl when all the women I read about wound up married and somehow diminished. I spent the next three Friday (...and Saturday) evenings at the gym pedaling away and reading about single women in American history -- really, an ideal night. It was such a relief to read stories of women forming deep, complicated, fulfilling friendships with other women and have those relationships be presented as valuable and normal instead of aberrant or a poor substitute for male attention.

I spent the rest of January kind of messing around with history -- beginning to re-read both the Zinn and the Kurlansky, ping-ponging back and forth between the two and trying to decide if I wanted to start from the beginning of this country's bloody history or jump into just one bloody year whose events feel fairly resonant right now. I ultimately decided to start from the beginning, but was interrupted by the arrival of a few library books.

I also dipped my toes into Carson's Silent Spring (a book I was supposed to read in high school but never did) and then had to return it to the library before I made much progress at all. From what I can tell there are only 2 copies in circulation in Chicago, and I admit, I thought I'd be the only one looking to dive into history in this particular way, but it looks like others are thinking about the likelihood of having to rebuild in the coming years and are also looking for guidance from those who helped push for the (now-threatened) legislation in the first place. Well, good.

Losing out on Silent Spring brought me to Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a re-working of 3 essays Kolbert wrote for The New Yorker in 2005 about climate change. 10 years out and it's a chilling read. I had thought it was a more recent book when I requested it from the library (Kolbert's Sixth Extinction, maybe? Or some disaster novel set in California that I clearly don't remember well enough to know much about), but I was glad that this was what I wound up with. While I was reading about researchers jamming a boat into an ice floe to study it and discovering that it was melting too fast for them to collect all of the measurements they expected to in 2004, the New York Times published an article about a crack in an antarctic ice shelf that's been growing rapidly since 2014, so it all felt really timely and really sobering and also really hopeless.

As for books in progress right now, as I mentioned, Between the World and Me is something I want to give my full attention to, which requires some carving of time in the evening or weekend. I'm still not great at this, but the rewards of spending real time and attention on this book make me want to improve and quickly.

Glass House is also hitting close to home and is demonstrating my complete ignorance around high finance and private equity. It's also making clear how damaging that ignorance can be.

...looking ahead to March, I'd like to be able to find a book to read before bed that isn't about economic disaster, environmental disaster, and/or crushing systemic injustice. That reading is vital and it's what's been missing, but it's not exactly great bedtime reading.