What I was reading in March

Started

Glass House, Brian Alexander
The South Side, Natalie Moore
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy D. Snyder
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
California, Eden Lepucki (abandoned)

Finished

Glass House, Brian Alexander
The South Side, Natalie Moore
On Tyranny, Timothy D. Snyder
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

About two hours after I heard an interview with Brian Alexander on NPR, I called in an order to my local bookstore for Glass House, his new book about the town of Lancaster, Ohio. Forbes declared Lancaster the ideal American town in the 1940s, but that was decades ago, back when Lancaster was home to a booming glass industry and those glass companies were locally owned. I bought Glass House out of some sadness for Ohio and the places I’ve known there. I thought it would be a bit of an obligation read, particularly once I realized it was about private equity and high finance, but it wasn’t at all. Terms that usually make my mind fog over were presented as the tools that destroyed cities and towns and communities all over the country. Economic theories that I had blearily memorized in high school with a quiet angry boredom were shown to be the foundations of the Great Recession. Large swaths of this still went over my head, but enough made its way through to drive home the point– this is despicable stuff.

The day after I finished Glass House I mailed it to my parents. I struggled with what to say in the note I sent with the book – my Mom grew up in Ohio, my parents met there. I thought they might recognize people and places they know in the book, but didn’t know how to convey what I thought was valuable about the book in that note. I didn’t know how to convey my sadness or my anger or my feelings of helplessness. But my mom started reading it, and when she and my dad saw “Sweat” last weekend, she said this book came up in their post-play conversation.

When I was ordering Glass House, I also ordered Natalie Moore’s The South Side. The South Side has been on my radar since last spring after hearing Moore speak at an event at the Art Institute. Moore was part of a panel held to celebrate the opening of an Exhibit of Gordon Parks’ work, and she spoke of her experience growing up on the South Side and moving to Bronzeville as an adult. I immediately requested The South Side from the library, but was still on the waitlist back in February when I decided that if I was going to buy a book on rural Ohio I could also buy a book about Chicago.

Having read it, I’m glad The South Side remains constantly checked-out of the library. It’s such a powerful examination of the stereotypes about the South Side, the dangerous rhetoric used to refer to south and west neighborhoods generally, the actual dangers in very specific neighborhoods and what gave rise to them. The South Side is the book I think I was hoping The Third Coast would be – a look at why a city as diverse as Chicago is is so segregated in its neighborhoods. The numbers are staggering.

It’s staggering to learn that this is the case in a number of major cities. Growing up in New York didn’t feel as white as living on the North Side of Chicago does. Going to public schools almost certainly affected that, but examining my childhood and adolescence more closely, those lines of segregation were still pretty stark. The South Side is so well written and researched, and although it’s uncomfortable to ask “why is my neighborhood so white?” the answers are important to have.

It’s also got me thinking a lot about infrastructure. A few months ago I heard Dr. Melissa Gilliam, the Director of Ci3 (the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry & Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health) speak at an office event about her work as a gynecologist and her work with students around developing health-focused games. Her work is fascinating and her enthusiasm is catching, but one anecdote stuck with me in particular. She explained that for a few years she took care to provide patients from the suburbs or further reaches of the city with care concentrated into one visit – knowing that it was taking them a few hours to get in to see her for every visit. And then she realized that for her patients in Chicago living on the south and west sides, their commutes to her office were just as a long-- if not longer. Neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago are so poorly served by public transit that getting downtown means stitching together a web of multiple bus lines and train lines and coordinating connections…an enormous task of coordination and timing as well as a large investment of time.

And then a few months ago I attended a volunteer orientation for 826 Chicago and heard about their current program where elementary students in one neighborhood write to high school students in another. When asked if they had heard of the other neighborhood, only a handful of students from each school said yes.

This thinking pushed forward as I learned about the Dan Ryan expressway, and how the decision to build it cut the South Side in half and how hard it has been to bridge that gash. How hard it is to support healthy food in the areas…but how hard people are trying to do it. I’ve lived in Chicago for 3 years now but still feel pretty ambivalent towards it, even while I recognize that there’s so much I don’t know about this place and so much I haven’t explored yet. The South Side provided context and led to questions about why I’ve visited the neighborhoods I have.

On Tyranny was a departure from the books I’ve been reading lately, a small manifesto of 20 ways to resist fascism. It was a gift from my uncle, who I think has sensed some of my hopelessness. On Tyranny is a little fear-monger-y, but it’s alarm isn’t unfounded. It was uncomfortable to read at times, and that’s from both ends – ‘this book is overreacting’ and ‘this book is NOT AT ALL OVERREACTING’. Constant vigilance. We can always be doing better.

Journal of a Solitude was the true gift of the past month though. It came my way through another Professor twitter recommendation and wow did it land. I had low expectations for this one, since I don’t love journals or love writers writing about the process, but wow, Sarton speaks my language. This was one of those books that reached out from the first few pages and one I reached back to immediately. I tried to read it in a way that wasn’t hurried and greedy, I wanted to spend some time with it – but I didn’t want it to be pulled back to the library before I was done, and didn’t want to wait for forever to feel ready to meet it. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that felt special-made for me, but Sarton’s relationship with her physical space and the way light inhabits it felt like seeing parts of myself in print. I’d forgotten the power of seeing someone else talk about something that you’re a little ashamed of in a non-judgemental way. How it’s so big and so small it chokes you up a little.

I’ll finish with what I didn’t finish – Edan Lepucki’s California. This was the book I thought I was requesting when I requested Field Notes from a Catastrophe last month. And this was the book I spent two days googling with terms like “California + climate change + disaster” or “California + novel + climate + 2014” but as it turns out “California + Climate Change” turns up a lot of results, not many of them related to novels. CPL came through though, and California was the second or third result in their database search.

The thing I remembered about this book was the cover, and I requested it because I remembered reading good reviews and because I remembered that someone compared it to Station Eleven (which I enjoyed) in a review. I also ordered it because it felt like I had no other honorable choice after all that googling and mental exertion. I made it about 50 pages in before abandoning the book because frankly it feels like we’re on the road to a slow decay of city and society right now and I didn’t want a field guide to the future. It was too much and I gave myself permission to give up on a well-written book because it was keeping me up at night. It will still be there in a few years. One hopes.