What I was reading in July

Books Bought
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

Books Read
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler
Mr Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood

Well that went by quick. July was a whirlwind of travel and love and celebration, and life just got in the way of reading. As a kid, my summers were so full of books and reading for pleasure. I remember my grandmother's house in Ohio, with its different smell and its cool front room which was protected by the heat of July by heavy shades and a deep front porch. I remember reading at the pool in her small town, while we ate, or after we ate, or if I had gotten too much chlorine in my eyes or grown too embarrassed of my body. And I remember reading back home in New York, sunburnt skin, the thin green rug on a cheek, the nearly endless golden light, and then the orange of the lamps in the evening. 

There's a Peanuts cartoon where Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown are sitting under a tree and talking about that incredible feeling of safety that came over you when you were a kid riding in the backseat of a car driven by your parents. Looking back, that's how those summers feel now. 

And now, as an adult, summers aren't set apart from the rest of the year. It's just work with the addition of heat and humidity and a heavier sense that I should be doing more with my free time. This month though, this month was filled with "more" – with trips home and friends and weddings. And even with all that, at times the two books I read pulled me into that same space of hunger and curiosity that fueled my childhood summer reading.  

On the surface there's not a lot these two books have in common, but in calling upon some rusty 5-paragraph comparative essay skills, it turns out there's a lot about masks and self-deception and what happens when those deceptions fall away. They're both stories of very particular time and place; setting is a major player in both.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning was featured in Nick Hornby's Believer column back in 2006, back when I was a moody broody 14 year-old. And as a moody broody teen living in New York, all I wanted was to leave and couldn't care less about the city's history. Ten years later, and at a distance of 500 miles, it's a different story. Funnily enough this year marked the 40 year anniversary of a lot of the events this books covers. It was eerie to be reading about the '77 blackout during a chance visit to the city on its anniversary. Mahler looks at a rough patch for the city and focuses on 1976-7, using the Yankee's season as a lens and a way to keep things moving, although as I learned 1977 had plenty going on all year long and didn't need too much in the way of storytelling device. The blackout, Reggie Jackson joining the Yankees, a crazy mayoral race, newspapers in crisis and combat, economic downturns, the Summer of Sam – one thing after another. What would it have been like to read this book in any other year? 40 years later and that same sense of "big crazy things keep happening" pervades. Cyclical movement or not, Mahler tells a great story of a crazy year with larger than life public figures and long-reaching effects. And as the best books do, it led to other questions -- what was Bushwick like before 1977? What is it like now? What happened in between? From a broad view – one year in an enormous city– to the specific – one or two neighborhoods in that city–this book felt a little like what Hornby called "reading going well" – one book laying down the path to further questions and further books. And it's always a delight to realize a city that I love and miss and call my own is still so unknown. 

Mr. Norris Changes Trains, is the first Isherwood I've read, and I was a little reluctant. After making an effort this year to read beyond my comfort zone of fiction – and particularly 20th century fiction written by white men – I felt insecure about going back. The book (and a stack of others) was a gift from my uncle, and the handwritten letter he sent with his gift was a gift unto itself. Figuring that if this work means so much to my uncle it was worth my time, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself pulled in so completely. I started it on a weekend trip to New York, after spending time with my oldest friends, brought it on an overnight train trip to see another old friend get married, and finished it back in Chicago, at which point I was invested in the story of friends in 1930s Germany. Set during the Nazi's rise to power, there's a lot about masks and superficiality and doublespeak and dancing as the world darkens. As relevant as Nazi Germany is right now, I can't recall much of this book or what compelled me to finish it. I didn't come to this book as the best reader version of myself, and knew that as I was reading it. I feel as though I should give Isherwood another shake, should maybe shake myself by the shoulders and ask myself to come to books with the critical eye I was supposed to have acquired at college. Or that I should at least be asking questions of my indifference to this work. 

Lately though, other questions have just felt more important. Which is uncomfortable because I think art is important. And Isherwood's work is about fascism and secrecy, which aren't exactly not relevant at the moment. And yet my thoughts still slide right off the book and these questions. I don't have answers to this, am just holding that notice in place to look at in the coming months. What resonates with my Uncle doesn't have to carry the same weight for me. But I'd like to give it another try. There's more Isherwood in the ziplock bags he uses to pack books, another chance, another way to exercise my creaky skills. 

What I was reading in June

Books Bought or Borrowed
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration, Michelle Alexander
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler
Modern Romance: An Investigation, Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenburg
How to Ruin Everything, George Watsky
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Books Read
Radical Hope
How to Ruin Everything, George Watsky

Makeup Bought
A shade of lipstick almost identical to one I already own
An eyeshadow actually identical to one I already own
Bright fuchsia lipstick in a tiny size
Lip gloss that I thought was lipstick, and was disappointed to discover was not, but kept anyway

I don’t enjoy wearing makeup, but once or twice a year I decide that dabbing things on my face is the way I want to change my life and wind up spending too much money on things I’ll never use. I keep buying the same shades of lipstick over and over, keep buying the same exact things over and over, as if they’ll save me from despair. As if the right color on my eyelids will make me better at socializing, make me more interesting, make me braver in public--and in private. Like it will totally change my life and erase the parts of my personality I’m ashamed of.

I’m writing about makeup I bought because I’m still not reading very much. In fact, I’m probably buying makeup because I’m not reading very much.

I also returned to the library and built up a small wall of books. They’re not related to the resistance. They’re not related to anything of the moment. I just want to read them.

I skimmed my way through How to Ruin Everything, a collection of essays from spoken word poet and rapper George Watsky. I fell back into Hamilton and then went deep on Watsky this month. Hamilton led to revisiting the Hamilton Mixtape, which led me to Watsky's 2016 album xInfinity, and eventually to videos and then to this book (also written in 2016 -- what a hard working person). They had it at the library and feeling despondent about not reading and about buying makeup I knew I'd never enjoy using, I ordered it. 

I've been feeling guilty about not reading, but I've also started feeling guilty about what I read if and when I do. Nothing's clicked for me in so long, and I'm still burnt out on despair. So this book was a nice brief reprieve from the not-reading guilt, if not the other kind. 

All told, it was pretty fluffy, a young guy doing stupid shit, but underneath all the levity and self-deprecation is this fear of running out of time. It’s the clock Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about in this interview with Michael Ian Black, and the driving current of Hamilton too. The fear becomes more overt by the middle-end of How to Ruin Everything and "Crying & Baseball" and "What Year is it?" are particularly poignant. "Crying & Baseball" explores how love of baseball can be both learned and inherited, and how the love of something silly can be the foundation of a love that's too deep to acknowledge very often. It also looks at how the things we love and the people we share that love with matter, and how when we lose the people and are left with only the thing we love, it becomes a remembrance and an altar. All of this is a roundabout reflection on Watsky's father and his father’s best friend's suicide, but the fact that it starts with baseball is so resonant to the ways that sometimes we can only touch the dark deep emotions while doing something else superficially. How we have big conversations in the car or in a stadium, when there’s something to occupy the top of the mind with so we can dip in and out of the harder things.

"What Year is it?" follows "Crying & Baseball" and winds through family history as well as social history while Watsky lays out some of what it's like to live with epilepsy, and how the disorder casts the props of quotidien life into much more sinister instruments. Watsky's great-aunt Pam had epilepsy too, and died after hitting her head on a bathtub during a seizure. Watsky holds his experiences up to his great-aunt, touching on the social stigma associated with epilepsy then and now -- from forced sterilization in the early twentieth century to misguided pity from witnesses of his most recent seizure. It's a really lovely essay about family and impermanence and existential threats and it fits in nicely with the entire collection which moves from a lighthearted tone into something deeper and then into something more resolute. I wanted to read this book quickly, and did, and that was this month's gift. 

On the other hand, Radical Hope I kind of had to hammer my way through. I probably shouldn’t have read it all at once, I should have skipped in and out, the way you sometimes can with collections of essays. For right now, the letters that spoke most powerfully to me weren’t the ones written to children or the future, they were the ones written to the past or present. The ones extending beyond children and parent relationships and into something fuzzier but just as powerful. I didn't read Radical Hope well. I was in an off mood and pushing to read it to have something to write about here, but it deserves a return -- or some of the essays do. Perhaps if I can read something more substantive in July, I can begin to put some of the letters next to longer works, make them talk or dance or shout. 

I also started Modern Romance -- and then had to return it to the library before I finished it. I could probably have anticipated that though. The first thing I did with the book was kill a waterbug in my apartment -- I'm just really good at living a glamorous single life and not ready to give it up. The book didn't have much of a chance. Homegoing and The Underground Railroad came way sooner than the library said they would and I wound up with too many books to read, and they're in high demand so couldn't be renewed. Maybe this fall? 

What I was reading in May

Started
Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew Bose
Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
Silent House, Orhan Pamuk

Finished
Too Much and Not the Mood, Chew Bose

May was a fitful month. I had a hard time settling into reading and felt like I was reading everything poorly. I had a time finding my way into anything I picked up, until Too Much and Not the Mood.  Chew-Bose’s book is a gift – it felt like meeting someone for the first time and knowing immediately you’re going to get along so well. What Anne Shirley would call “kindred spirits”. A better echo, in some ways, than Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. I feel about Too Much the way a lot of friends feel about Girls or Broad City – voices of an era...or voices of me! Chew-Bose’s meditations on nook people and her preoccupation with bright sidewalk glare felt much more my speed, my world of people.

Radical Hope – it’s still feeling like a necessary thing. I’m still kind of limping along, feeling a bit burned out on despair. I could use some hope, and these letters delivered it, but I couldn't push through to finish the collection. It might have been too much to hope for, given how emotional letters can be, and particularly those written across generations. 

I also had the chance to see a dress rehearsal of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte while back in New York for a weekend. That felt like a gift too. I mean, in a practical sense it was, from my dad, but in a larger cultural sense too. What a gift to go to see a performance, what a gift for it to be that performance.

What I was reading in April

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Tell Me How it Ends, Valeria Luiselli
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
What We Do Now: Standing up for your values in Trump’s America

In her 2015 review of Between the World and Me Shani O. Hilton expressed concern and disappointment that the book would be read (was being read) by white readers who would then take it as a defining book of blackness. Concerned that black male writing and black masculinity would define blackness for readers who couldn’t or wouldn’t take it as one person’s story, Hilton worried that black women would continue to be pushed to the margins of blackness.

Brit Bennett touched on Hilton’s observations in her response to Between the World and Me, remarking that “books by black authors are always asked to be more representative than they ought to be” but asking of the elision of women from this – and so many other narratives – “Whose vulnerability is horrifying and haunting, worthy of marching and protest? Whose is natural and inevitable?”.

I read Hilton’s review soon after it was published, and bought Between the World and Me when it came out, but didn’t read it for another two years. There was a lot of buzz around the book, but I was also concerned that I wouldn’t read the book properly. That I was coming from a misguided place, that I wasn’t ready to meet this work, that I would be guilty of what Hilton and Bennett feared – taking this book as a definition of blackness and applying its lessons poorly. It’s a shame, because Between the World and Me is, as Toni Morrison’s blurb claims, ‘required reading’ – the writing is so sharp and so clear and the story Coates unfolds of his own awakening is so powerful. There’s so much to learn from Coates’ exploration of disembodiment and unending unendurable fear for existing in a black male body. It’s a shame to have put off reading this book for two years, to have lost two years of this book in my life. Maybe we don’t always read books with the attention they deserve. Maybe we come at them wrong sometimes. But avoiding books that challenge or alarm isn’t the answer. Anyway, I wish I had read this book earlier

On a more removed note, it was interesting to read Between the World and Me two years after it was published, after the buzz and explosive popularity. As I was reading, and as Coates’ explored his own development and shifts in identity, describing his identities emerging out of each other, not the same but relying on the selves that came before, I kept thinking back to an interview between Coates and Neil Drumming on “This American Life.” Two friends talking about another identity shift, figuring out what’s changed and what’s stayed the same…  
 

Tell Me How it Ends is a short book, structured by the 40 questions immigrant children (or refugees, as Luiselli makes a strong argument they should be called), are asked upon entering the country. It’s a pretty devastating book – the refrigerated rooms where immigrants are detained. The subtle biases running through the questions. The sheer number of children who arrive in the US from Mexico, Central America, South America. And of those, how few are even eligible to apply for refugee status or visas. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s so beautifully told. Luiselli notes that she’s a writer, that writers tell stories, that this is how she’s helping these children, by writing about them and the things they’ve seen, survived, escaped. It’s immensely persuasive. It reminded me of an episode of On the Media from earlier this year about border patrol at the US – Canada border. About how terrible things can be, and and just how fast they can become terrible but how far away and opaque it can seem if you’re reading new reports. A lot of humanity is lost when talking about border walls and border crossing and policy and legislation and security measures – Luiselli returns it in a big way.

High Fidelity is a movie that’s come to mean a lot to me because it’s a favorite of a friend and it’s become one of our movies, part of our shorthand. We toss around a “Call me shallow, but it’s the fuckin’ truth” when we need to convey a gross opinion with a veneer of self-disgust. I picked the book up because I wanted a break, and because Hornby is the reason I’m writing these at all – a huge reason I was able to start writing or reading much of anything after two years of not feeling up to it.

I’m still learning how to read again as an adult and part of that is understanding what I’m looking for out of a given book. Hornby returns to this idea regularly in his “Stuff I’ve been Reading” column – your mind knowing what it needs, meat and potatoes or vegetables or chips…this was more of a chip, but Hornby is so good at writing that it didn’t feel totally indulgent. I wish I could put some gloss on it – High Fidelity is actually apropos for this era where a shallow dismissal of everyone else is the codeword for cool, where we’re all internet experts and able to filter out anyone based on a shifting set of criteria we decide in the moment, where what we like IS what we’re like, and that if you apply it to political affairs….but no. I mean, sure, maybe that’s an argument that’s worth making, but also – no, I just read this book because I wanted a break from the “Reading for Resistance” bookshelf at my local bookstore. Call me shallow, but it’s the fuckin’ truth.

What we do Now is a collection of essays, written immediately after the election of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States. There are essays from politicians to organizers to religious leaders and leaders of justice organizations and other people we might want to hear from at this particular moment. It’s a pretty mixed bag – some are really well-written; some are really boring. The final essay, from Dave Eggers, struck a chord. He talks about the night of the election and the days that follow it, recounting a busy stretch of sleeplessness and anxiety, of coming together, of working with students. In one heartbreaking moment, a student shares some of his writing with Eggers under which he has written “what do you think? Am I any good? Should I keep doing this?”

I can’t quite figure out why this puts a lump in my throat, except that I want to protect that sweet high school kid and tell him that yes he should keep on writing. I want to tell him that we need him and his voice. I want to tell him we need to hear from him.

Maybe it goes back to Luiselli’s steadfast dedication to continuing to write, to using her skills to tell grim truths in compelling ways. Maybe it goes back to needing as many people telling their stories and making art as possible, making it impossible to think of one story as defining an entire culture or race. Or maybe it’s some (naïve?) belief that we need art, that art makes a difference, is what the moment calls for. 

(Listen to “Let’s Talk About Me Baby: Lin Manuel Miranda” to hear someone also say that art makes a difference, is a fair action to take)

Or maybe it’s because I wish I had had the courage to ask if my work was any good. Because I still want someone to reach out and tell me that I should keep writing and thinking, that that’s vital. Because I want someone to say that to everyone. 

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.