What I’m reading

I intend to try something new in this space: summarize and highlight noteworthy books, articles, and other media that I have encountered. Reading is an encounter, aptly summarized in a recent TLS essay by Dinah Birch (“A wild ride,” TLS, Jan. 28, 2022):

In one of the more engaging passages of his composite autobibliography, [Rob] Doyle considers his own reasons for reading. “What is it we’re reading for?” Taking the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño as his example, Doyle’s answer is simple: “what I’m primarily in it for is friendship. That may sound corny, but there is no word that better conveys how I experience my relationship to his books. Admittedly it’s a capacious, sentimental, not very literary-critical word … I just like being around his books, in the same way that you cherish the company of a person you love, a friend”. That summarizes something fundamental to the appeal of reading. White reaches for a grander word—communitas—to describe a comparable phenomenon: “Reading is a way to keep asking vital questions in the company of others”. No one, while absorbed in a book, is alone.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels (New York 2140 among my favorites) capture this absorption well. And Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker profile of Robinson (“Best-Case Scenario: The climate-change sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson,” The New Yorker, Jan. 31, 2022) is a great introduction to Robinson and his work. I learned that Robinson completed his Ph.D. In English literature at Duke, where he studied under Fredric Jameson and wrote his dissertation on Philip K. Dick. Robinson’s novels express hope in the midst of catastrophe. As Rothman puts it, Robinson “is especially impatient with those who urge giving up when giving up is against their best interests. What he seeks to practice is, in a phrase popularized by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

While I was working remotely for the first 18 months of the pandemic, the lack of a commute meant that unread copies of the New Yorker piled up around the apartment. I’m slowly working through that backlog and came across a fantastic profile by Masha Gessen of Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV project. Gessen tells of Strangio’s role in and reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which determined that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. One of Gessen’s observations stuck with me: “Legal cases make up a disproportionately large part of the way that the wider society views queer and trans people. We are represented by our sexual practices or our coupledom, or we are seen, as trans people often are, as impostors, liars, or interlopers. The image is rarely nuanced, even when it’s positive.” A fantastic profile, available here: “In the Eyes of the Law: Chase Strangio’s victories for transgender rights,” Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2020.

Finally, I find Meghan O’Gieblyn (Interior States) always worth reading. Her recent cover article for Harper’s is a case in point, in which she observes the tensions between habit, work, purpose, and freedom:

In a 1934 essay, Simone Weil expressed a … skepticism that an “unconditional surrender to caprice” could succeed in making us happy. She was responding specifically to the utopian ideal—one she attributes somewhat controversially to Marx—that technology would one day liberate us from toil, a scenario in which “the ancient curse of work would be lifted.” Weil was naturally skeptical of this vision, not only because she believed routine work to be inescapable, but because she believed human nature to be ill-equipped to handle unqualified freedom, which would leave us at the mercy of our own desires. … Freedom, she argues, is not merely the absence of necessity; rather it involves achieving the right balance between thought and action. … [W]e outsource thought all the time to the rote movements of the body, through the development of habits. Technology is an extension of that process and can, like private habits, make our lives more efficient. But its usefulness begins to wane as it becomes more complex, transcending human thought and understanding.

You can read the whole essay here: “Routine Maintenance: Embracing habit in an automated world,” Meghan O’Gieblyn, Harpers, January 2022.