January 2022 in Books: What I'll Be Reading

On my desk, Menahem Mendel by Sholem Aleichem is still waiting to be finished, alongside Vol. I of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom (let's see if he mentions Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has just died), Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley, 4321 by Paul Auster, Beatrix Potter's tales, and Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement. For Christmas I've also received Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes on Grief. Besides, an English-language translation of Delphine Minoui's memoir I'm Writing You from Tehran looks tempting.

2021 in Review

In 2021 I kept a spreadsheet where I tracked part of my reading. I finished over 68 ebooks or paper books and 13 audiobooks. There were signs that I need to diversify my reading: for example, 56% of the books were from the United States.

Reading Journey Around the World

If I finally manage to write up the South Korean books read in 2021, as well as reading Ukrainian books, the next countries would be Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, the UK, and France.

What I've Just Read

I listened to the last of the audiobook of Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild yesterday.

Cover of Empire of Wild
via Penguin Random House Canada

Although its writing style leans toward too many similes, and a few patches of bald prose or scenes (like the sleazy affair of a corporate man of affairs with a young church acolyte) remind me of mass market thrillers, I found it incredibly absorbing.

The protagonist is Joan. She is a Métis woman — sometimes mistaken for a 'spicy Latina' in roadside bars — who has finally found an equally somewhat bohemian but loving partner in another Métis person, Victor. The two of them had met in a drinking establishment, decided to join forces and travel through the United States in a camper van, and finally settled down again and married in Canada.

In their rural Ontario community — the one Joan grew up in, with her construction worker mother Florence, grandmother Mère, her grandmother's friends, and her brothers — men and women work in house construction or mines, for example. Men and women also hunt for their food, like deer or rabbits or elk, alongside grocery store fare. Still, there are social conventions against killing more than one can eat. Also, one can't say that any of the characters in the book glorify guns, and there's no trace of Duck Dynasty.

After the pair argue, Victor disappears.

Joan does everything she can to find her husband. She finds irritation and solace in her family, who do not entirely support her quest and have their own battles to fight. Older than her years in spirit, unwise at times but self-aware, warm and reliable in her imperfect way, she felt very real, as if her voice were speaking from the page. [Edit: Some of the credit for this is surely also due to Michelle St. John's narration of the audiobook!]

The leading thread of Joan's longing for her husband, weakened by insecurities and lent interest and realism by the fact that neither of them were perfect, part of a bond whose precise nature is hard to pinpoint in moments of doubt, was in my view well spun. At times this plot aspect has a timeless quality, as old as Penelope waiting for Odysseus — with a positive modern difference: Joan is actively working for the good of her husband instead of waiting for him to reappear on his own.

It is also this plot and characterization thread, though, that makes me a more partial reviewer, prone to over-interpreting — it reminded me of the platonic yearning for family and friends in the era of social distancing. Sometimes descriptions of grief take on a very self-conscious, cult-like quality, but I liked Empire of Wild all the more because it steered clear of that tendency.

Cherie Dimaline's book has one foot in secular reality: the financial needs of Métis communities in Ontario vs. the destruction of ancestral lands and culture through pipelines (e.g. Keystone Pipeline) and mining, along with financial exploitation, casual misogyny, and the ways in which people both embrace and need more than the places they come from. Its other foot is set in the world of Métis legend: the werewolf-like figure of the Rogarou and the spirit world that avenges the misdeeds of the community. Of course, the lines blur.

As oil pipelines and other dilemmas still exist for many First Nations (and other) communities in Canada, as well as the mingled legacy of Christianity on First Nations cultures, Empire of Wild has lost nothing of its contemporary power and relevance.

Altogether, although listening to audiobooks I'm less likely to pick up on problems in the literary style, I'd say that Empire of Wild is one of the best books set in Canada that I've read. Like Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, Jesse Thistle's From the Ashes, Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed, and maybe even the works by Guy Vanderhaeghe and Margaret Laurence that I found singularly tasteless, grim and unedifying as a high schooler, it has made me even more aware of never really having understood the cultures and living reality of most of the rest of the country I used to live in. Attending a German-Canadian church in a middle-class suburban community in Victoria in the 1990s and early 2000s, with heavily Americanized influences through school and television, is apparently not all that representative.

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Pine Island, Georgian Bay (ca. 1915)
by Tom Thomson
via Wikimedia Commons

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"Cherie Dimaline: ‘My community is where my stories come from and it’s also where my responsibilities lie’" [Globe and Mail] (June 30, 2017)

Empire of Wild [Penguin Random House Canada]

***

Cookbooks

Aside from still needing to make more recipes in Yasmin Khan's Ripe Figs (but the tahini swirl buns were excellent), Kirsten Buck's Buck Naked Kitchen, and Sarah Kieffer's 100 Cookies, I now also have a German language translation of Meera Sodha's East, bought as a Christmas present for the family.

***

Resolutions

To forage in Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus again. Also, to read books in Italian. To read more internationally, and cook many healthy recipes and a few naughty ones ... The list goes on.

December 2021 in Books: What I'm Reading

THIS MORNING I read "Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes" (1922) from The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter. Published reluctantly when the author-and-illustrator was losing her eyesight, she gently rewrites famous rhymes like "This Little Piggy."

"We have a little garden"
Illustration of Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes
by Beatrix Potter

She also illustrates a poem from her friend Louie Choyce:

We love our little garden
And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
Or blighted blossom there.

[Tip: You can find the entire book on Wikisource. ]

***

Turning to adult literature of the 21st century:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett felt like a page-turner after a while. Set in the 1950s through 1990s, if I remember correctly, it follows two twin women who were born in the segregation-era United States.

I enjoyed the back and forth between the different generations of Vignes women.

My only gripe? At times I wished I were reading James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, or another 20th century author instead; sometimes a 21st century perspective blurs the experiences of the 20th too much.

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In a predictable coincidence, the Jimmy Carter biography His Very Best sheds another light on racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His campaign to become Governor of Georgia profited greatly by what a few people ca. 2016 have called 'racial anxiety.'

But Carter upended expectations when, in his inaugural speech, he declared his support of racial integration.

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In between I have been reading more of Assia Djebar's Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement.

Then I have begun reading Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Set during the recession of 2008-2009,  its main characters are a family of Cameroonian immigrants to the United States.

In an audiobook recording, I'm also listening to Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild. Published in 2020, it is a novel about a Métis community in Canada, in which a wife looks for her lost husband.

***

This past week, Barack Obama has posted his end-of-year lists of his favourite songs, books and films of 2021. A few authors are old-timers, like Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead, and Kazuo Ishiguro; others are relative newcomers like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Dawnie Walton. The lyrics of a few of the songs are also worth looking at, in their own literary right.

In the Bleak Midwinter, in a Nutshell

Christina Rossetti, one of the clan of Pre-Raphaelites, wrote a religious poem that has since been set to music by Gustav Holst and others, and turned into a Christmas hymn.

I've not entirely been a fan of her writing style, which in the first verse of this poem has a kind of literally lapidary Cubist quality even if she was writing decades earlier, in the 19th century. But it is undoubtedly also moving.

From Pre-Raphaelitism and the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (1905)
Likely by William Holman Hunt, via Wikimedia Commons

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.

Night
by Edward Burne-Jones
via Wikimedia Commons

Our God, Heav’n cannot hold him
Nor earth sustain;
Heav’n and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
Jesus Christ.

[...]

What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give him,
Give my heart.

***

To me, an element of William Blake's mysticism tinges the second verse: having an idea of religion in which there is always a conflict or a wrangling for a central role, the Tyger and the Lamb. Maybe inspired by Paradise Lost?

I see this portrait of conflict as projecting a personal struggle with faith, or with the world. Seen as an 'objective' reader of the poem: why, in a Christian cosmology, can't a loving God coexist with heaven and earth?

It's also unclear why Jesus would expect gifts; but that might be just my opinion, influenced by my Black Friday season anti-consumerism.

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'Pre-Raphaelite window
in Highfield United Reform Church, Rock Ferry'
In the Pre-Raphaelite style.
via Wikimedia Commons

The King's College Choir at Cambridge recorded a rather fine version of Holst's musical setting in 2005, and it is available on YouTube.

In the Bleak Midwinter (1872) [Wikipedia]

The Life of President Carter, Take Two

One of NPR's best books of 2020 was an exhaustive (800+ pages in paper, 30+ hours in audiobook) biography of President Jimmy Carter: His Very Best, by Jonathan Alter. Although it is rooted in portraits of rural Georgia during the Great Depression, when the president was still very small, and passes through the wartime 1940s and the halls of the naval academy in Annapolis, it always checks in again with contemporaneity.

His Very Best has ambiguities practically on every page. It makes clear that Carter was not always mild-mannered, not always the greatest husband to Rosalynn (pronounced 'ROE-za-linn'), a tough parent, a skeptic where he is now a kind of non-conformist Baptist, a future humanitarian who did not air his own liberalism on race at a time where the backlash to the civil rights movement made it uncomfortable, a political strategist despite his unworldly(ish) principles. Also: Depending on where you sit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may or may not see a contradiction (seemingly the author does) between the peace-brokering he did between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s, and his views on the Palestinian cause nowadays.

Every president proves as best he can that he is a man of the people, while running for office. Jimmy Carter himself may have overstated the deprivation of his childhood circumstances during political campaigning — sure, his family did not have running water for a while, but during the Depression they were rather well off compared to their indigent neighbours. In one passage the author, Jonathan Alter, also writes with painful directness about the way Carter's family economically exploited their Black neighbours even while the family was also at times more tolerant and more deeply helpful than their other White neighbours. — But Carter also seems a much more handy, self-made figure than his presidential peers. The author argues that he is an autodidactic renaissance man.

The truth, as one of Oscar Wilde's characters phrased it, is rarely pure and never simple.

The author — who states that the biography is unauthorized and does write a few very unflattering assessments, but also spoke with his subject for the sake of the book — tries to enhance Jimmy Carter's image, even without resorting to Carter's famously helpful post-presidential career. (Well into his 90s, he has still been on the ground with Habitat for Humanity, helping build houses for those who need them, for example.) 

Alter wants to show that what passed for weak policy in the 1970s is often common sense today: emblematic, the solar panels that the President installed on the roof of the White House. And the author does have a good case: another example is Carter's opposition to the death penalty, something that is now gaining wide currency amongst top Democratic Party leaders. Maybe Carter has been the first 21st century president.

I think the biography is in its approach also very much a reflection of 21st century thinking: we no longer need to pretend that large social struggles were won through immaculate saviour figures, nor is it useful or fair to pretend this. We do not need to write hagiographies of a Martin Luther King, Jr., as a saintly figure who glided through life enfolded by the aura of moral White approval, to appreciate his impact for the better on the course of history. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of all people who did not step into the light of the many others who came together to lead change, the people who would talk with a Menachem Begin and an Anwar al-Sadat — and help them be guided by their own thoughts and feelings toward some course of action that may make the world a slightly better place to live in. The future of civil rights and human rights may well lie (perhaps it has always done so) in a democracy of goodwill.

November 2021 In Books: What I'll Be Reading

After the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced, it would make sense to read the writings of Abdulrazak Gurnah.

And in September Colson Whitehead published Harlem Shuffle, set in New York City in the 1960s.

Cover of Harlem Shuffle
via Doubleday

For the would-be archaeologist like me, Lara Maiklem's Field Guide to Larking is also a tempting new book (published longer ago in August, it should be mentioned).

But I will continue to dig into a reading backlist instead of reading newer publications. There are the Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter to finish, and the list of best books of 2020 from National Public Radio's website.

Michelle Obama's autobiography Becoming is turning out warm, readable, and beautifully written. Still reading earlier passages about her childhood piano lessons when she grew up in Chicago, I'm enjoying comparing and contrasting her literary approach to her husband's.

Cover of Becoming
via Penguin Random House

Aside from that, I'll just post a list:

Sholem Aleichem: Menahem Mendel (transl. from Yiddish to German)

Assia Djebar: Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement

Eliese Colette Goldbach: Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

Brit Bennett: The Vanishing Half

Beatrix Potter: The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman: Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

... and I have a lengthy 'to be read' list too! The perils of being too absorbed in work, and relying too much on 'comfort reads' to get me through my stretches of angst, are that the books pile up too much.

August 2021 In Books: What I'm Reading

Earlier this month I finished Jutta Person's Esel, a thin German-language volume of cultural history about donkeys and anthropomorphic interpretations of them by everyone from Roman satirists through Christian theologians to German romantics. My uncle M. gave it to me as a birthday present last year because donkeys are my favourite animals. Now another birthday gift, Paul Auster's 4321, is lined up to read next.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji, are also read, and although both were undoubtedly good, I won't write reviews at present because they'd be too half-baked.

Cover of A Hundred Million Years and a Day
via Gallic Books/Belgravia Books

In a big geographical leap, I've moved to reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, a French hit novel that is set at various times in the first half of the 20th century, It is written from the perspective of a solitary, dry-souled ivory tower paleontologist — written by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and translated sublimely and award-winningly by Sam Taylor. Perhaps because my French literary frame of reference is small, the atmosphere and the setting remind me of Marcel Pagnol and the spare style reminds me of Le grand Meaulnes. It's also well thought out; sometimes time-hopping in books is so tediously confusing that I want to gouge out my eyes, but here the back and forth — as the details are filled in — adds genuine suspense.

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The book I'm most enthusiastic right now because it makes me happy is Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey by Bob Avian and Tom Santopietro. A basic knowledge of musicals or of mid-20th century film is enough to make its revelations understandable.

The aim of the authors is to tell us exactly what we want to know: each chapter is grouped quite tightly around a specific musical. Fortunately the gossip is generous and not mean-spirited. We hear that Jerome Robbins, a god of sorts among choreographers, was tremendously unpleasant; but we are also told that this was because he was unhappy.

In general Avian (from whose perspective the book is written) and Santopietro express modern views. Avian, in his eighties, makes little attempt to present a great man's (or woman's) sadism as ideal or even as a useful evil. He presents it as a flaw, but as a flaw whose owner still deserves sympathy.

I love the old-fashioned turns of phrase in the book, too, however: 'great gal', or "[... q]uicker than you can say “West Side Story,” Audrey set her cap for Michael and snagged him."

It feels twee or reductive to call Avian delightful, but the adjective comes to mind anyway.

The authors are friendly raconteurs, as we see not just there, but also when they wink at the audience with sentences like this vignette from an unsuccessful play production:

Act Two contained a King Lear ballet—yes, you read that right—and I was completely at sea.

Avian also mentions his experience of 1960s drug culture in a characteristically wholesome way:

I tried pot for the first time and thought, “Hmm, this sure is a lot of fun. And creative.”

He died in January this year, as I was startled to learn when reading his Wikipedia biography.

Readers who want memoirists to disembowel their private lives might find this book not for them, but fans of Broadway, or of 20th century American film star history, and perhaps also fans of New York City's social history in general, will probably love this. National Public Radio included it in their list of the best books of 2020.

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"Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer Bob Avian dies aged 83" by Adrian Horton (January 22, 2021) [Guardian]

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As part of my research into the history of the earliest decades of the 20th century, I have also jumped into the World War I chapters of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell's Autobiography. Published well after that War, when the Cold War was still on, it is like the oak in Jean de la Fontaine's fable — not in that its roots touch on the realm of the dead, but rather that its roots touch on the realm of Victoria and an era of absolute British aristocratic privilege that seems utterly absurd now.

I first read the autobiography when I was a teenager struggling with my own opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He was briefly an imaginary posthumous mentor.

And now — even as I wince at his views on relationships during the passages about Lady Constance Malleson, Katherine Mansfield and Lady Ottoline Morrell; even as I find him overprivileged in one passage, and mindbogglingly out of touch in another; and even though I don't admire his catty moments — in general it feels like his intelligence, his wonderful turns of phrase, and his dedication are not in doubt. And his insights on political and social celebrities are also great, if partial, gossip.

Cover of Why Men Fight (1917)
via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a passage where he has been imprisoned due to his activism against the First World War, in a rather posh prison division thanks to the intervention of former British prime minister Arthur Balfour:

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. [...] I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [...] and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.

(Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1978. p. 256)

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I'm also reading Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, about a large midcentury American family that included a high number of sons with schizophrenia. I am struggling with it. As a takedown of the conformist 1950s ideal of domestic bliss, or of the unalloyed joys of military service and being in a military family, I think Hidden Valley Road is the most effective.

I would like it better if the family could have written their own history. It's not much fun of reading their lives as a psychological literature exercise. From my amateur armchair perspective, I like it better when we acknowledge that we can follow some of the thought patterns of the more conspicuously mentally ill, for example.

I've known people who are genuinely healthy in mind, like the psychological equivalent of an amazingly athletic person. In most cases I would say, however, that we are participants in, and not observers of, the human battle for logic, reason and proportionate emotional reactions. If we don't acknowledge that, it's unhealthy for ourselves and harmful to others.

Around the World in 32 Countries: South Africa

"Typically, hair gets done on weekends (Hillbrow, 2010)"
Two women in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Attributed to Guinivere Pedro, c. 2015
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Official languages:

• English (first language of 9.6%)
• isiZulu (22.7%)
• isiXhosa (16%)
• Afrikaans (13.5%)
• Sepedi
• Setswana
• Sesotho
• Xitsonga
• siSwati (Swazi)
• Tshivenda
• isiNdebele

Modern-day state formation year: 1994 (democratization)

"Dune Strandveld growing on dunes
in Blaauwberg Nature Reserve. Cape Town."
Photograph taken ca. 2010, attributed to Abu Shawka
via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Capital city: Pretoria (executive), Bloemfontein (judicial), Cape Town (legislative)

Surface area: 1,221,037 km² (larger than Ethiopia and smaller than Mali or Angola)

Currency: South African rand

Driving side: left

Main trading partners: Germany, the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom and Spain

Crops: Sugarcane, maize, grapes, oranges, potatoes, wheat, soy

Mining: Amongst top 10 worldwide producers of platinum, chromium, manganese, titanium, vanadium, iron ore

Sources:

South Africa [Wikipedia]
List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia]
Economy of South Africa [Wikipedia]

***

While the history of South Africa stretches back thousands of years, I concentrated in my reading of South African books on the period from 1900 to the present.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela is a classic that requires little introduction. I am still reading Volume I. He portrays his childhood in a chief's extended family and household in the 1910s and 20s, then his education in colonial British institutions, reaching the apex of his university studies at Fort Hare. Then the life he'd envisioned takes another swing into the unknown as he runs away from his guardian, a short job at a mining complex abruptly breaks off, and he grows into work at a lawyer's office in Johannesburg. There he meets anti-apartheid activists, including Communists, and no longer just attempting to fit into the socioeconomic reality of South Africa as it approaches the Malan years where apartheid became solidified into its extremist nadir, he begins to become political. Altogether he takes pains when setting forth his own life's story to portray the different groups and milieus in South African society, to depict a bonded rather than isolated nation.

Because Albert Luthuli's life ended in the late 1960s, long before the defeat of apartheid, and he was more religious, his book Let My People Go offers the most insight into specific topics: Christianity in South Africa, attempts to bring about reconciliation between groups in the country (South African civilians who were facing apartheid in different parts of the land, urban or rural; the different White political groups and administrators; the interracial 'Coloured' population and population of Indian extraction; Communists and Anglicans and Catholics; racist White individuals and policemen and less racist White individuals and policemen), the creeping influence of apartheid on Luthuli's home ground of education, and initiatives to organize passive resistance on a large scale, in the mid-20th century.

Maloti-Drakensberg Park (Lesotho, South Africa)
by Véronique Dauge, c. 2005
via Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of UNESCO
CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

Apartheid, the volume of anti-apartheid essays edited by the exiled writer Alex La Guma to help concert international pressure to undermine the apartheid government, offers a broader spectrum view of all of South African history up to the early 1970s, when it was published abroad in Britain. It establishes a factual basis earlier in the book of the gradual introduction of racist government policy whether English or Afrikaner, details apartheid's impact in the fields of education, land ownership, military spending and even sports, and winds up with perspectives of the future that admit in some cases that violence and/or Communism may be the answer.

While the essays aren't always thrilling to read, and the earnest interspersed poetry often feels like the offcuts of better work, it remains informative even after 40 years of events have piled on top of the ones in the book. It's also interesting to me even in that bygone era of the Vietnam War, other after-effects of colonial rule, Cold War coups and invasions, etc., South African government policy internationally still had the power to shock.

"City Deep container terminal Johannesburg 2014"
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Turning to fiction: Lauren Beukes's novel Zoo City, set in her birth city of Johannesburg and published in 2010, gives a fantasy view of present-day South Africa. Her heroine is a young Black woman who had intended to become a journalist but had become sidetracked by the violent death of her brother, drug abuse, and a prison term, into petty crime. Even strangers recognize that she has been in trouble with laws written or unwritten, due to the presence of a large sloth by her side. This particular one appeared after the brother's death and it is linked to her by magic: a pet with a mind of his own, her external conscience, and her partner.

Crime and socioeconomic inequality in fictional Johannesburg are the focus of the novel. But, although this is by no means central, Beukes also mentions how the city (fictionalized in the book, but mirroring in some respects the 'true' South Africa) has paradoxically been a haven of sorts for refugees from violence, specifically wars in the northern African continent. 

To quote Wikipedia:

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2008 reported over 200,000 refugees applied for asylum in South Africa, almost four times as many as the year before. These people were mainly from Zimbabwe, though many also come from Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. Competition over jobs, business opportunities, public services and housing has led to tension between refugees and host communities.

The author also spent time studying in New York City. Her depiction of urban crime seems like it can be applied beyond Johannesburg, perhaps as a result of that, even if it's true that in smaller cities like Berlin I do expect violent crime but not regular shootouts. What I did find refreshing is that, although for example the imaginary musical scene in her book is influenced by American pop culture, she helps make pretty clear through her descriptions that the world doesn't revolve around the US or Europe (as I'm sometimes tempted to think from my German-Canadian perspective). Most of the preoccupations, entertainment and future of South Africa are driven from within.

Beukes's writing style in Zoo City is prone to clichés and the narrator indulges in libertarian-esque cynicism that I unkindly found performative. First-person, present-tense narration is not everyone's favourite quirk, either, even if it is fashionable. But her strong characterization, scene-setting and writerly intensity made me forget and overlook these aspects, and the novel was compelling to read to the end.

July 2021 In Books: What I'll Be Reading Next

In the 'journey around the world' in books, I'm wrapping up my sojourn in South Africa: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, the essays in Apartheid collected by Alex La Guma, and Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go all being read, I only still need to finish the first volume of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. (I've reached the stage of that autobiography where, as a fledgling lawyer trying to fit into his professional sphere without making waves, Mandela still decides to become politically active, joining meetings with Communists and other groups who are striving to end apartheid.)

South Korea is next. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 felt so cheerless at the first reading that I've decided not to reread it. The opening pages of Kyung Sook-Shin's historical tale The Court Dancer — about a Korean courtesan who marries a French nobleman — were good, but I wanted something different. Aside from Korean folktales available in online book archives in a colonial-era English translation, it looked like there were mostly books about North Korea or about 'comfort women' during the Second World War or other depressing books to choose from in my online book subscription website. And perhaps South Korean manhwa is a more promising genre for lighthearted topics than literary fiction.

In the end, I chose One Spoon On This Earth in an excellent translation — stylistically speaking, at least; of course it would require a detailed knowledge of Korean to know about the technical accuracy. It is written by Ki-young Hyun, and fictionalizes — during the early chapters, at least — a childhood during the post-WWII occupation of Korea. The tyranny of Japan and the war itself were history; but starvation, a cholera epidemic, the destructive effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on home life, a tug-of-war between the occupying authorities (American and Korean) and the Koreans themselves, and battles over Communism, partition, and independence ensued.

Likely the list of 'trigger warnings'  for this book is long enough to be a small book in itself.

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It has been hard to find Ukrainian books to read after the South Korean books are done. For example, Joseph Roth may have been born in the Ukrainian portion of Galicia, but to me it seems highly unlikely he'd have considered himself Ukrainian. Nikolai Gogol's books also feel like an ambiguous case. Let's see.

But if I step back and revisit countries with under 60,000,000 inhabitants:

A French colleague of mine with Algerian family members has suggested Algerian books to read — she also offered to read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo with me in tandem.

I might also finally track down a copy of the book by a Taiwanese author that another colleague's wife recommended to me a year ago: The Silver Bicycle.

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Yesterday I cycled to Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, on a dozy summer weekend afternoon with remarkably few tourists roaming the Friedrichstraße, and browsed in comfort in the English-language books department. In the end I emerged with two novels — Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half and Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers — and a travel memoir-cookbook — Ripe Figs by Yasmin Khan.

Lastly, my to-be-read pile still includes the 'best of 2020' books and related books from the National Public Radio list. Five hours are left of the Stamped From the Beginning audiobook, and I've made a little progress in Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker.

Cover of Ripe Figs,
via Bloomsbury Publishing

April 2021 in Books: What I've Been Reading (Children's and Youth Literature)

In the course of a deep dive into the Edwardian Age, I launched back into Beatrix Potter in April.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), of course, is a classic and led to the breakout success of the author, when publisher Frederick Warne — wiser than other publishers who had rejected her — asked for the manuscript to be illustrated in colour and accepted it on those terms:

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin: A young squirrel, bristling with energy, goes on short boat trips together with other squirrels to an island in the English countryside. The others, who respect the chief inhabitant of the territory, bring tribute to the elderly owl who inhabits the island, before they roam around it. But Squirrel Nutkin badgers the owl, taunting him with flippant rhymes, as the threat that the owl will finally take his revenge intensifies. I have to confess I didn't particularly like this book.

It is a cannibalistic book, in a way. In the Narnia books the conundrum of humanizing animals, but still making them attack or eat each other, also arises; but I think C.S. Lewis took more steps to address the paradox. One assumes that in the Edwardian Age, children were not thought to be particularly sensitive.

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

And The Tailor of Gloucester shows off Potter's range of illustrator skill with watercolour paintings: they teem with 18th century formality, panache and detail. It was, apparently, the author's own favourite work and is based on a local legend not unlike the Heinzelmännchen of German fairy tales.

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

***

King and the Dragonflies is a middle grade or young adult book that was published in 2020 and landed in National Public Radio's best books of the year list. Kacen Callender also wrote Felix Ever After, which follows a transgender teen and, getting a lot of attention when it came out, feels like a pioneering book in the broadening social awareness of transgenderism, non-binary ideas of gender, etc.

via Publishers Weekly

The narrator protagonist of King and the Dragonflies is a teenager who lives in rural Florida, in walking distance of the wilderness of the bayou. Hurricane Katrina's legacy still looms large, and based on the ages and birthdates it is clear that the plot is supposed to be set in the here and now. The bayou itself mostly suggests, to the protagonist, his brother Khalid — an older, only sibling who died unexpectedly as a school athlete, and whose spirit King likes to think is reincarnated in the dragonflies that fly over its surface.

His parents are torn up about the sudden loss of their son, also uneasy and angry in a social environment where the sheriff is a racist and they feel unsafe.

King and the Dragonflies has old-fashioned elements: the benign and not-so-benign rednecks who appear in the periphery of King's life are not too far off from the 1930s Alabama of To Kill a Mockingbird.  This (possible) literary continuity says more about how engrained racist thought processes become in the mass psyche once they enter it, however, than about the author's intentions, I imagine. [A line of thought suggested also by Ibram X. Kendi's historical book Stamped from the Beginning, which shows in hundreds of ways how racist tropes and practices that we consider as part of the social landscape now, and don't always question and fix as much as we should, were introduced over the course of colonialist history, were certainly 'not always there,' and have unfortunately been very difficult to de-introduce.] 

Racism and homophobia are shown as parallel ills, the battle against them both necessary for equality and individual freedom in the present day. Callender (the author prefers the pronouns they/them) also specifically stress intersectionality. People who champion the one cause might reject the other cause — in the book, King's father is homophobic, and King's friend Sandy, who is White and gay, is struggling to recognize his own family's racist legacy even if he does not share their prejudice. We can't fix one problem and believe that everything is fixed; the problems are interconnected and, to very crudely paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., we can only enjoy justice for the one once we have ensured that it exists for all.

*

For the target audience: I think this book is a friendly companion to gay (or bisexual) children/teenagers, and an encouragement to come out of their shell, trusting in their own individual truth and worth. And to straight classmates it is a great encouragement to be a braver and more reliable ally.

***

Kacen Callender [Wikipedia]

February 2021 In Books: What I'll Be Reading Next

For the Around the World series, I am still finishing the reading from South African writers.

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans, edited by Alex La Guma, is of course the book with which I started the reading.

Its essays, by expatriates who are far-flung in Europe due to their opposition to the apartheid government, lay out the racial political, economic and cultural structure of apartheid by the time the book was published. (Ironically perhaps, given colonial history, the book was published in London, 1972.) Land allocations, education, defence spending, the entire history of the colonization of South Africa are knowledgeably sketched... I think the interspersed poems, pan-African themes and all, are meant as seeds for a free post-apartheid culture.

Albert Loethoeli, leider Zoeloes in Zuid-Afrika (1967)
(Albert Luthuli, leader of the Zulus in South Africa)
From the Nationaal Archief, Netherlands
via Wikimedia Commons

Long Walk to Freedom (Vol. 1) by Nelson Mandela and Let My People Go by Albert Luthuli offer two perspectives on the fight against apartheid. Mandela (a member of the Xhosa people) came from a more prestigious background, and also appeared to benefit by the pre-apartheid reality more, and has more rigour and skepticism and lordliness. Luthuli (a member of the Zulu people) came from a less prestigious background, working as a teacher in what he describes as a cloistered academic environment for well over a decade before becoming a less well-paid chief; he also embraced Christian precepts to an extent that makes him feel more idealistic and gentle-tempered —most of the time. Like my paternal grandfather, one can sense bedrock underneath his mild willingness to find out what other people want and to let them have their way. Both Luthuli and Mandela, of course, became Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

A South African colleague, when I asked him, conceded that I could theoretically look into many classics of South African literature (Nadine Gordimer's work and Alan Paton's amongst them). But he suggested skipping them — instead, exploring contemporary South Africa and urban crime through the lens of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. I'm still hoping to come across an ebook version; but, failing that, the audiobook is an option.

*

As an accidentally companionable read, I am also reading more of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's non-fiction and criticism. Although his personal experience of colonialism and neocolonialism centres on Kenya, he alludes in the particular works I'm reading to the South African apartheid state — not yet dismantled at the time he was writing. Apartheid would only crumble in 1994. There's also a tragic element in the knowledge as a reader from the future, of the impending bloodshed in Rwanda.

I've become impatient with the rote Communist passages — I can only read 'join hands with the proletariat' or 'comprador classes' so many times, without feeling that these phrases lose all meaning — in these essays/speeches. And I suspect that he turned into a self-conscious Hero of the Lecture Hall type of academic in his later years (I say as a disgruntled former undergraduate). But Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms is fascinating as a geopolitical time capsule of the 80s and 90s.

I do feel awkward when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes of the need to write in African languages, not English or French or Portuguese, and he celebrates writing works in Gikuyu. In the end I am reading his celebration of writing in Gikuyu in English, because that is accessible to me.

His writing in Moving the Centre is less raw than the writing in his prison memoir Devil on a Cross, but the mood remains invigorating. He is always resisting.

To know a language in the context of its culture is a tribute to the people to whom it belongs, and that is good. What has, for us from the former colonies, twisted the natural relation to languages, both our own and those of other peoples, is that the languages of Europe [...] were taught as if they were our own languages, as if Africa had no tongues except those brought there by imperialism [...]

and

'A peaceful country, don't you think', he [a colonial farmer] would say turning to the house servants who stood by ready to serve him his breakfast. And the house servants would also stand on some of the bodies but at a respectful distance from the master and they would chorus back: 'Yes master, peace'.  

***

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi is proving challenging and rewarding, an indispensable and amazingly researched completion of any picture of European and American politics from the Renaissance onwards, and a gem to any history enthusiast who is genuinely curious. A few passages are horrible to read, like the fate of Sarah Baartman, the 'Hottentot Venus,' who was treated essentially as a laboratory rat by scientists of the late Enlightenment and early Napoleonic era.

*

In British contemporary literature, I started listening to Summer by Ali Smith.

It is a stream-of-consciousness third-person-narrative novel from 2020, of the musings of an English teenager on political news as she grapples with homework, her parents' separation and her brother's predicament.

The book is well-written and critically acclaimed.

It is also very 'of the moment' as it talks about everything from the deported British residents of the Windrush Generation through Trumpism to Australian wildfires. But I don't like remembering the times where I 'burned at the stake' of world politics as much as the teenager in this book. To be fair, likely the author's own angst derives from Brexit, which is generally not felt as the deep crisis of economics, politics and social culture, the daily emotional torment, in Germany that it is felt to be in the UK itself. But at least I walked in protests against the War on Iraq instead of just complaining at home.

That feeling of not wanting to read hundreds of pages of aimless whining, however literary and however near my own political orientation, was why I did not finish the book.

Cover of Summer, via Penguin Books UK

(The narrator of Summer's audiobook struggles with the repetitive 'he said' and 'she said' that dot the dialogue. This dialogue, in its faster rhythm, does bring movement and pace to the book. Therefore I found myself wishing that Ali Smith had written a play instead.)

*

In preparation for Canada Reads 2021, the televised competition will broadcast starting March 8th on CBC, I have begun reading Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. Magical realism a little along the lines of Toni Morrison, it begins by telling the tale of the childhood of a spirit that tends to slip away from the living world.

(Content warning: There's menstrual blood in an early chapter, so the easily shocked should likely find a more soothing book to read; and also serious subject matter like stillbirths etc.)

Cover of Butter Honey Pig Bread, via Arsenal Pulp Press

It's not self-consciously literary — you never feel like the word choice is stiltedly signposting its own excellence, even while it is excellent — nor pretentiously enigmatic.

*

Buck Naked Kitchen has a risqué title, but it's a respectable Canadian cookbook, published last year by Kirsten Buck. It has become a favourite of mine to the degree that I am sprinkling around good reviews around the internet.

I don't follow the Whole 30 Diet, which is a main nutritional inspiration for the book. But it's easy to stick to the more permissive recipe variants.

My family favourably reviewed the Smashed Potatoes with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce when I baked them the day before yesterday, as well as the pepper maple syrup bacon, so these appeal even to traditional tastes. I also liked the more consciously healthy or 'new-fangled' recipes. The Creamy Cashew Milk was frothy and sweet. The Perfectly Cooked Wild Rice was well cooked as promised: nutty and lightly salty and nicely grainy without being hard. And I've been making Buck's variation of a Fruit and Nut Trail Mix — walnuts, cashews, coconut flakes, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, dried goji berries and blueberries and white mulberries — for my brothers. It's filling and has a nice balance of natural sugars and colours.

The cookbook's healthy ingredients (well, all right, I guess the bacon is debatable as a healthy ingredient), when mingled imaginatively, can have an experimental flair while being as satisfying as steak and potatoes.

The author of Buck Naked Kitchen,
via Penguin Books Canada

It was also pleasant to see the peaceful photography: daytime lighting and a leitmotif of green plant life.

The idea for soup-to-go came to me while on a fall hike in the Whiteshell Provincial Park, located in southeast region of Manitoba along the Ontario border. The wind coming off the water was cold enough to give me a chill. Instead of the energy bar I packed, I really just wanted something to warm me up. 

Earlier in the week I had made the saffron rice from Yotam Ottolenghi's and Sami Tamimi's 2012 Jerusalem cookbook. It turns out that I dislike the flavour of saffron, even if the barberries were tasty. But I also undercooked the rice — not the recipe's fault, I am certain, because I used brown basmati rice instead of white basmati rice. The dill and white pepper instead of black pepper are important to the flavour, blending into and softening the stern flavour of the saffron, and I was impressed that the authors had figured this out.

Cover of 100 Cookies, via Chronicle Books

Lastly, I've begun baking recipes from Sarah Kieffer's 100 Cookies, an American bestseller in 2020, beginning with the soft chocolate chip cookies recipe. It is as regimented as Buck Naked Kitchen is flexible. Before the recipes begin, there are firm instructions, rather than idyllic word-paintings of kitchen escapism.

While Ottolenghi can be precise enough and I've grumbled in my head about the fiddly gram measurements and the need to measure fractions of a centimetre, it was only with 100 Cookies that I felt like I was baking with a fastidious superego looking over my shoulder.

But my family, of course, just experienced the final result. They made blissful, Cookie Monster-like gestures as they ate the doughy, freshly baked cookies with the chocolate melted and gooey in them.

So, in the end, weighing out each 45-gram sphere was worth it.

*

Aside from Buck Naked Kitchen, Barack Obama's A Promised Land has become a 'comfort read.' Since I followed the news so much during the 2008 financial crisis, etc., the book is illuminating the past, as well as setting a 'prologue' for the not-identical-but-similar challenges of the Biden Administration. Besides, it calms my anxiety when turmoil arises in the workplace.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Colombia

Number of recognized regional languages: 68
Main languages: Spanish, (in the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina) English

Independence: 1810 (declared from Spain)

Colombia and Panama (and, for a while, even more states) used to be joined as the Republic of New Granada, the Granadine Confederation, and then the United States of Colombia, in the 19th century.

"[... T]he Republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903, leading to Colombia's present borders."

Laguna de la Cocha (El Encano)
Photograph by G. Parra (attr.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Capital City: Bogotá

Surface area: 1,141,748 km2 (larger than Bolivia, smaller than Peru)

Currency: peso
Driving side: right

Main trading partners: United States, China, EU, Latin American countries

Main exports that are food: fruit and other produce, sugar and sweets
Main exports that are not food: mineral fuel, oils, plastics, precious stones, metals, lumber, electronics, clothing, glass, etc.

Information taken from "Colombia" and "List of countries and dependencies by area" [Wikipedia]

***

For Colombia, I read two books.

A Hundred Years of Solitude requires little introduction! Of course it made Gabriel García Marquez one of the giants of world literature. I did not finish it because I objected to some of the content, but it is undoubtedly great literature and an absorbing world to sink into.

It is an epic of multiple generations who begin a backwoods life in the remote forests of Colombia and found a town. Their community is visited by itinerant eccentrics who pierce it, they see the fading traces of the conquistadores of long ago, and disperse at times amongst the men who (for whichever reason) linked up to civilization again by signing up to fight in its wars.

Rocas del abra Zipaquirá
- Landscape in the Zipaquirá archaeological zone, Colombia
Photograph by S. Iizarazo, c. 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Because Marquez's genre here is magical realism, magic rules his characters' existence, whether it is the magic of science or the magic of alchemy.

The descriptions of rural life are not the elite explorations of national history and culture that often characterize 19th century literature to which one is used. The choice of milieu, characters and themes feel symptomatic of the author's leftwing sympathies. There is a distrust of the faraway centres of national authority, which filters through to the attitudes of the characters.

The reason I stopped reading it is that an adult male character becomes infatuated with a 9-year-old girl; even the character recognizes that this is weird, but either way I thought 'I'm out of here.'

Pendants by the lost Tairona people
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Photo by R. Müller (2006)
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

*

La Casa de la Belleza was written decades later, first published in 2015.

It transplants us to modern times in urban contemporary Colombia. Written by a journalist, Melba Escobar de Nogales, it explores Bogotá (a city of over 7 million people — more than Berlin's population) through the lens of a set of women who frequent the eponymous beauty salon. It looks pessimistically at gender relations, class, and racism, and the imperfections of the privileged class. Women and everyone else exploit others as they are exploited themselves. Not unexpectedly, since Colombia is still over 70% Roman Catholic, the book also casts a jaded eye on the rampant violence and moral corruption amongst the purported Christianity of the elite.

Of course the author's theme is the ridiculous juxtaposition of a society's obsession with beauty and material luxury, with the perpetration of ugliness and degradation.

The novel itself was a quick success internationally, translated into multiple languages from the original Spanish. I read it in Spanish and found the vocabulary quite specialized in parts; but now I know what sancocho, avena and aguardiente are.

Escobar writes this passage in La Casa de la Belleza: 

"Al ponerse en rojo, mendigos, desplazados, forajidos, drogadictos, tullidos, saltimbanquis, desempleados, analfabetas, maltratados, mutilados, niños y mujeres preñadas asaltan los vehículos en un performance diario tan repetitivo y predecible que ya a nadie sorprende. O a casi nadie."

(Rough translation: When the traffic lights turn red, beggars, displaced, outlaws, drug addicts, cripples*, charlatans, the unemployed, illiterate, and maltreated, children and pregnant women attack the cars in a daily performance so repetitive and predictable that no one is surprised any more. Or almost no one. [*I'm using this term as it appears to be the closest translation, but I am not sure if it is appropriate to use it in English.])

Karen is the heroine. She grew up in the seaside city of Cartagena as the daughter of a teen mother in the slums, or the barrio. A single mother, saving tips from her work in the Bogotá beauty salon to pay for a better life for her son, dark-skinned and attractive, her warm heart and capacity to care for others are badly repaid with betrayal and rape. A whole network of characters who all know each other begins having a noxious effect on her life. Eventually she becomes an ambiguous figure herself — or does she?

I think this book is a thriller rather than an elaborate literary novel, and it is also frankly just grim to read; I couldn't wait to have it over with and would only recommend it to someone who is neutral-about to fond-of reading about murder and violence against women. It treats its characters too strictly to gather the scope or insight of great literature.

I speak from little relevant experience, but my impression is that the book also splits and founders on a central paradox. It presents itself as critical, fearless and progressive. But the narrative voice complains about minor fishes, never landing real hits on the power figures who bear the most responsibility for the social/political/economic problems that face Colombia. Although she does try to portray individual members as pathetic and frail. In the end it feels more passive-aggressive than iconoclastic.

The book also 'borrows' grievances from Afro-Colombian women — the whole spectrum of racism from the daily torments of straightening hair to look 'respectable,' up to the more violent manifestations — when it might be better to read a book by Afro-Colombian women about this phenomenon instead.

(At the end, I'll note as a disclaimer that a Colombian woman, perhaps in her 30s, was once invited into my high school Spanish class in around 2001 — she was the friend of my teacher. She stressed that many people around the world had a totally wrong view of Colombia: it is not all drug lords and warfare.)

El Salto de Tequendama
Photograph by J. Cufiño (attributed.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence

January 2021 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

First of all, it feels appropriate to pay tribute to Jan Morris. An adventure-loving journalist and non-fiction author who broke the news of the ascension of Mount Everest in 1953, foe of political correctness and friend of many who admired her, host to pilgrimages to her rural home long into her old age, and a transgender woman in the public eye many decades before anti-trans bigotry became controversial, she died in Wales in November 2020. 

It feels strange to single out just one of the thousands of witty and insightful passages that she wrote for a good half century, but one that stuck with me was quoted by Jonathan Kandell, writing for the New York Times, in his obituary. Kandell summarized that "The more she was treated as a woman," (Jan Morris presented as a woman beginning in the 1970s) "the more she behaved — in her own estimation — as a woman."

“If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming,” she wrote. “If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.” She added, “I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them."

(Like Jane Austen's quotation in Northanger Abbey: "The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author;—and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire any thing more in woman than ignorance.")

Here is another passage, from a Tumblr blog for her book Contact! (2012):

I shared a taxi one day with a lady in a blue silk turban, who was visiting Washington and was about to meet her daughter for lunch at a Hot Shoppe. [...] it was as we passed the Capitol itself, and were deploring the state of the world in general, that she spoke the words I best remember: ‘I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut?’

Twenty-five cents for a doughnut.  Even Americans bleed.

*

Regarding daily reading, I am still hoping that sooner or later it will be safe to commute to the office again. In that case, The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane will shoot to the top of the list as the customary S-Bahn reading.

In January, the author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up will release another book for young readers, Concrete Rose. It goes back in time to visit the early life of the father of the girl who was the heroine of The Hate U Give, and how he breaks free from a gang. While she was still writing it, Angie Thomas touted it on Twitter as her best book yet; so I am looking forward.

In the meantime, I am reading a whimsical and intelligent book about donkeys and humans, Esel (2013) by Jutta Person, in German. My godfather gave it to me for my birthday because I have a well-known weakness for donkeys. It comes in a nice grey hardcover binding, from an independent publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin!

Besides, more books from the NPR best books of 2020 list are tempting me to read them:

Cover of Blacktop Wasteland, via Flatiron Books

Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron Books, 2020) is a crime novel by S. A. Cosby, about a car mechanic in the southern US who is drawn into petty crime against his will. What really 'sells' the book for me is the way that Adam Lazarre-White narrates the audiobook and the suspenseful writing. Lazarre-White brings detail and life to the phrases, lending a little softening and gentler pace to the terser prose, which has a masculinely direct and clear-cut 'voice.' It's also a tribute to Cosby's literary judgment that I don't object to his metaphors (which in my view often descend into cliché or kitsch in prose) in for example this passage:

Seconds ticked by and Beauregard felt a hollow opening blossom in his chest. He could see the gears working in Warren’s head and for a moment he thought he was gonna pass. But Beauregard knew he wouldn’t. How could he? He had talked himself into a corner and his pride wouldn’t let him back down.

[Update: I didn't finish this novel because it quickly became too graphically violent for me, but literarily it still seemed great.]

Eat a Peach, a popular 2020 memoir by David Chang, was on NPR's list. It inspired me to look at Chang's other books. Momofuku, where the New York Times food writer Peter Meehan helped with the text, is of course a cookbook and was written in an appropriately chef-like, profane and macho style in 2009. Its biographical introduction traces the Korean-American chef's early years cooking in the US, then his journey to Japan where he yearns to learn the art of the ramen noodle, and back to New York City. There Chang opens up a no-frills restaurant featuring, mostly, noodles. His later restaurants were popular enough that I heard of them by following New York media in the early 2000s. Eat a Peach sheds a deeper, troubled perspective on the life that is lightly sketched in Momofuku.

More information: "Momofuku (restaurants)" [Wikipedia]

***

Barack Obama's A Promised Land needs no introduction. I bought a large hardcover edition at Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus here in Berlin; and I am glad to have made the 'investment' because the book is so insightful, humorous, and re-readable. It also requires no advertising: it was stacked everywhere on the ground floor even of this bookshop across the Atlantic.

Cover of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You
via NPR

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is an earlier work (2016) by Ibram X. Kendi, an American professor and anti-racism-expert who survived a stage 4 cancer to become a bestselling author and spokesperson against racism with the May 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the public eye. It has also been adapted for children in a new book collaboration with Jason Reynolds. How to Be an Antiracist (2019) — a book that argues that it is more helpful to be actively antiracist, than to simply declare one's self free of racism and hope for the best — was also especially popular in 2020.

Lastly, I began listening to an audiobook of an English translation of Cho Nam-Joo's novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. It is written in the third person, in straightforward, deadpan sentences. The titular character is a young mother who begins to fall apart in a perturbing, at times darkly funny, but understandable way, because of all of the pressures that are put on her by a sexist and generally dismissive social environment.