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

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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.

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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.

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Kacen Callender [Wikipedia]

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.

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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]

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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.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part I

Early this month, the website for National Public Radio published a list of top books for 2020 par excellence. I took it as a very, very long series of reading prompts, and below are some of the results:

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A few books were interesting but I decided to skip reading the rest of the book after reading the introduction. (Also because this leaves me with a better chance of finishing over a hundred others...)

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is a memoir of a time when the author, Paul Lisicky, took up a position as a fellow in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, further away from his family. It was in the early 1990s and AIDS was breaking out, and even before then the author (and his mother, perhaps exaggeratedly so) was conscious of his social vulnerability as a gay man.

It is about family drama as well as the author's individual life. It's also not light reading: molestation, suicide, and marital disagreements already appear in the introduction. [And, to be very clear: I only read the introduction, so the rest of this review should be taken with a grain of salt.] So I'd suggest that perhaps the memoir is best suited for readers who will find the depiction of this kind of dysfunction cathartic or interesting, rather than unsettling or too personal.

For example, he writes how his mother has, to a degree, given up on life. Rather than die by suicide, which would be too dramatic for her, she ekes out her existence in a half-life:

Not making new friends, not allowing herself to be known, eating too much ice cream, no exercise, watching daytime talk shows that don’t even capture her attention. Life as pure endurance instead of the hard, hard work of finding interests that refresh and nourish her.

It's an interesting line of thought, not far from Henry David Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I'm sure the mother was asked for her consent to have her inner life described in the book. Is this a topic that should be published for the entertainment of the masses, however, or is this a topic that you can talk about over dinner to close personal friends? I'd go with the latter.

In any case he's indubitably an excellent writer and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of him before; perhaps he's a writer's writer whom one hears about more in professional circles. He's also published a memoir before, The Narrow Door.

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Paul Lisicky
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020

Cover of Later, via Graywolf Press

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Travelling from the coast of New England to the southern US, a collection of humoristic short stories about working- and middle-class Americans by George Singleton also looked really good; it was a little bawdy.

You can find three of his stories on the website of the Atlantic Monthly here to get an idea.

You Want More: Selected Short Stories of George Singleton is published by the independent Hub City Press.

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Cover of Alien Oceans, via Princeton University Press

In the end, I've been reading two books. The first is this, published by Princeton University Press:

Alien Oceans: The Search For Life In The Depths of Space

Written by a Californian professor with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this non-fiction book explores the ideas we have of oceans on other planets or moons.

Kevin Hand begins by telling anecdotes of the time when, as a graduate student, he took a submarine to the ocean floor in the company of Hollywood film director James Cameron. But the rest of the book so far is unsensational, and like a nice undergraduate lecture series.

He takes us from one moon in the orbit of Saturn to the other, and I was thrilled to learn that there are ice volcanoes (cryovolcanoes) on moons like Enceladus, and that such a small moon (500 km in diameter, I think) was already visible to scientists in the 18th century. Besides there are introductions to spectroscopy and a few other staples of astrophysics methodology.

Any person with a Grade 10 level of science, and no great inhibitions or feud against science, can follow it, I think. Even better: despite my analogy to undergraduate lectures, there is no need to do tests, tutorials, or lab work. The analogies — like the metal detector in airport security — are committed to and well spaced apart, so I didn't feel the bored bewilderment that I did when I read an Einstein biography that bombarded me with one analogy for special relativity after the other.

I could imagine a few post-graduates or professors in Chemistry or Physics wanting to thump their heads on their desks if they read Alien Oceans, because sacrifices of accuracy have been made to help general readers understand scientific concepts. But because these professional peers are not the target audience, they'd have to go out of their way to inflict this pain on themselves.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn (Oct. 28, 2015)
"NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus
for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region."
via Wikimedia Commons

On another note: As a humanities student, I have met examples of the Ivory Tower Ego. When I was at UBC, a professor had released a bestselling book that was turned into a documentary film. It's unfair to say this as I only saw the man once; but when he strode through the streets with his briefcase and took the bus along with hoi polloi, I felt it was with a strikingly self-conscious air. Not to mention a few other professors who also evidently saw themselves as mini-celebrities of the lecture hall, on far slighter grounds.

But in Alien Oceans, Hand portrays a collaborative research world in which long-term effort and sound thinking are as important as flashy brilliance. He honours Cassini and other NASA excursions for providing the data for scientists to work with. He mentions to which researchers (sometimes his friends) we owe which findings. And he forebears from saying anything ostentatiously modest about 'standing on the shoulders of giants.'

In general I like feeling that Alien Oceans mirrors the atmosphere that I sometimes felt when my father was working in physics or biology departments: real contentment in sharing knowledge with each other and asking each other for advice, and patiently putting in (lab) time day after day to figure out the puzzles they have set themselves.

(I am listening to the audiobook, so am not going to say anything about the prose as prose.)