March 2025 in Books: What I've Been Reading

In March, I finished the books All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong and Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and felt satisfied with the progress through my to-be-read list. In Leipzig, the book fair took place as well, but this year it took place without me due to my lingering cold and other personal factors.

All Our Ordinary Stories (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

I also 'binged' the 2025 Canada Reads competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation channel (YouTube). The friendly and attentive circle of panellists who were drawn from the books, sports, cooking, and television worlds was — as online commentators noted — less bloodthirsty (for lack of a better word) than in previous years.

Teresa Wong's book is from the Canada Reads longlist.

Besides I've read A Two-Spirit Journey — co-authored by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer, it's a memoir of the extremely difficult life of an Indigenous woman born in the province Ontario — which made it onto the shortlist.

Next up on my Canadian, independently published reading list is another shortlisted book: Dandelion, by Jamie Chai Yun Liew.

Dandelion (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

A Two-Spirit Journey was not literarily written, some commentators said. But I thought it did have a style. Listening to it in the audiobook version, I did not find it dry either: I pictured scenes, people and times in my mind, and the spiritual world of Ma-Nee Chacaby's grandmother. On the other hand, I too found that reading about the abuse that the author suffered as a child was very heavy. (All I'll say is that I'd never considered the ethical pros and cons of castration in depth before; but this book led me into that train of thought.) But in the end I'm not sure it's a sound literary criterion to tell somebody that their life is so difficult that one doesn't want to read about it.

A Two-Spirit Journey (cover)
University of Manitoba Press

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a lengthy look at United States immigration policy since the early 1900s. The journalist author (New Yorker) interweaves life stories of individual Latin American asylum seekers as case studies, convincingly arguing that US foreign policy missteps exacerbate problems in Latin American countries, resulting then in larger quantities of Latin Americans who flee to the southern US border.

It's stylistically a cross between an Amnesty International report and long-form magazine journalism. It's also a close portrait, in its final chapters, of a Trump administration's modus operandi when there are no 'adults in the room.' 

Where do we go from here, if there is not enough public support for making sure that every asylum seeker is well cared for?
— The Hippocratic Oath probably applies as well to immigration and foreign policy matters as to medicine: First do no harm.
And I think that part of 'doing no harm' means not making refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants scapegoats for socio-economic problems that already would have existed without them.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (cover)
Penguin Press

A Memoir of Two Presidential Offices, and More

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s was published this year by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was already a familiar name, and nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the Memoir genre.

Doris Kearns Goodwin at a BooksExpo in 2018
Photograph attributed to Rhododendrites
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

It is a memoir of a kind I've never read before:

In the house where the Goodwins — now in their 70s and 80s — are living in Concord, Massachusetts, they were storing boxes of documents from Richard Goodwin's (the husband's) career in the 1960s. (Doris Kearns Goodwin explored documents of her own life as well, explained during the earlier chapters of the book.)

The Goodwins open the boxes and explore these, often reading documents out loud to each other, as a special book project.

The historian interweaves, into the history, their affectionate banter, reminiscences, and years-long debates over the respective and competing virtues of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the couple's nostalgia for the 1960s. (She does have a partial eye, and you can make up your own mind how many of her defenses of Johnson, for example, make sense.)

But Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin have a far from ordinary perspective on federal politics in the 1960s:

Richard Goodwin was a junior speechwriter for John F. Kennedy under Ted Sorensen, later a self-appointed Latin America expert. Then, after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote speeches and led messaging amongst other projects for Johnson's Great Society.

Finally, he tried to help Robert F. Kennedy and, at other times, Eugene McCarthy, win the presidency — helping both of them for the sake of thwarting the Vietnam War, but also helping Robert F. Kennedy due to their personal friendship.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was a White House fellow during Johnson's presidency, and later helped write his autobiography; she also writes about experiencing the 60s as a socially conscious Ivy League college student.

Bryan Cranston reads letters her husband wrote in his young years, and the Kennedys and Johnson speak in historical excerpts, in the audio recording. Although the audiobook was over 14 hours long, it did not feel that way: Doris Kearns Goodwin's narration, as well as the special additions, were engrossing.

The ending is extremely touching.

*

Ideal accompaniment: videos from the LBJ Presidential Library's account on YouTube, e.g. archived live-streamed videos from the 2014 Civil Rights Summit.

***

Cover of Becoming,
via Wikipedia

Another recently finished memoir:

Becoming (2018), by former First Lady Michelle Obama, has been reviewed often elsewhere.

It's enough to say that the accolades for her memoir about her childhood, Ivy League education, professional career, marriage, and life as the First Lady are justified.

It is comforting, as President Joe Biden's presidency nears its close and the next administration approaches, to see life in the White House from the perspective of a human, idealistic, thoughtful tenant.

***

Lastly, I have begun Jonathan Blitzer's far-ranging book on the history and polemics of migration at the US-Mexico border: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (2024). It was recommended by Barack Obama in summer, then nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

The American journalist's epic work is not always easy to read, because of its subject matter. It describes, for example, arbitrary killings and torture in El Salvador, from the 1930s to the present.

August 2022 in Books: What I'm Reading

It's a colossus and I'm still running back and forth between its legs like a Brutus (to attempt a poor Shakespeare allusion). But gradually I'm tackling the audiobook recording of Robert A. Caro's memoir of Lyndon B. Johnson during his vice presidency under John F. Kennedy: The Passage of Power.

If it were a Columbo television crime show episode, I'd say at once that Johnson was the mastermind who organized Kennedy's assassination. Jealousy, enmity, rivalry, and humiliation teem in the pages.

It's hard to regard Kennedy's presidency as a saintly Camelot, or to consider even Robert F. Kennedy as a kindly figure, if one reads about the dynamics behind the scenes. That said, no individual actions of the Kennedys stick in my memory as criminal; the Kennedys generally just seem sort of mean. (Well, all right, I think the patriarch was genuinely a 'piece of work.') Johnson himself, however, practically built his career on electoral fraud and political crimes.

"Photo portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson
as U.S. Senator for Texas
and Majority Leader"
(1950s)
via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain

So it does feel as if one scratched the surface of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and found it — and by extension the entire presidency and democratic system — to be made not so much of stone, as of paper-mâché formed to look like stone.

And of course the other paradox: despite the emotional and moral hollowness that marked parts of their political lives, Kennedy, Johnson, and others, achieved genuine, lasting good. — And before Kennedy's political career, [as mentioned in a past blog post] his rescue of his fellow sailors in a torpedo boat in World War II really is the stuff of superheroes, and makes for a thrilling adventure in Caro's prose.

It's also astonishing how many significant historical details are no longer known, now that the former President and Vice-President have died.

The most significant detail, perhaps:

Did Kennedy offer the vice presidency to Johnson assuming, after their fierce primary battle and mutual hatred, that Johnson would reject the offer? Or was it in fact a purposeful, strategic move to enable Kennedy to win more votes than Richard Nixon's Republicans in the South?

***

New cover of Touch the Dragon
From the Turnstone Press

Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon (1994) was given to me by my paternal grandfather when I was a teenager.

The author went to Thailand on a student exchange when she was seventeen years old. It was the 1980s. She was a Canadian who didn't know much of the language, but she is taught partly by immersion and partly in a school.

In brilliant prose, Connelly describes daily life from the glamourous to the not-so-glamourous. She writes frankly of the mental discomfort of adjusting to what feels like a diametrically opposed new reality, and dishes about the dissolution of her relationship with a boyfriend back in Canada.

It's affectionately, immersively written. Connelly's sarcastic, worldly-wise voice as an author recalling her younger self is pitch-perfect — but I think that one or two snap judgments that seem insensitive, like calling music at a festival 'horrific,' could also have been edited away without weakening the book.

***

Otto Hahn's autobiography, Mein Leben, is not a famous book. But from reading it I have been converted from someone who knows that he was a famous German scientist, to an admirer of him personally.

He is generously precise about his life, starting in a lower-middle-class family in Frankfurt am Main, through his university years and his escapades e.g. in duelling fraternities, and his various youthful loves and losses.... And that's as far as I've gotten. His life certainly did not end in the early 1900s, and later chapters will likely detail his attitudes toward the two World Wars, and the Cold War.

Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer has come out in theaters, tracing the role and reaction of a different scientist to knowledge pursued for the sake of military applications. It would be interesting to compare the different works.

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.

***

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.

*

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

***

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)

*

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Canada Reads 2020: From the Ashes

In mid-July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

"From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up," runs the introduction of Jesse Thistle's publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster (Canada)

In 2019, the memoir first came out and it became a bestseller. Jesse Thistle was born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, where his Cree maternal grandparents lived. His parents split when he and his two elder brothers were small, and their father took them into his care. Plagued with drug abuse, he left them on their own for days on end, found food in garbage cans and through shoplifting; their experience then was Dickensian; and I was baffled that this was possible in 1970s Canada.

Then their father never returned. Their white grandparents rescued them from foster care, where they had been maltreated. After that they raised the grandchildren to the east in suburban Ontario.

The grandparents loved them. But they were set in their ways and raising three hungry, traumatized children challenged them. Their grandfather — an elevator engineer — was raised in a tough school. He handed out bruising beatings.

The 'cultural mosaic' Canada didn't exist in the boys' schools; the schoolyard appeared to be divided along ethnic battle lines. Thistle felt uncomfortable accepting a First Nations heritage he barely knew, when it was despised by his classmates. And the brutal social dynamic seemed to turn him off his school work.

Aside from keeping in touch with his parents, his cultural heritage could have been a steadying influence, I think adult Thistle is hypothesizing. I think (or hope) that the child welfare system might agree with this more now than in the 1970s.

I found the childhood scenes, although my siblings and I saw no abuse whatsoever, very relatable. [Edit: Although this is more my narcissism than because the experiences were alike.] The precarious feeling of being raised by just one parent for a while — if nothing else — and of children being left to improvise themselves while that parent was busy doing something else (in my father's case, it was just computer programming!), was familiar. In my father's case I also think there was an air of misery, and self-discontent when he felt that he wasn't managing to do everything quite as well as he intended.

When he was still a teenager, I think, Jesse's grandparents found him with a bag of cocaine. Especially because the drug abuse and imprisonment of Jesse's father had hurt them so that they weren't willing to take any more, he was kicked out of the house. He became homeless.

Wrestling with the Devil in (Post-)Colonial Kenya

Right now I am reading Wrestling with the Devil [originally entitled Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary], a memoir that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o published in 1981, after he was imprisoned for a year without trial, for being an intellectual with whom the government of Kenya disagreed.

The imprisonment of the author is part of a pattern that anyone who has read case descriptions published by Amnesty International in the 1990s would know well; and he was in fact adopted as a prisoner of conscience by the organization.

“Armed members of the Intelligence, then known as the Special Branch, who swarmed my study amid an awe-inspiring silence, were additionally guarded by uniformed police officers carrying long-range rifles. Their grim, determined faces lit up only a little whenever they pounced on any book or pamphlet bearing the names of Marx, Engels, or Lenin.”

Ngũgĩ sketches his transfer to prison — the midnight raid of his library for incriminating material, abduction by car, the lack of knowledge of his family what had become of him — with irony. Life in prison itself — fellow prisoners, guards, the general purpose of it in the eyes of the government — he describes with less detachment.

And then he presents a biting portrait of the grand inspiration for this unjust application of the law: the British colonial government.

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University of Nairobi (c. 2006)
Ngũgĩ was a professor here for 10 years
via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain

When I read Karen Blixen's Out of Africa in Canada, my fellow students and I were given an essay from Ngũgĩ's Decolonising the Mind to read alongside it. To my recollection, it was a meditation on the importance of writing in native languages (for example Ngũgĩ's Gĩkũyũ, not just English) and being exposed to something beyond British literature.

Little did I know that the Kenyan writer had in fact also written a sharp denunciation of Out of Africa and Blixen, directly.

There's also a blighting portrait of Louis Leakey, whom I'd heard about in far more flattering terms when I grew up:

"In science, they [British Kenyan society] could of course display Louis Leakey, undoubtedly a great archaeologist. Leakey’s specialty was in digging up, dating, and classifying old skulls. Like George Eliot’s Casaubon, he was happier living with the dead. [. . .]

"Colonel Leakey, and even Louis Leakey, readily proposed ways of killing off African nationalism, while praising skulls of dead Africans as precursors of humanity."

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Ngũgĩ sketches the history of Kenya from the 1800s to the late 1960s. He mentions the labour camps; the British figures like Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, who asked resistance fighters to peace talks but then killed them, and who massacred an entire village; and the irregularly-prosecuted murders of native Kenyans when British Kenyans were drunk or angry. A British social worker or politician would travel to Kenya every now and then, peer behind the scenes, and write an aghast report — perhaps effect changes. But as Kenyan independence from Britain grew nearer, colonial laws and their application did not become fairer.