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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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