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Recent Reading
Feb. 18th, 2021 12:04 pmLess, Andrew Sean Greer. I liked this a lot, perhaps more than I was expecting to. It was just very genuinely an enjoyable read, easy and compelling without sacrificing complexity or bittersweetness. And I loved and appreciated the incidental musings on gay fiction as a genre. I was not big on the ending--I thought it was overwrought and sort of boring--but to say that I didn't think it lived up to the rest of the book is more a comment on how much I liked the book rather than on how little I liked the ending.
Romance in Marseille, Claude McKay. I was very intrigued by the press for this--finally-published decades-old manuscript! LGBT rep in a book by a Harlem Renaissance luminary!--but I found the novel itself a bit of a slog, even at its very low pagecount. That said, the gay characters were interesting, especially in a novel originally written in the 1920s; they were very much side characters, but also nothing bad happens to them. It was interesting historically, but perhaps not, for me, literarily.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert. I've been meaning to read this for a while, and I liked it (though "enjoy" is maybe not a word that applies here). I liked her journalistic approach, as someone often bewildered by big-s Science; she explained things vividly and interestingly. I actually understand what ocean acidification means now! And as a former child obsessed with extinct and and endangered animals, this was right in my wheelhouse. I liked less the way she chose to end the book, with dire and typical warnings about humanity overtaking/killing the earth; while not untrue, it felt enormously unuseful and fatalistic after the book she had just written. I'm not necessarily saying she had a duty to be optimistic, but I do feel that in a popular science book that you are aiming at the general public you might feel some responsibility to point a way forward, even if that way forward seems unlikely or difficult. In addition, perhaps differentiating your generalized mass of humans into levels of responsibility wrt the environmental degradation you chronicle might be of some use.
Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi (trans. Chris Andrews). I loved this. A novel about the bookstore Les Vraies Richesses in Algeria, chronicling its history from the mid-20th century to the present; not uplifting, exactly, but somehow still hopeful. Adimi uses several different formats and narrative voices to tell the story, including a use of the first-person plural which I thought was incredibly effective and well-done. Short but with a lot of depth; I would highly recommend it.
Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security, Masanobu Fukuoka (translated and edited by Larry Korn). Extremely interesting--and, now that I think of it, perhaps an antidote to the Kolbert. I ordered it from the library solely on the virtue of this quote from it that I saw on tumblr, and I'm glad that I did. Fukuoka's ideas are very simple--or at least he explains them very simply--but fascinating, and the examples he gives of areas where he's tried and succeeded in his reverse-desertification strategies ground the concepts he discusses. A short, easy little read, but full of big and interesting ideas.
Romance in Marseille, Claude McKay. I was very intrigued by the press for this--finally-published decades-old manuscript! LGBT rep in a book by a Harlem Renaissance luminary!--but I found the novel itself a bit of a slog, even at its very low pagecount. That said, the gay characters were interesting, especially in a novel originally written in the 1920s; they were very much side characters, but also nothing bad happens to them. It was interesting historically, but perhaps not, for me, literarily.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert. I've been meaning to read this for a while, and I liked it (though "enjoy" is maybe not a word that applies here). I liked her journalistic approach, as someone often bewildered by big-s Science; she explained things vividly and interestingly. I actually understand what ocean acidification means now! And as a former child obsessed with extinct and and endangered animals, this was right in my wheelhouse. I liked less the way she chose to end the book, with dire and typical warnings about humanity overtaking/killing the earth; while not untrue, it felt enormously unuseful and fatalistic after the book she had just written. I'm not necessarily saying she had a duty to be optimistic, but I do feel that in a popular science book that you are aiming at the general public you might feel some responsibility to point a way forward, even if that way forward seems unlikely or difficult. In addition, perhaps differentiating your generalized mass of humans into levels of responsibility wrt the environmental degradation you chronicle might be of some use.
Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi (trans. Chris Andrews). I loved this. A novel about the bookstore Les Vraies Richesses in Algeria, chronicling its history from the mid-20th century to the present; not uplifting, exactly, but somehow still hopeful. Adimi uses several different formats and narrative voices to tell the story, including a use of the first-person plural which I thought was incredibly effective and well-done. Short but with a lot of depth; I would highly recommend it.
Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security, Masanobu Fukuoka (translated and edited by Larry Korn). Extremely interesting--and, now that I think of it, perhaps an antidote to the Kolbert. I ordered it from the library solely on the virtue of this quote from it that I saw on tumblr, and I'm glad that I did. Fukuoka's ideas are very simple--or at least he explains them very simply--but fascinating, and the examples he gives of areas where he's tried and succeeded in his reverse-desertification strategies ground the concepts he discusses. A short, easy little read, but full of big and interesting ideas.
