A READING REPORT

I was traveling for the first half (and more) of this month, and so I fell a bit behind on my reading notes. But I’ve now posted notes on books that I finished reading in April and added notes for the first few books I’ve completed this month as well.

It’s quite a diverse list, and the authors and themes are broader than what I proposed in my most recent revision (or re-revision) of my reading plan. One reason for the breadth is that I was committed to completing books I was reading before that revision; and another is that I simply can’t resist picking up a book that I find particularly interesting. Visiting bookstores while traveling means exploring other collections and presentations of new books.

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THE POWER OF READING – THE POWER OF TRANSLATION

Last night I began reading Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume I, which was shortlisted this year for the International Booker Prize. I’m only 15 pages into the novel, but I already feel as though I’m living in a world and even a time which is not my own. The power of reading, in this case, is enhanced, deepened, and complicated by the power of translation. Obviously I can’t compare Barbara J. Haveland’s English translation to the original Danish, but I feel the power of another world, a world different from mine, as I read.

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WORDS INSTEAD OF ACTION

Lauren Markham:

As a writer, I knew that words could sometimes feel like not only the antithesis of action, but also, worse, like mechanisms of concealment for doing nothing at all: empty gestures in the mouths of politicians, static social media slogans, platitudes on memorial plaques — never again, in memory of, may we never forget. I wanted for change to be made manifest in the world, and I continued to doubt my, or anyone’s, ability to manage that with words.

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TWO BODIES: THE INNOCENT AND THE IMPLICATED

Lauren Markham:

…to be alive on today’s planet is, as Daisy Hildyard writes, to hold two selves, to inhabit two bodies. “You have an individual body,” she writes, “in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” You can just be sitting somewhere in, say, Marseille, as she sees it, while your second body is “floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container on the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.” Essayist Elvia Wilk refers to this second body as “the ecosystem body,” which both influences and is influenced by “ecologies beyond the individual self.” We may or may not be aware of body number two, but the split is unavoidable, we inhabit both at once: the innocent and the implicated.

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SMALL TOWN TEXAS ROOTS

Earlier this week I described my recent travels in Texas, reflecting on planned re-connections with old friends and the surfacing of other connections with people in my past. If I’d thought about it, I might have incorporated Whitehead’s suggestion that what we tend to think of as an essential person going through life collecting all sorts of experiences is really an abstraction. The more concrete reality, he suggests, is a series of selves, each the concrescence of experiences that come together to make that self, and each dying and then passing its identity on as a central element in the coming to be of the next manifestation of self. As he put it, “the many become one, and then there is one more.” As I thought about that this morning, I returned to something that I often wonder about: who would I be today if my father had not made the mid-career decision to enter the army when I was 12 years old?

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CONNECTIONS ACROSS TIME AND SPACE

Last year I read Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters. As the title suggests, she writes about chance meetings between a variety of American notables. The book has stuck with me over the last year. Some of the encounters she describes are interesting in themselves. But she also has me thinking about how I’ve been shaped by conversations and encounters both random and planned. A recent trip to Texas, where I lived most of the first 30 years or so of my life, brought those formative connections to mind more vividly.

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WRITING IS MYSTERIOUS

Andrea Barrett:

Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be. Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without those foundations. Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer’s imagination works that way. Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between the writer’s own uncontrollable interior preoccupations, and what she’s most concerned about in the world around her. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the breathing, bleeding place we guard so carefully in daily life.

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TREASURES OF INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES

Saturday’s celebration of Independent Bookstore Day has me thinking about all of independent bookstores who have fed my literary appetite over more than five decades. Perhaps some of them will be familiar to you – I’d love to hear/read from anyone who has spent time in any of these stores. Even better, perhaps you’d be kind enough to point out other stores that one simply must visit the next time one is in a particular city.

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RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS

Simone Weil:

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights. He, in his turn, has rights, when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.

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UNIVERSITIES TEACHING IGNORANCE

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

Who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?

The Waste Books, 1793-1796; quoted in Ignorance and Bliss by Mark Lilla, p. 199