My current reading and TBR lists
Books I’m currently reading
- In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I read one of the volumes of Knausgaard’s autobiographical quartet about ten years ago. I don’t remember many specific details, but I do remember how he created a world that enveloped me while I was reading it and haunted me for months after finishing it. Much more recently, I heard Zadie Smith offer an insight she gained from one of his essays. Shortly after that, I found this collection on the shelves of my local independent bookstore. I’m working through it slowly, one essay at a time.
- Envisioning Real Utopias, by Erik Olin Wright. Recommended by Jathan Sadowski in The Mechanic and the Luddite. (Crooked Timber hosted an online seminar about the book in 2013.
- Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp. I listened to Kemp’s conversation with Nate Hagens last fall and considered buying the book then. There was a rather awkward moment near the end of that conversation when Kemp pushed Hagens pretty hard on his point that only a dick would work for one of the large tech companies. Hagens protested, but Kemp didn’t back off. I decided to request it from the library instead. I had to wait a while, but I’ve now received it. It’s a rather long book — over 500 pages — and other people are in line behind me waiting for the book. Time to press ahead.
- Flesh, by David Szalay. Trying (quite unsuccessfully) to work my way through the Booker List.
- The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic Culture, by by Birkerts, Sven. Recommended by George Scialabba in multiple essays and interviews. See, in particular, “More than Human?”, the concluding essay in The Sealed Envelope.
Books I’ve finished reading this month
- Happiness in Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life
- by Adam Adatto Sandel. Notes pending. A gift from my wife. How could I not read it?
- The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia
- by George Scialabba. Notes pending. Found prominently displayed on the new arrivals shelf of a local bookstore. The point intrigues me: acknowledging that anything like a utopia is generations and generations away does not mean we shouldn’t work toward it.
- The Correspondent
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by Virginia Evans.
As she introduces her discussion of the intimate relationship of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, a long-distance relationship nurtured almost entirely by letter writing, Janna Malumud Smith observes, “You cannot write a letter any more than you can paint a self-portrait without choosing a profile. You might not think about it much as you rearrange your head until it seems right, but you do it” (An Absorbing Errand, p. 139). I read Smith’s book before reading Virginia Evans’s novel The Correspondent; this novel is as powerful a confirmation of Smith’s observation as one is likely to find. The Correspondent of the novel’s title is Sybil Van Antwerp. Sybil is nearing the end of her life, a life in which she has expressed herself in letters to a wide variety of people — family, close friends, noted authors like Joan Dideon and Larry McMurtry, and others. The portraits she paints in these letters, together with the portraits reflected in letters written to her, are of a woman with a strong and gruff veneer that disguises a woman dealing with the tragedy in her life.
When encouraging me to read this book, my wife said that I would be charmed. I was charmed, but the impact was deeper than that. I was moved. At times I laughed out loud. At other times I was on the verge of tears. Sybil’s coming to terms with herself and her past, solidified near the end of the book, left me thinking about my own life. It was a good read.
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Books I’m thinking I might read next
One of my biggest takeaways from reading Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals was this bit of advice:
… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by (p. 29).
I’m thinking I might read these some day soon. I have to admit that it’s difficult for me to stay with this list — I’m much too easily distracted by new discoveries of books both old and new.
- This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee. This one has been on my radar for a while. I’m digging into it now in large part because of Joanna Kavenna’s review in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement and comments by Andreas at 82mhz.
- The Price of our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life, by Augustin Landier & David Thesmar. I don’t remember how/when I discovered this new book — perhaps in a blog post? But my interest in it is captured very well by Rebecca Henderson’s blurb on the back cover: “The authors highlight the deep flaws inherent in consequentialism and utilitarianism that are fundamental to most neoclassical economics, and they offer ideas as to how and why a broader sense of morality must become fundamental to economics analysis.”
- A Democratic Theory of Judgment, by Linda M. G. Zerilli. Strongly recommended to me by a young scholar working with Zerilli and currently writing a dissertation on Hannah Arendt.
- The Story Paradox, by Jonathan Gottschall. I heard a selection from this book as the reading in a Sunday service at a Unitarian Universalist church recently. My interest in this book and the next one is grounded in my growing appreciation of the importance of narrative in forming our sense of self and our understanding of the world around us.
- Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World, by Anne Enright. I think that this selection from the book, published in The Guardian, is so powerful. Unfortunately, it seems that the US edition won’t be published until the spring.
- The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, by David Graeber. I’ve been intrigued by this since reading Rebecca Solnit’s forward while standing in a bookstore several months ago, and also inspired by the occasional quotations from Graeber’s work posted by the David Graeber Institute on Mastodon.
- The Democratic Marketplace: How a More Equal Economy can Save our Democratic Ideals, by Lisa Herzog. Highly recommended by one of the contributors to Crooked Timber: “If you want to know more about how the current form of capitalism is undermining (a thick conception of) democracy, and what can be done about this, then you should read Lisa Herzog’s latest book The Democratic Marketplace.”
- Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, by Isaac, Jeffrey C. From a 1995 review by Seyla Benabib published in the Journal of Modern History.
Books already downstream, but tagged for possible retrieval later
- 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, by Adam Chandler. I’m not sure, but I think it was this review that brought this book to my attention.
- You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier.
- Joyride, by Susan Orlean. I was intrigued by the review of this book in the print edition of the New York Times. The following day I came across it while browsing the new arrivals shelves at my local library. (When I checked it out, the woman at the desk told me that I was the first to check it out.) It seemed like serendipity, and I wanted a slightly lighter book to take with me to the family gathering over the holiday weekend. So this one jumped the queue. (And now, as indicated by its position in these lists, it jumped off. Just couldn’t get into it.
- Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian. Another discovery from someone’s blog. I requested it from the local library weeks ago. It’s now arrived, so this is my window for reading. I’m intrigued by Slobodian’s contention that neoliberals, in need a new enemy after the fall of Communism, decided that feminism and democratic socialism are bringing society down. He argues further that neoliberals hope — or, rather, are firmly convinced — that scientific research will soon show that there really are intrinsic differences between men and women and between races that count against the validity of efforts to bring about more equity in the world. Abandoned about a third of the way in.
