I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there weren’t as many books as usual on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two monsters were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, and Orhan Pamuk's
Pig Earth is now on my shortlist (four books ahead of it on the waitlist, including Tremor). Then comes The Books of Jacob. Thanks for the recommendations. I'm into struggling as a reader if something (or someone whose opinion I value) tells me that the struggle is worth it. Dangerous times require new perspectives, I guess. The old forms sometimes need to be broken to repurpose their pieces.
Walter Benjamin, of course, also broke the molds. I'm reading his One-Way Street (mostly written as feuilleton at the bottom of newspapers' front pages between 1924 and 1926) off and on as a political devotional, and its first installment discusses the kind of publications his times require: "Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment." I like his criteria: what can nourish active communities? I love your accounts of your book group.
Anyway, I hope Substack may become one of those "inconspicuous forms" for me.
Despite Benjamin's typically categorical and almost hyperbolic remark, I read my share of books this year. Here are the ones that I think are influencing me the most:
Walter Brueggmann, God Neighbor, Empire: The Excess of Divine Fidelity and the Command of the Common Good (2016)
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2020)
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Pig Earth is now on my shortlist (four books ahead of it on the waitlist, including Tremor). Then comes The Books of Jacob. Thanks for the recommendations. I'm into struggling as a reader if something (or someone whose opinion I value) tells me that the struggle is worth it. Dangerous times require new perspectives, I guess. The old forms sometimes need to be broken to repurpose their pieces.
Walter Benjamin, of course, also broke the molds. I'm reading his One-Way Street (mostly written as feuilleton at the bottom of newspapers' front pages between 1924 and 1926) off and on as a political devotional, and its first installment discusses the kind of publications his times require: "Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment." I like his criteria: what can nourish active communities? I love your accounts of your book group.
Anyway, I hope Substack may become one of those "inconspicuous forms" for me.
Despite Benjamin's typically categorical and almost hyperbolic remark, I read my share of books this year. Here are the ones that I think are influencing me the most:
Walter Brueggmann, God Neighbor, Empire: The Excess of Divine Fidelity and the Command of the Common Good (2016)
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2020)
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)