Restingmotion

As I was dithering, putting off writing this post, I picked up a book to begin my next read.  The Book is The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, and I found this quote on the first page:

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read.  Now I know the truth:  what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.   (page 3, paragraph 2, line 7)

 

And so, in the beginning of a novel is a statement that completely encapsulates my approach to reading in general, particularly fiction, but I would argue that there is a corollary that relates to non-fiction as well.    Yes we read non-fiction for knowledge, but how we approach a chemistry text for example, should be different than how we approach history.  We are not empty pitchers waiting to be filled up only to disgorge the contents unfiltered.

I read five books in January 2024:

1.  Lord of Chaos, Robert Jordan.  Fantasy. Book 6 of the Wheel of Time series.
2. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophesy,  William Strauss and Neil Howe.  Reread from the 1990s. American History, Sociology, Generation Theory.
3. A Crown of Swords, Robert Jordan.  Fantasy, Book 7 of the Wheel of Time series.
4. Generations: The History of America's Future1584-2069, William Strauss and Neil Howe.  Non-fiction. American History, Sociology, Generation Theory.
5. The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff.  Literary. Themes include patriarchy, female autonomy, climate change, ecological degradation.

In my mind they can be broken into two groups:  the first four, then the final one.

I started both Lord of Chaos and The Fourth Turning before the close of 2023.  They were both slow reads. Oddly, or so it seemed at first, they complemented each other.  But it is not really odd.  They both revolve around a cyclical view of time.

I picked up The Fourth Turning, which I had read when it first came out in the 1990s, because I read somewhere that Neil Howe had come out with a new book, The Fourth Turning is Now.  I remembered reading the first book, and the general outline of Strauss and Howe's theory, and wondered whether or not I really needed a further explication of the theory as it relates to current events, or, if would be better just to reread the previous book.  I opted to reread before making a decision. Once I started The Fourth Turning, I thought I should read Strauss and Howe's previous book, Generations, and procured a copy.

Both books discuss history, specifically American History, although in the second book they have expanded their timeline backwards to the Reformation in Europe.   Their premise, that history is shaped by generations and that these generations fall into a repeating pattern of approximately a four-generation cycle of 80 to 100 years, called a saeculum, is thought provoking and worth reading.  The idea of the spaeculum is not new, it goes at least as far back as classical Greece.  Nor is the idea of differences in generations or the idea that time and history are cyclical in nature new.  These ideas have a much longer hold on human thought than the relatively new idea that history and time are linear.  

In general, people do react to the ideals and actions of the generation that came before them, every era has its own events and stories that shape its particular narrative, and much as many an older generation wishes the younger generations were more like themselves, this cannot be so. We all leave our marks on the culture in which we live, and the world in which our grandchildren live is not precisely the world in which we grew up.  This was as true in the past as now, although rapidity of change is much more marked at this point in time.   There are ages of heroism, ages of rebellion, ages of calm and peace.   Unfortunately the way the previous cycles played out grows dimmer the further removed we are from any particular time.   I am not saying that time or history is strictly cyclical, not in any sense of predeterministic, but I am also not saying that history is strictly linear either.  It seems to me we see what we need to see to survive and in this we see only a fragment of what is true.

Strauss and Howe combine a view of history with sociology in describing social movements and the way ideas shape history.  Was this new at the time? I don't know.  I think both books are good, although the latter book trends a little more toward pop sociology than appears to be the case in the first book, Generations, seems more solid to me, even if a little dry.   In both books, the authors sometimes appear to take great pains to adapt the flow of historical events to their four-generation, four-season outline, and sometimes  they leave out events that I might have thought important.  I am not a historian, but my father was, and he drummed the idea of historicity into me from an early age.  I am also aware that the way we look at the past, the way anyone looks at the past, even a historian attempting to be objective, is shaped by his/her understandings of the world in which he or she lives.  There are facts, but we see them darkly.

Anyway, reading these books along with the 6th and 7th volumes of The Wheel of Time was fascinating.  In once sense, the entire series, which takes place over the course of just a few short years, very much fits into the patterns of a crisis or "turning" as Strauss and Howe use the term.  Jordan also employs the idea of time as being a wheel, not repeating exactly, but themes and cycles that recur again and again.  He artfully weaves in "legends" that refer to events of our time, although so misconstrued and misremembered that they could be missed if one was not paying attention.

In retrospect I think the first few volumes of The Wheel of Time were a sort of prologue, defining the world and its boundaries.  Now, in the middle of the cycle, I find myself fascinated by the world itself, the societies, the individuals, the complexity of this world that also seems all too familiar in its humanity.  Everyone sees the world through different lenses.  Everyone believes they are right.  Everyone, absolutely everyone, is wrong.  We have a group of young adults who are changing the world, but not so much changing it because they want to, but because they see circumstances that others do not, respond in ways others do not.  They too make mistakes.  Everyone, in trying to help, in trying to guide the future, compounds the crisis. 

I find this fascinating because I see it play out all around me.  In global events.  In local politics.  In petty feuds and misunderstandings, some of which drive people apart because they can't let go of their own tiny piece of the world.  I am no better.  This is part of what it is to be human, although I still believe we have the option to attempt to reach beyond this, if we can.   This is what fantasy and science fiction do so well, they explore the everyday themes of human life, society, religion, in an abstract way that allows greater depth through distance.

I will continue reading The Wheel of Time but I will also probably take a break when I finish my current book.  I feel no need to read Howe's newest iteration of his theory.  Even in The Fourth Turning, I thought the book was making missteps as it tried to apply a general theory to the specifics of what is happening today.  I still find the ideas fascinating and thought provoking.  Reading the books was time well spent.  The same for Jordan.  But that is about the extent of it. I'm not sure any of us can really understand the forces that govern our life while we are in the midst of living it.    

And that takes me to my last book, which is a different thing altogether.

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff is definitely a literary novel.   The setting is roughly 1609-1610, Jamestown, but this is not specifically an historical novel even as it definitely references some of America's founding myths.  The story takes place over the course of a week or two, and revolves around the struggle of a young girl who has run away from the Jamestown settlement, who is pursued, and is sick and dying in the wilderness.  The scope is simultaneously very small and very grand.  The plot is minimal, and yet the story is compelling. I did not want to put it down.  

To this reader, the novel explores many of the themes that were explored in Groff's last novel, Matrix: patriarchy, misogyny, loss of female autonomy, capitalism sometimes masquerading as evangelism, climate change, ecological degradation.  Yet where Matrix explored these issues in a very external way, through a fictionalized character  based roughly on Marie de France, in this novel the exploration is very internal, through the musings of a young unnamed girl.  Yet this story is also very internal to the experiences of a woman in any age.  That the girl has no name is important to the story, as is the fact that she is called by many names, none of which feel real even to herself.

There are several things I like about the story and the structure of the story.  I like that Groff has intentionally chosen to write in a voice that is not modern, deliberately evoking the period.  And although our narrator is omniscient, and sometimes perhaps anachronistic in that between alternating sequences of dreams vs the reality of her plight, our young narrator explores issues of male sexual violence, discrimination both on the basis of sex and differences in religion/race, as well as the human need for possession and domination.  Groff bridges this gap well, with beautiful prose.  She also manages to make her protagonist not sound like a 21st century girl trapped in a 17th century setting, a problem I find rampantly annoying in many historical fictions.  In fact we don't know all that much about what 17th century women thought about all of these things, but I suspect their thoughts were not that different than ours even though their contexts and expectations would have differed wildly.

I was particularly struck by the question of dominion vs domination and the way it plays out through the story. Although the author addresses this question head on in the middle of the book, as one reads, one realizes that the theme has been pervasive throughout the novel in the various relationships between the characters, both men and women, but also adults and children, englishmen (deliberately not capitalized in the novel) and native americans, humans and nature, even to some extent in the struggle between outer life and inner life, or the ego and the soul.    

In this sense, I find the ending of the novel fascinating and necessary.  Our dying protagonist experiences a series of fever dreams in the moments before death in which she has survived and lived for some years, self-sufficient and yet lonely, in the wilderness. Through each iteration of her dream she makes a new realization about the meaning of life and what is truly important, another way of looking at dominion vs domination,  not just of the world, but of the way in which we are willing, or not willing, to embrace wisdom and who we truly are.  

In this story of a nameless girl I found, in one sense at least, the story of humanity.  Life is filled with nameless people who lived brave, sad, honorable or terrible lives.  We do not know about most of them, but they are no less important to the world we know today just because they as individuals are forgotten.  The same is true for each of us, each of us embodies humanity.  Most of us will not be remembered a few generations from now, much less hundreds of years.  But each of our lives is valuable, each of us is valuable for the choices we make.   I may be reading a lot more into this book than the author intended but I am not sure whether or not that is the point. I continue to maintain that a book opens the opportunity to form a relationship with an idea.  Reading this book opened a conversation. Discussing this book with my book club, refined and shaped that conversation in new ways, as have my meandering thoughts since that date.  Definitely a book I will want to read again.

I am going to conclude this post with a quote from near the end of the novel, during the prologue to the period of fever dreams, as much because I love the wording, as because it captures both the sweep of awareness of grace as the acceptance of peace to come. 

And in the air, now, she had a single bright flare, a vision that extended her life vastly beyond this moment of her dying, both in the greater sweep and in the smaller grains.

                                                                   page 233, paragraph 5

I want to get caught up with 2023 before January ends, which means there will be no review of the remaining books on last year's list.  Not that I am inclined toward toward such a task.   I do, however, want to think about my favorite novels, and so I shall.  

I've always avoided the arbitrariness of best lists, but somehow now that is exactly what I wish to embrace.  This blog, after all, is extremely arbitrary, wrapped as it is in my choices, my thoughts, my interests.  

In December a member of my book club proposed that we each think of our favorite book from the year.  It seemed that, for the most part, each of us chose a different book and I found the discussion fascinating.  My own favorite book was not the book I had initially chosen for book club discussion, so let's start this post there.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan would have been on my "favorite books" list from 2022, had I made one.  But my book club read it in 2023, and it was my favorite book of our selections.   It is a book that holds up to subsequent readings, and reveals more of itself with each encounter.  But I don't think my thoughts have changed significantly since I reviewed it in 2022. (here).  I read this for both of my book clubs this year, and it would be my favorite selection from each, although since I had read it the previous year as well, I would only put it in fifth place among this year's favorites.

In position number 4 on my list would be Sheena Patel's novel I'm a Fan.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel and I found it entertaining, challenging, and thought-provoking.  The story and the experiences of the protagonist are completely outside my experience, completely outside the possibility of anything I would consider.  Perhaps this is part of what elevates the novel because the protagonist is nothing like me and yet she becomes completely sympathetic and at times even understandable.  I feel like the author is helping me with insight into the inner world of a girl I would otherwise never bother to understand, who in a way lives in a world that is nothing like mine, even though it is the same world.  I would still read this again and, as I stated in my previous review, I would still love to discuss this book with someone else or perhaps even in a multi-generational small group.   I don't have much beyond that review to say, but ideas and images from that novel still arise regularly in my thoughts.

Number three on the list is completely different.  Although Patel's book is deeply artistic, intellectual, interior and polemical, Abraham Verghese's novel The Covenant of Water is a large, thoroughly enjoyable and engaging, family drama set among the Christian community in Kerala, India.   I read this twice, once in hardcover, and again listening to the audiobook on Audible, where it is narrated by the author.  Both formats are worthwhile.  This is the kind of novel that I can get lost in and am reluctant to put down, a book a friend once referred to as the kind of book you "read, read" meaning the kind of book in which she would completely lose herself in the story.  Here, this novel, yes.  

All of Verghese's novels have some medical component, or at least all the novels I've read, and this no exception.  I find that the medicine is artfully woven into the warp and weft of the story, and that even the parts I don't care about, or the characters about whom I am initially doubtful, all become essential to the makeup of the fabric of the story.  This is a novel to savor.

And just like that I'm to number two, the runner up.  That would be This Other Eden by Paul Harding.  This novel was nominated for the Booker prize, and it did make the short list, but I didn't read it until after the winner was announced. (It did not win).  But I've already stated I wasn't somehow engaged in Booker-mania this year, and that is okay.  I did however thoroughly enjoy this book.  

The novel is inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, which was once the home of a mixed-race fishing community, until the state of Maine evicted the residents.  But Harding has firmly held that although he was inspired by the true story, he has made no attempt to tell the specifics of that story. Instead we get a luminous story of well-drawn, all-too-human characters told in poetically mesmerizing prose.  Even though I knew how the story must end, I felt compelled to to dive further and further into this deeply haunting novel.   The story told is as much a story of a community, how they relate amongst themselves, as well as their position relative to the society as a whole.  At times allegorical, it is an exploration of humanity, wisdom, ignorance, power and loss.  The writing is fluid, imaginative, metaphorical.  Biblical references abound and this reader found them entertaining, but the author is not particularly heavy-handed about driving home lessons.  

The character of Matthew Diamond, a retired schoolteacher who strives to help the residents of Apple Island,  while at the same time battling his own aversions to their mixed race heritage, is particularly compelling.  Diamond brought to mind both the work and the life of the theologian Karl Barth, even before I knew the author modeled Diamond in part on Barth.  

There are also strong correlations to The Colony, by Audrey Magee, another novel about the incursion into and destruction of a unique and "lost" way of life, partially at the hands of well-meaning but misguided souls who only wish to "help".   The side story where young Ethan, sent away from the island, falls in love with Bridget, a young Irish serving girl, herself from a small isolated island community, seals both the link to Magee's novel and the universality of the themes that are playing out. This book satisfies both my love of a good story, and my intellectual leanings.  It is also a book that I am sure will reveal itself further with future readings.

Which leads me to my first choice,  The North Shore, by Ben Tufnell, a novel all about liminality and metamorphosis.  I do realize that this means it is not, perhaps, most people's cup of tea, but it is perfectly mine.    I am not certain that I have more to say about this novel above what I wrote in my previous review, here..  I found it an absolutely fascinating novel, a novel which I pick up occasionally to reread selected passages.   Just thinking about it makes me want to read it again, but I can admit that this is a novel in which I cannot separate the story from the intellectual process that it evokes.  It very much feels to me like a novel almost attempting to form its own metamorphosis, of blurring the boundaries between art, and life, word, experience, and how we know what we know.

There are so many things I want to write about, and yet there are also things that I fell behind on during my sabbatical.  I know I should just let them go, but I can't quite do that.  I hope to continue to write at least one, and hopefully two posts most weeks, but I also worry that if I keep writing catch-up posts, I will remain constantly behind.  Perhaps I will throw in an extra post or two, perhaps not.  I haven't gotten that far yet.  I can admit that I harbor a certain fear that if I write extra posts now, I might run out of things to say later.  

It just so happened that I was at lunch with some friends last weekend when the conversation drifted into a discussion of a recent popular health book, a book that I had read at the beginning of September.  The Book is Outlive by Peter Attia and it was a good discussion, a discussion that helped to clarify my thoughts on the book, which is good because they have been decidedly mixed.

First of all, I am a subscriber to Peter Attia's podcast, The Drive and it is probably the most worthwhile podcast I listen to regularly.   I love the depth of information and I am one of those subscribers who will follow up on the links to research, who loves delving into the science.    Attia notes in the acknowledgements section of the book that  "my then publisher said my draft was too technical and lacked any sense of me as a person" leading him to revise and expand his initial draft.  I am a person who would probably have loved that first, too technical, version.  I don't find a great deal in this book that is new to anyone who keeps up with the research, or listens to and follows up on the information available on The Drive.  I also find the lack of foot notes annoying.  There are notes in the back of the book, and they are well worth following up on, but they are not specifically referenced in the text.  Perhaps this too was a "publishing decision".  I don't know.

Despite these quibbles, and they are quibbles, I am glad I read this book and I think more people should read it.  There is a lot of valuable material here and it is presented in a clear and relatable manner.  I am sure there are people whose reactions run the gamut of extremes concerning this book; any book that promotes thinking in new ways invites those responses..  I think the author did an admirable job and I appreciate the effort involved, especially in terms of telling his personal story.  On that note I wish the mental health story had come earlier in the book, if only because the discussion on mindset, of being fixed in one place versus being open to new ideas, is critical to the book as a whole and I am not convinced all readers will get there.

Basically Attia is writing about health span, the  years we live doing the things that we want to do, versus lifespan, the actual years of our life.  It is an important discussion, as is the author's breakdown of the development of the history of healthcare and his advocating for something called "Healthcare 3.0".  I do believe this is a great idea, and although Attia makes a noble effort, I don't think he fully escapes from a lifetime of being trained in Healthcare 2.0.  But he does make us think and that is the true importance of this book.  Recommended. I'm glad I read it, but I don't think it earned a permanent space on my shelves.  I will however keep subscribing to Attia's podcast.

Since I've started with non-fiction, let's keep this post in that arena.

In October I read Michael Easter's Scarcity Brain.  This book, in many ways, was more thought-provoking for me, although I can't say that the information it contained was specifically new.  Easter made me think about things I knew, on the periphery at least, in new ways and discussed cultural trends that I actually hadn't spent enough time thinking about.  Easter is basically writing about addictive behaviors, how we develop them and how to overcome them.  In the process he also talks about how we have built a society that revolves around scarcity and accumulation and and uses research into brain neuroscience to drive us to want more.  I found it fascinating but not profoundly life changing.  The cover of the book appears to make this seem like a self-help book and I'm not convinced it actually works on that level. Nonetheless, I found the book interesting and entertaining, and I have been more overtly aware of the way everything, from news cycles to grocery store layouts, is designed to feed a scarcity impulse and to consider my behavior accordingly.

Perhaps my favorite non-fiction book of the fall was Jonathan Gornall's memoir How to Build a Boat.  It is not a perfect book by any means, and there can be many given parts of it that are too much for any one reader, but I found it insightful and charming.  Basically Mr. Gornall is writing about how, upon becoming a father again at 59, he decided to build a clinker-style dinghy for his newborn daughter.  There is a great deal about boat building, a great deal about sailing, and an exploration of Gornall's own troubled family history both in terms of his childhood but also his previous foray into parenthood.   Embarking on a parenthood he desperately wanted, filled with fears of not leaving this child the legacy of his upbringing, he embarks on a job far outside his skill set.  Being a writer and a person who thinks far too much about things in general, he goes on and on about his process, about his doubts, about his fears.  This is something that endears him to me.  Is this not how most of us end up embarking on all the journeys that prove to be the most important to us?  I found this book charming and completely satisfying.  On top of all that,  it has a happy ending.

Two other books:

John Phillip Newell's Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul  was a book I wanted to love but ultimately didn't.  There were a lot of things that appeal to me and can't really explain it.  I very much agree with Newell's thesis about caring for the earth and the soul. Also much as I may agree with his thesis, I found his interpretation and research somewhat faulty.  I was cheering when Newell brought up the disagreements that have occurred throughout Christian thought, and the decisions that have been made that have steered the faith in a particular direction and yet at the same time I felt the book lacked a certain historicity that I felt oversimplified many ideas.  I can't say that it is just because I disagreed with the ideas in the book, because there are many books I love even if I disagree highly with the ideas, but those books all lead me to think about issues more deeply or look at ideas in new ways and this somehow did not.   In fact I think that was what I struggled with here.  I did not find new insights and I felt the information was overly simplified.  I did attend a talk with the author, and I do think he would be a fascinating person to talk with, even if the book did not delight me.

And last, but not at all least, I raced through  The Courage to Face Covid-19, John Leake's book about Dr. Peter McCullough, a doctor I greatly admire for standing up for his beliefs.  The book is infuriating and incredibly sad; it reads like a thriller, which is not surprising as Leake is a true-crime reporter.  The book is about how a staid, mainstream, highly regarded and well-respected researcher and physician found himself on the wrong side of a wall, becomingo a renegade against the establishment, his career practically destroyed.   All this because he was trying to help patients that wanted his help.    I don't really care where you stand in the politics of Covid, since most of what we are all told is politics and has nothing to do with science, this is a gripping book and there is a lot here that should make everyone uncomfortable. When did we become a world where politics and money is more important that human lives, and human choice?  No matter what side of any argument you find yourself on, the one thing I do know is that no one is 100% right or 100% wrong.   When we allow ourselves to forget human lives and human dignity, when we sacrifice people over principles or politics, we have lost our humanity.