Clockwise from right:
Archive of the Forgotten by A. J. Hackwith
Oh, this series is fun. I read #1 (The Library of the Unwritten) last month and immediately put this one on hold. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole Christian afterlife framework, but it’s underpinned by the idea that people go not to the afterlife that they believe in but the afterlife that they think they need – which makes Hell quite an interesting concept indeed. I adore the main cast, individually and as a little weirdo family. I’m fascinated by the cosmological metaframework Hackwith has set up here and how the big central question (why is the library in hell, anyway?*) fits into it and I’m impatiently waiting for the final book in the trilogy.
*especially as the libraries of other major faiths are in their respective paradises and places of rest as appropriate. What does the Christian cosmology have against books? – ohhhh, right.
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
God, I just love John McPhee, you know? There are some authors that are a sensuous experience to read – there’s an pleasure to the prose that is like the pleasure of good food or lying in the grass in a sunbeam on a warm spring day or listening to really good music, just an all-over feel-good sensation.
This book is about writing, which makes it even better; and even better than that, the stories he tells in the essays illuminate some of why he’s such a pleasure for me to read – how he approaches narrative structure, how his technical virtuosity is the product of many years of intimate collaboration with editors and researchers in a way that is particular to the news magazine long-form journalism form and The New Yorker specifically. What stories prick his curiosity, and how, and why, to drive his passionate, meticulous, near-obsessive research. It’s a great look inside a master writer’s process.
I finished the book and immediately put the audiobook version of Annals of the Former World on hold at the library. I own a copy of Annals and I read it fifteen years ago, but I just want to get lost in his storytelling.
First We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety by Sara Wilson
Based on the reviews scattered around Amazon and Goodreads and elsewhere, a lot of people did not quite get this book. So to be clear: it’s not self-help, it’s not a clinician’s study. It’s a memoir. It’s a memoir that has a lot of opinionating and “this is what worked for me, and why I think it might work for others, feel free to give it a shot” and summarizing snippets of conversations with other people’s experiences anxiety, so one can be forgiven for thinking it’s a self-help book, but it’s not.
Sara Wilson’s premise, basically, is the idea of sitting with the idea that anxiety is real, it’s terribly challenging, and it fucks up people’s lives and relationships – without pathologizing it. She’s approaching anxiety conditions from a neurodiversity angle rather than a clinical-care angle. Okay, this is part of who I am, now how do I navigate the world? And that’s an approach that appeals to me, because after a certain point – after 30+ years of wildly varying levels of functioning, therapy, spans of years with no therapy, support groups, medication, no medication, self-medication, self-help books, neuroscience books, god, hundreds of books – that’s really the only angle that seems practical, because I no longer hold out hope for a fix. For me, and it seems for Wilson, letting go of that hope is part of finding a way to a fulfilling and meaningful life that holds space for the reality that pain and fear are part of life.
I didn’t get so much in the way of actionable ideas out of the book – I didn’t really expect to – but a whole lot of validation. Three books I’ve read recently – this one and Pablo d’Ors’ Biography of Silence dealing with anxiety, and (of all utterly random and unexpected things!) Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, dealing with trauma – have said things that cut to the heart of what mental illness feels like that no clinician or theorist has ever said, and that really helped to clarify things I’ve been struggling with,
The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk
I’m about a third of the way through, and damn, this book is weird. I mean that in a delightedly, breathlessly, admiring way. Have you ever been reading a really dense account of a folklore tradition that has not been cleaned up and sanitized for Western reading audiences and stopped to think, wow, humans are weird? It’s pretty much a rollicking rollercoaster of that, with a narrative structure. I have no idea which pieces are actually lifted straight out of Estonian mythology and which were cooked in Kivirähk’s mad mind but it feels purely mythic and I absolutely love it.
Of course, I also have a long, bitter history with “twilight of pagan Europe” fantasy novels. I want to love them, and they kick me in the teeth and leave me clutching my broken heart. So I’m gunshy and wary, but hopeful; this book is so far out in a realm of its own that it may give two middle fingers to the trope.
Class and Librarianship is up next. I’m keeping my pile to about five books (more that just stresses me out and makes me panic-spiral about reading rather than actually, you know, just enjoying reading) and I seem to be getting through three or four books a week right now, so there’s definitely a little overlap from week to week. I think that’ll slow down to two or three in January as I’ve got some small but thinky books and big bricks coming up on my holds list.