In April, the weather got nicer, so my walks to the library got more pleasant, so I read more. Who would've thought?!
A meditation on...meditation (sort of)
As a young only child who read a lot, one of my favorite fantasies was A Little Princess-esque in that I used to imagine I was an orphan living in the attic of a small convent. (I slept under a rather ornate quilt in a very squeaky antique bed frame, which only added to the mystique.) Not since then have I thought very consciously about secluded life in a religious community or hermitage. At least, not until I picked up Pico's book.
Pico Iyer is a lifelong spiritual seeker who has been fleeing to a remote hermitage on the coast of Big Sur for decades now. This book is a series of vignettes that reflect on his time growing in the holy silence fostered by the Camaldolese monks (and a select cast of outsiders) that call the hermitage their home. Interwoven with tales of the havoc wreaked on his life by the California wildfires, Pico's book is the closest thing a book can get to being an actual meditative experience. He writes movingly about the power of silent reflection and how the practice bolstered by such austere and simple surroundings can be brought into the "real world." (You know my penchant for materiality was absolutely singing at these points in the book.)
A techie tell-all
Was I entirely surprised when reading the lurid accounts of Facebook executives' poor behavior, ranging from complete lack of cultural or social awareness (ahem Mark Zuckerberg insulting world leaders to their faces) to outright sexual harassment (Sheryl Sandberg forcing her subordinates to share her bed and buy matching lingerie)? No. Do I think this tell-all is an incredibly important tool in the hands of anyone who wishes to fight back against Meta's consuming rise towards totalitarianism? Yes.
Sarah Wynn-Williams is the former director of global public policy at Facebook (pre-Meta) and she is currently the subject of private arbitration that aims to prevent her from promoting this book. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg (& co.) have tried so desperately to stifle Sarah's story is a rather compelling argument in her favor. Especially considering Meta's raging unpopularity, it's hard to imagine that a book populated with falsehoods would garner this much response from them.
At the same time, I am always hesitant to accept any memoir's presentation of facts as ultimate truth and that's also true here. A great deal of Sarah's justification for staying so long at Facebook—even though she was actively working for a company that helped manufacture genocide and was (apparently) populated with misogynist harassers—is naive idealism. That argument falls really flat for me, especially by the end. As Lily Janiak points out in her review of the book for the San Francisco Chronicle: "The subtext of chapter after chapter...is: 'If only Facebook had listened to Sarah!'" There are lots of open questions about fact checking as well, which is rather par for the course in any memoir.
All-in-all, my faith in Sarah's account is not crippled by questions about her motivation and bias (especially because it is simply far too easy to see the exact behaviors she describes modeled openly by the tech bros she's writing about), but these questions have to be factored into our understanding of what Sarah is trying to accomplish here. (After all, what is a diplomat if not a politician once-removed?)
Poetic vignettes about capitalism
Reading this book was extremely annoying, and I believe that's entirely by design. In it, Eula Biss examines her role in the unavoidable capitalist structures that order our world. Her writing is sparse and often ask more questions than they answer.
Eula probes the Western ideals of labor and the very American value system of consumption and ownership, invoking a wide range of philosophical and authorly muses along the way, and there is something mildly enthralling about the way Eula lies bare her insufferable patterns of thought. It's a confidence play that sniffs of the same energy as 'barefaced makeup' routines, where people use the very tools and techniques of the trade that they're attempting to appear liberated from. She is not hiding, she insists to us. And yet...
The central feeling I had at the end of this book—I do not want to call it "the problem" of Eula's writing, because it may very well be intentional that she left us alone to grapple with whatever this book opened within us—was the fact that the best solution Eula could seem to come up with is simply....opting out? And as the entire book aims to grapple with her various forms of privilege (namely white and class), that non-answer feels extremely hollow. But again, that very well may be the point!
The legacy of capitalism means that, as Carlee Gomes writes, "our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that's 'ours' in late capitalism, and as a result it's become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today." Eula's writing certainly revolves around the act of consuming, but she offers no ideas for how to radically shift that system, even in your own life. Perhaps the greatest tension I experience with Eula's writing is because, once again, I am compelled by tangibility. Eula's book is a commentary on the world outside her window with zero offering on how to actually interact with what she finds, which I find lacking.
Jordan Peele meets Huckleberry Finn
Besides complaining about the NYT opinion editors (and don't even get me started on their outdated AF style guide), the number one thing my friend Michael and I text about is books. He described Percival Everett's James as the "best book of 2024" and "one of the few NYT book recommendations I 100% condone." I'm a simple girl. When Michael recommends a book to me–especially with such high praise—I read it.
I am oh-so-glad that I did. It took several months of being on the library waitlist for James to finally fall into my clutches and I absolutely devoured it. James is at once both classic, wry adventure and quotidian horror. A novel with a Black narrator living in the antebellum south could hardly be anything less than horror. Language, linguistics, and philosophy become a motif for the buried interiority of James—who is, in fact, the enslaved character called Jim that plays second fiddle to Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's earlier text. (I use the word "earlier," not "original," purposefully here. Percival's novel deserves to stand in the context of itself as a work of contemporary fiction and only considering James in relation to Twain's novel is reductionist.)
James is a novel about agency and Percival carefully frames every scene, a direct contrast to the (apparent) carelessness of Twain when it came to James; Percival's omissions are alive with as much meaning as his inclusions. I did not read James in close parallel to Huck Finn—indeed, I have not revisited Twain's novel in well over a decade—though I imagine that approach to reading would reveal further insights about both texts. You do not need a handy understanding of Huck Finn to appreciate Percival's achievement here, and I can confidently echo Michael's apt adulation of the novel.
A light for the midnight hours
I first encountered the sage wisdom of Barbara Brown Taylor on an episode of "On Being with Krista Tippett" that I listened to while solo driving across the country in desperate search for myself. I am eternally grateful that the journey brought me to Barbara (and, eventually, back to myself).
Barbara was an Episcopal priest for years that left ministry for career in higher education and as an author, undertaking all things in her pursuit of staying "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count." In this book, Barbara embarks on a journey through darkness, both spiritual and physical. Her quest sees her venturing into a cave, into the woods, into the hospital, and her recounting is so moving and unadorned that I found myself tempted to turn from the final page back to the very beginning to read it all again. (Alas, another library book that had to be returned.) I do not practice particularly ecumenical beliefs, and still I found a great deal of purpose and comfort in Barbara's writing.
A visit with the bard
Another one of Michael's influences on my literary life lately has been through the influx of plays on my bookshelf. I picked up Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? late last year and it changed my life (not an exaggeration). Since then, I have a little ritual of seeking the plays in every used bookstore I step into! I've been delighted to find that most bookstores carry plays that were actually used as a script in a production at one point, so they're scribbled over with random notes and stage directions. There's something incredibly endearing about picking up a book that has been so clearly a part of someone else's life before finding its way to my hands.
For an English major, I am remarkably under-versed in Shakespeare's works. So this was actually my first time reading Midsummer! (I'm ashamed to even admit that.) It's a classic for a reason.