I’ve always tended to do or say things with enough fervor and over a long enough period of time that those activities and opinions become, I guess, defining traits. (But not quirks. Never quirks.) Still, over the years, I’ve been someone who: takes photos of vanity license plates, opines against the presence of fresh flowers in the home, goes to the same place for coffee every single weekday at exactly the same time, is married, walks an identical serpentine path through the park each morning, has bangs, never wears earrings, wears the same pair of earrings for months at a time, etc.
And then, I stop. Things change! Sometimes, a pang of guilt accompanies my abandonment of these petty enthusiasms and antipathies; sometimes, I’m asked to explain myself. Mostly, these sharp-edged facets soften so easily, often fading away altogether, that it’s hard to believe they ever mattered at all.
I’m not sure if this quality makes me perfectly disposed or uniquely ill-suited to recommend things to other people. What are the chances, after all, that I will endorse something one day and, a year later, feel nothing about that thing at all? Not bad! The chances are not bad. And what are the chances that I will start this newsletter, send it on a reliable (enough) schedule for months on-end, before just letting it disappear? That could happen, too. It probably will?
Hopefully, though, this newsletter — mainly about books, always related to a theme of some sort — will at least be something to enjoy. While it lasts. Whatever that means.
Fear
Recently, I was talking to my uncle about bears; specifically, I was explaining how, if and when I visit him on the remote parcel of land (reachable only by seaplane!) where he lives in Alaska, I will have a healthy fear of running into one. He told me that when he’d first moved to the state, many decades ago, he’d also been more than a little wary of bears, and had received the following advice from a long-time Alaskan with whom he was embarking on a surveying trip: “The thing to do when you see a bear is to stay very still and be very quiet. And, if you’re lucky? That bear just might come even closer, so you can both get a better look at each other.”
This reminded me of another bit of outdoorsy wisdom I’d been granted while on a day-hike in North Carolina, through Pisgah National Forest, just over three years ago. The small group I was with was walking through the sun-dappled, quiescent woods, and I asked our guide if she thought we would see any bears. “No, we probably won’t,” she said. “But they will definitely see us.”
As someone who likes looking as closely as possible at the things I fear — I’ve lost hours reading about ghost planes and the effects of untreated rabies, for example — there’s something compelling about the idea that those things are also looking back at me, as if fear itself were sentient and eager to have a conversation. Maybe there’d even be the chance to reach some sort of mutual understanding. Or maybe not. All the same, there’s comfort, even if it’s sometimes ice cold, with this theoretical companionship, and it’s something I felt when reading the following books; all offered me the often eerie opportunity to have my darkest thoughts reflected, to see and be seen by what I find most terrifying. Trust me, there’s nothing better!
Pilot Imposter by James Hannaham
In mid-2020, airlines began booking flights to nowhere. Passengers boarded the planes and flew for a couple of hours before landing back exactly where they had started. The appeal, it seems, lay in travel-starved people’s ability to go on a journey, even if they didn’t have a destination. There is something similarly attractive, both disorienting and surreal, in James Hannaham’s latest book — although reading it will all but guarantee that you’ll find yourself somewhere wholly new at its end. A simultaneous ode to poet Fernando Pessoa and the perils of air travel, Pilot Imposter is often unsettling (I found myself holding my breath in terror for pages at a time) but always exhilarating, a reminder of the curse and blessing of our consciousness; the burden of knowing as much as we do, the gift of awareness. Reading this book isn’t a soothing act; it’s thrillingly sticky, an open wound.
Relevant fears include: flying, oblivion, having to be a hero
Assembly by Natasha Brown
It’s scary enough to attain everything you’ve long worked toward having and realize it’s not even close to being enough, but scarier still to know that “everything” was never what you’d really wanted anyway. The unnamed narrator in Natasha Brown’s stiletto-sharp debut has it all: high-paying job, boyfriend who wants to marry her, nice apartment, cancer. Only she knows about that last thing, and only she knows that it alone is the thing she possesses that doesn’t make her feel trapped, or empty. Only she know that the life she has built, its inherent emptiness, is not only failing to sustain her, but is also killing her; “it was survival only in the sense that memes survive.” How can she take control again? The answer is unsettling, enraging, liberating.
Relevant fears include: people who work in finance, the British class system, having it all
The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore
Witchcraft has never particularly compelled me, not as a practice nor as an aesthetic. Same goes for self-identifying witches (sorry, witches!). However, who isn’t drawn to tales of persecution? Especially those in which it’s all too easy to imagine being either the unwitting persecutor or persecuted or even just a bystander (not an innocent one — there’s no such thing). And what’s scarier than imagining living in a time (1643) and a place (the English countryside) where everything from a cow dying to a ship sinking can be blamed on you, particularly if you happen to be the kind of woman who doesn’t live according to anyone else’s rules? Perhaps the only scarier thing is having to navigate a path out from under those types of accusations, as young Rebecca West finds herself having to do in this wickedly funny novel that offers a sharp, nuanced look — complete with primary source documents of 17th century witchcraft trials — at the banal horrors of life at that time and in that place. It’s also a reminder that those eye-roll-inducing T-shirts that say “we are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” are silly for many reasons, not least that so many of those “witches” were actually hanged. So!
Relevant fears include: telling the wrong gossip to the wrong person, organized religion, survival at any cost
Harrow by Joy Williams
“Nature [has] been deemed sociopathic” in Joy Williams’ Harrow, a sublime provocation of a book, which follows Khristen, a teenager and Gemini who maybe died briefly as an infant, as she navigates the apocalypse, first at a barely functioning boarding school, then in the midst of an aging group of suicidal eco-warriors, and then, well, these details aren’t really the point. Not when the world is ending and we’re all on our way to being assessed by Jeffrey, a messianic 10-year-old well-versed in the law. The point is diffuse; the point is all around us; we’re always breathing it in, even if we won’t feel its effects for years to come. Or maybe it won’t be many years after all. My best friend grew up in and now lives again in Salt Lake City, having moved there a while back from New York. There are a few reasons why she doesn’t really love it there, but the real impetus for her to eventually relocate, she told me not long ago, is because climatologists are predicting that the ongoing desiccation of the Great Salt Lake will render the area uninhabitable; as the lake evaporates, the air will become a miasma of poisonous particles swirling around that enormous natural basin. The matter-of-fact way we talked about this impending doom is probably familiar to anyone who has ever joked about how distant wildfires make the sunsets more beautiful or how nice it is to walk around NYC in December wearing just a light sweater. But then Harrow is a funny book, even if it’s not filled with jokes, exactly. It’s just that it leaves little doubt that it isn’t nature that’s sociopathic. As if there were ever any doubt about that at all.
Relevant fears include: dying of thirst or fire or toxic dust blanketing you as you sleep in your soft soft bed, the Goya painting “Saturn Devouring His Sons,” judgment
The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon
You don’t have to be someone who puts much stock in signs to know that it’s a bad one when a couple spends their wedding night “vomiting into their glistening honeymoon suite toilet,” but disaster is always hard to predict in its entirety, which is probably why anyone gets married in the first place. The disaster that is Liselle and Winn’s marriage is not actually the center of Asali Solomon’s illuminating novel; it is a symptom rather than the cause of Liselle’s real problem, which is that she chose to live a life that never quite fit. Now that it’s coming apart at the seams (on the evening she’s giving a dinner party, no less), all she can do is think about what might have been — and with whom. Though The Days of Afrekete takes place over the course of one night, it spans more than just a few hours, it goes further even than the decades of life that Liselle contemplates as she remembers who she once was and starts thinking about who she still has the chance to be. It encompasses everything energizing and humiliating about hungering for another person, seeing your own reflection in someone completely different than yourself, yet who still manages to be a part of you. At turns haunting and hopeful, it’s a story that, at its heart, is a gentle reminder that life keeps moving forward, but we don’t have to let go of the past to move with it.
Relevant fears include: dinner parties, your past coming back to haunt you, your past not coming back to haunt you
But also
You might have noticed that all the links to the books above are to Pilsen Community Books, an independent and employee-owned bookstore in Chicago. I pretty much exclusively order my books from Pilsen for many reasons — no matter how obscure the book, they always have what I’m looking for or can get it; they have a robust selection of used books; they support causes I believe in — but, I’ll admit, one of those reasons is an aesthetic one. Each book comes hand-wrapped and opening it feels like I’ve sent a present to myself. Which, of course, I have, but I never would have been so thoughtful about the presentation. If you’re thinking of sending anyone (including yourself) a book, please do consider shopping at Pilsen.
Speaking of giving: I’ve never really been burdened by the idea that gifts (or anything) must be timely, so even though we’ve only just exited what is a traditional gift-giving season and even though you might not know anyone with a birthday coming up, you should still do what I did recently and send someone (or multiple someones) you love something that they’ll love. Like a box of fruit? Yes, like a box of fruit! I’ve had good luck with both the Mystery Box from Full Moon Fruits (a company which I found out about from Tejal Rao’s very good New York Times newsletter The Veggie) and a big box full of blood oranges from Frog Hollow Farm (a company I found out about thanks to Google, but of which Alice Waters is also a fan). Fruit! Get it while you can.
I’m hoping to send this newsletter out with some frequency, at least to start. Every couple of weeks or so? In part, this is because I’ve missed writing these types of short book recommendations, something I haven’t really had the chance to do for some time. But also, I’m hoping that just the act of writing at all will make it more likely that I will write again. And then again. Although all the books in this edition are relatively recent, that won’t always be the case, as I’m planning on circling back to older books. (Right now I’m re-reading Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year and there’s just no way I won’t be writing about it soon.)
Okay! Oof. This was long. It probably won’t always be this long!