Category Archives: books

“Physics is not only a history of successes.”

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49F2772E-E32F-45D0-878A-DC5C30132020p. 33
This is the world is described by quantum mechanics and particle theory. We have arrived very far from the mechanical world of Newton, where minute, cold stones eternally wandered on long, precise trajectories in geometrically immutable space. Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.

p. 37
Physics is not only a history of successes.

p. 63
Time sits at the center of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics. A tangle of problems where we are still in the dark. If there is something that we are perhaps beginning to understand about quantum gravity that combines two of the three pieces of the puzzle, we do not yet have a theory capable of trying to gather all three pieces of our fundamental knowledge of the world.

School closures

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My school was closed Monday for snow. They were also closed early on Tuesday and all day Wednesday and Thursday for extreme cold. When I learned about the mid-week closures, I promised myself I would treat the days off as the gifts they were. No “getting ahead” on weekly chores. The house is immaculate. No reshelving projects. No reorganizing closets. No comparison shopping for a new lawn mower. The library looks wonderful. So do the closets. And I have at least six weeks on the lawn mower purchase.

Relax, I told myself. Approach the days with some child-like delight.

So, yes, I finished our federal and state tax returns, but I also finished Season 6 of Parks and Recreation and three books. Yeah, I caught up on correspondence with out-of-state family, practiced my music, and exercised. But I also slept in a bit and woke up without an alarm clock. And we made fun food: one-pot pasta and crunchy garlic bread; bacon sandwiches; brownies.

For two days: No makeup. No hair products. No work clothes.

I look forward to working with my students tomorrow; I do, after all, like my job. But what a week; Friday is already here!

“But the result was now ours to live with.”

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e764f31f-9808-488c-935d-d7f2dbc999f0p. 144
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful — a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids — and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.

p. 411
In the end, Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes than her opponent, but Trump captured the Electoral College thanks to fewer than eighty thousand votes spread across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I am not a political person, so I’m not going to attempt to offer an analysis of the results. I won’t try to speculate about who was responsible or what was unfair. I just wish more people had turned out to vote. And I will always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. But the result was now ours to live with.

From the shelves

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c753c096-14ec-4b0d-b45f-a9268a1ded27Over the winter break, my younger daughter borrowed my copy of the Halperin translation of Michael Bernanos’ wonderfully creepy and unforgettable The Other Side of the Mountain.* Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork caught my eye when I refiled it. What a perfect “Read from the shelves” selection: I received the review copy nearly twelve years ago! The book was good as Stephen King’s EW editorial promised, and it fits neatly onto the mental shelf where I recently placed two other novels about anthropology: Euphoria by Lily King (one of the best books I read last year) and The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (disturbing content but excellently written).

Since my last post, I also finished Upgrade Soul (Ezra Claytan Daniels; 2016), which I borrowed from the library. For those of you who are still resisting graphic works, especially those who enjoy speculative, dystopian, and/or science fiction, this would be a fabulous introduction to the form: deceptively simple art enriches a compelling and original story. Bonus: The protagonists are a vibrant, intelligent couple who have been married forty-five years.

It has been a slow reading month, but many of my bookmarks are in the last quarter of their books, so I hope to add a few more to my list before month’s end. Sure, it would be easy to blame my discovery of Parks and Recreation on Prime Video for the paucity of books read, but I have also been walking more; and my winter break concluded a few days after my last post, so I have returned to work and to music lessons and practice. ASL studies and snow removal have also nibbled on my reading time. Okay, okay. Yeah. I’ve been gleefully enjoying Parks and Recreation episodes — not binge-ing but definitely choosing the series over a book. If you’re a fan, you probably understand. Color me chagrined.

* I recently learned about another translation by Gio Clairval and have added it to my “Want to read” list.

Read from the shelves

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71975def-17e0-48e0-9d56-39fe2e09a477We spent yesterday driving to and from and hiking at Starved Rock State Park, but last night, I was able to finish the first book in my “Read from the shelves” challenge — Hanya Yanagihara‘s first novel, The People in the Trees (2013).

p. 73
Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one’s intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind.

p. 93
There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, and unsure even how to address him — Paul? Tallent? Professor Tallent? (Surely not!) Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.

Edited on January 13. Lesson learned: Do not fail to proofread voice-to-text entires.

The year in books

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Unfinished business.

With only two evenings remaining in the year, I’m not sure if I will finish any of the seven books I’m currently reading, so I am calling it at 138 books read this year. (As always, I have included only cover-to-covers.) Here is my complete list, and here are a few numbers:

— 51 novels (not including graphic works)
— 30 non-fiction works (32, including graphic works)
— 13 plays
— 1 poetry title
— 43 graphic works (2 of which were non-fiction titles)

Expanding on my mid-year review, then, here are the standouts:

Even better on rereading:
■ Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro; 2005. Fiction.)
■ Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke; 1953. Fiction.)
■ Daytripper (Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá; 2011. Graphic fiction.)
■ Mrs. Caliban (Rachel Ingalls; 1983. Fiction.)

Forgot how wonderful this writer is:
■ Memento Mori (Muriel Spark; 1959. Fiction.)

For those who loved The Elementals (Michael McDowell; 1981):
■ The Reapers Are the Angels (Alden Bell; 2010. Fiction.)

Fabulous story for a long car trip:
■ American Kingpin (Nick Bilton; 2017. Non-fiction.)

Honorable mention:
■ The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet (Justin Peters; 2016. Non-fiction.)

The most engrossing books I read this year (not including rereads):
■ Behold the Dreamers (Imbolo Mbue; 2016. Fiction.)
■ An American Marriage (Tayari Jones; 2018. Fiction.)
■ The Third Hotel (Laura van den Berg; 2018. Fiction.)
■ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou; 2018. Non-fiction.)
■ Euphoria (Lily King; 2014. Fiction.)

Honorable mention:
■ Killers of the Flower Moon (Dan Grann; 2017. Non-fiction.)
■ An Abbreviated Life (Ariel Leve; 2016. Non-fiction.)
■ After the Eclipse (Sarah Perry; 2017. Non-fiction.)
■ The Hole (Hye-young Pyun; 2017. Fiction.)
■ Bel Canto (Ann Patchett; 2001. Fiction.)
■ Things We Lost in the Fire (Mariana Enriquez; 2017. Fiction.)

Cannot stop talking about the ideas in these books:
■ Janesville: An American Story (Amy Goldstein; 2016. Non-fiction.)
■ Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America (Alissa Quart; 2018. Non-fiction.)
■ Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (Jessica Bruder; 2017. Non-fiction.)
■ Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (Sarah Smarsh; 2018. Non-fiction.)

Even better than War and Peace:
■ Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath (Sigrid Undset; 1920. (Trans. Tiina Nunnally; 1997.) Fiction.)
■ Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wife (Sigrid Undset; 1921. (Trans. Tiina Nunnally; 1999.) Fiction.)
■ Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross (Sigrid Undset; 1922. (Trans. Tiina Nunnally; 2000.) Fiction.)

Best graphic work I read this year:
■ The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt (Ken Krimstein; 2018. Graphic non-fiction.)

Despite all of that great reading, I didn’t make much progress on my 2018 reading resolutions:

1. Read from the shelves.
Of the 138 books I read cover-to-cover, 55 were published this year. So, yeah, “Read from the shelves” was a bust in 2018, but as I wrote early last month, I have a plan: In 2019, I will read one hundred books from my shelves (i.e., the books must have been in my collection before the end of 2018), including at least twenty-four non-fiction titles and at least one book from each of the following “special collections”: Shakespeare, poetry, NYRB, Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, philosophy, art, and children’s / YA. Since I’ve been finishing between 120 and 150 books annually for the last few years, this goal leaves me a little room for impulsivity.

2. Complete a close reading of Moby Dick.
Next year marks the two hundredth anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth. I’m reading serendipity/synchronicity/synthesis into missing this goal because obviously it will be more fun to complete it in 2019, right? I’ve read Moby Dick (conventionally, words on a page) once and listened to the spectacular audiobook (William Hootkins; 2004) dozens of times, but I would still like to reread it (closely) because it bears returning to. If you’re up for it, please join me!

3. Reread at least one Vonnegut novel.
Sirens of Titan is part of my unfinished business. (By the way, my (tentative) 2019 selection is Player Piano.)

4. Finish reading several books abandoned in 2017 (or *gulp* earlier).
Ayup. I am a shamelessly promiscuous reader, good books don’t deserve such treatment, and I will do better.

5. Read at least thirty non-fiction titles.
Twenty-six has been my goal in the past, so I raised the bar this year. It’s the only resolution I kept. This year, I read 32 non-fiction books, two of which were graphic works.

Words to live by

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1B624876-0326-456F-B748-5FE489F395A9From Kerry Egan’s On Living:

p. 180
When someone tells you the story of their suffering, they are probably still suffering in some way. No one else gets to decide what that suffering means, or if it has any meaning at all. And we sure as hell don’t get to tell someone that God never gives anybody more than they can handle or that God has a plan. We do not get to cut off someone’s suffering at the pass by telling them it has some greater purpose. Only they get to decide if that’s true. All we can do is sit and listen to them tell their stories, if they want to tell them. And if they don’t, we can sit with them in silence.