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049) A Book of Lamentations by James Goldberg, finished on May 23
James had a productive 2020. I haven't picked up everything he did yet, but I wanted to start with this one because the friendly-to-ecstatic reviews it was receiving online made it seem like the book of the moment, the book I needed now.
And I get why people love it. It is absolutely a book for right now. 2020 was a year of multitude pains seen with new clarity and these poems speak to that. I marked many poems as excellent and as speaking to the me of now.
I heard secondhand from a reviewer who read many more 2020 collections than I have that many of the books that came out last year didn't feel fully sculpted. Rather, they felt rushed---like the poets had a theme and a moment and rushed the books out. More than half of the 2020 collections I've read in whole or in part are deserving of this criticism, A Book of Lamentation included.
James told me a couple Octobers ago that he would rather write a poem for every idea he has than craft a perfect poem for only a few of them. I don't know that this strategy is incorrect. An author can't guess which works will still matter a generation later, so why not flood the space? Even with less quality control, this book is studded with gems and some of the lesser poems still contain brilliant insights. I'm not going to say his strategy is wrong. Could this book meant as much if it dropped just in time for Christmas 2025?
James speaks of the things that matter.
As an aside, let me note he does not speak alone. He has invited a handful of other poets and artists to participate in this volume. One of James's arts is community. It's a good one to pursue.
050) How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, finished on May 25
Permit a digression?
Last summer, Lady Steed and I watched Hot Rod. I forget where the dvd came from, but she wanted to see it and I, knowing a BW/DR essay* was awaiting me, was up for it. I liked it much more and some months into my BW/DR subscription suddenly remembered I had a Hot Rod essay to read and got on it.
I liked that essay. It got me thinking about a lot of things and I instantly put this book on hold at the library as a must-read.
When the book arrived, I started reading it almost immediately---but it took me weeks to remember why I had put it on hold.
I suspect I am better at doing nothing than the average American but I by no means think I am nothinging enough. And Odell's book is an excellent couple hundred pages at exploring the whys and the hows and the whats of nothing, It has moments of utter transcendence. But it can also be a bit of a slog. Since I read the book without internet access, walking to work or taking my daughter to the park, some pieces I couldn't quite decipher. I hope as Odell continues to write, she leans more into the friendly aspect of her voice rather than the jargon pit she clearly has a second home in. I suspect this is a side effect of how wide read she is (a high percentage of this book is quotation) in this very specific niche of thought, but it, at times, did leave me behind.
That said, I highly recommend this book. You will feel wiser and ready to connect more with "life itself---nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more" (204).
My big regret is in not owning the book. I wish I could have underlined and dogeared and revisited in ways only ownership allows. That said, I did do (don't tell) some minor dogearing. Here are some stuff I thought would be worth looking at once more before returning the book and that work well enough out of context (this is irony as you will know after you've read How to Do Nothing yourself):
. . . what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. (113)
We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like "annoying" or "distracting." But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer, term, however, they can accumulated and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to "want what we want to want." Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self. (quoting James Williams, 114)
. . . at its most successful, an algorithmic "honing in" would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. It certainly makes sense from a business point of view. When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to "be yourself," what it really means is "be more yourself," where "yourself" is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don't know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments . . .
That seems like enough.
To end, how about the one quotation from this book I've already quoted half a dozen times and intend to quote a hundred more, from John Cage:
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. (95)
051) We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, finished on May 26
On this cover of the book (which is very similar to mine---same art---but a later design), the pufferer claims that this is the most influential science-fiction classic of the century. And in case the person picking up this paperback is skeptical that a book they've never heard of by some Russian they've never heard of could be more influential than, I don't know, Clarke or Asimov, we see a blurb noting that it "led the way" to Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four.
Which is impressive but undersells the facts. Both Huxley and Orwell were directly influenced by this novel which they each read. And let's not forget that Nineteen Eight-four was directly in communication with Brave New World as well.
But We is where is started.
Fun side quotation from Vonnegut re his first novel: "I cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamiatin's We."
I also want to bring up another book which I've never heard was inspired be We but obviously 100% was: Ayn Rand's Anthem.
So here we have three novels that I have taught multiple times to many students and opposite we have their parent. Who takes most after their shared progenitor? Well...it depends how you weight things. Surface level it's more Brave New World than anything else. Shiny perfect world, funkily scientific freelove, distant future, assigned lifelong roles. But wait, I hear you say. Those last two also apply to Anthem! So they do. Plus, like Anthem, the characters are named things like D-503 or Equality 7-2521.
We also shares its greatest weakness with Anthem. These two Russian-penned novels rely on a first-person narrator (conceit being this is a record kept by the narrator) but the nature of the narration frequently strains credulity. Both writers want access to the mass of allusions available in our world but which should not exist for the narrators of their novels. So their constantly slipping them in with excuses and it's kind of embarrassing, frankly. Brave New World solves this problem by introducing a Shakespeare-reading savage and Nineteen Eighty-four fixes the problem by making our world in the recent past, allowing the main character to vaguely remember things and for evidence of allusion-rich materials to still have echoes on the edges of society.
Nineteen Eighty-four also gets DNA from We in the sense of an always-watching oppressive government (although the Benefactor is more like Anthem's World Council or Brave New World's Mustapha Mond). There's even a character like O'Brien, though, twist!, he is part of the Brotherhood! Nineteen Eight-four also lifted the bullet---one of the most powerful bookenders in modern lit---from a paragraph before the end of We.
The end of We is echoed in all three books' very different endings.
Is anyone keeping score?
Anyway, it's a short novel and most certainly worth a read if you're interested in the genre. It may not be the strongest of the four but it does hold its own.
Previously . . . . :
books from this year
002) You're a Pal, Snoopy by Charles M. Schulz, finished January 4
004) Served edited by Theric Jepson, finished January 9
005) Served edited by Theric Jepson, finished January 17
006) Shem in Zarahemla by Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood, finished January 19
007) iPlates: Zerin's Sacrifice by Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood, finished January 21
008) iPlates: Alma in the Wilderness by Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood, finished January 24
009) Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard, finished January 27
010) ved edited by Theric Jepson, finished February 4
011) The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, finished February 4
003) Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, finished January 6
012) Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, finished February 5
013) My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, finished February 15
014) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, finished February 16
015) Sisters by Raina Telgemeier, finished February 18
016) A Desolating Sickness: Stories of Pandemic edited by D.J. Butler, finished February 21
017) Nothing Very Important and other stories by Béla Petsco, finished February 22
018) Muppets Present "The Great Gatsby" by Ben Crew, finished February 24
019) Uncanny Avengers: Counter-Evolutionary by Rick Remender and Daniel Acuna, finished February 28
020) Guts by Raina Telgemeier, finished March 2
021) The Hoboken Chicken Emergency by D. Manus Pinkwater, finished March 4
022) Ghosts by Raina Telgemeieir, finished March 5
023) Consent (for Kids!): Boundaries, Respect, and Being in Charge of You by Rachel Brian, finished March 11
024) Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint, finished March 12
025) Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh, finished March 20
026) The Invisible Saint by Curtis Taylor, finished March 25
027) Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, finished March 25
028) Scrap Mettle by Scott Morse, finished March 26
029) Dugout: The Zombie Steals Home by Scott Morse, finished April 1
030) The Barefoot Serpent by Scott Morse, finished April 1
031) Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do by James Thurber and E. B. White, finished April 1
032) Boys Who Became Prophets by Lynda Cory Hardy, finished April 11
033) George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends by James Marshall, finished April 12
034) Stuart Little by E.B. White, finished April 14
035) Achilles by Elizabeth Cook, finished April 15
036) Have It Your Way, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, finished April 15
037) The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne, finished April 21
038) The Mystery of the Dinosaur Graveyard by Mary Adrian, finished April 22
039) The Garden of Enid—Volume One by Scott Hales, finished May 2
040) Tiny Writings by Danny Nelson, finished May 5
041) Whispering Death! by R.A. Christmas,
finished May 6
042) Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare,
finished May 9
043) T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton, finished May 14
044) Sweet Tooth – Volume 1: Out of the Deep Woods by Jeff Lemire, finished May 22
045) Sweet Tooth – Volume 2: In Captivity by Jeff Lemire, finished May 22
046) Sweet Tooth – Volume 3: Animal Armies by Jeff Lemire, finished May 22
047) Sweet Tooth Deluxe Edition – Volume 2 by Jeff Lemire, finished May 22
048) Sweet Tooth Deluxe Edition – Volume 3 by Jeff Lemire, finished May 23
final posts in this series from
2007 = 2008 = 2009 = 2010 = 2011 = 2012
2013 = 2014 = 2015 = 2016 = 2017 = 2018 = 2019 = 2020
___related___
UNFINISHED BOOKS
REJECTED BOOKS
* the most recent post in the books-read series *
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