Meet the new year, same as the old year. My reading goals for 2025 are basically the same as for 2024:
At least 48 books, of which:
at least 4 are in French, and
at least 25% are in Swedish
at least 12 are non-fiction
at least 10 have been in my library for over a year*
at least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2025)
at least half are by women or enby authors
at least 10% are by Black authors
at least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2025)
For my own reference, the last book I added to my TBR before January 1, 2025 was Où on va, papa ?
*I revised this one after I didn’t quite meet it last year. Shifting goalposts so I don’t have to own up to failure? Yup!
This was another move in my last-ditch effort to reach my yearly “books I’ve owned for over a year” goal. I doubt I’ll reach twelve (two more by the end of the year? unlikely), but reaching ten is good enough for me. That’s a nice round number.
Ormens väg på hälleberget has a whole cultural cachet that I was unaware of when my mother-in-law gave me a copy. I had no idea about the movie, about Torgny Lindgren, about anything. I put off reading it for years because I knew it would probably be bleak and unrelenting. Not only judging by the blurb on the back of the book but by the fact that my mother-in-law has a taste for the bleak and unrelenting. I think the same mechanism that allows David Lynch to be a relatively normal—even pleasant and cheerful—person while making incredibly disturbing movies is at play in her personality, too.
No surprise, Ormens väg på hälleberget is indeed bleak and unrelenting! But it was also good that I put off reading it for so long, because the novel is written almost entirely in a nineteenth century dialect that would have been incomprehensible to me when I first received it nine or ten years ago.
The story follows Johan Johansson, or often just Jani, as he bears witness to the exploitation of his mother, his sister, and eventually his wife under the insatiable lust of the local merchant family, first the patriarch Ol Karlsa and then his son Karl Orsa. It would be easy for this kind of story to descend into overwrought melodrama, but Jani is so disassociated from what’s happening around him that the tone stays firmly tragic.
Beyond that I don’t think Lindgren needs a review from me. Ormens väg på halleberget is a modern classic, Lindgren was a member of the Swedish Academy, who am I to have anything interesting to say about his work. But if anyone is in the mood for something bleak and unrelenting, it’s available in English as The Way of the Serpent.
One of the great things about my annual “read a book I’ve owned for over a year” goal is that it’s a fantastic way to trick myself into doing something I want to do but have put off because I don’t believe that I deserve nice things or fun or whatever else.
Hell yeah, Puritanical background radiation!
Suddenly this slim collection of Dutch flash fiction by A. L. Snijders went from “lovely gift from a friend that I haven’t yet earned the right to enjoy” to “necessary step in completing this arbitrary goal I set for myself.” Snijders’ zeer korteverhalen (“very short stories,” usually abbreviated to zkv) were also just the thing my melted brain needed. According to the people who count these things, most of the stories in this collection are no longer than 300 words. One paragraph, maybe two; rarely longer than one of the (small) pages of this paperback edition. Their brevity, their focus on nature, the element of the unexpected that permeates so many of them all make for a very ready comparison to haiku and I’m not sure why this doesn’t come up more often in descriptions of his work. Snijders wrote thousands of zkvs over the course of his life; Night Train has collected maybe 90 or so. If you want a taste, the translator John Irons has a few up on his blog. I’ll link to one that I’m pretty sure wasn’t in Night Train: “Barefoot.”
The other half of Night Train is the translator’s foreword? introduction? by the peerless Lydia Davis. It’s a bit like reading her translation diary, if she keeps one: detailing her thought process behind translating this or that word or expression, noting successes as well as failures. It occurs to me now that I would love for her to translate Marie NDiaye, just for comparison’s sake. At the very least, I would love to read her review of it.
Numbers are hard. I realized sometime in November that I had miscounted my progress in my “ten books I already own” goal and began scouring my shelves for something short that I could knock out.
Enter the dragon. Or technically: YuanTsung Chen’s The Dragon’s Village.
This is yet another stop on the “selections of bookstores” past tour: I picked it up from What The Book? in Seoul in its glory days, at the airy and well-lit second-floor location overlooking Itaewon-ro. Pour one out. Press F to pay respects.
In my mind’s eye, I can still see the shelf where I picked it up, and I can remember that my decision to buy it was because I knew nothing about Chinese history generally, recent or otherwise, and that reading about the land reform and the Great Leap Forward seemed like it would be a good self-improvement project.
It just took a while!
The Dragon’s Village languished unread in my library for over a decade. I started a couple times but couldn’t get into it. Now with my arbitrary deadline looming, I got to work and pushed through my initial resistance to finish the book.
The setting is 1949 China. The 17-year-old narrator, Guan Ling-ling, joins a revolutionary theater group and is sent to the remote village of Longxiang in northwest China to help carry out the land reform. The Dragon’s Village follows her trials and tribulations as she works alongside party cadres and sympathetic villagers to establish what they hope will be a better, more just, more equitable world. Chen frankly describes the misery of peasant life and the bleakness of the landscape, setting the context for why—at least in certain regions—the promise of land and wealth redistribution could gain the foothold it did. She also bluntly chronicles the obstacles and setbacks she and the other party cadres face, and equally sets the context for why the redistribution plans didn’t gain even more of a foothold. Through the novel we become witness to a pivotal moment in time, full of potential, when things might still have been otherwise but yet were not. It ends before anything has truly been settled, on a note of optimism and hope that still carries the weight of historical inevitably, as Ling-ling is speaking to an elderly and utterly destitute village woman:
“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It’s time.”
Chen’s style is hard to enjoy for its own sake, and even when I was deep into the story I was reading on despite the prose, not because of it; at best it didn’t get in the way. As far as I can tell, Chen wrote the novel in English, so there’s not a matter of translation at play here (officially, anyway). The phrase I kept thinking of to describe her style was “flat affect,” where the emotional tenor is always subdued almost the point of nonexistence. The other thing that put me off at first, but gets better as the novel progresses (mostly because people just talk less) is the tendency for characters to infodump during dialogue in a way that doesn’t sound like how anyone would actually talk.
Chen is very clear that this is a novel that draws from real life. “The story is fiction, but it is true,” is how she describes it in the foreword: a roman à clef. How real are the peasants we read about? How have their stories been refined, joined together, teased apart to become the people that Ling-ling meets? While the specific character we read about known as “the virgin widow” might not have a one-to-one correspondence with a single person who lived and died on this earth, the circumstances of her life were no doubt real for countless women. As an amalgamation of their biographies, the fictional virgin widow becomes true.
Or, maybe, in this case Chen drew on one very specific person she met in her land reform experience. Who knows!
This kind of blurred line, or overlap, between fiction and true didn’t bother me as much as it did in, say, Ali Smith’s Summer. Actually, it didn’t bother me at all. The Dragon’s Village is a novel but it reads more like a documentary or a diary of historical experiences and events, while Summer is a fictional plot specifically crafted to deliver a rhetorical (dare I say political?) point. “Based on a true story” is a lot easier to swallow if what follows at least gives the appearance of neutral documentation rather than rhetorical posturing.
(The more I reflect on Summer, it seems like the less I like it. Ouch.)
Of course, as an account of one of the major global political events of the twentieth century The Dragon’s Village can’t really be read non-politically. I don’t know the background to the novel’s publication, or the waters Chen had to navigate to get it published, but I have to assume it was tricky. Ling-ling is presented as an idealist who believes in the revolution and who wants to help the people she sees living in abject poverty, but she also clearly distances herself from the extremes of Maoist cult of personality. At one point she is distressed to see that her elderly hostess Da Niang has replaced an image of the kitchen god on the wall with an image of Chairman Mao. Not because Ling-ling has any allegiance to the folk traditions encompassing the kitchen god—she considers them all superstitions—but because she is wary of what the single-minded adulation of Chairman Mao might lead to.
I went and Googled “Chinese kitchen god” so you don’t have to.
The story is fiction, but it is true. Does this moment in the book reflect an exchange or insight Chen had in the moment? Was it a flourish she was encouraged to add to a novel that might otherwise land as not hostile enough to Maoism?
Chen’s other books also seem to be largely autobiographical (The Secret Listener and Return to the Middle Kingdom), and with The Secret Listener (published in 2021!) the criticism leveraged against her seems to be based in this blending of fact and fiction. I want to have something intelligent to say here about who is criticizing her for what and what any given audience expects out of an account of Maoist China but I’m fresh out of brain. An interview with the New York Times only vaguely mentions that it’s men calling her a “fabulist,” but no names or further details are given, and I’m too tired to research. As it stands, for me The Dragon’s Village is a valuable primary-ish source for a very singular moment in history. When I decided to really sit down and finish the book, I assumed I would toss it on the giveaway pile afterwards. But there is something about it that I want to keep in my library. Warning? Reminder? Enigma?
A guest on an episode of one of my favorite podcasts a few years back mentioned Mark and Paul Engler’s This Is an Uprising and it went on to the TBR. I managed to find a copy at Judd Books during my trip to London this past summer, and recent events have made it seem especially relevant, or more relevant than usual.
This Is an Uprising is a handbook and history lesson in nonviolent revolt, looking at various twentieth century case studies through the lens of nonviolent protest theory and evaluating notable successes as well as failures. The Englers review the two traditional models of protest activism, organizational-based and movement-based, and then propose a third model that combines the strengths of both of them for the best possible outcomes: momentum-based. The Englers did their homework and there are a lot of references to names like Saul Alinsky, Gene Sharp, and Frances Fox Piven. (Which also meant that, despite clearing one book of my TBR, I’ve now added four others, but that’s what the best nonfiction always does.)
This was also a welcome counterweight to Weil’s meditations on force. The Englers devote a whole chapter to outlining what they call discipline, that is, the commitment of individuals and movements to nonviolence. They highlight how violence—which they specifically describe as “whatever the public perceives as violence”—makes widespread acceptance of a movement more difficult, and how violence is often the wedge that allows state-sponsored infiltrators to compromise groups. From local criticism of Black Bloc members in Occupy Oakland to FBI infiltrators hosting bomb-building workshops for environmental activists to the habit of guerilla fighters of installing yet another military dictatorship, the Englers make it clear that nonviolence is an essential part of the revolt they’re detailing. While there’s a lot of compelling evidence in This Is an Uprising for Weil’s argument that force eternally begets force, the book also shows that transcending force—often by tactically submitting to it in the hope of garnering support or changing public opinion—is achievable by more than just two or three people in the course of human history, and that it can have serious and long-lasting outcomes.
Could the tactics outlined in this book have worked against Hitler and the Nazi party, though?
I’m not convinced.
While the Englers did a fair job highlighting mixed successes or outright failures (and explaining them according to their failure to implement the most important principles of momentum-based activism), I don’t think they ever tackled the hardest possible cases. Situations where the status quo to be changed is the absolute bones of how our society runs, the underlying principles from which everything else springs.
The successful protests in here, even the most impressive case of Otpor and the ouster of Slobodan Milošević, were all leveraged against situations that can be considered something like social byproducts of the deeper, more entrenched forces guiding the world. I’ll be less cryptic and tip my political hand by more explicitly defining those “deeper, more entrenched” forces as “the profit motive of capitalism as it overlaps with the state.” Segregation and Jim Crow laws were not inherent cogs in the profit machine. Nor were there any obvious financial incentives to banning same-sex marriages or the callous treatment of HIV and AIDS patients. These are huge, important, material concerns for millions of individuals that can have serious, even life-or-death consequences, absolutely. I wouldn’t wish to suggest that they were unimportant. But at a higher level, one could make the argument that these issues were always political footballs at the end of the day, kicked back and forth to show allegiance to this or that team, means to the true end: acquiring and maintaining a hold on political power and wealth.
Think of the cynicism with which the Republican party made abortion a huge issue for American Christians so that they could ensure a reliable voting bloc for themselves and the ability to, not make any laws about abortion out of a fervent true belief, but to craft legislation and economic models that would keep wealth and power consolidated with an elite ruling class (with a few token abortion decisions here and there). A ruling class you could, for example, call “the 1%.” Abortion was and is rarely the endgame for many (most) Republican politicians, which is why no one should be surprised when the same Republican politicians urge their daughters or mistresses to seek out abortions if a child would be politically inexpedient. It’s just the means to an end. The minute they can’t use abortion as the same galvanizing topic to get sympathetic voters to the polls, they’ll drop it and pick something else. Abortion I guess is still on the table now, but segregation no longer is. (Weirdly, with the “your body, my choice” meme, it seems like abortion has mutated or grown to become, not necessarily a purely Christian thing, but also specifically a feminist backlash thing. But anyway.)
If a change in law or regime happens to align with peak protests, is that really a victory? Is it causation or merely correlation? I suppose, after all, that it takes exactly these kinds of nonviolent protests to shift public opinion in such a way as to make something like segregation or same-sex marriage bans so toxic that it’s political suicide to promote them. I guess my concern is: material as those concerns are to millions of people, does changing them really get to the heart of what’s going wrong at the top? Are we just condemned to constantly putting out forest fires of different forms of social oppression (see: the explosion in discussions on trans rights) as long as elites remain addicted to wealth and power? Are we treating symptoms rather than the disease?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Otpor’s successful overthrow of Milošević is an example of what could have happened earlier on in 1930s Germany if the right people with the right ideas had deployed the right tactics. But while I appreciate the inherent optimism of This Is an Uprising, I worry that there is a limit to the success of the model the Englers are proposing.
It’s barely a book, really just an essay. And I’m not smart enough to have any kind of insightful commentary on Simone Weil but fuck it, we ball.
I’d been meaning to read Weil for some time, so when my philosophy study group voted on “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” as our November selection, I saw my chance and I took it. Is it her most beginner-friendly work? Who’s to say.
Weil is clearly enamored with The Iliad and heaps no end of praise on it, but she’s also using it to frame a political philosophy thesis: the true driver of history is force, defined as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” That is the force she refers to in the title of the essay, and her accolades for The Iliad are based in part on her opinion that it is the best, most accomplished depiction of force in Western literature.
Why Weil names this “force” (“la force” in the original French) and not “violence” is a question I wish I had asked the study group because I find myself at a loss for an answer. Maybe because violence is too restrictive a concept to categorize Nazi Germany—it’s hard not to read Weil, a French woman of Jewish background* writing in 1939, and not think about Nazis. But this thing called force is also her response to Marxist and Hegelian dialectics in addition to Nazis, and it also includes violence (or force) deferred: “…the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at many moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.”
Pretty irrefutable argument. And through her reading of The Iliad, where for Weil its greatness stems from showing how every character on every side is subjected to force, how people find it in themselves to love in the face of force, and how force destroys and renders tragic the things we most value in life, we can understand that Weil is critical of force and believes that we can’t escape history except by somehow transcending force.
None of that has really stopped being relevant, has it?
*Weil’s conversion to Christianity shouldn’t be overlooked, especially considering its influential role in her philosophy, but that particular factor of her birth is important for establishing the precise nature of her relationship to the Nazis and vice versa.
My frazzled brain has recently been unable to focus on the kinds of things I usually enjoy, so I took the opportunity to finally read a birthday gift I received earlier in the year: Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullshit. I like it and breezed through it in a couple of days, but my brain is perhaps still too frazzled to have a coherent thought about it. Let’s give it the old college try.
Author Tom Phillips (formerly of Buzzfeed UK) lays out a tasty little buffet of, well, “total bullshit.” Published in 2019, it’s very much a response to the burgeoning concern with fake news; to the extent any pop history book has a more serious agenda beyond mere entertainment, Truth serves as a reminder that people have been creating and spreading fake news forever, so let’s all take a deep breath and not panic over it.
First Phillips establishes the difference between bullshit and lies, as well as the myriad ways in which we can get things wrong or perpetuate untruths. A bit of theory, if you will. Then the rest of the book covers a wide variety of lies, grouped by topic: news and journalism, hoaxes, specious geography, con artists, politics, business, and finally mass delusions before rounding off with a conclusion about how we can get better at spotting all this.
I mentioned that Phillips was formerly of Buzzfeed UK because the kind of brisk, ironic writing (and occasional profanity) that characterizes popular Internet journalism permeates Truth from beginning to end. It had the nostalgic flavor of Cracked.com circa 2010 or so. Which is not necessarily a criticism! That was exactly the challenge level my brain was capable of at the time and I had a lovely time reading it.
Not that I would have pooh-poohed Phillips’ approach if I felt like my faculties were firing on all cylinders, either. There comes a point with non-fiction where an author has to decide what kind of book they’re going to write and why they’re interested in writing it. Who’s the target audience? What do they hope people will take from it? What’s the best way to potentially change people’s minds, or inspire them to action, or just help them learn something? My own inference is that the dizzying number of anecdotes Phillips presents is not out of a desire to trace the evolution of lying or to make a strong philosophical claim about the nature of bullshit (Harry G. Frankfurt has that covered). I think his motivation for the entire book comes through in the last chapter, with suggestions for how to become more discerning about truth and untruth.
In other words, couched though it may be in jokes and amusing anecdotes, Truth is a book-length appeal to the reader to stop and think for a minute before you share that inflammatory news story you just saw in your feed.
Back in the summer, forces beyond my understanding compelled me to look up The Josie Gambit, a book I read in fourth grade or so. I remembered it as unsettling, with an ending that I didn’t quite get but nonetheless felt a bit grim. Maybe it was the ending that made the book stick in my head better than a lot of things I was reading at that age, who knows. But I would think about it now and again over the years, wondering if I should read it again, and finally I got the idea to check on the Internet Archive.
A note from Future Katherine!
I first wrote this post sometime in July. Just a couple of weeks before I finally hit the “schedule” button, the Internet Archive suffered a massive DDOS attack and was offline for days to fix the issue. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, and will probably only become more important as we stumble into an era of deepfakes and unreality. Please consider donating to support their work!
Of course, the juvenile mystery/thriller of your childhood is much less unsettling when you read it again as an adult. And honestly the jury’s out on whether this post will ever see the light of day, because discussing middle grade nostalgia reads seems like filler content.
Another note from Future Katherine! The time for filler content has come.
Our protagonist is twelve-year-old Greg, who’s spending the school year with his grandmother out in Idaho while his single mom travels for work. He’s long been friendly with the neighbor family, the Nolans, whose patriarch taught him how to play chess. Now his friend Josie Nolan is having a rough patch with her friend Tory. Things get weird and dramatic, Greg joins the school chess club, and he finally cracks the case of why Tory is acting so weird.
Reading The Josie Gambit now as an adult in 2024, it is immensely Of The 80s. Single moms! Divorce! Scandal over implied drug use! I mean just look at that cover!
But what sets it apart is Mary Francis Shura’s pitch perfect narrative voice for Greg and also the seriousness with which the book takes chess. Greg’s thinking about chess and observations of chess games is what helps him figure out why Tory is acting the way she is, and the narration is peppered with the kind of insights into chess strategy that you would expect from a preteen who was pretty serious about the game. There’s even an appendix (still written from Greg’s perspective) to explain the basic rules and mechanics.
I get now why I thought it was unsettling, but as an adult it’s not really the stuff of nightmares. A fun read if you come across it somewhere!
Another international trip, another in-air read-through of Historiskan. Gems from this issue:
A brief interview with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer about the Women in the Nordic Enlightenment project (WHENCE). This was paired with little blurbs about three women philosophers in particular, but the only one I remember now is Birgitte Thott.
A longer article about the legacy of Jack the Ripper, which was also paired with longer blurbs about the lives of the canonical five.
The 1970 Women’s World Cup. I’m not an especially sporty person, but pigheaded resistance to women in sports always fascinates me. While the All-American Girls’ Baseball League eventually disbanded due to natural economic causes—declining public interest and, with it, declining profitability—the Football Gods (FIFA and UEFA) actively blocked and banned women’s games for years with a passion akin to Jock Semple trying to rip off Kathrine Switzer’s bib number. This despite a clear public interest in women’s soccer. The two women’s world tournaments organized in the 70s were therefore “unofficial” affairs hamstringed by interference from FIFA and UEFA, and even today don’t seem to enjoy official recognition.
A history of tuberculosis treatment in Sweden, and specifically the role of the traveling nurse who went around to educate families about care and hygiene practices. This was the work of Nationalföreningen mot tuberkulos, a non-profit organization established to fight the spread of tuberculosis in Sweden that that eventually became today’s Svensk Lungmedicinsk Förening. While a lot of the support these traveling nurses provided was about exercising power and control over the poor and working class, it also seemed to be motivated by genuine humanitarian concern. I can only assume that someone has already written a thesis comparing the work of Nationalföreningen mot tuberkulos to how the Swedish state handled Covid-19, since it seems like an obvious and juicy research topic. (Weirdly enough, the article didn’t make any such comparison at all.)
Revised looks at the role of women in Mayan culture and early Christianity.
Everything you didn’t want to know about lobotomies, which apparently remained a popular treatment option in the Nordics long after everyone else had declared them barbaric and moved on to other treatment options. Very cool! (Not actually very cool.)
Maria Bäckman’s Miljonsvennar came at the recommendation from a friend, a British national who spent his formative years in Västerås and now drops in to visit Stockholm a few times a year. Considering that he also now works in fintech, he is in every way more qualified to do my job than I am. Ah well!
Several beers after a jazz improv concert, we returned to our perennial topic of discussion: what is it to be Swedish, who counts as Swedish, are we Swedish, will I ever be free of my American accent. On the topic of the förorts he mentioned Miljonsvennar, which I immediately put a hold on at the Stockholm library.
Bäckman spent a full academic year or so observing and interviewing a class of gymnasium students (so 17- to 19- year-olds) in a less-affluent, ethnically and racially mixed suburb south of Stockholm that she anonymized as “Bergby.” What was it like, she wondered, to live in these neighborhoods as a white Swede, or at least a white Scandinavian? Over eight chapters she explores gender, religion and values, sexuality, and The Other—the more affluent suburbs and inner city of Stockholm.
Speaking in particular of The Other in this case, Miljonsvennar makes a great companion piece to Handels: Maktelitens skola. Or even more specifically, to Mikael Holmqvist’s other work, Leader Communities: The Consecration of Elites in Djursholm. There’s even a chapter in Miljonsvennar devoted to reflecting on the exchange visits between the school in Bergby and one in Djursholm. A matched pair. Bookends. Yin and yang.
