Tag: English

The New York Trilogy

Here’s another left field book, a pick for a book club on Meetup. I’d never heard of The New York Trilogy before, or even Paul Auster. There’s a whole slew of literature from the 80s and 90s that were too new to be part of curricula but too old to be topical by the time I was reading Big Serious Grown-Up Book, and The New York Trilogy falls neatly into that category.

It’s unclear to me whether the now-accepted convention of publishing all three novels (novellas, really) as one collection is according to Auster’s own wishes or a publishing company decision, but I have to say I can’t imagine reading any one of these stories in isolation, or what it would have been like to read the first and then have to wait a year to read the next two. Not because the first story ends on a cliffhanger that gets resolved in the sequels, but because it must have felt incomplete. (Or maybe I’m only saying that because I only know it as one chapter in a larger book.)

The New York Trilogy consists of three novellas: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. All three have the same, or nearly the same, noir-adjacent plot point:* the protagonist is induced into tailing a mark for some shadowy purpose. In City of Glass it’s a mystery writer who is mistaken for a private investigator; in Ghosts it’s an actual private detective we only know as “Blue” who is paid to follow “Black” in a world with only colors for names; in The Locked Room a frustrated writer finds himself obligated to track down his missing-presumed-dead friend who has become a posthumous literary success, whose widow he has now married and whose son he is now raising.

*Paul Auster on LitHub: “… it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.” Sorry, Paul.

Mistaken identities, self-referentiality, literary references, meditations on language and madness and identity permeate all three books. At the moment of writing I’m still waiting for my book club to meet to discuss it, but as it currently stands I’m not sure I got the point, or if there even was a point, but I still liked the ride.

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

I added Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style to my TBR after it was referenced in the generally underwhelming Refuse to be Done. That might have been the only worthwhile takeaway I had from that book—if I’m even remembering correctly, maybe I heard of it from somewhere else.

Artful Sentences is a fantastic compendium of, well, artful sentences. Each chapter focuses on a particular syntactic structure by opening with a brief introduction and explanation and then diving right into the examples. Tufte provides additional commentary throughout and, occasionally, brings up some examples that are less than artful for the sake of comparison.

This is not the kind of nonfiction book that everyone needs (“needs”) to read; the finer points of writing style are not in the general public’s interest in the same way that understanding the environment, racism, democracy, history, etc. are. But for book lovers and voracious readers, Artful Sentences is a fun investigation of what fuels great writing, and for writers and editorial professionals it is an absolutely indispensable reference. I borrowed a copy from Stockholm University’s library but by the end of the first chapter I knew that I would want my own private copy for reference.

Conflict is Not Abuse

While I was browsing Što čitaš? after I dropped off The House of the Dead, my gaze fell on Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sara Schulman. What a relevant and potentially controversial premise! Praise on the back from Claudia Rankine and bell hooks! The only problem is that it was a bit of a chonker; moreover, the original English edition was easily available at the Stockholm library. Really, it wouldn’t have killed me to wait. But I was impatient and wanted to leave the store with something, so I figured, why not? As it turns out, Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind was already on my TBR anyway. So it kind of counted, right?

Schulman’s thesis here is a bit complex. Her first argument is that the structure of private relationships, such as those in families or between lovers or friends, is the basis or model for the relationship between citizens and then state. Interpersonal and political conflicts are therefore analogous, or can at least be analyzed in similar terms. The second argument is that we often conflate “being uncomfortable” with “being in danger” (“overstating harm,” in her words) which leads to the claim Schulman makes right in the title of the book: many forms of “being uncomfortable” that are considered “being in danger” (whether by an abuser, the state, or a victim) should instead be thought of as either 1) literally Nothing (as in, one of the parties involved being triggered by something completely innocuous because of their own personal history), 2) Normative Conflict, or 3) Resistance. Overstating harm, Schulman argues, renders us unable to actually address the root of the issue. Her third argument is that the usual responses perpetuate more harm than whatever the inciting incident may have been.

With all of that established, Schulman then goes through four different approaches to conflict resolution that she believes provides a better alternative—historical psychoanalysis, Al-Anon, mindfulness, and pop psychology. A disparate group of frameworks, to be sure, but Schulman argues that all of them provide space for 1) pause and reflection in the moment (rather than immediate reactivity) as well as 2) accountability to a larger community. Throughout the book she illustrates her arguments with various case studies, from domestic violence and sexual assault to HIV disclosure laws in Canada to Israel’s occupation of Gaza, to demonstrate the various levels at which overstating harm and its consequences play out.

At this point, I will note that Schulman is not writing out of any particular academic discipline; her background is as a writer of literature, though also of nonfiction as well. She is up front about this and introduces the book and her argument as ideas she is offering up for consideration rather than a traditional academic examination (though she occasionally cites research and statistics when appropriate and includes a Works Cited section as well as citations by page).

Conflict is Not Abuse ended up being one of those books where the more I thought about it, the more mixed my feelings became. Schulman is very clear about her progressive bona fides right from the start because I think she’s perceptive enough to know that, at least from an unexamined surface level, her arguments are going to sound reactionary, or that she’s going to be excellent ideological cover for conservative talking points. (“Look at how this particular leftist is saying the same things about the left that we are!”) A quick Google leads to a glowing review from Heterodox Academy, for example, a group that I would feel safe saying is not in alignment with Schulman’s own values. It’s impossible to prevent that kind of reading or use of a text, however. The best you can do is what Schulman did: make it clear that you’re arguing from a specific position, in her case a queer leftist position including advocacy for people living with HIV and AIDS.

But there were other things that didn’t land well even when situated in that biographical context, with Schulman telling on herself in different ways. The first section, for example, could have well been titled Someone Had A Fight With Sarah Schulman Over Email Once And She Never Forgot. (The vibe was very similar to Bellwether in that vein: “A brash young person once asked Connie Willis to put out her cigarette in the 90s and she decided to write a whole book about it.”) As she sees it, emails and other forms of textual communication are the bane of all interpersonal conflicts today. Telephone calls and in-person conversations, meanwhile, are pure and holy and have never led to a single misunderstanding. This struck me strange as I was reading it, considering that Schulman foregrounds everything with her career as a writer and novelist—how could a professional and successful writer really believe that the written language is somehow insufficient and lacking in nuance? It only became stranger once I came to the section with her proposal for conflict resolution, the foundation of which is delay and reflection: taking a moment to choose words and reactions carefully. Isn’t that one of the advantages of written communication? That we can take all the time we need to say exactly what we want to say and to be able to revise it accordingly? That it can occur, if necessary, asynchronously? But then you realize: Schulman was 58 when Conflict is Not Abuse came out in 2016. Ah hah, Boomers and their predilection for phone calls.

Schulman also punctuates the book with personal anecdotes, both from her own life and those of people she knows. They soon begin to take on a sort of Goofus and Gallant tone, as Schulman always presents herself as an aspirational model of conflict resolution, whereas it’s always other people who escalate things unnecessarily. I understand not wanting to put your own painful or embarrassing mistakes out there for public consumption in a book for all eternity, but you can at least dial it back from being the Sarah Schulman Show and let other people be shining exemplars of conflict resolution. I think talking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine is important, but reproducing your Facebook posts and comments on it for pages and pages is the book equivalent of telling someone about this weird dream you had at length: it’s an exercise in self-absorption that is only interesting to you.

More seriously than just Schulman telling on herself, however, is a key point her larger argument. She (rightly) argues that people almost always have a reason and a motivation for doing what they do, even when the things they do are horrible. But then she pivots on that and argues that sometimes it’s not the person themselves but an outside observer who has the best insight into that reason. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this thesis seems largely uncontroversial to her because of her stated admiration for psychotherapy and psychotherapists; that she has a sort of paradigm where “good friends” (to use her words) are like gifted therapists who know what their friends’ problems are before their friends realize it themselves. That unexamined argument is where the book (partially) falls apart for me, because that’s the backdoor by which you can smuggle in all kinds of toxic nonsense. “You’re not trans, you’re just a tomboy.” “You’re not gay, you’re just brainwashed.” “I know you want it.” This single belief is the pernicious assertion that undergirds everything else toxic in this book.

To that end, someone should have been a good friend (or a good editor) to Schulman and told her: hey, you’re not coming across as your best self here. I don’t think it’s good or necessary to include these anecdotes. Here, I found some experts in these topics you’re covering, would you like them to review your material and talk to you about it? Schulman picked a sticky wicket to tackle, but in the end I don’t think she was quite equipped for it.

 

To The Lighthouse

My birthday gift of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was such a success with its intended recipient that they already owned a copy. “You’ve given me one of my favorite books for my birthday! I think this one is up there with To The Lighthouse,” they texted me after opening it. “Thank you! ❤️”

(If I can toot my own horn for a minute, I want to stress that even though this is a book friend and that most of our conversations touch on books, Carson McCullers had never come up. I was just operating on vibes.)

I’d given To The Lighthouse a couple of tries, years ago, because Mrs Dalloway was that rare piece of assigned reading that I actually enjoyed. It’s one of the few books I’ve liked enough to read more than once, and I even made a point of attending Bloomsday in 2019 in a low-key Clarissa Dalloway costume (so low-key that it was more akin to a private, petty joke that only I found amusing). Alas, I found To The Lighthouse so much harder to get into. Something about Woolf’s prose in anything else I’ve ever read from her is just…unpleasant. I don’t mean that it’s difficult; there’s lots of difficult writing I enjoy on the aesthetic level. I mean that I derive almost no enjoyment from it.

But the siren song of a book friend’s recommendation is hard to resist—and besides, I’m older and wiser now. Maybe, also, the paperback version I tried to read back in Korea was just too ugly, with too-small text and an unappealing font. Maybe this time I would fall in love with Virginia Woolf again. (Even though just three years ago I’d panned Orlando for “not being Mrs Dalloway.” Conveniently forgot that!)

This time around I at least finished To The Lighthouse, so that’s an improvement. I admire the conceit and the concept: the way that Woolf freezes a single afternoon into a cut gem and then examines it like a jeweler, assessing it from every angle and perspective; the graceful skip through the intervening years and tragedies (war, deaths, failed marriages) to arrive at the return of the Ramsays to the island. “Time Passes” was actually the one section of the book that flowed for me, that I enjoyed reading. Everything else was bumpy, jerky, hard to get into.

Always a weird, hollow feeling when you really want to like a book for whatever reason (it’s by an author you like; it’s a friend or lover’s favorite book) but you just can’t. Again, I ask: Why aren’t you Mrs Dalloway?

How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century

I read this one over the course of several months for a neighborhood book circle, even though it’s short and simple enough to finish in a couple of days. Erik Olin Wright intended this to be a quick introduction for laypeople, free of academic jargon and complicated arguments. Maybe stretching such a thin text over too long a time hampered my understanding of it, but by the end I felt like How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century didn’t deliver on the promise of its title.

I say this as someone who already fundamentally agrees with Wright’s larger project. But a how-to guide includes concrete steps and real-life examples to follow. Wright provides no instruction whatsoever, and for all of his theorizing about how different anti-capitalist (or simply not capitalist) groups and projects can be organized, the only specific example he mentions is Wikipedia. Contrast this with Chokepoint Capitalism, This is an Uprising or Rules for Radicals, which constantly refer back to real life protests and research, picking apart successes as well as failures. When hypothetical alternatives are floated to solve a current problem under capitalism, they are described in very precise terms. You come away from those books feeling prepared and capable of doing something.

A more appropriate title would probably be How to Think About Anti-Capitalism in the 21st Century, because what Wright does well in the volume is defining, categorizing, and organizing concepts. Instead of coming away from the book knowing what to do, I came away from it with better and more precise ways of articulating my ideas. This is by no means an unimportant part of the process of “eroding capitalism” (Wright’s own concept), but it’s not a fulfillment of the promise of the title.

How to Be an Anti-Capitalist… was intended to be accompanied by a denser, more scholarly text on the subject. Wright already had a heavy-hitting career as an academic and had been asked by various groups he’d organized with to write a more approachable popular text. He got that one out of the way first and then died from cancer before he could finish the bigger one. Perhaps that would have had the meat and potatoes I felt was lacking here.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

I first came across Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity in a friend’s Instagram story and thought, “Hm, this would be an interesting book.” And it was, but not in the way I had been hoping for.

Appiah examines the broader concept of identities in an opening chapter (“Classification”) and then breaks down five specific ways that people typically identify—creed, country, color, class, and culture—before giving some end remarks (“Coda”). In each chapter he highlights the inherent instability of these concepts, not just through abstract supposition but also by pointing to historical events and people, like Italo Svevo or Amo Afer, as case studies.

Perhaps the book wasn’t for me because I was already on board with how unstable these categories are. I wouldn’t be able to name any specifics, but I imagine that Appiah’s arguments in places (maybe especially in the chapters on country and color) were also made in Nell Irvin Painter’s A History of White People, which meant that they weren’t new ideas for me. The chapter on creed also left me particularly underwhelmed—Appiah gives a thorough and convincing explanation of why religions are more than just adherence to a particular sacred text, but it seems to be in response to a shallow Internet atheist style interlocutor. Yes, that specific understanding of “religious creed” as an identifier is indeed a bit wobbly, but religion can be defined in other ways besides “adherence to a particular sacred text.” Those more nuanced understandings go largely unaddressed.

I think I also was going in half expecting a diatribe against what’s lately been termed “identity politics,” but Appiah never goes that far, either. He does raise skepticism about appeals to diversity within political parties or companies, but never more than mild commentary as an aside to the larger point. I went in spoiling for a good debate and instead got an explanation of things that more or less aligned with the views I already had.

Instead, the most engaging parts for me came in the initial Classification chapter, where Appiah sets out a working definition of “identity” for the book and where he thinks identities fail. In his view, identity markers are a rough shorthand for group assignations we can sometimes choose for ourselves and that we sometimes have foisted upon us. If I’m a Muslim, I have a very clear idea about what it means for me to be a Muslim. I also have a clear idea about it means for other people to be a Muslim. At the same time, other people have their own ideas about what it means for someone to be a Muslim. So far so good, if slightly chaotic. But because individual ideas about “being Muslim” will never coalesce into a universally accepted definition, things collide. I might consider myself Muslim while other Muslims do not; someone can also consider me a Muslim when I’m not in reality.

This kind of sloppiness might be surmountable or at least tolerable on its own, but identities run into another thorny problem: essentialism. By this Appiah is referring to the philosophical idea of “essences,” that people (or things, or animals, or etc.) possess immutable, timeless qualities. Mash this up with identity labels, and this means that we think of any given identity marker as arising from an eternal and immutable characteristic of the person with said identity. To continue on the Muslim example, people tend to think (or to act and speak as if they think) there is a Muslim-ness that all Muslims share, that it is an eternal and immutable thing. Essentialism, Appiah theorizes, works more or less fine for simple concrete things like cups or chairs, but it can’t hold for identities. There’s too much variation, even contradiction, within any one group.

But even though essentialism is presented as the single most important reason to rethink identity, it’s only addressed head-on in the introductory chapter. Appiah refers back to it occasionally in later chapters, but not in any strong sense. If illustrating the inherent instability of identity labels was meant to be the argument against essentialism, I don’t think it’s a very convincing one.

This might be a problem where I’m expecting popular philosophy, or popular political science, to dig into a topic at an academic level. That’s simply not the job of a popular book aimed at a lay reader and the problem is my own expectations. If a book like The Lies That Bind is meant to be an introduction that inspires readers to seek out more robust texts, or even just to reconsider their own ideas, then that’s fantastic no matter what I think of it. After all, The Lies That Bind is also an interesting and engaging read. Appiah has a knack for effective framing devices and clear, concise explanations. Perhaps the fact that the book grew out of lectures also helped give it a light, conversational tone.

As someone described How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, it’s a good book to give to your centrist friend. But if you’re already convinced of the instability of identity markers then there’s not much new here for you.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

This one is a re-read for me. I originally bought my copy at my beloved, now-shuttered What The Book? in Seoul in 2012, though the cover of the Mariner Books edition that came out in 2000, with its haunting photo of Carson McCullers, was a constant presence in my high school book store visits. The text also made an impression on me, and long after I forgot the events of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the emotional wallop it packed lingered. It’s remained in my library ever since.

I picked it up again for a re-read now, in June 2025, because I was craving a comfort read. On a related note, I got the notion that it would be the perfect gift for a new book friend I’d recently made, and while “I don’t remember anything that happens in the book, but I know that I loved it” might be a glowing recommendation, it’s not a very convincing one.

In no way was I disappointed.

I don’t know why I never picked up another book by McCullers. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that I try to read as many authors as possible rather than hyperfocusing on just a few. But I expect I didn’t want an inadequate follow-up to tarnish my affection for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Maybe now in 2025 I can give it a shot.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

I’m increasingly deliberate about the physical books I buy to add to my library these days. My bookstore browsing always involves me checking what’s available at the library before making a final purchase. And I make a final purchase more often than not! Just less impulsively. Bookstores function as an important randomizing factor in a world with algorithm-based recommendations. The human element is key.

A recent trip to The English Book Shop in Stockholm—which also reminded me that I had put Sister Outsider on my TBR—brought Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine back to my attention. I’d seen it countless times in friends’ libraries, and Klein as a journalist was already familiar to me, but for whatever reason this was the moment where I decided to actually read one of her books. And as luck would have it, it was available in English from the Stockholm library.

The Shock Doctrine is a comprehensive look at the spread of Milton Friedman’s free market philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. I could list all of the case studies Klein takes up, but it would get long, fast. Suffice it to say that she draws on examples from all over the world. Her main thrust, however, is showing its most recent (at the time) application in the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq.

The distinctive element of Klein’s approach (compared to, say, The Jakarta Method) is her use of metaphor to frame her research: in this case, the gruesome techniques used by Donald Ewen Cameron in the Montreal experiments. The connection Klein repeatedly makes is that massive disaster (either man-made or natural) visited on an entire population is, if not the only, then the easiest or most direct way to traumatize a country enough to sneak in wildly unpopular changes—the ones she happened to focus on here with economic ones rooted in the Chicago school. Much like Cameron used electroshock therapy and other techniques in an attempt to turn his patients into blank slates upon which he thought he could rebuild them into healthy people, Klein argues, the US used the shock of these disasters to turn entire countries into blank slates upon which to build new highly privatized ultrafree market economies specifically to benefit the ultra wealthy (usually but not always located in the US). In other words, “disaster capitalism.”

She’s received criticism for this choice of metaphorical framing device, which isn’t entirely unwarranted I suppose, but personally I think the metaphor is an apt one. It allows Klein to highlight the common factors of a large number of disparate tragedies and make sense of the bigger picture and it’s also not entirely unrelated, considering how those electroshock techniques were often applied in the campaigns of violence Klein describes throughout the book. Fractal violence.

My only lingering thought, since this was published in 2007, is whether or not Klein’s attempt at optimism in the final chapter ended up being warranted. In what I assume was a deliberate choice in order to leave readers with a sense of hope for the future, she closes with developments in South America she feels will help create “shock-proof” countries and economies and lead to more just and equitable outcomes. This was a chapter written before Bolsonaro or Milei rose to power, obviously. Since there doesn’t appear to be an updated edition, for the moment I’ll just have to hunt down subsequent interviews and op-eds.

Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde is a name that’s been familiar to me for years, for better or for worse through people quoting her in well-designed little social media banners about poetry, the master’s tools dismantling the master’s house, or self care. There is something kind of sad and deflating in that: to generate a substantial body of artistic work as well as intellectual and theoretical thought, only to be reduced to the 21st century equivalent of a soundbite, lost in the stream of other reductionist soundbites.

The Sister Outsider essay collection came up in a podcast I was listening to—contextualizing Lorde a bit more beyond a neatly designed and typeset swipe-able image—and anyway, here we are now!

I actually finished the collection a few weeks ago; I just couldn’t find the time or brain to write about it until now. The short review that Sister Outsider doesn’t need is that it’s a fantastic collection. Lorde is a deep thinker and an engaging writer. I just wanted some of them to be longer, because there were lots of ideas and assertions that Lorde presents without cracking them open because they were always in service of some other, larger thesis, particularly in “Uses of the Erotic: the erotic as power.” Lorde uses a very nuanced and all-encompassing concept of “the erotic” that I was hoping she would examine more deeply and that I get the feeling she perhaps hashed out in other pieces not included in the book—like, I don’t immediately see the eroticism of constructing a bookshelf?

The diary accounts of visiting the Soviet Union and Grenada also stick out as personal favorites, maybe because those are more self-contained accounts of real-world events rather than out-of-context selections from longer, fuzzier academic conversations?

I’m also keenly aware that this is the rare piece of nonfiction by a Black author I’ve managed to read as an adult. Out of that nonfiction, almost all of them are either autobiographical or a treatment of race relations in the US. (I expect all of them are, but I’m hedging my bets here in case I’m wrong.) Obviously race relations, or whatever the best term is anymore, is important and one worth learning about. But I feel like surely Black journalists and academics are experts in a wide variety of fields, so why should the default expertise readily available to me be so limited? Offhand I can think of astronomy: Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has at least a couple of popular science books out by now, as does Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Of course limiting this to English, to books published in the US or the UK, is another factor. Etc. I guess my point is, this is something I try to reflect on in my nonfiction choices: whose expertise do I have access to? Whose is marginalized? How can I broaden the knowledge pool available to me?

An Unnecessary Woman

After years of an uncertain future on my TBR—always tempted to admit defeat and remove it, yet never quite gave in—my WhatsApp book club decided the issue for me and made Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman our read for March.

My reluctance about getting around to An Unnecessary Woman was entirely because I thought it would be a very serious, morose book. I think I added it to my TBR at about the same time as Bel Canto, and then after I read Bel Canto last year assumed An Unnecessary Woman would be more of the same.

This was not the case at all!

An Unnecessary Woman unfolds over the space of two days in the life of the narrator Aaliya, a childless divorcée living alone in Beirut who has just accidentally dyed her hair blue. After working for years in a bookstore, she is now retired (or unemployed? her source of income was unclear to me) and spends her days translating her favorite books into Arabic. In the space of these two days, the isolated and solitary Aaliya reflects on her life in Beirut, her rare friendships and strained familial relationships, her love of music and literature. Aaliya and Renée from L’Élégance du hérisson would get on like a house on fire.

I go through periods in my life where I get very grumpy and frustrated with fiction. There are so many books, so many novels, what’s the point of trying to wade through the tidal wave of stories out there? Maris Kreizman over on LitHub expressed it well, though less from a reader or existentialist perspective and more from a publishing perspective. An Unnecessary Woman was just the book I needed to read in that sort of mood.