of Reading

We are all People Who Read, whose days are more or less entangled with the written word.

What are your strategies for deciding what to read next?
Or what have they been, as you reconstruct them?
How has your reading habit evolved?

There was a Question in March 2023 What are you reading, and why? that might be worth a look, and a few days ago the New York Times published The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, which might be a useful springboard if you can access it. The Question is, of course, open-ended, and may take us in all sorts of unexpected directions...

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I expect to worry this one over the next couple of days, and will collect thoughts and pointers below...

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My own reading tends to be project-oriented (thus the Plantae exploration I'm now embroiled in), but is interrupt-driven. The projects morph and roil, as they encounter new materials and go hareing off in unexpected directions, and as they find common cause with former enthusiasms, and provoke re-examination of archived knowledges. This digressive 'method' keeps me busy, and occupies the hands of Amazon's elves, packing stuff to send to me.

Here's a listing of 2024 Amazon book orders, to date, one take on the fluxions of my attention. Each of those orders had a purpose behind it, and fitted into an understanding/scheme/curiosity of the moment ...and those moments keep moving, keep fanning out.

Another part of the 'method' finds me collecting exemplars and fragments, as I've been doing with my /Plantae logfile. That accumulation corrals far more than I can process, but does give a useful sketch of territory I can come back to when the time is ripe...

An example of the moment from /Plantae: my explorations of my library holdings took me into the mutualisms of domestication (the old question: "did man domesticate corn, or did corn domesticate man?", to which the answer is obviously "Yes."), and thence into industrial and plantation agriculture, and so to the epic of Hevea brasiliensis [rubber] ... which led me (only a week ago) to Michael Dove's The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo.

Michael Dove and Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing were in the cohort after mine in the Stanford Anthropology department. I didn't know them (we didn't overlap), but both did fieldwork in Kalimantan —the Indonesian part of Borneo— in the mid-1970s. I didn't discover their work until 6 or so years ago, and only a week ago I discovered that Michael Dove's field site was just a few miles from where we had lived in Sarawak in the mid-1960s. Thus was rekindled my long-running but mostly mothballed engagement with things Southeast Asian which covers a lot of conceptual and geographical and ecological territory).

So my reading develops by hopscotch-like jumps that seem always to lead to new vistas, sometimes in old territories and sometimes in new terrain. Each item fits somewhere somehow; it all connects, it All Counts in a forever-unfolding fractal complexity of Collection Development.

With ALL one's history of reading, it's a bit difficult to discern pattern and significance, or at least to see the activity as having any consistency or direction. One only sees the order in the process as it unfolds, emerging as an always-entertaining and somewhat surprising narrative [what I always meant to do in my classes when I was a prof...] Thus, as I read Michael Dove, bits that I now recognize as /having-been observed but not well understood/ 60 years ago now make more sense, in the specific case of Hevea.

I'm inclined to think such eclecticism a GOOD thing, because it covers so much interesting territory (that's the librarian speaking), but at best I'm a dilettante if my actual knowledge is closely examined. S'okay.

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I'm not sure how to make sense of my relationship to fiction, though over the years I've consumed a great deal of it, in several genres --sci-fi, 'fantasy', English comedy of manners, familiar locales, characters with whom one becomes identified, social conundrums, evocations of place and Time...

And yet I'm not tempted by very many of the New York Times 100 (I have read a few from the list and thoroughly enjoyed: Demon Copperhead, Overstory, Olive Kitteridge, My Brilliant Friend). So I thought maybe I should make a list of my 10 'best books' of the 21st century... by which I mean books that have led me to think differently, more broadly, with elevated style and subtlety, and with admiration for their authors' breadth of vision. A scan of the shelves found 11 (order immaterial):

I also scrolled through my Kindle library, which suggests a stratigraphy of interests. In the 20teens I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, many of which I have no memory of (but would probably remember if I was to open them up again). From around 2020, my Kindle purchases took a turn toward "natural world" and "science" titles, which I've mined for quotable passages (the Kindle Notebooks)

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It's been interesting to see responses to the NYT 100 (listed accessibly here by Tertulia)

The Times itself (3 "Critics")
DWIGHT GARNER I had no idea what "best" meant, so I went by feel. Each book on my list, I'd like to think, has a certain sting in its tail — a lasting sting. Each puts a prickle on my neck. They're written by writers who see the world as if it were new.

Theres a tendency when making book lists — especially ones that will be made public — to reach for high-minded titles because, you know, they're testaments to your discerning nature and the fineness of your moral weave. I check my moral weave in the mirror at least twice a day. But I tried not to fall into that trap....

JACOBS I see, subtextually, a story of the internet and how it's shrunk the world and widened our perspectives almost indefinitely, and how literary culture is no longer taking place exclusively in smoky French cafes or Ivy League universities. At least, the cafes have Wi-Fi now... I think the internet is there even when it's not there — if there are more historical novels, it's because authors are avoiding the tremendous challenges that a supercomputer in every pocket poses to narrative...

Heather Pagas at Medium (paywalled, Members Only)

The Overstory (2019 Pulitzer Prize winner) by Richard Powers (big name) is #24 on the list. It's a multi-generational saga about trees, and it's good!

But Canadian Michael Christie's Greenwood, a multi-generational saga about trees, published the same year, is great. Only one multi-generational saga about trees gets attention at a time, I guess.

...Something climate-y just might be important in the 21st Century, for example, The 6th Extinction (2014) by Elizabeth Kolbert.

...I thought I was well-read, but maybe I'm not. It's humbling...if you take any of this seriously.

Noah Berlatsky at Everything Is Horrible (50 books, all fiction, of which I've read very few)

Likewise (2002) Ariel Schrag (link to review)

Ariel Schrag's amazing graphic memoir of her senior year in college filtered through obsessions with James Joyce's Ulysses, her girlfriend Sally, and penises (not necessarily in that order) is probably the single most underrated aesthetic achievement of the 21st century. Mammoth, formally intricate, laugh-out-loud funny, bizarre, and agonized, it's one of my favorite works of art ever.

...and The Guardian, not to be outdone, has its own 100 Best, posted in 2019, and with not much overlap with the NYT set... how different the world looks 5 years later.

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While fiction has been a more or less constant element in my reading (in that I always have a few in process, and sometimes I'm transfixed by a story), much more of my reading is basically didactic: specifically designed to refer to the "real world", rather than the world as it's imagined. The post-modern take sees everything as imagined — but for me there's a lifelong engagement with what seems more actual than fanciful... So I'm constitutionally unsuited to book discussion groups; too much backstory is required to explain the choice and charm of a 'didactic' book.

There is a subset of "graphic novels", of which my library shelves offer quite a few examples. It's not so much that I seek them out, but the happen to me —Sandman, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Maus...

And I must also consider the books of 'cartoons' which have fundamentally steered my life and enlarged my understanding... The New Yorker Album 1925-1950, the collected Pogo of course, Calvin and Hobbes, Abner Dean... and so on...

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As I scan the shelves, I note that many books fall into 'History', 'Anthropology', 'Ecology', 'Sciences'. 'Technology' and such-like. Sorting and organizing and shelving in the last 5 years or so has led to many rediscoveries. And theres's the special case of 'Photography' and 'Art' books, where the primary significance is located in images

digression: about a week ago I was pointed to this video:

The whole interview is interesting on multiple grounds, but see around 11 minutes in for my first exposure to Walter Chappell's Metaflora images (see onlandscape.co.uk and Aperture and bonhams.com for more of those 'Kirlian' photographs of plants). Of course I ordered Eternal Impermanence because that's how I roll...

I have a lifelong history of being swept up by books, and by fascinations with subject matter... so LOTS of books in realms of /musics (and lots of CDs and vinyl and mp3s)... and lots of sci-fi/fantasy (William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman...)... and multiple feet of books on food and cooking... and lots of unclassifiable curiosities and off-the-wall items... and Language books (dictionaries, lexicons, linguistics... and computer/information books, many of them in the 1990-2005 time frame, when I was a participant in that world... and the Southeast Asian and East Asian material that continues to fascinate...

To a remarkable degree it seems that who I AM is artfully reflected in the books with which I've surrounded myself, and which underwrite my continuing adventures in learning about stuff that my curiosities keep presenting. But WHY? —or maybe it's why doesn't EVERYBODY follow the same course? And there I have to recognize my plumage as a very strange bird indeed: a life of reading and images and listening, of COLLECTING, of curiosities and multiple passions... the luxury of self-directed learning, personal dignity untrammeled. The roots and foundation go all the way back to 42 Quincy Street, Cambridge.