May 2025
Some notes about books I finished reading this month
On the Calculation of Volume I
by Solvej Balle
This is an amazingly thought-provoking novel. One of the best I’ve read this year.
Imagine living the same day repeatedly for a year – 365 days, each the 18th of November. Imagine further that other people in the world, including those close to you, are living a normal day, a November 18 that’s preceded by November 17 and followed by November 19. And that you drop in and out of their normal day, but each new day that you appear to one of them is their first November 18, so that they have no memory of having seen you before on that day, because this is the first time that they have lived the day that you have lived again and again and again.
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I’m reluctant to say more because I don’t want to ruin the suspense of your reading it. (You will read it, won’t you?) Instead, I’ll just offer this passage from early in the novel, as the narrator comes to grips with the fact that the new day is, in fact, not new at all:
“That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws” (p. 32).
Equality: What It Means and Why It Matters
by Thomas Piketty and Michael J. Sandel
Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard University, and Thomas Piketty, an economist with appointments at the Paris School of Economics and the London School of Economics, held a public conversation at the Paris School of Economics on May 20, 2024. This short book is an edited version of that conversation.
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They start the conversation by agreeing on three reasons that inequality is a problem. It means that there is unequal access to basic goods, that there are different levels of power, voice, and participation, and that some are denied a sense of basic dignity. As the conversation develops, each offers examples of these problems and different proposals for rectifying the inequalities.
Some highlights:
After social democrats in Sweden came to power in the 1930s, they introduced progressive taxation and used the increased funding to decommoditize education and health care, making it free for all citizens. Conservative economists like Hayek argued that this was a “road to serfdom,” but the country is flourishing. (Piketty doesn’t mention the increased power of the nationalist Sweden Democrats party, but it’s worth noting that they support the socialist welfare state, though they think that immigrants should not receive these services.) Contrast that with tax rates in the United States, which saw a similar rise in the first decades of the 20th century, from a low of 7% in 1913 to a high in the low 90s from 1951 to 1963, then floating around 70% until 1981 before dropping to the mid-to high 30s for the reminder of the century and into the first quarter of the 21st century.
Some argue that economic inequality is not really a problem because of meritocracy – those at the top deserve to be there because of their talents and effort. However, Sandel sees two problems here: first the meritocracy is in fact unequal, since those with advantages have a head start on the competition. Second, it allows those who are successful to believe that their success depends exclusively on their ability and effort. Instead of doubling down on the meritocracy, he would prefer that we work in enhance the sense of dignity of all those who participate in the economy, lessening the “prestige” associated with a university degree.
The two scholars make many other points. The conversational tone makes it easy to follow, but also leaves out a lot of detailed analysis of what stands behind the positions that they are arguing. While I’m convinced by much of their argument, I think that if I didn’t begin the reading already convinced that a move to democratic socialism is the right move, I would want more argument in support of the positions they’re developing.
No Straight Road Takes You There
by Rebecca Solnit
This book is a collection of essays, published in a variety of publications over the last 6 years or so. Different essays, in different publications, but in this book they come together to make and support several related claims. First, we human are part of a vast, interconnected natural realm, and one of the shortcomings of conservative ideology is that it fails to recognize or appreciate the implications of this connectedness. Second, it’s important to recognize that thinking in terms of a longer time frame can reveal social progress that seems missing in the short-term. Third, that we should not only acknowledge that we simply don’t know the future with certainty simply because the future is uncertain, but also recognize that the our decisions and other actions in the present will shape the future.
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Solnit insists that these three points are important to our understanding and living in the face of both cultural and natural change. Culturally, they facilitate awareness of the ways in which the powerful abuse those without power and offer reasons and strategies to work against such abuses. Naturally, they offer strategies for those concerned about the rapidly developing damage to the world in which we live and push us to hold on to hope that we can work to mitigate these damages.
Some relevant quotes:
“as the poet Antonio Machado famously said, ‘Walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.’ For so many of our destinations, no straight road takes us there. The route is over mountains or through forests and beyond what we know — and it may also be through inconceivable beauty and transformation as well as peril; it may be uncharted, or steep, or take decades or centuries to traverse; we may get there through storytelling, alliance, or the appearance of some unanticipated participants. That’s a declaration of difficulty and uncertainty but also of possibility that I offer as encouragement to keep going” (p. 6).
“When you take on hope, you take on its opposites and opponents — despair, defeatism, cynicism, and pessimism. And, I would argue, optimism. What all these enemies of hope have in common is confidence about what is going to happen, a false certainty that excuses inaction” (p. 65).
“But the present only looks incomprehensible to those who ignore the past, which is full of the strange and unpredictable things that transpired to create the present, reminders of how often destiny hangs by a thread and turns on a dime, how often the unexpected happens anyway” (p. 28)
“I’ve called contemporary conservative thinking ‘the ideology of isolation,’ obsessed with control through separation and segregation, through borders and anti-immigration rhetoric, through policing racial and gender categories, and through marriage inequality as both a denial of marital rights to same-sex couples and an affirmation of male domination within heterosexual marriage. It’s anti-environmental, because of its opposition to the foundational truth science has revealed more and more boldly in recent decades is that the world is made of pervasive, interconnecting systems, not discrete objects. With that truth comes a mandate to act with responsibility toward the consequences that is at odds with the conservative ideals of individual freedom and unfettered capitalism” (pp. 162f).
I’ve been a Solnit fan since reading Orwell’s Roses, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I discovered her so late. This collection is yet another gem. As I read, I found myself, repeatedly, thinking “Yes!” Solnit hasn’t completely freed me of my despair — or is it cynicism? But, as I said in a post shortly after I began reading this book, she has me hoping to hope.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In this book Kimmerer expresses her discomfort living in the current economy of extractive capitalism and her hope to live in what she calls a gift economy. The latter, she says, is modeled for us in the natural world.
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“I lament my own immersion in an economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts gifts to commodities in a currency that enables us to purchase things we really don’t need while destroying what we do” (p. 72). In the natural world, she says, different organisms engage with each other in symbiotic relationships, each providing something to and getting something from the other. She’s not painting an idyllic view of a nature in which no creature harms another — death is a part of life.
She finds hope in the field of ecological economics. For example, she says, Valerie Luzadis defines economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance it’s quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves” (p. 30). Kimmerer finds in this definition a stark depature from mainstream economics, which sees scarcity to be a fundamental element, and decisions about resources in the face of scarcity to be crucial decisions.
Kimmerer acknowledges that there are times when natural scarcities make it difficult for organisms to survive. “There is no question that all living beings experience some level of scarcity at various points, and therefore that competition for limited resources, like light or water or soil nitrogen, will occur. But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting ‘If there’s not enough of waht you want, then want something else.’ This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote” (pp. 76f).
She draws on indigenous cultures, including her own, to develop what she calls a gift economy, “a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else” (p. 91).
She acknowledges that the hope for such an economy will seem naively optimistic to many. But she sees hope in what she and others call the “cuddly capitalism” of the Nordic countries. She thinks also that there are emerging gaps in the current economic system that leave room for gift economies to emerge on the margin.
Things Become Other Things
by Craig Mod
This book is multi-faceted. In one sense, it’s a travelogue, inviting the reader to travel along with the author as he tours rural Japan. In another, it’s a rumination on the joys and challenges of seeing Japan at a walking pace that both allows intimate encounters with ancient shrines and temples and also communicates just how tedious and tiring walking can be. In yet another, it’s a comment on significant differences between Japanese culture that encourages caring for individuals and community, on one hand, and United States culture that celebrates individuals who “make it” and discounts the misery of those who don’t. Finally, and most poignantly, it’s a love letter to a childhood friend who didn’t manage to escape the deteriorating town that Craig Mod left behind when he moved to Japan for university.
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Mod’s experiences while walking through Japan lead him to reflect on the world he escaped and, more intimately, on his time with Bryan, the childhood friend who didn’t make it out. Some of these reflections are pleasant, even entertaining. Others are painful, such as when Mod recalls the violence of his childhood, a violence in which he and Bryan forged their relationship.
The inspiration for the book’s title comes from conversations with the couple hosting one of the inns where Mod stayed. While he’s visiting with the couple, a woman in her mid-30s joins them. The wife introduces the woman as their daughter. The next morning, the husband gives Mod a ride back to the trail. “As the husband drives me down off the mountain, back to the Ise-ji path, he breaks our silence by saying, She ain’t … our daughter. I am entranced by something out the window: Beyond the fields, past a dirt road, in the forest something burns. Before I can register what he said, he continues with more fluency. She just appeared seven years back. Wanderin’ the country, needin’ a job, somehow … found us. Not a daughter but like a daughter. Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens: Things become … other things” (pp. 60f).
Time passes, life moves. Such is the case with Mod’s sense of self and of the world in which he lives. He moved from a failing town in the United States to Japan, and became a different person. The power of this change comes home to him, and to the reader, when he re-visits the United States to take care of things after his father died. “Having spent the majority of my twenties in Japan, it had been a while since I’d been in a place I didn’t know, and yet was so readily accepted as a local. There was no second-guessing how to speak to me, no hiccups with language, no shock at my ability to speak or implicit or explicit questioning of where I was ‘really’ from, no looks as if I were a horse that had wondered into a shop and begun lecturing about physics. The realization was a shock: Standing there, I was able to slide into someone else’s world by dint of simply leaning against a wall. And yet — something had failed us on this side of the ocean and I was still trying to pick it apart. Something systemic, not any one person or thing, but the whole of it all, and no matter how easy it may have felt to slide back, I knew then that I could never return” (pp. 90f).
He and his friend Bryan, though they started and were formed in the same place, took different paths. “Two healthy young boys with healthy minds, capable of so much. Our paths ran parallel for so long, until they didn’t. But as we now know, you can start at the same place, under shared circumstance, and in the end it means nothing” (p. 72). Things become other things, and some things are lost in the becoming.
(A couple of points from this book have already found their way into my regular blog posts — see here and here. It’s also worth pointing again to this very interesting interview of the author.
Immemorial
by Lauren Markham
Markham’s inspiration for writing this book is her deep-felt need for a way to grieve the impending loss of a habitat that can support life as we know it. The need she feels is complicated by her realization that she shares some responsibility for this impending loss. She suggests that each of us has in fact two bodies, one innocently living day-to-day and the other living a life that is destroying our habitat. Of course, we are not two selves, but I think the image captures nicely my own sense that in some ways I’m living a “normal” innocent life, while in the larger scheme of things I’m consuming resources at an alarming rate.
Click to read more.
She describes a frustrating quest as she worries that language might be insufficent: “On my most doleful days, I questioned what words could accomplish, and, if anything, whether it would be nearly fast enough. What good were words when the world was burning? These questions had always been lurking in the corner, but now they crouched upon my shoulders each time I sat down at my desk. It was beginning to feel like anything I wrote about climage change or other urgent social matters was either a feeble finger wag or merely a double underline: a reminder of things everyone already knew” (p. 31).
And yet she wants some way to talk about the grief, some memorial that captures the pain of the impending loss. “…in yearning for a memorial related to climate grief, I was in part looking for a place to deposit it so I could leave it behind. Cast your sorrows here …” (pp. 51f).
Along the way, she notes that others struggle with the language. The Guardian updated its style guide in 2019, changing the way it speaks about what many still call climate change. “Instead of ‘climate change’ the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming….’”
She ultimately settles, perhaps provisionally, on the term immemorial. “It was almost impossible to read immemorial and not think of the phrase time immemorial — connoting something ancient, long-lived, some ancestral past. It did have the word memorial in it (though its definition, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with the sort of memorial I was talking about). Because the prefix im- can mean both into and toward, as well as not, or something’s opposite, the word simultaneously connoted being inside the memorial and being not a memorial at all. Maybe it needed a suffix, too, something that spoke to the ache and desire to be a part of ancient time, the ache and desire for this memorial space, to be both inside it and to not need it. Mania was one — an excessive desire. And then there was -algia — another suffix connoting a discomfort disorder, as in myalgia, nostalgia. It derived from the ancient Greek word that meant both pain and sorrow. Immemorialgia. The sorrowful ache for memorial, to be part of ancient time and to mourn it, to be distinct from memory and deeply nested within it” (pp. 114f).
I find this a thought-provoking book. It returns me to themes I explored earlier this year while reading Matthes’s What to Save and Why. I appreciate the importance of grieving the world that we’re losing, even as we push ourselves to lessen the loss. (Though I can’t resist observing that the current administration in the United States is intent not only on denying the loss, but also on destroying any infrastructure that could help us to understand the magnitude of the loss.)
Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction
by Andrea Barrett
Barrett is an award-winning writer of fiction, and in this delightful book she offers her insights into how the results of historical, biographical, and literary research find their way into the pages of novels and stories. She doesn’t claim to describe the way to approach writing and research. Instead, she grants that different writers have different ways of working.
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Barrett opens a window into her process, describing research she did in order to write some of her fiction and unpacking just how the facts revealed in her research inform the truth in her fiction. Reading the book is like visiting an artist’s studio – provided, that is, that the working space includes rough sketches, several attempts to paint the same scene, works by other artists that the artist finds inspiring, and both finished paintings and abandoned efforts.
Along the way Barrett describes the work of writers as various as Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. She gives a detailed analysis of research she did in order to write stories of arctic explorers. She describes how the project she planned for a year-long residency in New York changed rather dramatically in the wake of the September 11 attacks. She discusses the difference between a straightforward biography and historical fiction.
So, how does she write? And what might the reader learn about her writing process? I posted this as a commonplace last week, but I’ll add it again here: “Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be. Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without those foundations. Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer’s imagination works that way. Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between the writer’s own uncontrollable interior preoccupations, and what she’s most concerned about in the world around her. We write in resonse to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the breathing, bleeding place we guard so carefully in daily life” (pp. 54f).
The Friday Afternoon Club
by Griffin Dunne
I’d say that this book is interesting, but I don’t think that reading it was the best use of my time. It’s not all that unusual for me to begin reading a book and then wonder why I’m reading it. That’s a problem for me, because I’m haunted by the sunk cost phenomenon. I don’t want to stop reading it, because then I will have wasted the time I’ve already spent reading what I’ve read.
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Occasionally I manage to overcome this and set the book aside. But this time I couldn’t. Actually, that’s not quite true – I managed to set it aside several times, but each time I picked it up again. I suppose I couldn’t resist being a fly on the wall in a world very different from the one in which I live. (I hasten to add that this sort of otherness is rather different from what I describe in my comment on the importance of reading books in translation.) From his early years, Dunne and his family ran in circles decidedly different from my own. He describes occasional and also ongoing encounters with people whose names I know only from newspapers, movies, and books. I was particularly interested in the occasional descriptions of time with his aunt Joan Dideon, but those were few and far between.
One interesting bit is his account of his mostly platonic relationship with one-time apartment-mate and up-and-coming actor Carrie Fisher, before she left to assume a role in a movie she knew very little about. Her catapulting to star status after Star Wars put some distance in their relationship temporarily, but they managed to stay good friends.
Though this really isn’t my type of book (why was I reading it again?), I think that Dunne writes well. He writes about both happy and unhappy times with a direct honesty that left me feeling like that fly on an actual wall. His account of his family’s pain when his sister Dominique was murdered, and the deepened pain as they sat through a muder trial, is touching. He also deals honestly with the ups and downs of his professional career and personal life – though he writes too honestly and openly for my taste about his sexual encounters. I was reminded of the 1972 film Butterflies are free, in which Mrs. Baker tells an aspiring playwright that she’s not willing “to pay money to see nudity, obscenity and degeneracy.” Ralph, the playwright, responds “Mrs. Baker, these things are all a part of life.” “I know, Mr. Santori. So is diarrhea, but I wouldn’t classify it as entertainment.” I think there’s room in good drama for nudity, obscenity, and even degeneracy, but I don’t need quite as much detail about adolescent and young adult sexual encounters as is provided here. Your mileage might vary.
Not very positive comments, I know. But I think that’s because of a mismatch between Dunne’s life and my own. If this is your sort of book, I think you could well find it a good read.