Links + Notes

• Nov 19, 2023 - Reading notes - Beloved by Toni Morrison

  Beloved is every bit as heart-rending, beautiful, and erudite as I expected. It’s incredibly brilliant from a technical, writerly standpoint. I also appreciated its weaponization of the gothic novel genre for racial justice and black feminist purposes. In the gothic novel of the 18th/19th centuries, we often see captured women whose only power is the power of refusal - to say “no,” to flee - running around mossy castles pursued by evil Dukes, predatory priests, vampires and all that. Here, Morrison gives that trope meaning that is so much more complex and demanding of the reader. Beloved reorders the genre and its descendents around itself. Incredible.

• Nov 6, 2023 - Reading notes - Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway

  Haraway is someone I turn to to remind me what reality is like. In this book she continues her journey from feminist cyborg to Significant Otherness to compost-human ecologies, and it does not disappoint!

• Nov 5, 2023 - Reading notes - A History of Bangladesh

  I appreciated the thoughtful and de-colonizing approach the author took to Bangladesh’s complex cultural and geopolitical histories.

• Oct 27, 2023 - Reading notes - The Issue At Hand: Essays On Buddhist Mindfulness Practice

  A thoughtful and practical guide to American Buddhist mindfulness and meditation practices

• Oct 22, 2023 - Reading notes - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir

  I don’t often re-read books, but this was a good choice. Murakami’s “running novelist” memoir turns out to also be a meditation on aging. This is not something I picked up on when I first read it, even though it wasn’t all that long ago. Murakami discusses his simultaneous growth as a writer and as a runner with a kind of disarming literalness. He avoids grand narratives or grand theories of mind and even, for the most part, poetics. But he’s writing from the position of a runner who is past his physical prime (he was something like 56 when he wrote it) and whose way of life has perseverance, in running in particular, at its core. It’s a short book that could have been even shorter, and it’s lousy with cliches and unpolished prose. Oh, and I don’t know what I hoped his taste in music would be, but Eric Clapton was definitely not on the list. But it’s a good book because he refuses to speak for anyone’s else’s experience, which in turn makes space for the reader to reflect on their own.