Last July I mentioned how I tried to zero out my Goodreads Challenge number in an attempt to move my reading away from a consumer capitalist, must read as many books as I can, must be productive mindset. I struggled to lower the number, because, what would people think? I’m a reader, dammit, I read a lot of books! When I did try to change the number to zero, Goodreads wouldn’t let me. Trapped in the Amazon net, did I simply change the number to “1”? Nope. I was mentally unable to do it. I lowered it to 30 books. And when my book count was 31, I was ridiculously thrilled and appalled at being so thrilled.

This year, in spite of Goodreads emailing me several times to remind me to set a goal, and despite the Reading Challenge widget telling me to “Challenge yourself to read more this year!” every time I login, I have not set a goal. In fact, I am weaning myself away from Goodreads entirely because I don’t need Amazon keeping an eye on me, nor do I need to be encouraged to read more. Instead, I am working out a way to use LibraryThing to keep track of what I have read, not so I can have a number at the end of the year, but only as a means to help me remember a few years from now whether or not I’ve read that book that seems so familiar.

I am not the only one these days thinking about capitalism and reading. Molly Templeton has a fantastic essay at Reactor (previously Tor), asking Why Are We Talking About Books Like This? Her “feelings” about how we talk about books started awhile ago, but boiled over with a Washington Post poll about reading that horrified her when it framed “big readers”—those who read more than 50 books in a year—as being the “true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.”

Templeton rightly points out, “You know what this framing does? This presents reading as an elitist activity. Again.” And she goes on to say, “We don’t need to be set apart by the language of capitalism, described using the language of the ultra-wealthy, as if books make you a billionaire.”

Why do we keep talking about books and reading like this, she wonders. Who does it benefit? Of course it benefits Amazon, Jeff Bezos owns the Post after all. And it benefits private equity firms and corporate publishing. But does it benefit us as readers?

Shannon Reed doesn’t think so. She recalls plowing throw books when she was a kid to earn free pizza from Pizza Hut. She was already a reader, but reading for prizes taught her how to skim. “I’m sure you’re familiar,” she writes,

You have to read a book for some reason, and you’re not that excited about it …, but you’re a good person, you’re not going to say you read a book if you didn’t. So you run your eyes over every single line. And yet, when you get to the end, much more quickly than you should’ve, you’d be hard-pressed to explain even the basics of the book.

Even after she no longer read to earn pizzas, she found herself reading like that; she got praise, she passed her English class tests, and she “still somehow believed that adding to my growing stack of books marked read mattered more than what I got from the experience of reading them.”

Not until she got to graduate school did she begin to have problems, “I realized that I had to slow down, to read less in order to understand more. It wasn’t easy to learn to do this.”

Reading is not a race, she says, but a lifelong companion. Oh sure, you might argue, it is a race, a race against mortality. I have a lot of books to read before I die. But there will always be more books. We will never read them all, so what does racing gain us, especially if in a week or two we have no recollection of what we have read? If we have no understanding?

This is not to say that books and reading can’t be escapist and fun, a little brain candy. They absolutely can be. However, there is way too much about reading as medicine, reading as being good for you, reading as broccoli (I love broccoli, but you know what I mean, eat your vegetables!). Such thinking tips over into making us feel guilty for not reading “important” books. It also edges into demanding that books “do something.”

Like the idea that is big in climate activist circles insisting we need to tell better stories about climate change so people will stop being apathetic and actually DO something. As Emma Pattee writes in her essay, “On the False Promise of Climate Fiction”:

I frequently find myself in conversation with people who want to wax poetic about Kim Stanley Robinson’s visionary climate novel, Ministry for the Future, but shy away when I talk about the painful grappling my family is doing around the idea of giving up air travel. Buying books will always be easier than questioning one’s own consumption. Besides, people are busy. As Schneider-Mayerson explained, ‘There are so many economic, social, and cultural pressures, incentives, and norms that encourage us to go back to sleep—to focus on other things.’

Schneider-Mayerson, quoted above, is Associate Professor of English at Colby College, who, in collaboration with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, performed a little experiment. They used two short stories about climate change to test the impact on readers. They found that immediately after reading the stories, readers showed a small increase in concern. However, this concern faded after only one month. No one was prompted to act or make any life changes.

In fact, Karen Russell relates that after her story “The Ghost Birds” appeared in The New Yorker, one commenter said that it didn’t want to make him save the planet, but instead made him want to save as much money as he possibly could to leave to his children so they could buy water and air.

In The Great Derangement Amitav Ghosh takes writers to task for not writing stories that include climate change, which is fair. However, now that more and more novels do include climate change, it seems to be mostly background (realism!) in many cases. Not that every book needs to stare head-on into the abyss, but telling better stories doesn’t appear to be making much of a difference.

Etaf Rum has also discovered that stories don’t always prompt people to be their best selves. In spite of studies showing how reading makes us more empathetic, and by extension, better people, Rum has found that is not necessarily so. Rum is Palestinian-American and has written books and stories about Palestinians based on her family experiences. She has received much praise for her books and comments from many readers expressing empathy for Palestinians.

Until October 7th.

Recently she has been “bombarded” with messages from readers who are angry with her unwavering support for Palestinians. She was surprised and hurt, and concludes,

The genuine astonishment many readers experienced when learning about my support for Palestine exposes a troubling reality—the prevalence of performative empathy within the reading community. There is a clear disparity between the empathy they felt for my fictional characters and their ability to apply it to the real-life humans suffering in Palestine.

Yet, with all the book-banning efforts in the United States, books clearly have power. Rebecca Gordon writes for Tom Dispatch:

Contemporary book-banning efforts extend beyond school libraries, where reasonable people might differ (a little!) about what books should be available to children, to public libraries, where book banners seek to keep even adults from reading whatever we choose. EveryLibrary, an anti-censorship organization, keeps a running total of active “legislation of concern” in state legislatures that relates to controlling libraries and librarians. They maintain a continually updated list of such bills (the number of active ones changed just as I was exploring their online list). As of today [February 11], they highlight 93 pieces of legislation moving through legislatures in 24 states as varied as Idaho and Rhode Island.

Books and reading matter a great deal. Books have, and do, change lives everyday. As William Carlos Williams wrote:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                       
yet men die miserably every day
                                               
for lack

of what is found there.

“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower“

I think, as readers, we get a little too full of ourselves sometimes and forget. We forget what reading is all about. It’s not how many books we read in a year. It’s not whether we have read Anna Karenina or Don Quixote or some other weighty classic we somehow feel obliged to check off our list. It’s not whether we have read all the prize-winning “important” books at all. It’s about whether we have read, actually read, paid attention to, thought about, allowed the story to enter into us, to change us, that’s what matters. And it doesn’t require capital “L” Literature at all. It doesn’t matter what we read, but how.

So I’ve been practicing presence when I read, being there in the story, paying attention and not thinking I need to hurry up and finish this book because my TBR pile is about to tip over. I keep reminding myself that it’s not the person who has read the most books when they die who “wins.” What does that even mean? I’m trying to read like I did when I was a kid, when all that mattered was being in the story and loving the entire experience, getting lost, being found, and coming up for air to see the world in a different light. It’s hard. Currently it’s work. But every now and then I manage to slip into the story river and eventually wash up on the shore, breathless and dazzled.

Reading

• Article: Leaked Emails Reveal Hugo Awards Ineligibility Details. Speaking of reading, I’ve been kind of following the Hugo Award fiasco in which some works and authors were quietly banned from being on the ballot even though they qualified because the award organizers were concerned about offending the Chinese. The 2023 award ceremony was held in Chengdu, China last October.
• Article: Rubble from Bone: Tom Stevenson Writes About Operation Iron Swords. This is a most excellent article at the Times Literary Supplement about Palestine and Gaza and Israel and what has happened in the lead up to the genocide that is presently occurring there.

Listening

• Podcast: For the Wild: Merlin Sheldrake on Embodied Entanglements. Sheldrake is the author of the bestselling book about fungi, Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our future, a book that’s on my TBR. I have seen the completely unrelated movie Fantastic Fungi though. Fungi are amazing beings, and if you want to get jazzed up about them, listening to Sheldrake is a good place to start.
• Podcast: This Machine Kills: Kill the Ecomodernist in Your Head. This is a new to me podcast and I picked an episode near the end of last season and felt like I was dumped into the middle of a conversation. It took me a bit to orient, but once I did, I really liked the episode and will be listening to others for sure. They hosts are anti-capitalists and talk a lot about Marxism, but aren’t full-on Marxists. This particular episode goes all over the place talking about degrowth and capitalism and finally lands on an extended conversation about how socialist capitalism, a kinder, gentler capitalism, is completely bogus.

Watching

• Movie: Anyone But You (2023) James wanted to watch a romcom and came up with this one. It’s very Millennial and predictable, but has some good, funny moments. Many of the best laughs were because of a minor character who is an energetic Australian surfer dude.

Quote

What do you value? What do you want to raise up in this world, this big world in which we live brief lives? How do you want to shape things with language, within a life, with the way we interact with the world? What role does art play in your life? What role beauty? What do you want to set free rather than consume?

Molly Templeton, A Reader is Not a Consumer of Books

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

Tuesday was National Pancake Day and the chili from the other week didn’t stay in the freezer for long. Instead of turning into chili cheese fries, James made two big cornbread pancakes and the rest of the chili went on top. So good! And a great way to celebrate the versatility of pancakes!

James likes to make treats on the weekend, and yesterday he made chocolate coconut mocha muffins. When I asked where he had found the recipe he replied, I pulled it out of my ass. James frequently pulls recipes out of his ass. His ass is very productive that way. I will only suggest he see a doctor about it if the recipes begin to go bad.