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Finished reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad 📚
El Akkad has found the words for what has been happening in Gaza, and describe its effect on all of us. Essential and heart-wrenching, like prime James Baldwin but right off the stove and no time to cool down.
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Finished reading: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino 📚
This might have been my favorite book of 2024 if I had read it last year. Adina Giorno was born the moment the Voyager I spacecraft launched. Before long, this sensitive and observant child of a Philadelphia immigrant learns (or decides?) she is an alien sent to Earth to observe humanity and report back to her home planet via fax(!) about just what it is like to exist here. This charming account of her life and recollections is an absolute joy. Melancholy and funny at once, a profound and carefully observed meditation on longing and belonging.
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Finished reading: Wild Forest Home by Betsy Leialoha Howell 📚
Well-written glimpses into the work of a PNW wildlife biologist working for the National Forest Service are woven into the backdrop of Howell’s personal journey. You would be hard-pressed to find a better account of the changing landscape of forests in the last 30 years, especially in the altered landscape of the Northwest Forest Plan’s realignment of the forest service’s goals, from someone who cares about these places. There is also plenty about specific animals like Olympic marmots, martens, marbled murrelets, spotted and barred owls, salamanders, and fishers, along with accounts from decades at the front lines of forest fires.
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Finished reading: The Traveling Feast by Rick Bass 📚
A lovely idea: a writer makes the occasion of a dinner an excuse to speak with and write about his favorite living writers. Many of his favorites overlap with mine, and I really enjoyed this.
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Finished reading: The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig 📚
The Sea Runners a stupefyingly relentless account of four indentured servants escaping from a Russian trading post in what is today Sitka, Alaska. In their harrowing journey by canoe (in winter) through a brutal stretch of Pacific coastline down to Astoria, Oregon the yearning for human freedom constantly confronts an absurd and often hostile universe, with mounting dread. Like Dostoevsy trying to write a Coen Brothers movie. With prose so sharp that it can feel brittle, Doig carves narratives that feel simultaneously intimate and epic. Not for the feint of heart, but boy can Doig paint a picture.
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Finished reading: In the Pockets of Small Gods by Anis Mojgani 📚
Opened this with no knowledge of book or author. It hooked me immediately and never let go. This is a readable, genuinely moving and at times profound collection of poetry with a through line of processing grief. Wonderful.
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Snow beginning to recede on the skylight of my office.
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Finished reading: Slow Down by Kohei Saito 📚
I liked his rationale for degrowth and why it is not just another word for “austerity,” and I even followed his rehabilitation of the Marx’s ecological bona fides as far as that goes; but I wanted more detail about how it might be achieved.
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Currently reading: And the Roots of Rhythm Remain by Joe Boyd 📚
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I didn’t plan on diving into an 850 book about music, but I flipped to a the chapter called “Tezeta”, learned like seven fun things about Tony Allen in two pages, and knew I was installing myself inside these covers for a few weeks. This is so great.
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