Book 31: Range by David Epstein

This book absolutely blew me away. I first heard about it when the author was interviewed on the Longform Podcast, which interviews nonfiction writers about their careers and process and all that, and it's essentially taking a look at the argument for being a generalist vs. being a specialist.

The intro looks at and then kind of dismisses the ten thousand hours explanation of genius, where Tiger Woods is a brilliant golfer because he got in the necessary number of hours of practice in specialized, repeated drills when he was very young. The counterargument is Roger Federer, who played lots of different kinds of sports when he was a kid, and didn't focus on tennis to the exclusion of others until he was a teenager. But the broader, more applicable lesson is that broad, flexible learning is the thing that human brains are actually exceptionally good at, when compared with computers, and attempting to become experts via drills and rote learning actually just results in us being not very good robots instead of exceptional humans.

Every chapter explores this concept of breadth having a much greater value than people want to believe to be the case in a variety of settings, and I found the book to be both fascinating and extremely challenging and also a bit scary, because of how much the central argument of the book feels almost impossible to implement in academia or scientific research or policy development, to say nothing of individual lives. Also, the chapter on the women musicians of 17th and 18th century Venice alone is well worth reading. Just thinking about this book makes me want to re-read it.

Grade: A  

Book 30: Circe by Madeline Miller

Man, I loved this book. I read it for one of my book clubs, and it took a while for it to grow on me -- I found myself frustrated by the protagonist for the first hundred or so pages, and then once it hooked me I was really and truly hooked.

The central concept of the book is a retelling of various ancient Greek myths from the perspective of Circe, who is a minor character in The Odyssey and now takes central billing in this re-centering. I have never read The Odyssey, and most of my knowledge of Greek myths feels at best second-hand, although there is the argument that all knowledge of the myths don't exist from primary sources. But it meant that I have very little sense of exactly how transformative the book is or is not; my impression is that it's quite a leap, but I truly don't know. I loved what this journey is, though, and the way it made me think about the plays and poems I've read, and how many of them are translated and interpreted by men, and prioritize the male experience to the exclusion of basically everyone else.

Part of what I loved about this book was how the passage of time was experienced by a goddess, and how that contrasted with all mortals, and what that means for all the myths about the gods and their disputes. I came away from this book wanting to read Emily Miller's translation of The Odyssey, and to go back and reread the Greek plays and poems I read and only barely understood in college. If the story of a goddess who's framed as a witch in a story about a man but is centered as the protagonist in in this novel appeals to you, I would definitely recommend reading this.

Grade: A 

Book 29: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Another book club book! And another book that feels like it's in conversation with other stories I've consumed recently - The Raven Tower and Hadestown. This story of mythmaking and gods and the underworld takes place in Jazz Age Mexico, and focuses on the journey a young woman named Casiopea takes with Hun-Kame, a Mayan god of death, in order to free him from his brother's bindings. She is coerced into helping him when she opens the trunk her terrible grandfather kept locked in his bedroom and discovers his bones inside.

It's a story that is incredibly readable and that flows, even while exploring a cultural tradition and foundational myths that I knew very little of going into the story. I kept finding parallels to polytheistic traditions I have more familiarity with, but it also feels incredibly grounded in the specific time and place of the story. It made me want to learn more about both pre- and post-colonial Mexican history, but the book holds up on its own, even without a deeper knowledge. I really enjoyed both the POV of Casiopea and the authorial voice.

Grade: B  

Book 28: Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by Andrea Lawlor

I read this right after finishing Just Kids, and while none of the book takes place in New York City, the entire book is informed by the title character's experience there in the early nineties, just after Robert Mapplethorpe's death and the end of that memoir. It was a clear thruline, although not intended, and Patti Smith is mentioned often, and so are so many other aspects of culture referenced throughout that memoir.

This book isn't a memoir, and can't be, really--Paul is a shapeshifter, whose primary form is that of a young gay man, but who shifts into the body of a lesbian in order to go to Michigan with his best friend, a dyke named Jane, and often shifts into whichever queer body he needs to inhabit to explore both himself and the world. The book takes us from Iowa to Michigan to his hometown in upstate New York to Provincetown in the winter and finally, of course, to San Francisco, with flashbacks to his time at Pride in New York City. And it takes us to every single version of queer identity and culture and sex that existed in 1993 America, with a clarity and knowledge that made me laugh out loud multiple times and marvel at things I had once known but forgotten, and yet could not hope to remember how I had learned of it for the first time. I haven't felt so known by a piece of queer culture since first hearing the song "Ring of Keys" (and now that I write that, it's obvious to me that how I know of so much of the culture depicted in this book is from Dykes to Watch Out For), and the book just hit a part of my heart that I didn't know I needed to have pinged: what it was to be queer through the nineties, even if the character Paul is about ten years older than I am.

Paul's gender identity and sexual behaviors are both fluid, as is his exploration of what kind of queer he's going to be, regardless of how he presents. It's such a fascinating use of magical realism, this depiction of someone who truly lives between worlds and genders and identities, always the outsider, always finding his way through a porous barrier. The sex is frequent and explicit and the sort that I almost can't believe is still shocking, except that of course it is, and every cultural reference (with the exception of one that is so egregious an error I almost have to believe that it's me misremembering rather than it being something that made it through editing, except that I know it's wrong) is so pitch perfect it felt almost disorienting to look up from the pages and still be in 2019. I don't miss the early nineties; I was in my early teens, and even beyond that, queer life in America is better now, no matter how rosy the glasses of nostalgia are. But in the same way that the music of your youth always sounds good to you in a way that music from no other era ever will, this book thrums a very specific chord that I will always respond to.

Grade: A

Book 27: Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a classic book of the past couple of years, in that I borrowed it to read for one of my book clubs, wasn't able to attend the meeting, but still finished the book after the meeting had already happened. Patti Smith is a musician and poet I knew of, but didn't actually know the work of; this book is a memoir of her lifelong relationship and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work I was familiar with but whose life I knew little about.

The two of them met in the late sixties in a park in New York, and spent the next five years together living in artistic poverty together, first in Brooklyn (in my old neighborhood) and then in the village at the Chelsea Hotel and then a loft space, back when loft living in New York was actually how young and mostly broke artists lived. They were romantically and sexually involved during these years, even as Mapplethorpe's awareness and understanding of his sexuality came into focus, until they each found new partners and their relationship shifted into friendship and collaboration. 

I read this right after City of Girls, and it felt in so many ways like a continuation of the New York that was explored in that book, with neighborhoods and cultures that felt familiar but also completely cut off from my own experience. Both books have key scenes and moments that take place a block or two from places I go to frequently, and yet. There has been a serendipity in the order I've read books this past month, where one seems to inform the next one. I think of Mapplethorpe as being such a quintessentially queer artist that it was almost confronting to have his life told through the perspective of a straight person, even someone who by any reckoning was as close to him as anyone else during his adult life. But it was also a really fascinating exploration of how the counterculture of that era ran in opposition to so many norms, and on a purely personal level, it reaffirmed for me how extremely poorly I would have done as a starving artist in any era. 

Grade: A

Book 26: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I borrowed this book because the author of it was on a podcast discussing the research she did for it and that was interesting enough to me to want to read the novel. Her research was about how single women in the mid 20th century had sex and held jobs and in general led lives that are not at all what we think of when we imagine American women during and after WWII. The main character isn't a show girl, but Vivian's a Vassar drop out who doesn't want the life her WASP parents want for her, and so when she gets the chance to move to New York with her aunt who runs a not very impressive theatre in Hell's Kitchen, she takes it. Her skills as a seamstress serve her well, as do her good looks and willingness to do just about anything, and even when she pushes that envelope too far and almost has her reputation ruined by the tabloids, she bounces back.

The frame of the story is essentially How I Met Your Father -- Vivian is now in her 80's and is explaining to a woman named Angela "who your father was to me." So there's that mystery leading you through the narrative, the desire to find out who he is, while also wondering how a woman who moves to New York City in the fall of 1940 will make it through such world-shattering times. It took long enough for that reveal to happen that I began to wonder if the book would land for me as anything other than a very readable and light exploration of the theatre world and life in New York in general. But when it does land, it's quite a shift, and it gave the book some emotional weight it hadn't had for much of it. So much of it was deliberately light and insubstantial, and to suddenly have a real foundation made the lightness matter more.

Grade: A

Book 25: Educated by Tara Westover

I read this book because both of my parents read it for their book clubs, and I had seen it mentioned all over as well. It definitely affected me more than I had anticipated; I started reading it thinking it would be a bit of a throwback to the dominant memoir genre of the mid-2000's (compellingly written memoir about the author's abusive/unique/uniquely abusive childhood, and how they recovered), and while it is that, what's lasted for me about the book goes far deeper.

The author grew up in a fundamentalist, survivalist Mormon home in Idaho in the nineties, and was homeschooled until she was accepted at Brigham Young University. She wasn't actually homeschooled, though--there was almost no actual formal teaching, and most of her time was spent either helping her father in his wrecking yard, or her mother as a midwife and naturopath. Her parents were abusive primarily via neglect; she was injured repeatedly because of her father's unwillingness to take any basic precautions with her safety, and any kind of medical treatment from outside the home was viewed as rejecting God's help and therefore evil. But she suffered more deliberate abuse at the hands of one of her older brothers, and I think the biggest shock about this book for me is that everyone in her immediate family actually survived.

The break from her family that she finally achieves via BYU and then eventually Cambridge and Harvard isn't as neat and as clean as I wanted it to be, nor is her anger at them as fully expressed as I desired it to be on her behalf. But her analysis of how her family existed within Mormonism and America is so cutting and much more nuanced than the instinctive blame I have of the structure of her family's faith for her young life--the Mormon church was also what got her out of her family's abuse, via education and a world outside of her mountain. She wrote a dissertation about how Mormonism fit into American culture as a whole in the 19th century, and I genuinely hope that eventually it is released as a popular history book, because this book made me want her perspective on the topic within an academic context. Her story of academic success is extraordinary for its uniqueness, but I think there's so much more that can be learned from her work than merely the ultimate 'overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve something' life lesson.

Grade: A