How to Read Now is that rare species of book that I don't feel I can recommend without having a conversation about it, or—six different conversations How to Read Now is that rare species of book that I don't feel I can recommend without having a conversation about it, or—six different conversations at once. It’s been such a joy to live with this collection of essays in the past few weeks, to read it and reread it and think about it so often I feel that it’s become part of my internal narrative. I still find myself returning to individual pages, underlining and pondering passages, chewing over individual lines, sometimes arguing with them loudly in my head, sometimes wishing I had a glass of wine that I can gulp down in fierce agreement.
If you spend any ordinate amount of time in online bookish spaces, you have probably noticed how utterly diseased our reading culture has become, invaded and reduced in the same breath by practices that seem instinctively antithetical to the very spirit of reading. In How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo unspools and amplifies what’s long been intimate, complicated inner thoughts I had about our reading practices, the amalgamation of all the almost-screams that scraped my throat whenever I learned about yet another book ban in the United States, or read a particularly infuriating Hot Take on Book Twitter. Reading this collection of essays felt like listening to your fiercely intelligent friend improvise a masterpiece of rigorous critical thinking in a personalized voice note. It felt like being seen and being rescued, all at once.
Castillo’s targets resonate deeply in our cultural moment, a bolt sliding perfectly home: the empty platitudes about how reading teaches us empathy without interrogating who exactly it’s making us more empathetic towards (and to the detriment of whom); the silences and erasures kept within our “canon,” all the gaps into which entire unrecorded worlds and peoples disappear and no one ventures; the hollowed, impoverished performance of “Representation Matters” that continuously fails to address the fundamental and systematic class-race disparities within the industry or truly account for the heterogeneity of marginalized communities; the hypocrisies of demanding we “separate the art from the artist” when your favorite white author is outed as a fascist or transphobe while seizing and measuring art by artists of color against a standard of authenticity that positions their “otherness” as something exotic—like subjects in a zoo, to be observed safely from a distance.
Whether she’s writing about Asian cinema, the cult of Joan Didion, or dragging Peter Handke through the (metaphorical) mud, Castillo’s writing is generative, incisive, charming, irreverent, with clever arms to hold you. But despite what the title might conjure, How to Read Now is not a prescriptive book. Castillo does not offer her reader an exhaustive How-To Guide to thinking about and engaging meaningfully with art. She doesn’t even ask you to agree. The assignment Castillo gives herself instead is to create for the reader the conditions to be present and alert alongside the questions that animate her essays. In other words, what Castillo offers is a profoundly personal record of thought—one that explodes with perspective and voice—to place alongside (sometimes even against) our own, so we might trace the connections and contradictions and see what meanings might be revealed from those intersections. The resulting book is an earnest and open-hearted invitation to think, seriously, about our responsibilities as readers in the world. Why do we read the way we do? And, most important, how can we imagine otherwise? How do we start to make space for new ways of reading and seeing that are novel, galvanizing, rewarding, and even reparative?
In How to Read Now, Castillo asks us to meet her vulnerability with our own, which is, I think, at bottom, precisely the kind of reading and seeing practice that she powerfully gestures at in these gorgeous essays: to read with openness, with depth, with constant complexity, to read as an opportunity to reiterate our closeness to each other, to strengthen our connectivity, to take up each other’s stories and open ourselves to each other’s silences—instead of an opportunity to shift burden, absolve debt, or refuse the intimacy of sitting in discomfort. The kind of reading How to Read Now champions is one of both freefall and rootedness, of both surrender and resistance—reading as an undeniably political act that spares no one and implicates everyone, reading as a practice that estranges us from and ultimately returns us to ourselves.
In the end, this is what How to Read Now solidified for me, in ways I will never stop thinking about: reading asks of us all manner of vulnerability, sometimes to extents unbearable—if one suspects they have stepped out of a work of art entirely untouched, perhaps one never submitted in the first place at all....more
Empire of Pain is a staggering, whipping, relentlessly infuriating book that swallows you whole as soon as you step inside. I devoured this story as iEmpire of Pain is a staggering, whipping, relentlessly infuriating book that swallows you whole as soon as you step inside. I devoured this story as if my life hung on the balance, even when I deeply, intensely abhorred it.
Patrick Radden Keefe marshals a wealth of research and journalistic derring-do to tell the story of a family obsessed by greed, secrecy, immortality, and denial. For years, the Sackler family paid perfectly despicable amounts of money to emblazon their name everywhere—on art museums and universities and medical facilities around the world—while going to great ocean-spanning lengths to obscure and obfuscate their ties to and involvement in the pharmaceutical industry. Unfortunately for them, in Empire of Pain, their claims to invisibility are rendered hideously visible.
Keefe’s book fastens on all the ways in which the Sackler family is (more than partly) responsible for engineering one of the worst public health crises in American history: the opioids epidemic. The Sacklers built their empire of pain, as American photographer and activist Nan Goldin hauntingly puts it, “by promoting addiction.” Purdue Pharma, the family’s pharmaceutical company, aggressively marketed and promoted their opioid painkillers, most notably OxyContin, to patients and doctors all over the country. They made billions upon billions of dollars by misrepresenting OxyContin's window of pain relief, falsely claiming its superiority to other treatments, and—most crucially—lying repeatedly about the risks of addiction. In fact, even when the Sacklers knew that people were actively dying as a result of using their drugs, they marched on, undeterred, unwilling to hold themselves even slightly accountable, or show the faintest hints of sympathy or remorse. Keefe’s book recounts a particularly blood-boiling instance when Purdue’s then-president, Richard Sackler, responded in an email to a report of 59 deaths related to OxyContin in a single state by saying: “This is not too bad. It could have been far worse.”
Put simply: I think we, as a society, should bring back the guillotine.
Ultimately, this is a book about the pervasiveness of moral evil, about the violent procreative indifference of the wealthy to the harm they cause, and the ways in which social systems and institutions diffuse guilt and grant protection and prestige to the rich and powerful. It is, in all ways, a great book; though your soul might just curdle from reading it....more
I'm just on fire with so much admiration for Emily Brontë right now. Having read this book, I now understand why it’s generated such fierce controversI'm just on fire with so much admiration for Emily Brontë right now. Having read this book, I now understand why it’s generated such fierce controversy since its first publication in 1847. Why early reviews dismissed it as an aberration (with one pearl-clutching reviewer wondering “how a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters”) and why writers like Sylvia Plath and E.M. Forster, drawn to the complex and often contradictory open vein of the novel, went out of their way to reject such easy classifications.
This review is, in many ways, my attempt to understand how Wuthering Heights continues to enable many difficult and contradictory stances even today, entrenching its legacy as one of the most dynamic and generative novels of the 19th century.
The first element that makes Wuthering Heights so interesting is form. The novel is presented as a series of second—even third—hand accounts, a story rehearsed and sanitized by multiple re-enactors with the reader being the last in a succession of interpreters. In other words, the story changes hands multiple times, often between hostile and uncomprehending narrators, before it makes its way to the reader. This structure is nuanced in multiple ways; it is also very tricky, for it depends entirely on the reader’s willingness to turn to Nelly—the central narrator—for an authoritative interpretation of the story. Nelly, however, is not a very sympathetic narrator, and her thinly veiled bias against (or for) the characters brings into question the validity of her account. We are forced into awareness, again and again, of the flawed nature of Nelly's interpretations and of the uncrossable distances that lie between what we are reading and what the story is. It is precisely this awareness which challenges us to take nothing at face value and demands our active participation in the process of meaning-making.
To put it differently: faced with the possibility of the novel as the culmination of a flawed—even failed—interpretation, one can only read Wuthering Heights with a kind of longing, with the desire to get close to something inconsolable, just beyond reach. Therein lies, the novel says, the potential for true understanding: in the underground currents of emotion, the not-easily-reached places far beneath the surface of what the reader can see and understand. It is this frame of reference—however flawed, failed, or imperfect—that gives the characters a context in which we can begin to accept, understand, and grapple for their ultimate depths.
This brings us to the second element which makes Wuthering Heights such productive fodder for interpretation: the characters. In a story that is told at one, two, sometimes three removes, Brontë’s characters are not at all remote. Brontë brings a depth of anguish to the characters and engages our compassion no matter how unflattering and biased the gaze through which we see them. This is nowhere as gorgeously epitomized as in the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, with whom lays the broken heart of Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff’s vehemence, his grief and naked want, Catherine’s selfishness, her strain and struggle against the confines of her life—these things are rendered so honestly and so rawly in a way that appealed to me despite, sometimes because of, their deep abiding wrongness. Wuthering Heights is not just a story about a “toxic” romantic attachment between two deeply broken and detestable characters. In fact, to argue the degree to which Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship was “toxic” or “problematic” seems less relevant to me than the incontrovertible fact that in a world that would not let them be whole, Catherine and Heathcliff lent meaning to each other. To me, this is where the simple truth of Wuthering Heights lies: in Catherine and Heathcliff's longing to be recognized by each other in a way that defies and transcends “separation,” and in the subsequent void and loss they suffer when one is intolerably deprived of the other.
Wuthering Heights returns over and over to this theme of identity through the other, the desire to be defined in terms of an “existence… beyond” our “contained” selves. For Catherine and Heathcliff, their very sense of “self” was sustained through the bond of devotion they forged between them in childhood, back when they were flashing with youth and magic and hunger, and their passion for each other has always illuminated the gap between who they longed to be, and who they actually were. Invoking Heathcliff, Catherine confesses to Nelly at one point that “He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” In this way, Wuthering Heights is so truthful about what it means to be human: to desire to be known by another as intimately, as completely, as one knows their own image in a mirror, to love and despise and long for and tire of each other because it is a much merciful fate than a lifetime of emptiness, silence, and absence.
Under this light, it is easy to understand Heathcliff’s and Catherine’s unraveling, and in understanding, to love and pity them. We understand that in losing Heathcliff, Catherine lost her life, and in losing her, Heathcliff lost himself. All the proofs of passion, all the crawling devotions that sustained him in youth have yielded to nothingness, and somewhere inside Heathcliff a dam has broken, with nothing in its stead to stave off the madness of being alone, or to ward off the unpurged ghosts of a brutal past.
Through Heathcliff’s unraveling, Brontë lays a carefully layered, generational look at the reverberating effects of trauma and what it costs to give others so much power over us. Raised with the stigma of illegitimacy and of deviancy (and potentially of race, but that’s an essay for another day), and subjected to a childhood of casual abuse, name-calling and cruelty, Heathcliff spends the years following Catherine’s death trying to methodically reproduce his traumatic past, his experiences of degradation and loss, in others. Heathcliff, ultimately, does not just preserve the memory of Catherine, which he feels bound to, but rather transform it into something else, into a display of his wound in full.
It is impossible not to feel at once entranced and horrified and rocked by the horror of what Heathcliff becomes, not to ache with sympathy for a younger version of Heathcliff. But I found myself hurting more for Cathy, Hareton, and Linton, and the complex, many-generationed hatreds that twisted between them. Wuthering Heights paints one of the clearest portraits of generational trauma that I’ve ever read. Brontë's use of intimate domestic spaces as prison, her disfiguring of family into a site for violence, evil, and struggle, and her deliberate re-creation of past trauma in the second generation—is masterful. The result is a novel that understands so thoroughly, so completely, and with bone-deep care that the scars inflicted by childhood abuse, by trauma, by the generational inheritance of atrocious memory, do not just fade away; they stay and linger and fester until we all become a casualty of each other.
That Wuthering Heights was conceived and published before the advent of psychology is absolutely wild to me. The novel is a profoundly haunting experience of a book, one that I am sure will dog my thoughts for a very, very long time....more
The Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplineThe Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplined modes of thinking and unexpected forms of agency. It does so by privileging silence, refusal, indeterminacy, and a certain infidelity to form and genre; but also by thinking in terms of collectivities and communal traditions instead of the singular, all-obliterating experience of the “I”—or, at least, with an acute sense of its difficulties.
The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in the US as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The memoir begins with the injunction, from mother to daughter, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” which immediately oxidizes into betrayal when Kingston subsequently reveals the content of her mother’s words. The story Kingston is offered is a cautionary tale that rises out through layers and layers of silence: an adulterous “no-name aunt” who is punished for transgressing her community’s sexual norms by being treated as a ghost, “as if she had never been born.” It’s an intense beginning that suggests something of the weight of trauma and loss that shapes the narrative on the pages, and it is enough to press the breath from your lungs. What follows is an internal journey that leads to an equally terrifying sense of having to stand down a hostile world that holds certain lives so cheaply.
Maxine Hong Kingston tracks the processes of self-creation and self-understanding through the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) territories of silence, erasure, misremembrance, rupture, and violence. Her coming of age is cobbled together through myth and imagination. She does more than reproduce the material facts of her life: she expands her life into a mythology more enduring and more substantial than the impoverished existence scripted for her, interconnecting her story to deep, perennial lineages that echo endlessly into the present. She shifts perspective, slips from the indicative to the subjunctive, collapses space and time: she is the "no-name" slave woman, the filial daughter, the sword-bearing warrior Fa Mu Lan, the poetess Ts’ai Yen shoring up the narrative of her life through song. In this surplus, Kingston locates an essential agency that cannot be reduced to nothingness. She uses all herself up in a desperate longing for a language that might hold her. And she refuses annihilation.
At the heart of this narrative is the author’s struggle to negotiate her subject position as a woman, on the one hand, and her dual identity as both Chinese and American, two poles laboring for mastery in her life, warping her into a permanent outsider. In this delicate negotiation, Kingston grapples with the nature of articulation itself. Throughout the book, one senses a real strain to criticize the subjugation of women and the culture of silencing that is transmuted into her, without concealing and conceding to the forces of stereotype. This effort does not always succeed, and the memoir sometimes shades into contemptuous generalizations. But this is perhaps expected: few stories, particularly ones as vulnerable as this, can be dichotomized into a neat narrative of either transgression or nothing at all. Kingston depicts the inner workings of her immigrant family as a seething cauldron of anger, resentments, misrecognition, and difficult intimacies in the wake of uprooting and displacement. Beneath this turbulent surface, however, lurks a real sense of love and caretaking, and a longing to express the fullness and earned integrity of her mother, her aunt, all the indomitable women in her life, real or otherwise—and, of course, herself. I think of Kingston’s memory of her mother cutting her tongue, an act of violence unfathomable to Kingston who “felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry.” Yet, when she asks her mother about it, the answer is not what she expects: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language.” The act of violation becomes an imperfect expression of love.
In this sense, The Woman Warrior reflects the porous borders between knowing and unknowing, inside and outside, betrayal and devotion, love and disillusionment. It’s a book, in other words, about translation. Maxine Hong Kingston moves through awful and tender silences, reads between the lines, attends to the gaps in the narrative, and speculates when necessary. In the process, she repeatedly loses sight of herself, of her mother, of the past, and then regains it, only to lose it again. Everywhere, the very possibility of translation cannot be made inseparable from its impossibility.
I loved this book for its gestures of refusal, its willingness to be against the grain and in and alongside the contradictions of becoming one’s self and being in community with others. The Woman Warrior holds an underlying sadness that leashes into the words like rainwater through roots. And a kind of fury too—the fury of “a first daughter of a first daughter”—still chafing against the leash of a mind too accustomed to good behavior. It all rather “translates well.”...more
Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine being part of a society that asks, indiscriminately, each and every single individual: “what do you want?” aClose your eyes for a moment, and imagine being part of a society that asks, indiscriminately, each and every single individual: “what do you want?” and “how can we help?” and “you don’t have to be afraid—there’s all the time in the world for you to find out what you want”.
Tell me—did you allow that vision to build itself in your imagination, to grow, stretch wings, and soar in your mind? Or did it melt into nothingness before you could completely grasp it?
This is Drones to Ploughshares’s catalytic inquiry, the question that leaves you teetering on the edge of the abyss: are we capable of imagining a world in which we can look at each other with the entirety of our past—to take account of each other’s history in an embrace of profound knowing, of complete acceptance—and imagine the future, and in that imagining, begin to propel our bodies towards it?
Somewhere between my first and third read, I realized—abruptly, like a door opening in an empty house—that I started thinking about the story as some kind of utopian hope of inimitable loveliness. I run my eyes over the words “A chance to stay. A chance to help. A chance to be [one’s] self without fear” in a way that made me feel utterly blank. I couldn’t stretch my imagination far enough to see that future, to grab hold of it, and the formlessness was terrifying. What is this world we made, I thought, that for a moment I couldn’t look at myself in the context of this story and in the context of the larger power structures I live within, and imagine something so modest as to live without fear?
It was a strain of pessimism that I’ve never considered part of my emotional vocabulary, and I can’t tell you, precisely, when it has begun to impinge upon my imagination: this absence of hope, this void, this abject longing for something that feels, more and more everyday, so distant as to be completely unattainable. Something so unimaginable even my mind couldn’t touch its edges.
Drones to Ploughshares—a short story about a surveillance drone whose entire world is brought to a halt and then to vivid, mind-bending life by a simple invitation—managed more forcibly than anything I've ever read, and in so few words, to make visible the limitations of my own imagination, and to break them in the same breath. It made me confront that the incapacity to imagine is a form of violence, a violence more pronounced than the tyrannies of the powerful who hate us. Because imagination is the first act of survival, and to surrender your imagination is to surrender your life.
When you read Drones to Ploughshares—this beautiful, earnest, tender, defiant story—I want you to remember: this is no utopia. It is not even a dream. This is hope—hope of generosity, of kindness, of togetherness, of freedom—and it will tear something inside you.
There’s a joy at once fierce and quiet in feeling profoundly rearranged by your encounter with a book. In understanding, with certainty, in the deep cThere’s a joy at once fierce and quiet in feeling profoundly rearranged by your encounter with a book. In understanding, with certainty, in the deep core of your heart, that the you who first entered this book exists at a distance of several hundred pages: you’re not the same person, you’ve changed—been changed—in ways you cannot explain but which you will always carry with you. I might have finished this book but I feel like it’s only just begun me.
Man’s Search for Meaning weaves together compelling personal narrative and profound scientific inquiry into a short volume that is luminous, insightful, and deeply empowering. Frankl provides us with an extraordinary investigation into his doctrine of Logotherapy, a branch of therapy that believes that “the primary motivational force” of a human being is the striving to find a meaning in his life.
From the outset, Frankl makes it clear that he does not bring to this inquiry solely the tools of a scientist, but even more importantly, the weight of first-hand lived experience. The first part of this book recounts, intimately and horribly, Frankl’s experiences as a Jewish detainee in several Nazi concentration camps, illuminating in the process the key concepts of Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy.
It is impossible to hide one’s wince reading this section. Frankl’s account is unsparing, giving an unflinching testimonial of humanity’s violence against itself, of “the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners,” of what it means to survive through unimaginable horror in places where one’s definition of suffering is deranged, every second, into entirely new meanings. (In a particularly haunting instance, Frankl remembers how he abruptly stopped himself from shaking a fellow inmate out of a fearful nightmare he was having because “no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”) To cushion himself against the shock and constant oppression of terror, Frankl remembers his wife’s face and the stolen manuscript containing his life’s work and feels empowered to survive long enough to fulfill his twin needs of seeing his wife and re-writing his manuscript. Frankl’s beloved and unwritten manuscript become, in other words, the marginal references for the survival of his self.
Frankl survives to speak the full agenda and unequivocal goal of his therapeutic doctrine— Logotherapy—which is explained and explored in the second part of this book. Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy, when reduced to its simplest form, is clear, precise, and easy to both grasp and appreciate: that “life holds meaning under any condition,” therefore the purpose of Logotherapy is for one to be “confronted with, reoriented towards the meaning of his life.” From this deceptive simplicity, however, arises a practice of meaning-making that is complex, challenging, unresolved, and ongoing.
Throughout the book, Frankl insists upon the plural, specific, and shifting nature of the meaning of one’s life—as opposed to a unified, abstract, and generalized understanding of meaning-making. In other words, it is not so much a man’s search for a meaning, but for a multitude of meanings: a constantly changing constellation of potentialities, as opposed to a fixed quantity of traits. In this book, Frankl invites us to work out the vocabularies of our unwieldy selves, to make our own meaning(s) and walk through them. For him, this exercise is fraught with tension—the tension “between what one has already achieved and what one should become”—because tension is not only inevitable in the process of meaning-making—it is also “normal and healthy.” Frankl refuses to see this contradiction as conflicting: in his rendering, it is precisely this tension that prevents us from being embedded in misery and a freezing boredom. It is an amulet that protects us against the void that threatens to devour our selves, what Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.”
Frankl identifies this void as a primary aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that precludes us from finding meaning in life and stresses how important it is to resist this void and to struggle openly and fiercely against it. To this end, Frankl delineates three broad avenues through which one might find meaning(s) “at any given moment”. The first is through personal achievement or a good deed. The second is through the embrace of beauty, culture, and nature and/or personal encounters with one another, in which we grapple for each other’s depths and love each other. The last one is through personal suffering.
Let me immediately admit that I was very resistant, for several pages, to this last point: to the idea that suffering enobles us, that our life and the meaning of it is enlivened by it somehow. But Frankl, as it turns out, has anticipated this objection and hastens to explain that he isn’t making a case for suffering as something indispensable for or dissociable from the practice of meaning-making—that suffering is, to put it differently, a requisite for leading a meaningful life—but that meaning can come, not from suffering, but despite the abundance of it. It is difficult not to feel persuaded, and even liberated by this: the idea that not only can we survive through our suffering, but that we can live thoroughly within it. That even in the worst types of circumstances, through a rigorous and indefatigable striving for meaning, one can be transformed.
Here, Frankl brings us directly and inevitably against the question of how. How does one give meaning to one’s suffering when one’s subject, in their everyday life, to larger systemic forces that feel impossible to overcome? Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy does not deny that there are circumstances beyond our control, but it insists that there is one thing that we are able to control, which is “the way(s) in which we respond to (them).” What is available in the search for meaning, in other words, is the deepest kind of freedom. “It is not freedom from conditions,” to borrow Frankl’s words, “but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.” The freedom one is born with, which is as inextricable from one’s self as a strand of DNA. The freedom to imagine an elsewhere and an otherwise, or as Frankl puts it, to imagine a present that is both past and future: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” The principle of responsibleness is therefore integral to Frankl’s vision of freedom: the pursuit of meaning has the immense power to heal the fissures that suffering makes on the imagination—but only if we can first extend our imagination to articulate what we are responsible for.
In its most radical moments, Man’ Search for Meaning speaks deeply to the human desire to mediate rupture and powerlessness and create ourselves through annihilation. It’s a testament to how humans have always evolved creative responses to rupture, crisis, and fissure, and how we manage to endure at the center of even the most unendurable atrocities. This is not a book one comes to for answers—Logotherapy is, in Frankl’s own words, “neither preaching nor teaching”—but rather, a book that one can approach as a way of being and thinking, as a way of conceiving of one’s self and the world, as something to hold consciously at the center of one’s practice. Ultimately, what Man’s Search for Meaning does best is posit a set of questions that become a ferocious call to action: to always strive for meaning—and to hunt for it when it’s necessary—even in a world that seems to perpetually corrode our freedom....more
How do you talk about a book that has completely obliterated your capacity for language?
For days after I finished reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant,How do you talk about a book that has completely obliterated your capacity for language?
For days after I finished reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, I searched in some cobwebbed closet of my memory for words that might convey the acuity of my feeling, groping in the dark for any pieces of disused language that might help me make sense of my reading experience—but my arms, each time, closed on nothing.
I could have cried with my frustration. Truly. Instead, I just quietly shelved The Traitor Baru Cormorant under “to-review” and tried disappearing into other books. In other words, I ran away. I did not want to allow any thoughts of Baru, Tain Hu, and the whole ugly tangle of their story to enter my mind. But that story occupied the space of an itch there, the burned edge of something unfinished. I would be mid-meal, fork halfway to my mouth, and some mysterious tug at the center of my chest—like a rope gone taut—would stir me from stillness and send me back to the pages of this book. I can’t tell you how long I would just sit there, trailing my fingers under the passages I’d underlined, rereading them out loud, absorbing them even as they absorbed me. All the places in the margins where I had scribbled my thoughts:
this. the feeling of insolvable discontinuity—you are in two places, home in neither. perpetual exile, perpetual fragmentation
but who can blame her? so much of surviving empire is keeping your teeth gritted around the shape of your name to hide the scream of rage at the base of your throat. so much of survival is hiding behind a perfectly fitted mask of specious conformity
I can't think the word "conformity" without seeing "complicity"
she wants to belong to empire and still belong to herself and it’s such an offensive impossibility. when the mask is lifted, what's going to be left of her, for salvage?
the thing that fucks me up so thoroughly is that very few things here can be completely crystallized into ‘right/wrong’, ‘evil/virtue’, 'hero/villain'—but how do you even begin to account for the rest of it? what about the people who are grist in the gears of that merciless machine (making hideous decisions, committing hideous injustices) because they’re just trying not to be devoured?
survival but only in its darkest rudiment—that’s one of the obscenities of empire
the price of liberation has been, historically, nothing short than one's very humanity
at the bottom of everything, this is what it comes down to: can she ever undo empire from her blood? or has it already stained her indelibly?
“some things are not worth being within”—I need to remember this
and on several pages, a line from A Memory Called Empire which has lived in my head for so long and still takes up so much space: “nothing empire touches remains itself.”
I think I was simply, deplorably unprepared for the sheer gravity of this novel. I knew it would be intense, but incorrectly anticipated how much it would affect me. I didn’t expect it to gut me so thoroughly of words, and to get into me in ways that very few things ever have, and I think it’s so hard to talk about it, even now, because it’s too close to the skin. I know, objectively, that if I were to try hard enough I can lay hands on some words to describe the author’s mastery of plot, the twisting loops of bright narrative threads that he weaves into a treacherous tapestry, the mesmerizing complexity of the characters, the heart-stopping clarity of the prose, the finely drawn emotional and thematic sketches. But the words, I know, will fall inevitably short. They will be a pale phantom of the inarticulate enormity of what this book did to me—and more unforgivably, perhaps, the words would be a way to circumvent the harder, truer thing.
Reading books about empire and colonialism and what it means to be seized in those sharpened teeth—the seduction and horror and inexorability of it—have a way of cutting me open. I cannot read them without breaking open and pouring deeply personal pain on the table, like a spilled glass of wine. Maybe it’s a matter of resonance—when the story becomes an echoing place into which you can cast a stone and hear reverberations of your own historical grief. Feel the whole meaning of your life in that forlorn echo. But I’m also thinking words like reflection, refocusing. When the story asks—forces—you to consider your own face in its mirror, to confront yourself in the depths of its darkness. And here, a shimmer of sorts might occur: the sudden terrible thought that you’ve missed some fundamental fragment of your reflection—or some new fragment has revealed itself when you were not looking. I think also: unlocking, transformation—when a story continues inside of you long after you’ve turned the last page, and in immeasurable increments, begins to shift something in you, unsealing some previously hidden dimension, until it changes you so completely.
Maybe I'm still circumventing the harder, truer thing.
Whatever strange alchemy these books seem to possess—The Traitor Baru Cormorant has now gone into my brain, and into my heart, burrowing so deep; I suspect I might never peel it off me....more
I am incapable of reading anything Sofia Samatar writes without the tumbling headlong desire to put my whole body into her words, to dissolve into theI am incapable of reading anything Sofia Samatar writes without the tumbling headlong desire to put my whole body into her words, to dissolve into them like salt into the waves, to be subsumed so completely into something so aching and grieving and beautiful.
I spent 6 long months reading this short-story collection, because the language is so sensuous, so rich and profuse with feeling I didn’t want to miss a second of it. I wanted to carry each word in my mouth and savor it for hours like an exquisite unfamiliar delicacy. And because I would go back routinely to my favorite stories and reread passages several times to fix them into my memory. “Walkdog” broke me open in ways I did not anticipate. “Olimpia’s Ghost” made me long for poetry in an absurdly intense way. “The Red Thread” left me drunk with melancholy, reciting the words “Belonging, Fox. It hurts” until they curdled in my mouth. “Meet me in Iram” and “Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Cold” are the stories that spoke of the things that haunt me the most, and the ones my thoughts often circled around, full of ghosts and cities and land and absence and belonging.
To read a Sofia Samatar story is to fill your whole world with it and to feel inconsolably bereft once you depart from it. Though, I suspect, it is impossible to depart from her stories—not completely anyway, not all the way....more
This week had been so unbearably hideous, but I read the letter nestled tenderly at the end of this short story in a dim and lonely launderette, at 7aThis week had been so unbearably hideous, but I read the letter nestled tenderly at the end of this short story in a dim and lonely launderette, at 7am in the morning, delirious with insomnia and sick at heart, and it felt like being seen, like being known, like being loved. I read it once, twice, thrice, more times than I can comfortably confess, and I cried because it was such a relief to feel anything at all—let alone everything.
This book tore me end to end with the kind of awed heartache I've only ever felt before in the presence of poetry and I don't know what to do with howThis book tore me end to end with the kind of awed heartache I've only ever felt before in the presence of poetry and I don't know what to do with how much I feel, or where to put it in my heart. ...more
Giovanni’s Room is a gut-punch of a book. Beautiful, elegant, and eloquent, but a gut-punch nonetheless. There is no preparing anyone for the sheer inGiovanni’s Room is a gut-punch of a book. Beautiful, elegant, and eloquent, but a gut-punch nonetheless. There is no preparing anyone for the sheer inexorable force of Baldwin’s language. It burrows into you, reaches deep down into your belly and tightens a fist around it. To read Baldwin’s words is to be ambushed by a grief both personal and historical.
This is a story about what it means to live in a world that demands our death and seeing no way out of it. A world that compresses the beautiful capaciousness of our lives into tragic biographies of violence and loss then punishes us for the basic desire to stay alive. It’s a tragic tale of queerness, a story about being queer and in denial and wrestling every day from the webbings of a shame that stains everything we love and care about. The tragedy is that “Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.” If there is hope to be found, it must be carried through these words and into the world....more
It's been a while since I've read a book that was so much my type.
Everything about The Goblin Emperor sung to me: from the clarity of its prose, to itIt's been a while since I've read a book that was so much my type.
Everything about The Goblin Emperor sung to me: from the clarity of its prose, to its delicate internecine politics, to its understatedly gorgeous and thoughtful world-building, to the way it deals, very achingly, with the terrible buried wounds of childhood abuse, the deep scouring griefs of unbelonging, and that quiet, painful pang of recognition when you read “it was the first time in his life Maia had been surrounded by people who were like him.” And of course, Maia, because if there's anything that wraps its fingers through my heart strings and pulls, it's a devastatingly gentle-hearted character who, despite being weaned on so much malice and bitterness and enduring the most gratuitous and unutterable of cruelties, chooses not to harden his heart into steel and meet hate with hate, but to embark upon the path of compassion and kindness instead.
All in all, I loved this book so unreservedly. Something about it pulled me tenderly towards the feeling of being 13 and hurrying back home from school, alight with a ferocious giddiness and determined to erase myself, and the whole world around me, into a fantastical story. I owe a great debt of gratitude for Katherine Addison for giving me that moment....more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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