Stuff I read in 2020
At the beginning of this year I set a goal of reading a book a week and even made an elaborate spreadsheet to track my reading. For the third year in a row I did not meet my goal, though I was doing well until the pandemic hit and I forgot how to read books. I also continued tracking articles I read in my Pocket app, and compiled some of my favorites below. Please enjoy the third installment of “stuff I read”…
Books
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that “doing nothing” — in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen — entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Severance by Ling Ma
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books 1–5 by Ann Brashares
- Over the past year I’ve thought a lot about a concept that I call romantic supremacy, the widely-held idea that one day, you should find a romantic partner to build a life with, and this relationship should and will be more important than your other relationships, and always prioritized above them. Basically, I have like ten best friends and I think it would be amazing to build a life around them and it seems like most people think that this is crazy and also that there are few examples of this in popular culture. Enter the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, an early-2000s series of YA novels about four girls who meet as babies and grow up together, becoming best friends. They maintain their friendships through deaths in their families, serious relationships, time apart during summers and in college, struggles with mental illness, and other challenges that could easily tear them apart, and they never take their relationships for granted: there is a sense of commitment between them, not unlike the type of commitment that’s normalized in a romantic partnership. I was moved to tears multiple times as I reread these books at age 25, at least ten years after I first was introduced to them as a teenager. Tibby, Bee, Lena and Carmen love each other SO much and understand each other so well and go to such great lengths to be a part of each other’s lives, and it is beautiful to witness. Books written for young adults, especially young women, are frequently overlooked, but there is something radical about Ann Brashares’ portrayal of friendship.
How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
- I’m convinced
Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman
[W]e currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make us and others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as a part of life, as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility.
The Last Summer of You and Me by Ann Brashares
- I read this mediocre romance novel every time I travel because I have it on my Kindle and it’s totally brainless. I guess it’s better than the alternative (texting)
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
- It’s worse than you think
Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner
Articles
Some articles I loved reading this year. Some are from 2020 and some aren’t.
Andrea Long Chu watches Sex and the City:
It’s a curious thing that heterosexuality, in a show that purports to be taking it into the twenty-first century, doesn’t actually work without 24/7 technical support. It is a curiouser thing that, thanks in part to Sex and the City itself, teams of women across America are convinced to provide this technical support for free. Maybe there’s some kind of feedback loop at work here: heterosexuality forbids you from being a dyke, then makes you gay for your girlfriends. I’m hardly convinced that any of our protagonists actually like men; what they do seem to like is liking men, because empirically speaking, liking men translates, almost all of the time, into being with women: touching their hair, rubbing their shoulders, sharing their feelings. One would be forgiven for assuming that, in a world such as this, the easiest way to be gay is just to be straight, with the confidence that Mr. Right, like Christ, or Godot, is always coming but never comes. I know many women to whom this applies. They, too, are always coming. They, too, never come.
I could not believe how much happier I was now that I had Merle in my life. Merely by agreeing to feed her and dispose of her waste, I had opened a portal to a pure, white-light joy that cut through all miseries, personal and structural. We walked and walked, mostly at night, over the bridge, around the town, over the other bridge, in the cool dark. Mere errands became ecstatic experiences because she was with me. “We are together,” I liked to exclaim to her reflection in my rearview mirror. “We are alive, and we are together!” My life was no longer a disaster. It was instead the miracle that had landed this creature in my back seat. I don’t want to say that Merle made me happy, but she made me stop wishing I was dead.
I’ve never felt that angry. When I say: “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood” — that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a speech. When I wrote it, I thought, OK, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to speak in the United Nations General Assembly, and I need to make the most out of it. So that’s what I did, and I let emotions take control, so to speak. But I’m actually never angry. I can’t remember the last time I was angry.
My friend Maha Ahmed’s fantastic roundtable on fact-checking in journalism:
[Mother Jones] ran a feature last issue on Oakland’s Ceasefire program, which at least on paper is a joint effort between the Oakland Police Department and Oakland residents to reduce violence. I thought there was a clear underlying premise — policing is reformable, whether or not this program is doing it effectively — that we could present, but had to interrogate explicitly. Because what we’re saying by commissioning the story at all is that police-based community safety efforts are worth discussing on a practical level. And that meant bringing in more sources, conducting more interviews, adding more evidence, taking a lot of stands on a paragraph-by-paragraph level about whether we had a fair range of perspectives.
One thing this catastrophe is teaching us is that, in a pandemic, no one is well — and that thus far the rules of the pandemic are simply the rules of capitalism, accelerated. Which means that if we are going to confront this crisis adequately, we will have to insist that we are all sick — and not just in this moment of emergency, as Joe Biden would have us believe.
That night, I had an odd realization: Some of the greatest romances of my life have been friendships. And these friendships have been, in many ways, more mysterious than erotic love: more subtle, less selfish, more attuned to kindness.
The two experiences — coming out, learning to swim — kept braiding together, a second adolescence, and then a third. I would arrive to swim class awkward and jittery, nervously cracking jokes as soon as I got in sight of the water, babbling as if I were in front of a crush; I’d leave feeling on top of the world or six feet deep in it, my moods shifty and sudden. I cried random tears of happiness, disorientation, relief. Water would get into my nose, and I’d feel like a failure; I’d survive a jump into the deep end and feel ecstasy. At times, I dreaded going to class with the same angst as having to ask a girl on a date. I felt gawky and unsure and annoyed and insecure and thrilled and elated and confused and strong and brilliant and wondrous all at once. I was performing miracles every day.
… I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to think about this, because it is a very startling thing to be my age — I’m sixty-nine — and to have something happen that doesn’t remind you of anything else.
30,000 beautifully written words that took me two hours to read and filled me with rage and sorrow
Legal scholar Cheryl L. Harris, in her very important text “Whiteness as Property,” argues that the ultimate property in society is whiteness. And for many white folks, especially in this country in 2020, [whiteness] may be the only property they own. Part of why so many have come out to the street this time is because they realize that the wages of whiteness have gotten really low. It’s important to understand that whiteness and property are inextricable from each other: Without one there cannot be the other. We tend to think of property as tangible things or commodities, but it also includes rights, protections, and customs of possession passed down and ratified through law. Whiteness emerges as the race of people who are neither Indigenous nor enslavable — national identities are increasingly collapsed around the distinctions of slave/free and black/white.
So when black folks rise up and attack property, they’re also attacking whiteness. That is an understanding that goes back to the plantation: When you attack your status as property, you attack whiteness as domination over you.
Police officers always have been, and always will be, the servants of the rich. When the rich feel threatened, they demand more protection. Sometimes this means hiring more servants (“we need more cops on the beat!”), and sometimes this means arming those servants more heavily (“the gangsters have Molotov cocktails, so our cops need flamethrowers!”). But the elites’ message to their cop-servants is always the same: the streets are crawling with murderous, criminal scum. You (and your gun) are the only thing that stands between civilization and utter chaos.
Ball Don’t Lie by Jay Caspian Kang (the link won’t unfurl smh)
When I finished reading this it was all I thought about for at least 48 hours
Soon the season will resume, and the league will again test hundreds of its players, coaches, and staff for Covid-19 in a bubble located in Disney World. Those players will receive their results within twelve hours in a state where doctors, nurses, and elder care aides report twelve-to-fifteen-day waits on their diagnoses. Between games, the players will head back to their rooms, which are cleaned by a workforce made essential by the NBA’s need to play games. They will eat food cooked by another, similar group of workers, none of whom are within the bubble or have access to the same testing capacity. The vast majority of those workers will be Black or Latino. This is also a form of “systemic racism,” but it’s one that the usually smooth, frictionless politics shared between the NBA, its players, and its fans will never acknowledge because it goes beyond the abstract desire for white people to understand Black people, and speaks, instead, to the ritual exploitation that benefits — and damns — us all.
But while I find the illness harrowing, she finds it tedious, yet clarifying: “Being sick is boring. All I do is sleep, drink water, sometimes juice. Lie in bed for a day, and then another one. Take a steam shower and lean against the wall so I don’t collapse. But I am not bored, as every moment has meaning. My purpose is infinitely clear: to get well.”
