Readings for July 10, 2022

I’ve been working every day on my French translation project this summer, and I hit my first milestone, the halfway point, two weeks early! I celebrated by taking a day off to rest my wrist. (I’m handwriting the first draft.) But I really like the book, so I was eager to get back to it the next day.

Coincidentally, I also needed to start a new Bullet Journal because I was out of pages in the old one. So I’m trying to include notes on the translation as I work, as Ruth Ozeki suggests doing. She calls it a “process journal,” which I like. The trick for me is incorporating it into my routine; I keep forgetting to take the notes before or after doing the work.

Percival Everett, The Trees

Months ago, I put a hold on The Trees by Percival Everett at the library. When the ebook became available, I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted to read it, and I was reading something else, so I let the hold go. Then I was reminded of why I wanted to read it by another review, so I put another hold on it, and this time when it came around, I read it. What a ride.

I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s about lynching in America … and it’s funny. And it’s smart. And it’s a blazing page-turner. And it has an ending that I could talk about forever, but since the book has only been out since September 2021 — not even a year — that seems unfair.

I had not read any of Everett’s work before, but I can feel a tiny obsession coming on. This interview published by The Millions only makes me want to read more.

Svetlana Alexievitch on Russia, Ukraine, and Humanity

Jose Vergara interviewed Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievitch via Zoom for Literary Hub, and she brings such intelligence and perspective to a conflict that can be hard to comprehend. In this interview, as with all her work, she resists the simple, easy answer and wrestles instead with the complexity of being human.

The human secret—this is just my hypothesis—has been replaced by information, and the secret of life has nothing to do with this information. The secret of life is something more complex, something which cannot be understood; we can just dance around it, look, wonder, but not replace it with this information, with kilobytes, gigabytes. I think technology, on the one hand, has made our world more complex. On the other hand, it has also made it simpler intellectually.

The Book Hermit

Apparently, hikers in China stumbled across a middle-aged man in a cave, contentedly reading, taking notes, and smoking cigarettes. The people who found him said that his living conditions were bad, but that he seemed to have chosen to live there so as not to be disturbed. I gave up smoking years and years ago, and yet …

In These Troubled Times

Our attention is pulled in a different direction with every new law, new ruling, new shooting, new weather event, and on and on and on. Where do we put our energy? Our money? Our time? What do we even have to give after the last few years of disease and disaster?

So I’m sharing a little thing that makes me happy. Several years ago, my friend Mel Brittner Wells started a swimsuit company with androgynous, ’20s-style designs that work for a variety of bodies, no matter their age or gender. Beefcake Swimwear is often given shout-outs in fashion media, but this Teen Vogue interview with Mel and other gender-affirming fashion business owners is particularly well done. (Almost everything Teen Vogue does is great, really. Being a teen is not required for reading it.)

So this one is not a book, but it is a bright spot, and their suits pair nicely with any beach read you like, especially the Bee’s Knees print. (I receive not one dime from Beefcake for saying how great they are. Oh! I did ship suits one day while Mel was out of town, and she paid me for my labor. So if you ordered a Beefcake suit in, like, 2018, I may have put the label on the packaging and walked it to the post office.)

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