Category: Books

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Book: Palimpsest: Documents from A Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom

Palimpsest: Documents from A Korean Adoption
by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
published by Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal, Canada
2019

This is a beautiful, non-fiction graphic novel about an adopted Swede of Korean origin, her life experience as an adopted person, and the corruption and bureaucracy of the international adoption industry.

Drawn & Quarterly is a great publisher, and the excerpt of this book at their website drew me in. The story is charmingly illustrated, but the subject matter is serious. Who gets to decide what the narrative of adoption is? For international adoptions, why is the story always that heroic white people saved a child from their terrible relatives and/or homeland? Why are so many children who are not actually orphaned adopted out of their families and culture?

The narrator looks into her own family history, and it takes years of effort and abundant support from her friends and family to dig through layers of lies – constant lies, omissions, and half-truths – to learn the circumstances of her birth. She illustrates and narrates her experience wonderfully, and makes an excellent advocate for adoptees.

I had to double-check my understanding of the word palimpsest: it is a document that has been erased and written over, and so may have different layers of meaning. It’s a strange Greco-Latin word, and a fitting one for the identity layers adopted people experience.

~~~

I’ve had friends who have been adopted, and a colleague who made an international adoption. My adopted friends shared their perspectives about their adoptions with me, how they processed revelations about their origins, and their desires to eventually meet their genetic relatives. (They did!) Their views were the opposite of the adoptive parent colleague, who baselessly villainized his child’s anonymous birth mother to a degree that shocked me, but which fit into his desired heroic narrative. So much of what Ms. Sjöblom wrote made sense to me because of what my friends had shared, but her story should appeal to anyone who wants to know who they are and feel that they “belong.”

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Book: The Lover by Marguerite Duras

The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
translated from French into English by Barbara Bray
published by Pantheon Books, NY
1985

On the paths of the yard the shadows of the cinnamon-apple trees are inky black. The whole garden is still as marble. The house too – monumental, funereal. And my younger brother, who was walking beside me, now looks intently at the gate open on the empty road.

Note: This edition of Duras’ concise novel includes an introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston, who advises us to interpret the novel as autobiographical, which I might not have done otherwise. She also observes parallels with Duras’ screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour, which I’ve read, and her observations gave me insights about Duras’ life.

If there was a character limit to my remarks about reading this book, I would write something like: at-risk French girl in occupied Vietnam escapes her unhappy home by sleeping with a meek older man; a dire situation, beautifully described. Unluckily for you, I can write all the words I want!

Through a series of increasingly vivid memories that drift forward and back in time, Duras’ novel tells the story of an impoverished French teen in French-occupied (colonial) Vietnam, living with her deeply depressed mother, two brothers, and a her own developing awareness of mortality. (So FRENCH!)

Our unnamed character’s life is tenuous. She wears her mother’s old, threadbare clothes; the family struggles on her mother’s schoolmistress wages after her father’s unexpected death; a sense of doom hangs over the family; her mother not only falls frequently into immobile despair, but also spoils her sons while pressuring her daughter to make up for their failures.

Her escape: to get into the limousine of a nervous, fellow foreigner, but one who is not French: a wealthy Chinese man, entirely beholden to his father, but also inappropriately smitten at first sight of this inappropriately dressed, quite underaged teen.

The novel is often (but not always) a first person narration, centering the girl’s alienation from Vietnamese culture and her own (French) family; the alienation of remote colonial life; the constraints of poverty; the scarring, emotional tensions of her household; her self-enforced emotional distance from her unsuitable lover; the pain of her mother’s exploitation; and always – always always – a sense that everyone will die and all things must end.

The prose is visually rich and lightly punctuated as the narrator moves from awkward social interactions of German-occupied France in adulthood to afternoons of being fully absorbed by illicit sex in Vietnam; from invisibility to parental approval for all the wrong reasons; forward to deaths, and backward to youth. It starts as a novel, and winds up a vivid, non-linear series of beautifully described recollections.

It absorbed me completely, and I’m glad I read it.

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Books: Audiobooks that support your local bookshop

There are times when I want to read a book, there are times when I won’t do my chores if I have the option of a reading a book, and there are times when one of my neighbors shouts her conversations immediately outside one of my windows, distracting me from my reading. The solution to these awkward circumstances is: listening to an audiobook.

Audiobooks from megacorporations don’t support my beloved local bookshops, but Libro.fm does. Libro.fm sends a portion of my purchases to a specific local affiliate shop of my choosing. (I see you, Green Apple Books!) I recently signed on with them, and recommend their service, website, and app (<– referral link, if you are into that).

About Libro.fm Audiobooks
Libro.fm is the first audiobook company to directly support local bookstores.

Audiobooks aren’t a new idea: even in my childhood (geologic ages ago), there were books on record or audio cassette (now you know my age) that were like radio story programs. They relied entirely on dramatic readings and cool sound effects! There were also tapes I could play along with children’s books, with child-appropriate character acting, and a chime when it was time to turn the page, to give tired parents a break from reading the same story in dozens of voices YET AGAIN. (I still have songs from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and Jungle Book memorized… ) Current publishers have the author or other skilled voice actor read mainstream, contemporary books, either condensed or full (unabridged), in an up-to-date, relying-on-the-words way. I still love, purchase, and collect BOOKS, of course; audiobooks are just a nice way to enjoy a book once eye fatigue from work has set in. Audiobooks can be well-produced and enjoyable as an experience in their own way.

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Book: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

The Fifth Season
by N.K. Jemisin
published by Hachette
2015

It’s been a while since I read an expansive sciency, future/past work of fiction, so I am delighted to have found this book, the first in The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. There’s a lot of sciency stuff to geek out over, and I need to tell you just enough about it to tempt you, without spoiling anything about it.

In a future or alternative earth, humans and much other life on earth has nearly been wiped out by extreme seismic and volcanic activity. Periodic volcanic winters that last from years to decades have dramatically limited human habitation and survival, and people lead relatively simple lives while forever preparing for the next time ash blots out the sky. Civilizations have risen and fallen, over and over, scattering technology that no one remembers how to operate around the remaining large continent where people scrape by.

Some of the surviving humans have inexplicable skills in managing or controlling seismic activities. Those who can be trained and controlled by the dominant empire are exploited to minimize earthquakes for society, but are killed if they become too independent; those who aren’t controlled by the empire are killed by mobs, even if they are just children, due to superstition and fear surrounding their abilities.

The story follows the adventures of several individuals, but especially a woman who secretly has these seismic energy powers. She returns home to find the body of her murdered toddler, and pulls herself together just enough to begin a quest to avenge her son and rescue her daughter; this happens shortly after a major seismic event may have set off potential mass death across the earth again…

The characters, who are organized into three groups, are engaging and interesting enough that I got misty over what my favorites experienced; the societies we see are superstitious and nearly feudal, but the powers that trained seismic experts wield are advanced; there are subtle technologies that people can’t interpret as such; there are non-humans present that people likewise can’t interpret or perceive correctly; the many abandoned structures and mysteries of prior civilizations have me giddy with curiosity, even while people are almost completely disinterested for practical (if misguided) concerns about their immediate survival. And, as a multi-racial person, I am delighted with the descriptions of the characters, most of whom have brown skin of different shades, and kinky or curly hair. The fact that they have these characteristics is completely normal, as it should be.

This is an engaging, FUN, gloomy, interesting book! I recommend this book for other people who also have a go-bag ready for earthquakes, who generally object to empires, who wish people weren’t so suspicious of education, and who desperately want to know what the abandoned tech lying (or HOVERING ) around is for! I’m looking forward to the next two books in this trilogy.

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Book: Hunger by Roxane Gay

Good cover design! It also matches the color scheme of her essay book, Bad Feminist. Hooray for consistent designers!

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
by Roxane Gay
published by Harper Collins, New York
2017

Hunger is a remarkable memoir by Dr. Gay, whose essays I’ve always enjoyed. She is a child of Haitian immigrants; a sexual assault survivor; a university professor; a writer; and a six foot three inch woman who has to cope daily with the overt hostility of the designed physical environment toward larger people.

This memoir is as charming, thoughtful, and well-written as her other essays, but also deeply personal. She shares many private experiences, not only relating to the sexual assault that traumatized her and changed her relationship to her body, but also her struggles in managing the pressures of her parents, the decisions that were made for her by others about her future, her loneliness in school, difficult interpersonal relationships, the appeal of the Internet to communicate, and her path to teaching and writing.

Dr. Gay writes that her memoir was very difficult to create. It does contain many painful moments, told with her clear, direct, and elegant prose. I enjoyed the audio version of this book read by the author, and her voice is pleasing; the intimacy of the work in her voice is especially touching; while she won’t admit to bravery, the way she shares her life with honesty and vulnerability is moving and admirable. Her wry humor shines through in unexpected moments.

Portions of the book relate very much to the body she has created as armor against the traumas she has survived, and much of the press for the book when it came out focuses on this. I’ll include an excerpt printed by the UK Guardian on this topic, but know that this is just one of her themes.

Roxane Gay: ‘My body is a cage of my own making’

o tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? At my heaviest, I weighed 577lb, or over 41st, at 6ft 3in.

I felt a bit defensive about the decision to publish excerpts on this topic by the press and/or the publisher, but I think it supports a point Dr. Gay makes about large bodies being treated like public property by our society.

This is an excellent memoir, and I hope it was satisfying and cathartic to write it. I think it will be enjoyed by: anyone who already appreciates her essays; sexual assault survivors (and their loved ones); writers (and anyone else with a passion) who need reassurance that the path to a writing life (or a professorship) can be indirect and filled with detours; people who are trying to understand trauma; and anyone who enjoys a well-written, contemporary memoir.

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Book: No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh

Book cover with SHINY letters! Nicely designed.

No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
by Thich Nhat Hanh
published by Parallax Press, Berkeley, California
2014

I own and have read MANY books by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and talented author of many books on Zen Buddhism. I’ve seen him speak in an auditorium here in the Bay Area. No matter how many times I hear or read him, I find great clarity and some useful insights into Buddhist philosophy. While I joined a temple of a different Buddhist sect for several years and enjoyed meditating and studying with them, I return to TNH’s work frequently.

TNH’s work helps me be more thoughtful about living in the present moment, a key concept of Buddhist study. He writes about it many different ways in different books, but the key concepts always remain the same.

This particular book emphasizes that suffering of various sorts is a part of life, and that we need to acknowledge that. This isn’t some book about faking optimism, or always looking on the bright side of life [insert Monty Python song here]: it’s about admitting that our suffering is real, but not letting it consume us. (It’s refreshing to read this, when we know people who force optimism on us for their own comfort…) Discussions of how we compound our suffering by dwelling on particular misfortunes and berating ourselves over them ring very true, and can help us manage misfortune more thoughtfully, without tearing ourselves apart.

Like many of TNH’s other books, this has the main thematic writing plus a supplement with a different structure. This time, it is a sort of workshop to help us resolve conflicts with loved ones through being present and thoughtful about emotional pain. The words seem simple, but the approach is highly thoughtful, and presenting these concepts in such a clear fashion makes them less intimidating. Just the first step – telling someone dear to you who is in conflict with you that you are really THERE for them, fully present, that they have your full attention – this rings really true to me, and I can name times when that first step alone could have de-escalated difficult personal situations.

This is another thoughtful, easy to read, problem-solving book written in a calming, reasonable tone. I’m glad I picked it up.

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Book: Hokusai’s Landscapes, the Complete Series, by Sarah E. Thompson

What a great cover!

Hokusai’s Landscapes, the Complete Series
by Sarah E. Thompson
published by MFA Publications (The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
2019

Hokusai was a master of block printing, and he and his collaborators produced prints that extensively influenced the art world both within Japan and throughout Europe. This gorgeously produced hardcover book reproduces his famous collections, including the views of Mt. Fuji, famous bridges, and scenic waterfalls, along with gorgeous details and text that provides context for the locations the images are based on and explanations of the work frequently being performed in the scenes.

There are works dedicated to stops along historic pilgrimage trails, references to mountain-worship, works created to illustrate or allude to famous poems, and lovely blow-ups of details.

YES, he did more than one version of his famous wave!

YES, he did more than one version of Mt. Fuji in red light!

YES, he had a hazy, impractical idea of how large logs were sawn! But he really liked drawing that, and so you have to give him points for enthusiasm. He liked showing people at work generally, not just wealthy people lounging around, but people farming, gathering clams, washing fabric, and other ordinary tasks of daily working life. Even when someone fancy is present, there is always someone behind them, carrying their stuff!

I have multiple layers of interest in Hokusai’s work. I make prints of multiple types; I use Prussian Blue for much of my work (Prussian Blue is the color of cyanotypes!) ; I create some work in a series with grandiose names (I’ve got a set of acrylic ink & paint works in development since 2015 called One Thousand Abstract Thoughts, and the name may partly be Hokusai’s fault); and I am trying to understand how to document or commemorate specific places, or at least have a better grasp of how this was done prior to documentary photography.

I hadn’t seen all of the works in this collection before, and am thrilled to have it. The waterfalls and bridges are worth it – I’d seen so few of these!

Seeing more of his work organized in this way, I also can better distinguish what I like about Hokusai from other famous Japanese printmakers. Hokusai’s work has often appeared in collections / shows with other artists, including Hiroshige, who is similarly excellent but has a different compositional approach. (Hiroshige has more works that focus on specific details up-close, rather than these broad landscape and town scenes….)

This is a lovely book for fans who want to spend more time staring deeply into these well-designed and beautifully executed prints.

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Book: McSweeney’s Issue 54: The End of Trust

The End of Trust at the McSweeney’s Store

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 54: The End of Trust
published by McSweeney’s
2018

McSweeney’s first fully non-fiction issue had the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an advisor, and is so full of great writing that I ran out of sticky tabs.

Are you interested in surveillance capitalism and how we are going to survive it? McSweeney’s Issue 54 is for you! While it was published in 2018, it remains completely topical.

At the time I’m writing this, active dis- and misinformation campaigns from a variety of sources are hoping to influence the public in multiple countries to change their votes or behaviors with “stories” about the elections, the global pandemic, civil rights, race relations, protest voting, and other topics. These campaigns are using technology to inexpensively spread their messages, often through unwitting social media consumers, if not through individuals easily converted to new causes online. Meanwhile, a major social media platform is being criticized for secretly changing its algorithms to favor right-wing figureheads have been chummy with the company’s CEO. The manipulation had measurable, real financial impacts on sidelined news organizations, though the changes were hotly denied at the time. (You can read more here in Clara Jeffries’ Twitter Thread on this topic , which has some great links to other resources on this story.) There is no obvious path in this development to hold this platform accountable for its actions, or to keep it from giving resources to bad actors to spread misinformation.

There are companies using technology you enjoy to change your behavior, and the strange discomfort you feel about what you’ve shared with them (and their business partners, seen and unseen) is based on real concerns.

Issue 54 isn’t a compilation of the single-breach/oversight articles you’ve already read. This thoughtful collection of essays spans the technical AND the philosophical: the embrace of daily life surveillance by both “free” capitalist societies AND repressive regimes; the way data is used to maintain existing power structures, so majority communities tolerate surveillance at the expense of law-abiding minorities whose efforts for social justice are violently repressed; how individuals receiving any social services are forced to give up data about their families that the wealthy can keep to themselves; and what could happen if we reframe privacy from an individual choice to a community-wide asset, whether information is demanded by government authorities or corporate entities selling our data for profit.

This collection is SO THOUGHTFUL. In a world where people are programming their own biases into AI, it’s also quite urgent. I recommend this collection with great enthusiasm – and concern about where we think we’re going, versus where we actually seem to be going.

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Book: Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitarianism, Volume One from McSweeney’s Books

Link to SBAET, Volume One at the McSweeney’s Store

Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitariansim, Volume One
from McSweeney’s Books and 22 contributors
published by McSweeney’s Publishing
2018

This compact collection of heartfelt essays was compiled after the first year of DT’s presidency. Each essay concisely (in as few as two pages!) reflects the individual inspiration to vote of a range of writers, poets, and journalists.

Their inspirations and concerns are diversely progressive: calls for kindness, democracy over fascism, the potential of refugees and immigrants to achieve their dreams, the injustice of war, the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ liberation, the reclamation of language, the climate crisis, science, and more.

I used to think of collections like this as merely ‘preaching to the choir,’ but I now appreciate the sense of community and thoughtfulness they provide in a landscape in which perhaps 40% of the country believes in conspiracy theories and white supremacy.

(I was certain I have Volume Two, but it is small enough to be hiding in any number of caches of books around my home… If I can find it, I’m sure I’ll find some solace in it.)

A subtext to the essays, delivered directly or implied : DO YOUR PART TO MOVE US FORWARD. Real change won’t happen without you!

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Culture: National Novel Writing Month is nearly here

Someone made the mistake of saying they needed a hobby, and so I zealously promoted NaNoWriMo to them. Because: IT IS GREAT!

Do you want to write a first draft of a novel? In a month? As part of a socially-connected online community, with abundant daily encouragement? OF COURSE YOU DO!

NaNoWriMo

Yaaay, novel-writing!

I have four novellas from successful past NaNoWriMos, and while I’m trying to turn my attention to making photography books now, I’m still a zealot for sharing great experiences. Participating in, and successfully completing, a 50,000 word novel/la in a month is a GREAT experience!

It’s also surprising low pressure. When I was participating, the idea was that your first novel isn’t going to be your best, so let’s just get it done and out of the way without agonizing over it!

Also, 50,000 words divided over a 30 day month is just 1,667 words a day! You probably TEXT that (emoji aside)!

And the bragging rights! DO IT FOR THE BRAGGING RIGHTS!

I heartily recommend NaNoWriMo. Do it!

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