Reading Log & Comments (2019)

This is the 2019 Reading Log. Here is the linked 2020 Reading Log.
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"The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows."

      – Stephen King

When I was a kid, I read as many Stephen King/Richard Bachman books as I could haul from the library, steal from my mom's room, and pay for at the bookstore. I read his words at the dinner table, spooning them in around bites, and I admit, I read him on the toilet, too. I flipped pages by flashlight past bedtime on school nights. Summer vacation at the beach, I read so long and so hard I turned purple on the sand.

Of course, I was reading long before I discovered Stephen King, but it's him I most often think of when I'm reaching for my next read. Every time I pick up a book, I experience the same hope I did when I was a kid: I want the story to transport me; I want to disappear.

Part of what I loved about reading when I was a kid was the sharing. My mom and I would often read the same books and discuss them afterwards. My sister and I both enjoyed horror and poetry, and we'd compare notes and spur each other to check out new authors. Now, as a an adult in a tech-heavy world, I figure it might be nice to share a little of what I'm reading. Maybe I'll inspire others to hit the library, buy a book (from an independent bookstore, please!), and take a few minutes or an afternoon to give back to themselves in the form of story. I might keep myself accountable to my beloved pastime, too.

December

The Empathy Exams: Essays. Leslie Jamison. (Graywolf Press, 2014).

"Empathy isn't just remembering to say that must really be hard--it's figuring out 
how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn't just 
listening, it's asking questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy 
requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you 
know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context 
that extends perpetually beyond what you can see...
Empathy means realizing no trauma has 
discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. 
Out of wounds and 
across boundaries."

I wanted to read this book years ago, but didn't. So I was glad when it jumped out at me while I was browsing the shelves at the library. While the book is indeed a collection of essays that all touch, or plunge, into subjects related to or worthy of empathy, the essays tend to wink at each other through the author's personal story, a narrative of her wounds that mostly rides sidecar until it's called forth in apt moments.

The first essay, from which the book takes its name, introduces readers to Leslie Jamison in her job as a medical actor, in which she acts out maladies that medical students must guess, and then evaluates their performance, including their affect, or ability to convey compassion. In an interesting twist, she also becomes a patient, and her boyfriend becomes the person she turns to for support and empathy. She winds up empathizing with her fictional roles and with the students. She also arrives at a deeper understanding of empathy, which turns out isn't so much as stepping into another person's shoes and imagining yourself in their situation, but in surrendering to their pain and their needs without putting on their pain or putting on your own (I think). 

Anyway, she takes this investigation of empathy into the remaining essays, which take readers to a Morgellons conference, to Mexico, to Nicaragua and Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, to the silver mines of Potosí, into television shows about intervention, on a gang tour in LA, to the Barkley Marathons, into pseudo sugar and sentimentality, to prison and West Virginia, into Frida Kahlo's life and Joan Didion's attempts to capture culture in grocery store aisles, to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, into documentaries about the West Memphis Three, and finally and most profoundly (IMHO) into the "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain," in which she explores the complexities around the wounds of women.

While Jamison's writing at times caused me to reach to the upper corners of my brain in an attempt to truly and fully understand her deep analyses, I didn't mind. Her insights and impeccable turns of phrase kept me collecting quotes and wishing I could synthesize literature, culture, and my own personal stories as adeptly as she does.

If I could only recommend a few essays from the book, I would recommend, in this order:

1. Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain
2. Morphology of the Hit
3. The Empathy Exams
4. Lost Boys

Those are the ones that resonate most with me, though the writing and revelations in all were brilliant, and the whole book is worthwhile reading.

November

The Faraway Nearby. Rebecca Solnit. (Viking, 2013)

"Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, 

rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water 

scooped from the sea and poured back into it..."

I was hunting for T Kira Madden's memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, at the local library when I saw Rebecca Solnit's name on a book spine, and having seen her name a lot lately, I decided I should see what she's all about.

It turns out, she's about a lot. And I like it. If I had to sum up the places Rebecca Solnit takes her readers in this book—I wouldn't. I'd just provide a list of vague spoilers in the form of keywords...

Apricots. Stories. The Thousand and One Nights. Mother. Abundance. Fairy Tale. Alzheimer's. Loss. Decomposition. Maps. Curses and their undoings. Power. Disguise. Allegory.

Moths

Mirrors. Jealousy. Rage. Place. Adventure.

drink

Ice. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Beauty. Destruction. Preservation. Heat. Cold. Light. Dark. Mary Wollstonecraft. Loneliness. Empathy. Death. Creation. Suffering.

the

Flight. Doors. Disappearing. Prophecy. Dreams. Books. Worlds. Pain. Rescue. Iceland. Dei ex machina. Intersections. Wolves. Skeletons. Poetry. Art. Library of Water. Wu Daozi. The Chronicles of Narnia.

tears

Breath. Carnivorous. Cannibal. Metamorphosis. Cooking. Time. Canning. Inheritance. Vanitas. Damp. Dry. Biopsy. Pero yo ya no soy yo, ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But I am no longer I, nor is my house still my house.

of

Wound. Che Guevera. Alberto Granado. The Motorcycle Diaries. Leprosy. Isolation. Colony. Injustice. Numbness. Touch. Rilke. Boundaries. Ginsberg. Georgia O'Keeffe. "From the faraway nearby." Robert Jay Lifton. "Miscarried repair." Farewell. Oath. Revolution. Asthma. Kindness.

sleeping

Knot. Ticking. Bomb. Cancer. Gifts. Money. Goodwill. Intensive Care. Baby. Tea. Tiles. Islands. Archipelago. Thread. Sutra. Surgery. Eulogy.

birds.

Unwound. Monks. Protest. Buddhacarita. Rupture. Crisis. Attachment. Compassion. Subhankar Banerjee. Arctic Dreams. The body as toxic waste. Polar bears.

Cupid & Psyche.

Breath. Volcanoes. Glacier melt. The Snow Queen. Weather. Stykkishólmur. Bestiary. Language. Starvation. Peace. Starfish.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

Flight. Strangers. Birds. Reykjavík. White nights. Labyrinth. Path. To be heard. To listen. Russian dolls. Identification.

Beauty and the Beast.

Ice. Shrinking house. Flesh sled. Melting. Peter Freuchen. Transgression. Communion. Sustenance. Skin. Skeleton Woman. Transfiguration. Survival. Drowning. Shamanism. Community. Feeding.

Who

Mirrors. Ekphrasis. Permanence. Ephemerality. Chess. Lipstick. War. Forgetting. Happiness. Slipping. Falling. Pronghorns. Forgiveness. Understanding. Balance.

hears

Apricots. Letting go. Wholeness. Charlie Musselwhite. Jessica McClure. A well. Singing. Addiction. Trauma. Suicide. The affective system. Figs. Julia Princep Jackson Duckworth. Virginia Stephens. Woolf. Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols. Interruption. Inspiration. Compunction. Compel. Openings. Emergence. Becoming. River. Stone. Dust.

your story?

October

I'll Be Gone In the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. Michelle McNamara. (Harper, 2018)

"If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn't just pain

but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else.

The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob

behind a door that never opens."

I picked up this book from the library upon a friend's recommendation and quickly learned that author Michelle McNamara died suddenly at the age of 46 before she could complete the book (a fellow GSK researcher provided some case details as McNamara's husband Patton Oswalt and her editor worked to finish the story). It saddened me to realize she wasn't alive to witness the Golden State Killer's capture in April 2018, two years after her death and a mere two months after the posthumous publication of her book, though she may be celebrating on a different plane.

I enjoyed feeling like an accomplice in McNamara's quest to solve the mystery of the Golden State Killer's identity. As I read, I pulled up Google maps, plugged in street names as I crossed them, and plotted the serial robber-rapist-killer's movements across California. I knew the answers to McNamara's (and my) questions had to be online, but I refrained from peeking until I'd finished the book.

The post-read investigation was extra intriguing. I got to compare McNamara's (and my) hypotheses with the information the police have gathered in the past year and a half since apprehending the GSK. It was interesting to see how the lack of connectivity between police departments, as well as institutional blind spots, contributed to the maintenance of the killer's anonymity. But it was also fascinating to see how wild were some of the theories proposed and yet how close McNamara came in her speculations.

The book doesn't require the GSK's capture or a pat ending. Its allure, at least for me, is McNamara's exploration of this particular darkness and her crime-writing style. I am as curious as she is about why stories like GSK's are so compelling. McNamara contests that the power is in the mystery, and she fantasizes about GSK's capture: "His power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name." But GSK has since been caught, and my drive to understand his behavior hasn't gone anywhere. His name doesn't tell me anything about his soul. His face is a human face.

I suppose my favorite part of reading this book was being immersed in McNamara's obsession as she expertly brought horrifying scenes to life, ran interviews, and ultimately chased this story through the back alleys of suburban neighborhoods, into countless boxes of fading reports, and across the pages of Internet forums rife with ramshackle theories and gut hunches. Readers who like true crime will enjoy this book as much as I do.

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The Skinned Bird: Essays. Chelsea Biondolillo. (Kernpunkt Press, 2019)

"Metaphors offer a comfortable distance from which to view many phenomena, 

a kind of protective shell. For example, if I say that my compulsive fleeing 

from one place to another, from unassuageable heartache to 

heartache-to-be, is like a swallow flying year after year, 

to and from Capistrano, it is so that I can 

find value in it, instead of shame."

A Portland friend recommended this book by Oregon author Chelsea Biondolillo just before I moved away from the Pacific NW, back to my childhood state of Pennsylvania. A couple months after I'd finished unpacking, she sent me her copy.

I immediately appreciated Biondolillo's relationship with metaphor. In her writing, I recognized my own way of understanding events in my life. Her paragraphs fill the pages like feathers, delicate and poetic, singular and to the point, overlapping, textured, blending, deftly shaping an entity of heart and bone. This is a book about relationship, with self and other. Biondolillo explores what it means to subsume desire to fit the flock and also what it means to fly alone, in the direction suggested by her own compass.

The book is intelligent, experimental, and honest. I didn't read it like I'd read Stephen King. It is not meant to be devoured in one sitting, or even two. And it requires the light of day and plenty of time to ruminate on its beautiful lines—"It was country-late: the air outside getting cool and damp and purple"—and its hard truths—"If we could predict all the ways in which we might one day fail ourselves and others, I'm not sure how many of us would want to get up the next day." I recommend it.

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Note: This log was begun October, 2019. It only includes books, not all of the wonderful literary magazines I like to read online and in print.