January Update: Oh right, I have a reading syllabus

This month I didn’t read any books that fit any of the criteria below. I started to read Wicked, which is good (at least the 50 or so pages I’ve read are good) but couldn’t hold my interest for long stretches. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it, I just wasn’t reading it. Every time I picked it up, I felt like there was something else I was supposed to be reading.  I did finish three books, however, A Wrinkle in Time, Hope in the Dark, and Trainwreck. The first two deal, both literally and figuratively, with beating back the darkness. The last is a reminder of how little room to act out women are allowed in our society–as if I needed the reminder.

I missed A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid. I can’t remember a teacher assigning it or a friend reading it around me or a librarian recommending it. I wish they had. It would have come in handy before I had Harry Potter. Despite my upbringing, I was never a fan of the Narnia series so I can’t recall reading any books growing up of the plucky-young-kids-take-on-evil variety. Truth be told, by the time I really enjoyed reading as a preteen, I was more interested in the evil than I was the plucky kids. Maturity (what all of it I have) has made me sentimental. After last year’s election, book people I follow online recommending reading hopeful fantasy like Rowling and L’Engle. I started using my Audible credits to collect the Harry Potter series to listen to while driving or cooking dinner. Right now it’s more relaxing than NPR. NPR used to be what I listened to when panic attacks made listening to a lot of music hard (songs all start to sound like sirens. It’s a very The West Wing season 3 side effect of my anxiety and I don’t care for it.) It seems other people had the same idea since I had to wait a few weeks before I could pick up A Wrinkle In Time from the library.  I won’t go through the novel’s full plot, but in the novel’s climax Meg Murry, her younger brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe travel to the planet Camazotz with the help of their supernatural neighbors, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit. They’re hoping to find their father, a research scientist working for the U.S. government. They do, but not before Charles Wallace falls under the thrall of the planet’s overseeing brain, IT. IT enforces total homogeneity on the dark planet. The children’s father is held captive there because he would not succumb to uniform thinking. Meg is ultimately able to rescue her little brother because she loves him. IT is not capable of love and Meg is able to use emotion to underline the brain’s control. It’s a good lesson for children—that difference is to be celebrated, not stamped out and that love unites us. It’s a good lesson for the U.S. right now. I’d say it’s a good lesson for the president, but he doesn’t  read and the Ava DuVernay-helmed adaptation isn’t slated for release until 2018.

The “dark” in Hope in the Dark is less literal than in the black cloud consuming planets in A Wrinkle in Time. Instead, it’s the Bush administration’s neoconservatism, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. But still, Solnit is able to find places for optimism. In particular, she points to the Zapatista’s anti-globalist guerrilla resistance to the implementation of NAFTA in Mexico. The Zapatistas did not rebel to overthrow the Mexican government per se, but instead to critique power dynamics. They advocated for indigenous and women’s rights at the same time. In the Zapatistas, Solnit sees a model of activism in praxis that “does not sacrifice or postpone one kind of justice for another.” Elsewhere, she highlights how the anti-proliferation movement of the 1980s eventually led to nuclear arms reductions but failed to see full disarmament because people when back out their lives. “It’s always too soon to go home,” she writes (and I would do well to remember when my voice starts to go a little hoarse and my feet hurt and I start to worry simultaneously about the sheer size of the assembled crowd and whether anyone is actually paying attention):

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.

I got Hope in the Dark when Solnit made it available for free through its publisher, Haymarket Books, just after the election. I read it in short bursts, leaving it to set for weeks before actually finishing it. I lumbered through A Wrinkle in Time. By the time I got around to buying Trainwreck by Sady Doyle two days after the inauguration, I was ready to be angry again. If the book has a patron saint, it’s Britney Spears. Toward the end of the book, Doyle notes that hers and any other book on celebrity meltdowns are now haunted by Britney, even though she has survived (however scathed.) Doyle’s premise is fairly straightforward: we expect female silence. Female abundance—sexuality, ambition, advocacy, addiction, displays of anything but the blandest emotional compliance— is met with harsh and continual critique. Even fictional women are ostracized when they can’t quiet down–the same abundance of emotion that makes Meg Murry her brother’s rescuer alienates her from most of her classmates and marks her as a problem student.

Doyle touches on the lives of everyone from Mary Wollstonecraft and Sylvia Plath to Valerie Solanas, Hillary Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky (The last two being held up as reliefs of the other—the overly sexed and the sexless.) While I was reading, it came out that Trump’s team in the White House have been using private email addresses for official business. The outrage from the campaign’s “but her emails!” crowd was predictably nonexistent. The dig against Clinton, for a lot of folks at least, is her inability to fit a collective gendered notion of ambition and leadership. Her loss will be* our collective loss too.

Thursday morning, I started the syllabus in earnest with bell hooks’s Feminism is for Everybody. I’ve read essays and excerpts from hooks over the years, but never her book-length work. She is an uncompromising scholar and activist. Her writing style is purposefully undemanding—she repeatedly expresses the concern that feminist theory has requested itself in academia, making it inaccessible for the people who need it most—but that ease belies an undergirding rigor. bell does not come to play, ever.  That does not mean it’s not possibly to disagree with her. Her suggestion that we do not yet understand the long-term effects of abortion seems to go against the opinion of medical doctors who understand the long-term effects and potential risk associated with abortion pales in comparison to the risks of pregnancy. More on that when I actually finish the book.

In thinking about this list after a month, I wonder if it might need reworking. Part of my reaction to this presidency has been to commit myself to small, daily resistances. Twice now, that’s meant leaving my house and standing outside in D.C. to physically protest his ideology and policies (once at the Women’s March and once in front of the White House after he issued the executive order banning immigration from seven-majority Muslin countries.) Once, it’s meant attending a town hall meeting held by my congressman. I’ve been setting aside a little money here and there for organizations like Earthjustice, the SPLC, and CAIR in addition to my monthly donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Most days, it’s just calling my representatives at the state and federal level about upcoming legislation, etc. But it’s also less obvious (or more frivolous.) I’ve bought A LOT of books this year and this year is only a month so far. In addition to a small-scale spree at a nearby used bookstore a couple days into 2017, I’ve bought ten new books. That’s a lot, even for me. Most of them are conspicuously opposed to a Trumpian worldview. They are foregrounding the lived experience of people of color or women (or both). One is Mexican novel in translation. Two are written by John Lewis. One warns that humanity is still susceptible to the ideologies and impulses that allowed the Holocaust to take place. Two are about difficult women. One was literally written in response to Trump’s election. Are three Russian novels from different eras as necessary to the work that needs doing as reading my way through the Middle East? Do I have the time for long-winded world building in a fantasy novel, when everything feels so urgent? How many William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy novels do I need to read to get a sense of the two men? I’m not sure. Reading has always felt at least a little political to me, even when the reading itself is largely apolitical. But during this administration, it feels like an insurgent act. 

2017 Reading Syllabus:

• Authors:
  • Elena Ferrante
  • Toni Morrison
  • Margaret Atwood
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Joan Didion
  • bell hooks:
    • Feminism is for Everybody
• Books:
  • Wicked
  • Blood Meridian
  • Sound and the Fury
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Genres:
  • Feminist Sci-Fi
  • Intersectional Feminist Sci-Fi
  • Epic Fantasy
  • Urban Fantasy
• Regions:
  • Living African Author
  • Living Central or South American Author
  • Living Middle Eastern Author
  • Living Asian Author
• Other Criteria
  • A book about Whiteness
  • A pre-Soviet Russian novel
  • A Soviet novel
  • A post-Soviet Russian novel
  • A book about Reconstruction
  • A book about Islam
  • A book about the Holocaust
  • A short story collection
  • A poetry collection
  • a STEM book

*Will be? Who am I kidding, it already is.