Books In Conversation -- Here We Go!

But, what are Books in Conversation?

Before 2016, I used Twitter with a frequency that made my husband raise his brows. I live-tweeted debates; I followed the news to the point that I never lost a Breaking News Off. I had always been exposed to the news—my parents never thought to protect me from current events, for better or worse, and some of my earlier memories are of my mother talking about Carter’s inauguration, watching Carter at Camp David with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, and Reagan getting shot on live television. And don’t get me started on the Iran Hostage Crisis. I was better informed than most seven and eight year olds, though my understanding was probably more age-appropriate.

I studied history in college. I talked to people. I’d like to think my understanding improved. Some things still didn’t make sense to me, but at this point I think that was because they didn’t make sense, period. I was very, very well-informed by 2016, and for more than twenty years had been “the political one” in most circles that weren’t, well, political. I expected Hillary Clinton to win the US presidential election not because I wished it so, but because the smartest people in media told me I should.

The smartest people were wrong.

I was as devastated as many other people by the results of the election. I didn’t believe Trump could be as evil as he turned out to be, if only because I thought he would be stopped. I was wrong. But I was also angry that I had been so misled. By my reckoning, the media had told a story that they thought should be true because it always had been before; they saw what they wanted to see, and it wasted precious time. (Also: “But, her emails.”)

I had already intended to start writing my science-fantasy series, and I needed to know a lot more than I already did to flesh out the family saga that dealt with the aftermath of genocide. I had an ambitious amount of reading to do, and after stumbling onto a book about recent Japanese history, it occurred to me that my time was going to better spent reading books for a deeper understanding than memorizing how many children a tertiary character in an ongoing news-of-the-week story had, or what color tie they favored. I wasn’t going to be the person who kept track of intrigue in the presidential cabinet—boy, would that have been a full-time job—but I was going to be the person who understood better what was really going on.

I read more history. It’s what I do and how I am, but I branched out into military history and areas of the world I’d been too afraid to delve into because they were so complex. I read less political history and finally dived into Edward Said’s Orientalism. That was intense! However, I’m a better person for it. I found Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and had my mind blown every other paragraph as I read about things I thought I already knew. I learned about Asian American history and later South Korean sociology. I read King (the civil rights leader, not the horror author), Fanon, and more Said. I finally found someone who put into words my feelings about the Syrian Civil War and reminded me that my memory wasn’t faulty. I learned the term “settler colonialism”, and I’ll probably never stop shuddering.

I read about the value of solitude and that, no, you actually don’t want everyone to be a prodigy a la Tiger Woods. I read about the importance of nature in our lives, and I read yet more Marie Kondo before I read about what it really means to “collect”.

Because of what I wanted to write, I finally decided to read science fiction and fantasy, even as I cringed over getting caught up in medieval imperialist fantasies. I got started with The Colors of Madeline, V.E. Schwabb’s Shades of Magic trilogy—Amazon’s Vine Program was good for something—and then read Naomi Novik’s standalone novels. I branched out to N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy, and started feeling seen. I finally jumped into Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and everything followed from there, including Ken Liu’s amazing Dandelion Dynasty Quartet, Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga trilogy, the Nameless Republic Series by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, the devastating standalones of Tochi Onyebuchi, and the Akata series by Nnedi Okorafor. (And how can I leave out the works of Shannon Chakraborty?) And more! I had finally found the niche I wanted to spend a lot of time in.

Through it all, I’ve been struggling to be the most productive, Modern person that I can be, and believe me when I tell you that I loved my Bullet Journal as much as I loved Marie Kondo. That community, as well as the artist Austin Kleon, recommended How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens, and the idea that I could do something interesting with my nonfiction observations and book reviews beyond using the perspectives in my fiction began to take shape. Ahrens talked about notes beginning to “converse” with each other to create new information, and I got excited because it reminded me of all of the times I’d made an off-the-wall connection between two disparate facts. I took copious notes in my Bullet Journal—I am Team #OneNotebookToRuleThemAll—and half-heartedly took some notes on note cards (500 isn’t that many, is it?).

My husband read many of these books with me, but at a certain point that wasn’t tenable, and I didn’t have people to discuss these topics with. I can write book reviews, but that doesn’t invite the same kinds of conversation on my library website as I might like. I have been thrilled to interview authors in the past, but while I’ve enjoyed most of those writers, I wanted to put some of those people in the same room and have them talk about specific ideas in their books. I’m really not that persuasive, especially when the subject matter is vastly different, and some of the authors in question are gone. (How sad to know Edward Said isn’t here for me, since he was the person who made me realize I hadn’t been imagining racism everywhere I turned.) I can’t get the authors to talk to each other, but I can—after a fashion—get the books to talk to each other.

“In Conversation” will hopefully not only apply to books but to readers as well. I desperately hope that people who have read some of these titles will chime in—whether in the comments or their own blogs or videos—to talk about the themes that I see and what these books meant to them. I don’t know how we get out of this mess, but I do know that we have to do it together, in solidarity.

At the time of this writing, we are seeing a degradation of the establishment news media we could only barely imagine eight years ago. Major papers pulled endorsements for Kamala Harris because they were betting Trump would win and they wanted to make sure that their other businesses wouldn’t be punished for allowing some journalistic integrity. This is a predictable outcome of monopolization—and by predicted, I mean people were warning of it in the 1990s, not just the 1910s—but to see it happen so shamelessly is still shocking.

Do I sound smug about my reliance on books over current event coverage? Sure, but please know that I rarely enjoy feeling superior about anything for long. I’m an indie author, and I’ve followed Amazon’s predations on traditional publishing. I’ve also been aware since the 1990s that all aspects of the media landscape, including book publishers, have been subject to consolidation. With very few exceptions, publishers are always more powerful than their authors; this is the way of the world, and this is why so many of us jumped at the chance to publish independently. But when there were twelve important publishers, authors at least had more theoretical options. Today, there are four that are making decisions about the vast majority of what is being read and discussed, and publishers and editors are not making decisions in a vacuum. Those decisions are shaping our narrative, and it is *always* worth pausing to consider to what extent our beliefs are being actively shaped. Questioning your own beliefs is always a good idea. I would add that reading older books—going back at least one generation—can be one way to diversify perspective, but again, those books were chosen by someone as well. Another is to look for truly independent authors, although it is much rarer to find indie history and politics than it is indie fiction.

I want to mention a couple of invaluable resources for helping me build my virtual library. The selection at the New and Notable area of the Boston Public Library at Copley should win an award; if I’m ever hurting for reading material, I know I can go there and find a title that I’ll be glad to have read—I would never have found Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti Series without them. The NoveList feature on the library website helped me find or confirm fiction titles that enriched my life. Brooke Gladstone of On The Media is amazing—I found the magnificent Fearing the Black Body on one of her shows, as well as the author Cory Doctorow, whose blog pluralistic.net has been an invaluable source of information. I reluctantly admit that the blog of Austin Kleon has pointed me in the right direction more than once; now, I hope, someone will convince Kleon to get off of Substack and let someone else keep Nazis company. Finally, I must also admit that Goodreads has been helpful—not because of their algorithm, but because of the recommendations of several authors, including N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu and Shelley Parker-Chan; without them, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to read Consider the Fork, Orality and Literacy, and Women in the Picture. I also would not have found the podcast Gaslit Nation, which has been a source of irreplaceable community during this bleak moment in history.

If any of that sounds like an endorsement for a subsidiary platform of Amazon, it’s NOT. I’m not so grand to hope that my little project will be the beginning of a return to a decentralized blogosphere, but I do hope we start writing about what we’re reading and what we’re experiencing in spaces that can’t be weaponized against us on a whim. Let’s stop worrying about SEO—the fact that you’re not going to make a lot of money on Facebook hasn’t stopped you from posting there—and start talking to each other again. Who knows? A conversation in the ether just might turn into a meaningful relationship...one that hopefully includes discussing new ideas, and acting on them.

I'll update this page as I post the "conversations". Thank you for your patience!

Volume 1

Deb in the City

Fourteen down, two to go, and Books In Conversation

Damn, I wish I were done transcribing. Perhaps I can be forgiven for my delays of something I started in, you know, the first Trump administration. There were addiction issues (not mine), cancer, chemo, elder care, and then sibling care, and always children, the last of which I'm not complaining about. Some days I pat myself on the back for being stubborn enough to see this through.

All to say that I have finished transcribing installment fourteen of my saga, and I have only two more to go. The heartbreak is hinted at in this one, but the next one is just simply wrenching. It's about loss, but it's also about survival. (Sound familiar?)

For the record, This installment is 20,788 words, which brings the series total to 363,411. I imagine I'll get the total count to 400,000, then between cuts and additions I'll land at about 350,000. Or maybe 450,000--who knows?

When I'm not volunteering as a climate organizer, I'm also working on a project I'm calling Books In Conversation. The conceit is that the books are talking to each other. Which they have--in my head. It's also a way of talking through the links between seemingly disparate pieces of information. It's my hope that others who have read these titles will join me in the conversation, but if it's just the books and me, that's fine, too.

And yes, it's related to the maelstrom of tyranny: these were almost all books I started reading after the first Trump election and my realization that the establishment media had failed us in more ways than one. Stay tuned.

Deb in the City

What do human rights mean?

Every time someone wants to take a vote on extending human rights, I'm incensed. Human rights aren't things you vote on; they are inalienable, guaranteed because we are human beings.

Or at least they should be.

For decades, Massachusetts stood proud as a state that guaranteed a right to shelter. That was why, even as the homeless population exploded in Boston, you almost never saw families living on the streets. There were reasons, many legitimate, that people wouldn't go into a shelter and felt safer exposed to the elements, but if they wanted to, they had a legal right to, even if shelters were inconvenient to their former lives (this is not a small thing if you have, for instance, school aged children).

I've been saying for years that Massachusetts is more conservative than other people want to admit, or than many others in Massachusetts want to talk about. Well, Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida took our measure, called our bluff, and won. They showed us what we're really made of, and it makes me ill.

Our governor, Maura Healey, after months of an escalating crisis of homelessness, abetted by Abbott and DeSantis busing migrants from their borders to Massachusetts, as well as other "blue" states, is now asking for, essentially, the right to shelter to be effectively rescinded. This is after months of putting limits on how long people could stay in shelters (and that includes families). 

There are so many things about this that repulse me, but I'm particularly nauseated by the requirement that people need to prove their identity and residency status, as well as go through a CORI check, in order to secure shelter. As a reminder, Massachusetts does not have voter ID laws, in part because someone somewhere understands how difficult it is to secure those forms of ID when you live in poverty. But, somehow, those will be easier to obtain when you've been evicted from your home? Of course they won't be. Wait, maybe that's part of the point.

Oh, and if you were evicted in New Hampshire or Rhode Island, sorry, you can't shelter here; MA for MA! (Why did I think we were in a federal system?)

This is not a surprise, and I am not disappointed with Maura Healey (dear reader, there's a difference between being disgusted and surprised). This is the same governor who enacted tax cuts for the wealthy, which led to an inevitable budget shortfall, shortly after the "Millionaire's Tax" passed here after years of lobbying. Among other things, this led to a freezing of benefits for children and families living in deep poverty.

I knew who Healey worked for, but that doesn't make it easier to stomach--or look at.

Deb in the City

Well, this has been a week

(And change)

I made it clear after the US presidential election that I think Donald Trump is a very bad pick. That is putting it mildly. I'm the kind of person who needs to get to work in a crisis, because if not I'm going to go crazy. My childhood was as short as everyone else's, but I will never forget how much I chased at the lack of agency. Now that I've got it, I'm going to use it.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel some despair afterward, and for so many reasons.  Climate. Pollution. Human rights. Racism. Sexism. Education. Health. Inequality.  Everything. I was going to do the work, but I didn't feel any optimism.

Now I do.

I am so happy that Bashar al Assad, the butcher of Syria, is gone. I did not think I would see the day. It was hard to find news of the Syrian resistance for a good few years; the last I could find, they had been confined to one area. But I did see that much of the Arab world was trying to normalize relations with Assad. All of them, evidently, had made the assessment that it was easier to work with him than against Iran and Russia. Once again, screw the Syrian people.

But a funny thing happened while politicos and pundits were playing 4D chess amongst themselves so they could arrive at doing exactly nothing: the Syrian resistance refused to die, and as soon as they saw that Russian and Iranian assets were being moved out of Syria, they moved. And they won.

I have no delusions about HTS (Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham). No, I don't care about the "Islamist" label, but they have been credibly accused of violating people's rights on occasion, and they are almost certainly receiving support from Turkey, which has been aggressive toward the Kurds in Syria, particularly in Rojava. But I don't need HTS to be perfect; I just need then to be not as monstrous as Assad. Shockingly they've met that low bar, so I'm happy to celebrate with the Syrian people. 

But because it pours when it rains, I am also proud as hell to be Korean. God damn. 

Let's back up: I take no pride in the fact that President Yoon Suk Yeol, one of the moat unpopular elected presidents ever--anywhere--declared martial law. He's not wrong to call out the opposition, the Democratic Party, for being obstructionist, but you don't mean obstruction with martial law--and especially not in South Korea after the decades they laborer under it. 

And I'm not the only Korean who said so. The South Korean citizenry came out into the streets immediately. This was not their first rodeo, and they knew that you have to stop a would be dictator immediately. There's a measure of luck--Yoon, clearly, doesn't know how to plan a self-coup, because anyone could have told him it won't work without the military under control--but this would not have ended so decisively if South Koreans weren't willing to stand in below freezing temperatures for over a week to make it clear that Yoon was done. Say what you will about us, but we know when we're being bs'ed, and we'll have none of it.

Syria, South Korea, and OG resistance as well as straight up bad assery out of Ukraine give me hope. Donald Trump would very much like to be a dictator, but even now, he's getting pushback from within his own party, some members of which still, shockingly, have either their pride or some standards. (Or maybe they just really didn't like Matt Gaetz.) And most interestingly of all, Trump seems to smell the rot on Putin and is distancing himself. (I suspect that may be the result of pressure from our own corporate interests, but it's only a guess.) There's still plenty of damage they can inflict on millions of people without being the Joker and Penguin in some kind of tag team from hell, but it's a glimmer of hope if they're not ride or die.

I can do my work--I was going to any way--but now I see a glimpse of what this might end up looking like. It just might be a future worthy of the Syrians, Ukranians, and South Koreans.

Deb in the City

Thirteen down, three to go

I have a lot to say, but it deserves more time than I can give on a Sunday with my sister. 

Though I can manage: thank god Assad is gone. Let me know when he's put on trial for everything he did.

I managed to eke out my thirteenth installment. 26618 more words than before, for a total of 342,623 words. Three more to go. 

Let's do it.

Deb in the City

The swelling emptiness of substitutions

There are a lot of things I can no longer eat. I'm in good company, apparently, and I've heard enough horror stories that I'm not going to complain that I can't eat wheat, dairy, or soy when other people--some in my family--can't eat tree nuts, sesame, sunflowers (!), or oats (!!). These allergies were almost unheard of a generation ago, and as a chemo nurse told me that in her experience cancer was 90+% environmental, I feel pretty good that the same can be said for allergies and food sensitivities. (No, this does not mean that I think Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a good pick for Health and Human Services.)

It has taken a long time, but for the most part I don't crave the foods I used to be able to eat. A lot of us--A LOT--are used to what my daughter and I jokingly called "delicious regret": you know you're going to feel awful later, but it tastes so good in the moment, you're willing to suffer through it. My dear readers, this isn't the stupidest thing in the world if we're talking about a stomach ache, but not exactly the smartest. Gas and stomach upset are not our friends, but most of us have lived through it. But it is a really, really stupid philosophy to embrace when you experience hives, especially around your mouth, a closed throat, or, in my case, closed sinuses. Please believe me when I tell you that while dim sum rice noodles bathed in sweetened soy sauce used to be my idea of heaven, now the thought of it makes my stomach cramp up. There is no taste in the world that makes not being able to breathe later tolerable. By the same token, when I know that eating wheat is going to give me digestive difficulties for five days afterward, vegetable tempura is not going to be remotely tempting. 

There are many foods that I can now walk away from--Cheese? Yogurt? Bread? No, thank you--but there are still a few that I remember fondly enough that I do still seek out their substitutes. Vegan ice cream is a big one, in large part because it is so readily available, at least near me. I have eaten more than my fair share, but for the last six months I have been left with a profound emptiness when I'm done. I can't explain it, but that is exactly how I feel. I have eaten nothing but chemicals reorganized to resemble frozen dairy, and, perhaps, I'm so aware of it that I feel as empty as what I have eaten. It's not a hole in my gut, but in my chest.

I admit, too, that I feel a great deal of envy when I see my family eating something like pot pie. Oh, how I used to love vegetable pot pie, back in those halcyon days when I was just a vegan but could still eat wheat. It is the marriage of texture and flavor that is difficult to get to with whole grains and stew. (If I may, I think it is texture we miss more than flavor.) Seeing my son get a very large chicken pot pie this weekend (that will linger in the fridge until after Thanksgiving, I'm sure) inspired me to try my hand at a home made version with the stew that my husband made this weekend. 

You will be happy to know that my vegan, gluten-free crust was more than credible. Yes, parts of it broke, but for the most part, it baked well. It also gave me that "bite" that I had been missing for so long...and then I remembered those other things I used to experience when eating pot pie, as well as shepherd's pie. Oh, that combination of vegetables and starch is really quite filling, uncomfortably so, in fact. I looked at my pie and started wondering how bad it would be if I put in soup or stew.

There's an argument that the way I eat now--you can check out the recipes section of nutritionfacts.org to get an idea--is lacking in the glamour and sex appeal that you find in a lot of cookbooks and blogs. It's very uncool, but then again, so am I. It is probably not the worst thing in the world for me if I eat banana or mango nice cream instead of the vegan substitutes, or if I top a stew with some whole grains. Yes, I have missed some things about old favorites, but I've forgotten how relieved my body was not to deal with some of the consequences. 

A lack of regret is perhaps something we don't realize we benefit from, but maybe now is a good time to review all of the things you think you miss and ask yourself what you're really missing.

Deb in the City

You've seen this movie before; make sure you remember all the beats

Getting things off my chest a few days ago was the right call. I've had some realizations (that I don't need to share here, at least not right now...), and I'm now able to think on Things more clearly.

I'm looking for what might be called Comfort Wisdom. I want to find people who have lived through some variation of this reality before. For a couple of reasons, I've found Studs Terkel's archives invaluable, especially this weekend. 

His show ran for decades--amazing to hear the same interview Lorraine Hansberry before her untimely death, as well as Carl Sagan decades later. My heart fluttered when I heard Edward Said this weekend, and I shook my head and sighed when he interviewed someone about Gorbachev. Actual good times.

I haven't listened to even one percent of his archives, but I'm picking up on at least one theme. He talks about the violence in the United States at the time, and you can practically see him pointing at Vietnam and then nuclear weapons. It's the same point Donna Leon made in her latest Commissario Brunetti installment; for all of the complaints about baby gangs, do people really not notice that they're trying to be little militias? Where would they have gotten that idea?

It's a sociological insight that is, of course, pretty obvious, but which I really do need someone to point to. It's so obvious, actually,  that I wonder why I have to go back through archives almost sixty years old to find it. (I had heard some inklings of it before, but it was dismissed as so much handwaving.) But here we are, and find it I did. Now I'll have an extended think on it.

What I don't need any kind of review of is actual known and discussed history, but am I the only one? No, I'm very grateful for the Gaslit Nation community, because they got the memo--excuse me, history book--and actually read it. They seem to be the only ones though. 

I've been horrified for over a decade as I've seen similar scenes from the 1930s play out and people proceed as if they don't know what they need to not do if they want to avoid similar consequences. If Syria wasn't a full-on repeat of Spain, it was a close enough rhyme that we should have known that abandoning the Syrians wasn't going to help anyone. And wow, how difficult was it to predict that if Syrians had to flee their country, other countries gutted by austerity programs were going to lose their minds and lean full-on native? (It wasn't hard at all unless you were Obama and Jake Sullivan, but those were evidently the only ones who mattered.) Almost as difficult as it is to predict how trustworthy Putin would be about ending the war in Ukraine if we, you know, appeased him. Ask Neville Chamberlain how well that worked out.

I feel similarly about the consequences of voting in someone who has made fascist promises, as well as people who are calling for political violence as a counter measure. I see people talking about that, and I feel like I am in an alternate dimension. Just...are you out of your minds? That kind of violence will accomplish nothing. (I can go back to the late 19th century for that lesson.) Somebody, somewhere, might get to vent their anger, but it won't stop the much more organized violence of fascists. I will say that coming in strong numbers when there is a threat is a good strategy, but thinking you can shoot your way out of this is not the right move. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't choose passive resistance out of cowardice, but strategy. He was leading a "minority" movement, and his accomplishments were amazing. Imagine what a majority using the same strategy can accomplish?

Deb in the City