Books I Read, May 2021
Dear friends,
I hope this letter finds you well — it finds me at the end of a transformative month of reading. Not because I read life-changing books in May, but because I more or less accidentally stumbled upon a vast secret reading treasure I had been stockpiling behind my own back over the last decade. Let me explain.
In May I decided to try out this new service called readwise. A number of friends had been urging it upon me. It's a simple proposition: readwise collects all your highlights and notes from your e-reading devices, annotated pdfs, instapaper archive, etc, and it even transcribes passages from paper books if you take a picture of the page and from podcasts via auto-transcription. It puts all these things into one database. You can tag and comment on them via readwise's website or a phone app. And you can export the resulting collections of tagged quotations to note-taking applications or (in my case) text files. In short, it gives you the technical capacity to maintain a low-effort commonplace book from all the sources of discourse in your life, textual and audio. As someone personally and professionally invested in the self-conscious organization of intellectual life who, moreover, has a long and tortured history attempting to build an annotated life, obviously this sounded like my jam. So I gave in to peer pressure, signed up for a trial, and allowed readwise to sync my various reading devices and folders of pdfs.
The result astounded me.
From my e-reading devices alone readwise discovered and pulled into its database more than 7500 annotations. It also found thousands of annotations on academic papers I had made in grad school and thousands of annotations I had made in Instapaper (where I peruse most of the longform journalism I read). The funny thing is that I had made most of these annotations out of sheer, pointless habit, never expecting to see the passages I highlighted again or do anything with them. Only a tiny fraction of my highlightings and comments were for writing or research projects; most of them were the expression of a reflex I developed at some point in my teens, a reflex to make note of anything that strikes me deeply as I read, even if that annotation simply disappears.
All these "useless" annotations were suddenly gathered, organized, and presented to me in an attractive form. I spent hours upon hours in May considering this unexpected compilation of a decade's excerpts, categorizing each one by topic tags, and thumbing up or down whether I wanted to keep it in the database. Grinding through that sediment of reading was a a slow but beautiful experience. At times I felt like weeping at how relevant my interests have remained to my own mind, so that passages excerpted ten years ago remain exciting to me now as I rediscover them — it was like discovering a deeper intellectual self beneath the one I am conscious of possessing. Over the years I've kept many inadequate and disappointing commonplace books. Every such attempt withered in the face of the volume of stuff I read and think about, often causing me to feel lost in my own intellectual life, unredeemably lazy. But here it turns out I have been compiling a huge and excellent commonplace book — in secret from myself. I'm usually dubious about the value of technology to really enhance humanistic intellectual work, but readwise is proving to be an enormous exception.
Anyway, as a result of the dozens of hours I spent in readwise last month, reviewing a decade in reading, I only read nine new books. I continued my desultory investigation of Turkish literature and history, but also strayed away from the project at times.
(A brief interlude for all the new subscribers to this newsletter: Hi! I'm Robert Minto. I write essays and science fiction, and you've subscribed to a newsletter I send out once a month about what I've been reading. Thanks for subscribing, and feel free to write me back simply by responding to this email.)
This is what I read in May:
The Book of Madness, by Levent Şenyürek
A collection of speculative short fiction (translated from Turkish by Feyza Howell). The first half is composed of trite stories that regurgitate genre cliches, but the last half gets more interesting. One story retells the biblical tale of Daniel and the Lion's Den, but from the perspective of King Darius who, on this account, drugged the lions. Another features a Turkish family who appear to be living through the apocalyptic end-times predicted in the Q'ran, but then we learn what's actually happening is that aliens are causing it to appear to our species that our own mooted apocalypses are genuinely occurring. There's also a retelling of the Abrahamic creation story, but it's actually a trial run for a tech company's computer simulation. Such stories reveal a preocuppation on Şenyürek's part with a certain category of philosophical problem — or theological problem, I suppose — about the relationship between appearance and reality, determinism and agency, providence and miracle.
Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A novel (translated from Italian by Lahiri herself) about the many superficial relationships that structure the life of an unattached academic living in an unnamed Italian city, and therefore really about the loneliness at the heart of this woman's life. It is composed of very short chapters, each with the rounded, polished structure of flash fiction, and each titled with a prepositional phrase indicating the place or time in which it occurs: "On the Sidewalk" or "In Spring" or "In the Piazza." Most such chapters end up providing thumbnail sketches of the lives of other people. It felt like a pleasing but basically shallow marriage of the style of Rachel Cusk with the subject matter of Barbara Pym. Of course the big news around this novel is that Lahiri wrote it in Italian, part of her general project to shift, midlife, from one language to another.
The Emergence of Modern Turkey, by Bernard Lewis
An old and out-dated — but influential — history of the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Lewis's basic narrative goes like this: In the late 19th and early 20th century, military competition with Europe led the last of the Ottoman Sultans to attempt drastic reforms of the state. These reforms were opposed by old factions and entrenched orders, so the modernizing sultans seized tyrannical power to accomplish their goals. Their autocracy sparked a revolution of elites, after which the Ottoman Empire became something like a constitutional monarchy. But it was dominated in this brief period by the "Commitee of Union and Progress" — the first one-party state in modern history — whose leadership cratered the empire. The Committee, increasingly nationalistic and ethnically exclusionary, presided over the Armenian genocide and got the empire involved on the losing side of World War I. After the war, the victorious powers of Europe attempted to chop up the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia. But they only managed to prod a war-weary land to new rebellion. Out of this rebellion grew a second, longer-lasting revolution in which the nationalist armies led by Kemal Ataturk shoved the European powers out of Anatolia and ultimately abolished the Ottoman Empire and the structures of political Islam which had held it together. A part of that old empire, basically Anatolia, became what we know as the modern nation-state of Turkey.
For Lewis, the final "emergence" of modern Turkey occurred in 1950, after the death of Ataturk, when Ataturk's party was defeated in an election and voluntarily handed their power to a civilian opposition party. This peaceful transition of power within the framework of a constitutional republic marks a finish line for Lewis's story; indeed, one could say that his narrative is a teleology leading to that point. The second half of the book revisits the course of events narrated in the first half from a variety of specialist perspectives.
While very readable, the book is over half a century old, and there are inevitably better and more up-to-date histories. I started reading one of them right after finishing this one, and will probably write about it next month.
I should also note that Bernard Lewis — a prolific scholar of the Middle East — was harshly criticized by other scholars throughout his career. His best known critic is Edward Said, who held him up as a poster boy for orientalism, specifically alleging that Lewis had a monolithic and inaccurate view of Islam. In the 2000s, Lewis lent his considerable academic prestige to the cause of the disastrous invasion of Iraq by the US, and he's written war-mongering op-eds about Iran. So, in short, he's an author who came to my attention under a cloud. I chose to read his book anyway, both because no other book seemed to be more often cited by other scholars when I first started looking into Turkish history and also because I consider it important to expose myself to the best argumentative shot of influential thinkers I expect to disagree with. Lewis's book is an extended attempt to establish the plausibility of installing democracy from above, in the guise of a historical narrative — but to teach that lesson, the historical narrative posited by Lewis has to shave off a lot of sharp edges and uncomfortable knobs that make the story more complicated and the lesson less clear.
On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, edited by Thomas Karshan, Kathryn Murphy
A collection of articles about the history and nature of the essay as a genre, published in 2020. I read it because I was asked to review it for The Los Angeles Review of Books. Like any academic anthology, its quality varies by scholarly contributor. It includes superb articles like the one in which Warren Boutcher contends that that we should understand Montaigne's essays not as the invention of a new form but as an innovation in the content of an already millenia-old form, the authored miscellany. And it included puzzling articles like one about the absence of a tradition of psychoanalytic essays, in which Adam Phillips contends that the reluctance of most psychoanalysts to write essays tells us something about the nature of essays. (Seems to me it tells us very little, and that little is mostly about the nature of psychoanalysts, not essays.) This volume is the first of a number of exciting histories and handbooks of the essay that will be published in the coming months and years. I'm excited for literary history and literary criticism to catch up to the evolution of the essay in the last decade, a revival driven by the rapid proliferation of new venues on the internet. On Essays was conceived in 2009 and published in 2020: between those dates we saw the whole "personal essay boom" come and (ostensibly) go and the arrival on the scene of a host of excellent new magazines. I say more about all of this in my review, forthcoming from LARB.
Killing Floor, by Lee Child
The first volume in a very popular series of thriller novels featuring a nomadic ex-military investigator named Jack Reacher. In this first book, Reacher gets embroiled in the machinations of a counterfeiting ring based out of a small town in Georgia, and he ends up investigating the murder of his own brother. I read it because a lot of mostly non-readers in my life have spoken fondly of it, and I was curious what sort of book could overcome their resistance. It's fine, if you like macho wish fulfillment, clipped prose, and lyrical descriptions of what it feels like hitting people.
The Self-help Compulsion, by Beth Blum
A brilliant scholarly monograph — one of the best books I've read this year — on the intertwined histories of self-help books and literary modernism. Blum traces how modern novelists, beginning with Flaubert, in many cases defined their work in opposition to the genre of self-help. Writers like Joyce and Woolf and so on satirized self-help books in their novels and set the holy uselessness of literature against the debasing instrumentalism of self-help. Yet somehow the modernist's self-consciously negative relationship to self-help evolved into the present situation where self-help is often borrowed as a formal structure by literary novelists, and not just to satirize it: witness novels from Sheila Heti, Charles Yu, Mohsin Hamid, and Tash Aw. Blum also charts the parallel rise and evolution of self-help in its own right — from Samuel Smiles' Victorian best-seller, Self-help, through Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to the ubiquitous advice columnists of our own time and self-help peddlers like the bibliotherapist Alain de Botton. De Botton is particularly interesting for Blum's purposes, because one of his favorite moves is to use the texts of literary modernism as the basis for his self-help books (for example, in How Proust Can Change Your Life), a curious inversion that would probably appall the authors thus turned into self-help gurus. Blum argues that modern literature and self-help are inextricably intertwined, feeding each other. Is the convergence of self-help and literature in the 21st century (novelists pitching their books as how-tos; advice-givers turning to modernist literature for life advice) a triumph of instrumentalism over art, or is it art's recovery from a self-decieving pretention to inutility?
Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire, by Caroline Finkel
A huge history of a 600 year dynasty, the house of Osman, which governed the Ottoman Empire until the last Sultan was deposed and sent into exile by the Turkish Republic (see above). Finkel takes the most sensible narrative approach to such a vast subject: she proceeds Sultan by Sultan, making little digressions into the most important events of each man's reign. The intersecting trajectories of great power politics, the history of Islam, the historical constitution of ethnicities and regions, and the development of a cohesive court culture in the capitol city of Istanbul — these vast and complicated stories are told through the generations of one family. This is history from the dynastic point of view, and it was fascinating to see how that point of view processed the bits of impinging European and Asian history I already knew about.
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
A murdery mysery (transled from Turkish by Erdağ Göknar) set among 16th century book illustrators — miniaturists — in Istanbul. Deliciously complex and fascetious, it is composed of chapters each beginning, "my name is …" or "I am a …" And we get narrative bits from the perspective of all the main characters, but also a dead body, a tree, a dog, and so on. The book is full of stories within stories, dialogue in which characters communicate obliquely through parables, moments when the narrator of a chapter addresses the reader directly. Everything — all the encrustations of reflexivity and the nested narratives and the literary jokes — swirl around a central conceptual tension created by the theological iconoclasm of Islam. This iconoclasm creates an awkward order of values for visual artists. Accurate representation of individual objects is a kind of sinful and second rate form of art — reminiscent of Plato's contention that the representational image is a flickering shadow of a shadow, a cheap nothing in comparison to the hidden eternal Ideas — and therefore, for example, the "best" illustrators are blind, because by working from memory rather than observation they get closer to representing the true nature of things as they exist in the mind of god. Because of the book's metafictional artificiality and conceptual focus, I was driven onward page by page less by emotional involvement, immersion in an invented sensuous world, or narrative suspense, than by a desire to see the end of the dramatized debate about aesthetics and theology.
Human Landscapes from My Country, by Nazim Hikmet
A huge (17,000 line) narrative poem — an epic — about the history of modern Turkey. It begins at a train-station, spending a few stanzas in the head and life of one character then hopping — often as if the narrative focus were transfered by the last character's gaze — to another head and life, as the passengers board the train and it begins to roll through the Anatolian countryside. The poem has an easy, novelistic style, giving a scene, some inner monologue or dialogue, and the backstory of the focal character, and then moving on; but unlike a novel, its organizing principle is juxtaposition, not cause and effect. There isn't really a central character — though the poem comes more an more to focus upon the probably autobiographical figure of the poet Halil, a political prisoner. The poem is "about" the history of modern Turkey in the sense that the kaleidoscope of its scenes and characters returns again and again to considering and discussing, from their various perspectives, recent events: the end of the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the Turkish Republic, and the early course of World War II. But this thematic unity is peripheral, and the title of the book / poem really does capture what it feels like: landscapes passing by the reader, except these landscapes are human lives. I've never read anything like this, and it inspired a new interest I've added to my list of possible future reading projects: I want to read a bunch of long narrative poems, modern ones.
(Here's a provisional list in no particular order: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Wordsworth's The Prelude, Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Derek Walcott's Omeros, G.K. Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse, C.S. Lewis's Dymer, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Byron's Don Juan, Comte de Lautreamont's The Songs of Maldoror, Adam Mickiewicz's Master Thaddeus, and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. Am I missing anything important?)
And that's what I read in May!
Until next time, you have my warm regards,
Robert Minto