It’s been a while

I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading the books on my shelves instead of constantly buying new ones that pique my interest only to be too busy to read them. This year I did the Goodreads challenge and read 74 books most of which were murder mysteries read before bed. Work was intense and insomnia was my constant companion. But there were more challenging reads mixed in there.

I read all the long form journalism I can by Rebecca Solnit, Masha Gessen, and Timothy Snyder and loved three of their books I read this year. I read the print version and listened to the audio version of Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. It is a beautiful wedding of important ideas and gorgeous writing. Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy is disturbingly relevant these days and Timothy Snyder released an audio version of his very important book On Tyranny with additional talks on the war in Ukraine. His course on the history of Ukraine found on the Yale Youtube site is very worth watching in its entirety as well.

Krista Tippet’s podcast On Being introduced me to the wonderful Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama and his new book Poetry Unbound based on his podcast of the same name is delightful. It is another book I have in print and audio format and when I can’t sleep his voice is balm for my soul. Ditto his lovely collection of autobiographical writings In the Shelter which carried me through a stressful time. In recent years I’ve discovered the challenge and the power and the beauty of the writing of James Baldwin and Eddie S. Glaude Jr’s book Begin Again is a wonderful exploration of his work. After reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything I am challenging myself to read the big pile I have of Graeber books sitting by my desk.

For fiction the highlights of my ‘serious’ reading were Barbara Kingsolver’s new, much acclaimed, novel Demon Copperhead. I find myself thinking about it all the time. As healthcare in Alberta becomes more and more precarious and the future of oil and gas in question Kingsolver’s novel about the collapse of extraction industries and the developing opioid crisis felt very relevant. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad also haunts me. It’s a disturbing look at Iraq following the war and the ambiguities of virtue and vice. This novel contributed to some of my problems sleeping for a while.

As someone who enjoys police procedurals, academic settings, and mysteries set in Britian I enjoyed discovering Elly Griffiths and Kate Ellis this year. I was sad to read the last Peter Robinson mystery and was very glad to read another of Thomas King’s Thumps DreadfulWater books. King is always a fun read and although it’s set across the border it always feels close to home and this time Stand Off even figures in the story.

I’m glad I kept track of the books I read this year. It didn’t feel like I had read much so it was reassuring to have a record of the reading that I did manage to do. I do have a very very big pile of books that wait to be read though so maybe this year I need to go back to my resolution of my original project to only read books from my shelves or the public library. Maybe it is time to start a 65 before 65 project. I’m 32 months away I think so replicating the same pace of 2 a month would do it. Onward forward!

https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/38375680

Books 53, 54, 55, 56, and 57

A few weeks ago I took a week for study leave and sat in my back yard reading novels and memoirs by people of colour. It was a fascinating week that stretched me. Only one was a book from my shelf – I went to Chapters, pulled up their list of black and indigenous writers and pulled four that interested me. So the legalist in me thinks they shouldn’t count towards my 60 but God willing I’m going to pass that goal soon anyway and I still have 11 months until I turn 60. It’s hard to go a day without a rationalization.

Urrea’s book was already on my shelf. I had picked it up after reading an interview with him a year or so ago. His father was Mexican general and his mother a WASP from an establishment family on Staten Island. This is a memoir that gives glimpses into his childhood, his parents’ volatile marriage, and the tensions in his identity as neither truly Mexican or American. It’s a really powerful, often very moving book. After marrying his parents end up living a much more financially constrained life and it gives some interesting glimpses into the intersections of ethnic and class identity. It also gives some disturbing glimpses into the impact of a toxic masculinity that tried to ‘toughen’ him up as a boy. Now I want to read more of Urrea’s poetry and fiction. He’s a beautiful writer.

Frying Plantain is a first novel by Zalika Reid-Benta set in Toronto . The protagonist has been born in Canada to a mother who had come from Jamaica. She is treated often in school as not really Canadian but her friends who were born in Jamaica don’t consider her truly Jamaican either. So she too is caught between two identities. Her mom is a single mom with a difficult relationship with her own mother. They often need to turn to the grandmother for help because of economic struggles but that help always comes with complicated obligations.

I love campus novels and this one is a great contribution to the genre. Brandon Taylor draws on his own experience as a queer black student in the midwest to write this novel about a queer black grad student from Alabama who has moved north to an unnamed university to do his research in biology. There he discovers that he doesn’t really have a place among the other grad students who along with the profs subject him to a multitude of micro aggressions. As I read it I kept thinking about what Kendi says about how calling these things micro aggressions fails to capture how soul destroying these acts are. There is even a scene where a white woman weaponizes his status as a black man to cover up her own screw up. Much of the book is really disturbing.

I hadn’t heard of this novel or writer until I found it on the list of indigenous books at Chapters but wanted to read it as soon as I heard it was set on the Peguis reserve in Manitoba and in Winnipeg. I don’t know this reserve but I know some of the area spending my summers growing up on Lake Winnipeg. And when he writes about Winnipeg I can see the places he’s describing. The novel moves back and forth in time and place from Jonny’s childhood on the reserve and his life in Winnipeg. He’s two-spirited and the novel describes scenes of violence at the hands of men who want to ‘toughen’ him up similar to those Urrea describes. The life he describes on the reserve is a complicated mix of trauma, abuse, addiction, but also love, generosity, good humour, and resiliency. One week in my reading group we had a long discussion about the ways in which groups get labeled as traumatized people – a point Kendi wants to resist – and I thought about that a lot reading Whitehead’s novel. I find myself thinking about this novel a lot and have since discovered I’m slow to this party as many of my friends love his work already.

My favourite read of the week though was We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib. I basically read it in one sitting because I couldn’t put it down. This is a memoir by a writer who came to Canada as a refugee with her family when she was in elementary school. They are part of a small sect who are persecuted by the Pakistan government and fled the threat of violence. Her marriage was arranged by her mother when she was 13, she married at 16, and was divorced at 18. She married again only to divorce him when she realized she was queer. There is so much in her book about the experience of an immigrant family, discrimination against people of colour and muslims, and the tensions in her own family over the role of women and sexuality. I found the book so engrossing and thought she addresses some of the issues of sexuality and gender really well that were the weakest in Kendi’s book. It is good to read them together.

I really valued reading these books and have another pile of novels and memoirs to continue reading writers of colour. A friend of mine has made a commitment to read books by women and people of colour for a year – each month she’s focussing on a different scholar – and won’t post any writing on facebook by white men for the same year. I’m curious to see what she learns by doing this. I know that this opened me up to a bunch of experience that isn’t mine and I enjoyed it even as I was challenged by it. Often when white folk post that they are going to do this it sounds like a penance. Maybe that’s part of the problem with some folk – we don’t like stepping out of our comfort zone much. But this is a happy quest for me and one I’d recommend highly!

Book Eighteen

I actually read this book last month on James Baldwin’s birthday. Since I watched the documentary I Am Not Your Negro it seems I see references to Baldwin everywhere. I’m not sure if there is a resurgence of interest in him or if it is just that now I’m paying attention. But I have a pile of his books now and started with The Fire Next Time.

It took me a long time to write this because I’ve been thinking a lot about the book and I didn’t want to dash something off. The first part of the book is a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew about growing up in America as a person of colour. A few summers ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me which is written as a letter to his son and I was disturbed reading Baldwin’s letter by how little things have changed since Baldwin wrote his letter in the early sixties.

The second part of the book is an essay on race relations in the US and in particular Baldwin’s reflections on religious identity in the context of race relations. He details his own childhood in the church and his reasons for distancing himself it. But he also describes his meeting with Elijah Muhammad and his reasons for not joining the Nation of Islam either. The church failed to speak to the dire conditions of the neighbourhood Baldwin grew up in, promising instead eternal rewards. The Nation of Islam involved a rejection of the white community which Baldwin rejected.

Baldwin writes at length about the ways in which he thinks the circumstances of blacks and whites are tied together and argues that the emancipation of one is tied to the emancipation of the other. Life is ultimately tragic because one day we will all die and we will do anything to hide this fact from ourselves. Baldwin sees in white attitudes towards and treatment of blacks the projection of these fears on others in a futile attempt to see oneself as free from the fact of mortality.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on the public hostility expressed in social media towards clients of our local Supervised Consumption Site as something of the same. If the racialized “other” is to blame for his or her problems, if they “deserve” punishment, if they are suffering the consequences of their own choices, then I am safe from the threat of the opioid crisis because I am protected by my race, my economic status, my virtue. To which Baldwin responds: whoever debases others is debasing himself. We are all in this together and if we are going to see a better world it is going to be by seeing our redemption as wrapped up in the redemption of all.

Book 12

A few days ago Macleans released an article on the working class in Canada focussing on the work of Wolfgang Lehmann, a sociology professor at Western. Lehmann studies the experience of working class students in university and this was the focus of the article. https://www.macleans.ca/society/what-does-it-mean-to-be-working-class-in-canada/ It is a fascinating article and echoed many of the things a friend has said to me about going to university after growing up in a mill town.

In each of the last three summers I’ve read a memoir by someone who grew up poor and disadvantaged and yet achieved stellar educations. Two summers ago it was J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Last summer it was Tara Westover’s Educated. Vance’s book details how he grew up in poverty in Ohio but after serving in the marines was able to attend Yale Law school. He describes the obstacles that stood in his way, both in getting to university and to fitting in once he got there. It was a bestseller but was also criticized by some for underplaying the systemic barriers at play for many poor students, particularly those of colour. Westover recounts her childhood in a fundamentalist mormon family where the children didn’t go to school or access medical treatment. But she loved learning and is able through a remarkable effort to teach herself enough to get admitted to BYU. Ultimately she is able to study in Cambridge. This is also a gripping book and became a bestseller. Both writers offer insight into the challenges they faced of not “belonging” at university but also becoming alienated from their own families and communities because they have gone.

After reading a review this winter I picked up another memoir in this vein, Undocumented, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Peralta, who now is a classics professor at Princeton, came from the Dominican Republic as a boy with his parents to live in New York. His father returned after the birth of his brother but his mother decided to stay with her two sons although only her youngest had papers once her visa expired. Undocumented is Peralta’s story of growing up in living in constant fear that their lack of papers would be discovered and they would be deported. He loved books and learning and was fortunate to meet people who opened doors for him – a private school education that led to Princeton and then Oxford. Ultimately he was given papers and allowed to return to the US where he did a doctorate at Stanford. In many ways it is an exceptional story and he addresses that clearly in the last chapter. He now advocates for immigration reform and for other undocumented students and he knows his story is not typical. He attributes much of it to luck and refuses to see his own story as a “rags to riches” story of personal accomplishment. The system is broken and has gotten even worse since 2015 when the book was published.

I remember reading John Osborn’s classic account of Harvard law school, Paper Chase, and being inspired to study study study. Peralta’s book inspired in me some of that same love of study and desire to immerse myself in reading. It is difficult to explain to those who see reading as a task or chore how it can be a delight and magical as it clearly is for him. Reading opens up a world to Peralta as they are living in a shelter. It is fascinating to read how he discovers classics and to read his reflections on why it is largely a white discipline.

A big part of what is both painful and engrossing about the book though is his account of what it is like living in multiple worlds and not feeling at home in any. The energy that goes into keeping secret his status is exhausting. And then there is the discussion over what it means to be black on a predominately white campus and whether he has an obligation to speak out about his immigration status. It’s a powerful read.

One last thought: Peralta is very clear that he was fortunate to receive support and love from teachers and others along the way. His story is a great example of how people can make a huge difference in the life of a child by showing up, by challenging them, and by loving them.