Month: May 2018

Books I Am Currently In The Middle Of Reading

A byproduct of going through Lesley’s MFA program is that for that two years, I was limited in what I could read by available time and required reading.

In the past, my book buying habit has been to buy one book at a time and get through it and/or abandon in, then go book shopping. I love to book shop (actually, let’s face facts: I love to shop, period) so I was hardly ever without a book to read; I just never had a backlog. Two years of prescribed reading has changed that in a big way. I now have a TBR (to-be-read) pile that is somewhere around fifty books.

I’m also finding that I will read part of a book, then set it down in favor of something else, with the full intention of going back to it. At this moment, there are 8 books I’m somewhere in the middle of.

  • The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee
  • The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
  • The Best American Essays: 2016, Robert Atwan, series ed.: Jonathan Franzen, ed.
  • E. B. White: Writings From The New Yorker 1927-1976, Rebecca M. Dale, ed.
  • Brand New Ancients: a Poem by Kate Tempest
  • Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books 2000-2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Little, Big by John Crowley
  • A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E., Schwab

So, three adult fantasies, three books of essays, one epic poem, and a craft book. The book that’s in my bag right now is the Schwab. The one that’s been on this list the longest is the Crowley.

The two single-author essay books are made up of very short pieces. To my mind, they’re not one-sitting books, because neither has anything in them that’s longer than 7 or 8 pages, and in the case of the E. B. White, there could be as many as three short pieces on a single page. The Le Guin’s shortest pieces are around a page to a page and a half. Both seem to me to be the sort of book you pick up and thumb through when you have a free moment. The White, especially, excites me because the prose is so tight and the pieces so poignant.

On the other hand, the epic poem feels like something I should sit down with and read through, possibly aloud, in one sitting. I will have to make a hole in my schedule to do this. I made it a few pages in, and then decided that I needed to start over with the above conditions met.

The craft book — The Kovach & Rosenstiel — feels like work. It’s essentially a text book for journalism students, and as a nonfiction writer, I want to have some of the finer points of objective journalism in mind. I’ve read the introduction and have in mind a strategy for getting through it. I’ve identified what feels like 4 sections of two or three chapters each, and I should sit down with each section and get through each in one session. This is where it is handy to me to know that I read approximately 30 pages an hour. Each section should take me about 3 hours. Sorry: not all reading is for pleasure.

The Best American is also required reading. I have the 2017 in my TBR pile, and as soon as I finish this anthology, that one should be added to this list immediately. This is both work reading and pleasure. I’ve found some of my favorite writing in the pages of these anthologies, including a recent piece by Franzen himself in the 2015 anthology.

The Lee is something I picked up based on a short story of hers (“Bite-Me-Not or Fleur de Fur”) I’d read for an interdisciplinary studies course in fantasy writing taught by Mark Edwards. The Birthgrave her first published book in a long and prolific career.

The Crowley is on my list for the same reason. At the time, I felt like it was a “nutritious” enough read for a budding nonfiction author, but at the moment, I seem to be drifting more towards fantasy again, so it may get picked up sooner rather than later, though probably not next after the Schwab.

Arrogant

In a recent thread on a social media site, I posted a link to an article on The Intercept which includes a recording of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer trying to brow-beat progressive Democratic primary candidate Levi Tillemann into getting out of the of the race for the Colorado’s 6th Congressional District in favor of the DCCC’s preferred candidate, high-powered corporate lawyer Jason Crow. I offered it as evidence that the Democratic Party is anything but democratic.

Anyone who has noted the behavior of the DCCC and the DNC for the last few years knows of any number of instances where the party leadership has quashed (or attempted to quash) progressive and leftist voices from prominence within the party, all the while demanding that all progressives fall in line with their centrist views and preferred candidates. For many, including myself, this pattern of behavior has been disturbing as well as alienating. Some of us have begun organizing within the party under the banner “Justice Democrats,” others have left the part altogether, some for the Green Party, others for the Democratic Socialists and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, publicly questioning the motives and actions of the Democratic party leadership inspires many rank-and-file Democrats to shout down any criticism of the party and/or its methods. Two years out from the 2016 election, woe be to anyone who has the temerity to mention that they supported Jill Stein, as I did and still do, or, in some circles, brings up Bernie Sanders.

I have been told that I am personally responsible for the Trompe presidency. I’ve been called a self-centered child. No matter that my gender is female, I have been called a “Bernie Bro” more than a few times. I’ve been told repeatedly, as I continue to stand up for myself, that I am arrogant. I have recently been told that the country is “in flames” because of my support of, and vote for, the Green Party’s presidential candidate.

At the point where any discussion of non-support for the Democratic Party and/or its leadership reaches this level of rhetoric, the possibility of further reasonable discourse would appear to have been trashed. You will almost certainly be told, as Steny Hoyer helpfully explained to Levi Tillemann, that you don’t understand “how the world works.”

I created this post in response to such a discussion. The first draft of it was filled with the hurt and anger I felt, mixed with amusement when the person I was having an exchange with concluded their final post in the thread with “Up yours!” My assumption, based on prior experience, was that I would be unfollowed and/or blocked. I also assumed that it then wouldn’t matter what I said or did, there would be no way to reach yet another centrist Democrat, and that political discussions of any sort are no longer worthwhile: everyone is so wrapped up in narrative that an actual discussion of the merits of any particular point of view aren’t productive: either we already agree or I won’t be listened to because there is no incentive to go beyond one’s tribal viewpoint.

But the person I had had the argument surprised me: they reached out via private message, explaining their point of view, and when I sent a thoughtful response, they thanked me for it. I found that hopeful.

We are still very far from being on the same page in our opinions, but I think that at the end of this minor crisis in our long-distance friendship, we found that the friendship is still intact, and we are also more likely to hear each other’s views without perceiving them as an attack or threat. The risk turned out, in this case, to be worth taking, and neither of us has had to back down from our positions in order to move forward.

What this means for situations like the Hoyer/Tillemann exchange above is less clear. My hope is that Levi Tillemann stays in the race for the Colorado 6th. I believe that he will, but I say that from clear across the country and from outside the Democratic Party. I’d be more willing to support Democratic candidates if I knew that the DCCC and DNC were allowing the voters to choose their candidates rather than the party leadership dictating to those voters who their candidates should be.

In truth, I believe that the party would be stronger, the country would be stronger, the candidates the party picks will be stronger for having earned the voters’ support through cultivating a more direct and authentic connection with the voters, rather than fishing for advertising $$$ via the DCCC and the DNC.