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[duncanwrites]

All the books I read in 2021, reviewed in two sentences or less

The Killing Moon, The Shadowed Sun - NK Jemisin: I started the year with this duology by NK Jemisin, which came out before her much more well known Broken Earth books. I had tried to read the Broken Earth books years ago but didn't get the hang of them, and these are more fantastical and written in a voice that I preferred, and convinced me to retry her later works.

The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky - NK Jemisin: While I never fully adjusted to the style of the narration in this series, I'm glad I returned to it and finished it - even if the ending becomes a bit more  handwavey than I had hoped.

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories - Ursula K. Le Guin: This is a book of some of Le Guin's later short stories where she plays more explicitly with gender and power dynamics with her extraordinarily clear voice. As with some of my favorite works by her, all of these stories focused on the slow churn of changing societies, and the personal stakes for the people leading that change.

Spain in Our Hearts - Adam Hochschild: While I'd say this book doesn't have the driving focus of some of his books on slavery and the Belgian Congo, you can still hear Hochschild's commitment to looking at the importance of social movements in world history, and his disappointment in the nations that let down the forces of freedom in the 30s. Fully captures the desperation, disorganization, and dedication of people who traveled to Spain during the civil war.

Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov: All-time classics revisited partially out of nostalgia, and partially to feel out a theory I had about them that didn't pan out.

Barn 8 - Deb Olin: I could tell this book had its heart in the right place but left a bit to be desired in the execution; on the one hand uncomfortably realistic in its description of radical political subcultures, and wildly unrealistic in its plotting and story.

Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener: I loved this memoir of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area under startup culture, which I think captured both the hopefulness of the people who are drawn to the industry, and the banality of the damage it does to both them, and the world around it. Exceptionally written, carefully reasoned, and highly recommended.

My Antonia - Willa Cather: I try to make a point of occasionally reading books from other eras than our own, this was one of those efforts and I'm glad I made it. A book that shows how the harshness of living as a colonizer shaped gender politics, and the voice of the women who wrote about it.

American Pastoral - Phillip Roth: A thoroughly intense slice of an older form of political paranoia.

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life - Samantha Irby:  A terrific book of personal essays, with some of the funniest single lines, or moments of any book I read this year. A perfect mix of fun, dark, and optimistic.

The Ministry For The Future - Kim Stanley Robinson: This is one of the books that surprised me the most this year; I loved Robinson's Mars Trilogy but I didn't automatically relish the idea of reading a long novel about the climate crisis (you may note how few books about climate change I read in general). But it ended up being a work of real imagination, looking carefully but creatively at the future and crafting visions of the path through the climate crisis in a way that was both invigorating and grounding.

Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner: I wasn't as taken with this memoir as others have been, there were moments of grace and clarity, but a lot surrounding them felt unfocused and even a bit evasive at times.

Changing Planes  - Ursula K. Le Guin: A fascinatingly structured book of interconnected short stories given to me by a friend. I hadn't seen this book of hers before, but I'm very glad I read it.

Private Empire - Steve Coll: I can't remember why I finally decided to read this book about ExxonMobil, but what I liked best about it is how it gives a picture of the global reach of modern oil companies, and the work, violence, and money that has to go in to managing the kind of sprawl. Covering the time between the Valdez spill and the BP Gulf Spill, you really get a picture of what makes this company so uniquely dangerous.

The Topeka School - Ben Lerner: I find Ben Lerner's autofiction method a joy to watch unfold; it sparks so many questions and opens me up to looking at my own life more closely. While I think the ideas in this book are less sharp than in 10:04, the language and beauty he digs out of mundane life are undimmed and more than worth the read.

The Found and the Lost - Ursula K. Le Guin: a massive tome of Le Guin's short stories, this was a delight to return to night after night for almost a month. What I appreciated most about the compilation was the opportunity to look into new corners of her thinking and storytelling - I particularly enjoyed a series of short stories set across several hundred years about a society struggling to overcome a period of racially-charged civil conflicts.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong: I understand and appreciate the craft that went into writing this novel, but I mainly finished it thinking about how frustrating I find poetry at times.

Ted Chiang - Exhalation: I had previously read Chaing's earlier book of short stories and didn't care for it, but the breadth and variety of stories in this collection is much greater, and I am grateful that a friend prodded me to try reading it.

Recollections of My Nonexistence - Rebecca Solnit: One of Solnit's more personal books, I'm disappointed more people didn't get a chance to read it when it came out in March 2020. One of the things I love about her writing is the core kindness that lies at its center, and I think that aspect of her work is brought out most in this book.

10:04 - Ben Lerner: I wanted to re-read this book after The Topeka School, and there are more than a few moments when I had to actually put it down because there were phrases or paragraphs that needed to be savored. So melancholy, so insightful, and so well-written.

The Waves - Virginia Woolf: This was my second reading of this exceptional book, and I think it may be a top-3 novel of all time for me. There still isn't anything like it, and the central section on grief is the best anything I've ever read on the subject.

Dune - Frank Herbert: Re-read in order to prepare for the (excellent) movie. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers: I ended up not caring much for this recent sci-fi novel.

The Beginning Place - Ursula K. Le Guin: Yes, another Le Guin book - one that I found genuinely uncomfortable to read. I'm not sure exactly what the backstory here is, but this one clearly came from a dark place, and felt more like a strange horror story than a fantasy novel.

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist - Sunil Yapa: Imagine the movie Crash... but set at the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. That's this book, and it's not awesome.

Circe - Madeline Miller: I fully expected Madeline Miller's re-tellings of Greek myths to be a little on the corny side, but they are so well-written and so soulful, they bulldoze all objections. This one ended up being my most-recommended books of the year, and a fun one to read as I was walking around European art museums full of Greek sculpture.

Orwell’s Roses - Rebecca Solnit: I don't think there's a book for which I am more in the target audience than one written by one of my favorite writers, about another favorite writer, regarding his appreciation for flowers, which make me unreasonably happy, but Orwell's Roses fully lives up to the bill, and is recommended even if you're not yourself as much in the target audience.

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger: I wanted to re-read this book because it's one of the best I know of where the plot only takes place over two days or less. It feels like a cliche to say that Catcher in the Rye is misunderstood (being a book, famously, about a misunderstood boy), but I think it's important to read this book as a reflection on how trauma - a brother dying suddenly, witnessing a suicide, a roommate harassing a recent romantic partner - can fester and become toxic when men are not given tools, support, or language to handle it.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness - Claire Vaye Watkins: I didn't set out to read this book, someone gave it to me on a whim and I am very glad they did. Dark, squirmy, but fully truthful and stunningly beautiful.

Barbarians at the Gate - Bryan Burrough and John Helyar: I've started to read more about finance and banking and picked this up off the shelf after having bought it a while back. I think this book gives you a good picture of how arbitrary, absurd, and emotionally stunted the highest-rungs of the ladder of Wall Street really are.

[duncanwrites]

All the books I read in 2020, reviewed in two sentences or less

My 2020 in reading was, naturally, a little strange. I had lots of long pauses, did a bad job of keeping track of everything I read, used an e-reader for the first time, and read more for work than I usually do.

So these may not be in strict chronological order as they usually are, and there may be a few missing, but here’s the list, as per tradition:

Rising Tide - John M. Barry: This history of the Mississippi floods of 1927 and the resulting changes in how the US deals with natural disasters is one of those stories about how politics and personality can become a part of the concrete world, and essential for understanding the racial dynamics of disaster response. Well-told, and worth reading. 

The Consultant's Calling - Geoffrey M. Bellman: A very useful recommendation from a trusted friend that now has a long-term spot in my office shelf. This book isn't only about consulting, it also offers great thoughts about finding your place and impact in organizations in general.

Range - John Epstein: I think Range is the nonfiction book that had the second- greatest impact on my thinking about myself this year (stay tuned for number 1!): I've always approached my professional and political work as a generalist, and for a long time I felt like that approach was leading me to a dead end. Reading this convinced me that I could be effective and even more useful with my fingers in a lot of different pies, and nudged me to keep searching for my most effective place in the movement.

The Accusation - Bandi: A harrowing work of realist fiction from North Korea that shows the toll authoritarian hero-worship takes on the soul.

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead: I found that the quality of The Underground Railroad did not quite match its notoriety. It felt like two books awkwardly joined, where the more grounded approach to the emotional and interpersonal stakes of slavery and freedom was attached to a poorly-explored fantasy device.

Maus - Art Spiegelman: So much more than a book about the Holocaust, Maus is about parents and how pain is handed down between generations.

I Love Dick - Chris Kraus: After a long enough time, it becomes hard to evaluate books that are meant as a provocation as well as storytelling, but even 20 years on, it's not hard to see why I Love Dick brought us so much of the style and voice of feminist writing on the internet. A unique, itchy, sticky piece of work.

Bloodchild - Octavia Butler: Whenever I see an Octavia Butler book in a used book store, I buy it. This collection of short stories is a fantastic example for what transgressive, visionary speculative fiction should aspire to.

King Leopold's Ghost - Adam Hochschild: What I love about this book and the other I've read by Hochschild (Bury the Chains_ is that he very carefully merges deep explorations of systems of violence with the way that they can be undone by the people who participate in them. King Leopold's Ghost is as much about Belgium's murderous plunder of the Congo as it is about the successful global movement against it.

Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon: Priory of the Orange Tree is built on a strong foundation, melding Eastern and Western dragon stories into one universe, but couldn't seem to tie all of its threads together in a compelling way by the end.

Desiring the Kingdom - James K. A. Smith: Smith's point about meaning and desire being embedded in every day practices is a valuable one, but I think I may be just too far outside of his target audience of religious teachers and thinkers to get the most out of his explorations here.

City of Brass, Kingdom of Copper, Empire of Gold (The Daevabad Trilogy) - S. A. Chakraborty: This series is exceptional, and some of my favorite books of any kind that I read this year; I certainly think I recommended them more often than anything else I read in 2020. A high fantasy built on Islamic and Arab cultural iconography, the characters are insightfully developed, the world building grows with precise pacing, and the themes of intergenerational trauma, and sectarianism are handled with expert delicacy.

Leadership and the New Science - Meg Wheatley: While I appreciate the effort to apply metaphors developed from scientific paradigm shifts to provoke paradigm shifts of thinking in other areas of work, I think this book strains its chosen metaphors a bit too far to be useful.

The American Civil War: A Military History - John Keegan: I appreciate that there's a value to these kinds of military analyses of conflicts, but I found this book's neutral tone - and sometimes admiring takes - towards the Confederacy off-putting. Two things I did take from it: the outcome of the war was not certain at the beginning, and speed is truly a critical part of winning conflicts.

To Purge This Land with Blood - Stephen Oates: This was the first substantial reading I had ever done about John Brown, and Oates' book made it very clear why he is still one of the American historical figures most worth talking about today. The contradictions, complexities, and unimpeachable truths caught up in his raids are almost too many to name, but I think he is one of the people most worth thinking about when considering what actually changes the world.

Normal People - Sally Rooney: Anyone who denies that this book is anything less than a truly great novel is not telling the truth, or does not actually care about the feelings people feel. It is a work of keen emotional observation, and perfect, tender language, as well as a pleasingly dirty book -- and there is nothing I would change about it.

Conversations With Friends - Sally Rooney: Still a banger, I think Conversations with Friends struggles somewhat to get to its point, and has less of the pleasing depth and ambiguity of Normal People. Still worth your time and attention, I think.

The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel: I loved Station Eleven, and I can't imagine having to follow it up, and I unfortunately think The Glass Hotel doesn't quite accomplish all it set out to do. It wandered, hung up on a few strong images, but never progressed towards a point that needed to be made, and I finished it feeling underwhelmed.

The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Coates is an essential nonfiction writer who can turn a phrase to make devastating, memorable points - but I thought his novel failed to do very many of the things that make his nonfiction great.

A Visit From The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan: Someone once recommended this book to me as a way to study voice in character development - it is certainly that, as well as a brutally efficient window into hope, fame, and aging.

Trick Mirror - Jia Tolentino: The best parts of Trick Mirror show why Jia Tolentino is one of the writers most worth reading today: she knows how to find the experiences and people that wormhole you into dimensions of American culture that you might not otherwise think carefully about. While I think some of the essays in the book are weaker than her usual work, overall it is still terrific, and her essay on Houston rap, evangelical culture, and drugs is one of the best anythings I read all year.

My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell: I feel like I'm on very shaky ground making any definitive takes about a book like this that is so fundamentally about gendered violence and what it means to be a victim of that violence. But I will say that I think it's important to recognize how power and charisma can be used to make you want something that actually hollows out your soul.

Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel: Without a doubt, this is the nonfiction book that had the greatest personal impact on my life in 2020, and I have much longer things I've written about it that I will probably never share. While I've not ever been to the extremes she describes here, Wurtzel describes so many things that I clearly remember feeling that the shock of recognition still hasn't worn off.

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander: In truth, we should all be shaking with rage at the American justice system every single day. This is certainly not the only book to explain why, but it does a particularly good job of explaining both the deep roots, and rapid expansion of the system we need to dismantle.

The Martians - Kim Stanley Robinson: Getting another little taste of the world Robinson built in the Mars Trilogy only made me want to drop everything and read them again. Well-made, but not stand-alone short stories that are worth reading if you've finished the novels and aren't ready to leave the formally-Red yet.

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters - Ursula K. Le Guin: One of the things that makes Le Guin so special is the sparseness of her prose and world building, and her genius is very much evident in her short stories.

Matter - Iain M. Banks: This is the second Culture series book I've read by Banks, and once again I thought it was inventive, satisfyingly plotted, but not so heady to be imposing. A very solid read.

Ogilvy On Advertising - David Ogilvy and Ogilvy On Advertising in the Digital Age - Miles Young: The original Ogilvy on Advertising is  frustratingly smug but at least delivers plain and persuasive versions of advertising first principles. Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age is also frustratingly smug, but is mainly useful as an example of the hubris and narcissism of contemporary advertising executives.

Goodbye to the Low Profile - Herb Schmertz: Schmertz was the longtime public affairs director for Mobil Oil, and in this book he talks about how they worked to manage public debate about the oil industry, without realizing that he's writing a confession. Reading this it is abundantly clear how the oil industry's commitment to making deception respectable led to the collapse of the American public sphere.

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries: I was surprised by how much I liked this book, and wish more people who wanted to start political projects would read it. The Lean method is a way of building organizations that are ruthlessly focused on serving their base of supporters, and evaluate their work against real results - and I think we all could use more of those.

Zero To One - Peter Thiel: Another book that reads like a confession when perhaps not intended to, Zero To One's main point is that the point of building businesses should be to build monopolies, and that competition is actually bad. A great starting point for understanding what's gone wrong in America's tech economy.

The Mother of All Questions - Rebecca Solnit: Of the many things to cherish about Solnit as a writer, the one I needed most when I re-read this book is her ability to gently but doggedly show other ways of imagining the world, and ourselves in it.

Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee: I think this is the third time I've read this novel, and the time I've enjoyed it the least: somehow on re-re-reading, the core metaphors became overbearing and over-used, and the plot and characters thinner.

Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller: There are several excellent entries in the sub-genre of classic tales re-told from the perspective of silent women characters, but this is the first I've read re-told from a man's perspective - in this case, the likely-lover of Achilles in the Iliad, Patroclus. While not necessarily a groundbreaking work of literature, it is a very well-executed one that tells a compelling story about how violence can destroy men who carry it out.

Uprooted - Naomi Novik: What makes Uprooted so engrossing is that its magical world feels grounded, and political: magic has consequences for the individuals who use it, and further consequences based on their place in the world. What makes it frustrating is the overwhelming number of things the author has happening in the story, and the difficulty they have bringing them to a conclusion.

[duncanwrites]

All the books I read in 2019, reviewed in 2 sentences or less.

The annual tradition returns! These are all the books I read in the last year, and how I felt about them in two sentences or less.

Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson: This was the final book of the science fiction trilogy that exploded my brain at the end of 2018, and the after-shocks lasted well into 2019. These books capture something essential about the relationship between place and politics that you can only do with science fiction.

Bark - Lorrie Moore: A thoroughly uneven book of short stories - when they were good, they were great, when they were bad, they were bumbling takes on the domestic side of the war on terror.

Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway: Maybe it's just my mood in the forsaken year of 2019, but I just have no tolerance any more for works of art that aestheticize the degradation of the human spirit. This book made me feel near constant disgust.

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf: In contrast, I think you can create works of art that dignify people even in their darkest moments, and offer a bridge into the experience of others that can be a passage into becoming a better person. It's always nice to read a book for a second time and realize you can keep reading it again for years to come.

The Asshole Survival Guide - Robert I. Sutton: We all have assholes that we have to work with, and sometimes it's necessary to have some external validation that it's not all your fault, and that establishing distance between yourself and said assholes is a good idea.

My Invented Country - Isabelle Allende: It took me until the very end of this book to realize there was a different memoir by Allende that I meant to read instead. This one was not so great.

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller: Gonzo literary comfort food.

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker: I found this book charming enough, but it never totally wowed me at any particular point. I think it showed that the concept of two magical creatures from different cultural contexts meeting in turn of the century New York is an interesting thought experiment, but a struggle to land as a full narrative.

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami: Prior to this, the only Murakami I had read was What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and it's safe to say that did not properly prepare me for the surreal darkness of Kafka on the Shore, which seems to never stop going deeper into the abyss.

God Save Texas - Lawrence Wright: There are very few books about modern Texas that don't try to valorize it, or douse it with excessive nostalgia, and this is one of them. A politically-astute, funny meander through the state as it is, not as it might have once been, or never was.

M Train - Patti Smith: Patti Smith is obviously a genius, but this one didn't leave a great mark on me. Worth revisiting some other time, I think, since it's my girlfriend's favorite book.

Working - Robert Caro: I am shamefully still putting off my years-old plan to read Robert Caro's LBJ series, and finish his book on Robert Moses. In the meantime, this is a thoughtful reflection on how and why to tell stories about power.

Feel Free - Zadie Smith: I love Zadie Smith, and if you haven't read her non-fiction essays, you are missing out on some of her most exciting and moving writing. This is her second collection of essays, and you can tell how much the decade since the first has taken its toll - so many more of the pieces are about fear and frustrations, and the language is much wearier, even while it is still penetrating and beautiful.

The Telling - Ursula K. Le Guin: A slim, late novel from one of the best to ever do it, this book projects the sense of engrossing calm that reminds me most of all of listening to a story well-told - not incidentally, an experience that is a key theme of the plot itself.

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang: On the other hand, the short stories in this book all came off as one note thought experiments that failed to build compelling worlds.

The Overstory - Richard Powers: Not just my favorite book of the year, but also one of my favorite ever, The Overstory is the book I talked the most about, and told the most people to read in 2019. The best way to explain it ('it's a book about people who become obsessed with trees') really undersells things, because it's also about forest ecology, generations of trauma, the terror and clarity of radical thought, and a soul-splitting vision of hope. It receives the coveted 3rd sentence in the review, because I just need to emphasize again that you should read this book.

The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner: Maybe it was the fate of any book that I read after The Overstory, but The Flamethrowers left me feeling cold. It wandered off into too many fanciful-seeming plot arcs that didn't develop all the characters to the depth they needed.

What is Populism? - Jan-Werner Müller: I re-read this book because I wanted to revisit his ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of populists ahead of the next election, and whether there is ever a version of populism suitable for the left agenda. I finished worried, and skeptical, respectively, on those two points.

The Great Derangement - Amitav Ghosh: I don't read many books about climate change - I find there are very few things that I really feel like need saying in the face of the obvious and overwhelming - but I'm glad I made time for this one, which focuses on both the global north-south dynamics of the issue, and the inability of storytelling to capture the problem in full. It's profoundly difficult to sum up in two sentences, but it's worth a full read.

There, There - Tommy Orange: I think this novel asks too much of characters that are too thin to hold what they are made to bear. Too busy at the same time as it's too ordered to be fully credible.

The Slynx - Tatyana Tolstaya: I somehow convinced myself that I had read this surreal post-apocalyptic novel set in Russia 100 years after nuclear winter, but not only had I not read it, I haven't read anything like it before. A wide-ranging nightmare about authority, literacy, and the power of fear, set in its own vernacular and kaleidoscopic distortions of our authoritarian world today.

The Iliad - Homer: I wanted to re-read The Iliad because I find the idea of a hero felled by a single, discrete flaw to be a fascinating allegory, not realizing that Achilles' fatal flaw is not his heel but his anger.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood - Janisse Ray: There isn't much widely-read nature writing about the US South, and I think Janisse Ray's book dignifies and mourns the overlooked parts of the country that may not be wilderness but still contain bits of natural grace.

Sundiver and Startide Rising - David Brin: These two novels follow the same premise of humanity entering a universe of intelligent life as the only species to reach consciousness without patronage of, and servitude to, an elder species, and the power struggle that ensues. Sadly, the premise writes a check the execution can't cash, and while the first book, leaner and more focused, is solid, the second is over-long and distracted from what made the first fascinating.

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry: It took a lifetime of seeing this book (a signed first edition, from an Austin bookstore that has left no digital trace) on my parents' shelf to finally read Lonesome Dove, and it was a fitting welcome back to Texas. McMurtry's characters are fully-grown from the beginning, made of both broad archetypes and fine detail, and the narrative gives them the journey they deserve.

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt: There are very few novels that convey big ideas in balance with pot-boiler plotting, but this is one of them and my only regret is not reading it sooner. How dare anyone blight this novel with a terrible movie.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin: What makes this book special is not that it's speculative fiction about a world with unique gender arrangements; that's been done before by many other authors. What makes it special is that it investigates that world with tenderness towards its inhabitants, and an understanding of how gender weaves its way into institutions besides the family or the bedroom

Gun Island - Amitav Ghosh: I had high hopes for Gun Island, but felt it never quite rose above being a thought experiment carrying out his ideas from The Great Derangement.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P - Adelle Waldman: Your opinion of this book will probably hinge on how important you think it is to read books about writers in Brooklyn hanging out with other writers in Brooklyn. If you think that's still a useful world to explore, you will like that this book is merciless towards its characters, and startlingly accurate - but if you don't think that's important, you will be frustrated for the same reasons.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid: A gloriously rich experimentation in genre and contemporary global politics - playful, infuriating, and heartwarming, really everything you could hope for from a short novel. This is the second book by Hamid that I've read, and I'm going to set out to read all of them as soon as I can.

[duncanwrites]

All the books I read in 2018, reviewed in 2 sentences or less.

It’s that time again, where I write the shortest book reviews you’ll ever read, and dump them all at once to start the new year. 

The Faraway Nearby - Rebecca Solnit: An astonishing and heartbreaking book that melds form and function in the written word, a journey and a guide to many of Solnit's other rich and rewarding ideas.

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe: A glimpse into an older and more melodramatic version of male obsession.

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi: This book was an ambitious but somehow still slim epic about the intergenerational impacts of colonialism and slavery. It doesn't capture the uncapturable, but opens a window that needs to be looked through.

The Wind’s 12 Quarters - Ursula K. Le Guin: This is a book of short stories by Le Guin from her early work, showing her care with ideas and distinct moral compass. She's one of the very best to ever do it.

The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin: I've loved Le Guin for a long time, but I always put off reading The Dispossessed for various reasons. After finally finishing it, I see why it became one of her most well-read works, but still feel it doesn't have all the depth and mystery I love most about her other books.

Beautiful Rising - Many: This assembly of lessons, theories, and tactics from organizers outside the United States should be read by people trying to create change inside the United States.

East of Eden - John Steinbeck: I have a low-level goal to read great American novels to see if any of them measure up to Moby-Dick. I think East of Eden doesn’t quite match up to Melville, but is still epic and gorgeous.

The Inconvenient Indian - Thomas King: King's personal history of First Nations in North America cuts deep, with dark humor that may be the only way to turn a long genocide into something approachable for broad audiences. It works.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison: This is a terrifying book to read, full of dread and tumult - and in that way, is true to life in a way that a more conventionally told story could ever be.

Origins of the Urban Crisis - Thomas Sugrue: This is the second book by Sugrue that I've read, and both have been excellent. What I took from this one is that the moment of shared industrial prosperity in America was on the one hand vanishingly brief, and on the other a myth to begin with: the experience of de-industrialization and exploitation occurred simultaneously with the supposed peak of American industrial might.

Beloved - Toni Morrison: This was my second reading of Beloved, continuing my read-through of great American novels, and this time the fear and ghastliness came out much more vividly.

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power - Amy Sonnie and James Tracy: I think it can be worthwhile to write histories of political movements that failed, but I think you should write about them in ways that are honest about their shortcomings, which this book did not.

Another Country - James Baldwin: Another Country is full of grace and beauty; for Baldwin, country is a word for race, a physical place with history, and love, ‘a country he knew nothing about.’ He shows over and over again how so many of us are failing to find the one thing we are looking for - connection, a place where people can know us - not because of some personal fault but because the barriers of race and shame are so high.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs: This is a different book to read in 2018 vs. 1956: from a distance, you can see its impact, and its shortcomings. Though I agree with much of its analysis, I don't think she's ever clear about what makes her take on cities better than any other, besides the fact that it's her take.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain: Whether this book's obvious racism is 'of its time' or not, I think it is fine to say that it is obviously racist to its bones, not just in its word choice. I don't believe anyone should be made to read it as part of a study of great American literature.

House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende: I re-read this book because I wanted to read something about a country's descent into fascism - which it certainly is, while also being about about the emptiness of wealth, the crushing power of machismo, and the long echoes of violence.  

Goodbye to a River - John Graves: Goodbye to a River is about a solo canoe trip down a Texas river just before it is dammed for good. I read it while in Texas, and it helped me see the ways that even a few decades of development have permanently reshaped the land and water - and some of the deep cultural roots of what makes the state interesting.

Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward: This is another ghost story about blackness and racism, but written with hard edged contemporary realism that makes its hauntings more keep-the-lights-on terrifying than Beloved. I think Ward is writing things that everyone should read.

Ho Chi Minh - William Duiker: For whatever reason, I've read several novels in the past few years about the US war in Vietnam, but never anything about Vietnam before US intervention. I learned a great deal from this biography of Ho Chi Minh, most importantly the importance of timing in revolutionary movements, and Ho's humor and personal charisma as a force in pushing forward his movement.

What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky - Lesley Nneka Arimah: I didn’t enjoy this book of short stories as much as others have - I found it clumsy and showy, with too many of the stories structured in unsatisfying ways.

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger: I read this book over about as many days as are covered in the action of the story, while wandering alone a bit through New York. Something about the convergence between the world around me and the world of the novel gave it a new light, and I felt much more the softness and thinly papered vulnerability in Holden that I missed in earlier readings.

The Son - Philipp Meyer: I did not care for this novel's macho style or thin, cliche characters.

Open City - Teju Cole: I sat next to someone on a train that was reading Open City for the first time, and it inspired me to pick it up again. I'm glad I did, even if reading it remains one of the most unsettling experiences I've ever had in literature.

Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolph Anaya: I have seen this book on various shelves for years and finally picked it up only to find that it was not quite what I hoped, half-formed in many of its ideas and characters.

Exit West - Mohsin Hamid: Exit West is an exceptionally well-executed work of fiction. Hamid uses language that is stripped almost entirely of its own metaphors in order to draw us into the central metaphor of the story, pushing us into a world that is not so different from our own despite its added magic and upheaval.

How to Read a Protest - L.A. Kauffman: L.A. Kauffman is one of the best documenters of contemporary social movements we have on the left, and this book is just one example of why.

The Waves - Virginia Woolf: Reading more Virginia Woolf is always a good idea, and The Waves is my favorite book of hers that I've read so far. As a reader, it asks you to stretch, but rewards you when you stick with it.

Telex from Cuba - Rachel Kushner: I think this book accomplishes something unique to fiction, which is allowing you to dive into the minds of people in particular historic circumstances without directing you towards any firm judgement of them. A well-titled and well-done book.

Monkey Bridge - Lan Cao: I read this book a few years ago, and misremembered that it was good. It is not.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion - Ursula K. Le Guin: I am so grateful that someone thought to package these three linked novellas from Le Guin's Hainish cosmology, because read together they feel like so much more than any one of them alone. I think of them as three clusters of color in an impressionist painting about the effects of colonization and war on societies, even ones that stretch across planets and thousands of years.

Red Mars and Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars is the start of a trilogy about the terraforming of Mars, and it takes seriously the ways that corporate power, ideology and personalities would shape such a venture -- while taking all the science fairly seriously. I've just started Green Mars, and am sort of obsessed.

[duncanwrites]

Books I read in 2017, reviewed in 2 sentences or less.

Among other things, in 2017 I tried to read more books by authors from different eras other than our own. I also ended up putting down more books half-read than usual. I’m sure those two things say something about our year in anxiety.

But here’s what I finished and what I thought:

Birds of America - Lorrie Moore: This book contains some of the very finest short stories I've ever read. Every word, sentence and paragraph seems perfectly put together to draw out the real humanity of flawed people in a flawed world.

Wolf in White Van - John Darinelle: Among other qualities, I think Wolf in White Van has the best title of any book on this list: in the context of the novel itself it provides a perfect framing device that allows you to see the poetry of a dark twisted staircase of a story.

The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen: If I talked to you about The Sympathizer this year, it probably came out as an excited rant about any number of things - its dark humor, brilliant structure, mind-bending narration - but I promise you that beneath the exuberance there's a genuinely stunning novel sort of unlike anything I've otherwise read.

The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein: I re-read this book to get ready for Trump, and it did help, but it also reminded me about how angry I still am about the war in Iraq and so many other things. Still my favorite book by one of the best political writers out there doing the work.

Hegemony How-To - Jonathan Matthew Smucker: Another pre-Trump read, I think Smuker's book is one of the most useful -- as in practically, real-life make your work better -- books on politics in a long time. My only complaints is that I didn’t have a chance to read it years earlier so I could have avoided a lot of the things Smucker describes so well.

Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death's End - Liu Cixin: The first two novels of this trilogy I thought were some of the finest science fiction I've ever read: both grounded in real human suffering, sweepingly large in their approach to theory, and bringing out some exciting ideas. The third book dragged itself down with the darkness that already ran through the start of the series, but that shouldn't at all stop you from taking these on.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson: Another re-read, this is a classic science fiction novel that contains the kinds of themes and concepts that you begin to see everywhere around you once you finish it. Noticed a few more plot holes this time around.

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson: Set in the same world as Snow Crash, The Diamond Age never reaches the same wild intensity of the previous book, and is plotted more in the model of a shaggy dog story than a sci-fi thriller.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn: A classic text, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the source of a lot of conventional wisdom that was revolutionary in the 70s when it was published. Maybe a bit more tedious that it needs to be.

Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver: I think Barbara Kingsolver is a terrific novelist, and although this book moves quite slow through its paces (and is a bit stressful if you spend your days already thinking about climate change), the payoff towards the end is real. She does a lot, with a lot of heart.

The Mother of All Questions - Rebecca Solnit: Humane, withering, lyrical: Rebecca Solnit is one of the writers I most admire, and this is a really wonderful compilation of some of her best work on feminism, hope and politics.

In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck: I love John Steinbeck as much as the next left-leaning American, but only up to a point. This is a rough book about Men doing Men Things, full of people named Mac and Doc who do a lot of fighting and dying and it's just not his finest work.

Native Speaker - Chang-rae Lee: I re-read this book for the first time in about 10 years, and found myself coming across passages that had still somehow stuck with me through all that time. I could recommend Native Speaker as one of the best novels about New York City, relationships and language all at once, and its the kind of thing that will bear re-reading again in the future.

Trauma Stewardship - Laura van Dernoot Lipsky: I dunno, this one just didn't work for me. It felt over-broad, attributing so many behaviors and outcomes to trauma to render the concept almost meaningless.

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville: An epic that earns its place in the canon, I gushed wide-eyed about Moby-Dick at strangers for several weeks/months. Chapters on chapters about whaling history, seeming diversions, pile in between portraits of personal and collective madness: so much of this book is not about the White Whale and yet all of it is at the same time.

Direct Action - L. A. Kauffman: Direct Action is deftly written, insightful in its analyses and one of the best practical histories of contemporary organizing I've read. Hugely recommend for anyone trying to get a handle on What to Do Now.

What is Populism? - Jan Werner-Muller: I put this book next to The Shock Doctrine, Hegemony How To and Direct Action as one of the crucial books to read about Trump and the moment we're in. A book that covers the things that really need saying about Populism, but with the good sense to be brief, approachable and clear.

Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay: I am late coming to this book of essays, but I was thoroughly won over from the very start, because Gay has this way with short, direct but vulnerable language that makes her polemical points land with so much more intensity. I can't quite put my finger on it, but her manner of writing is so special, and she uses it to say such necessary things.

Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk: Let's just say this book is an acquired taste: you need some ready familiarity with Istanbul and a lot of patience for detailed personal stories and obscure asides in service of a memoir with a small focus. I quite like Istanbul and admire the literary goals of the book but didn't quite have the patience needed to really enjoy this throughout.

Dune - Frank Herbert: Apparently some people still haven’t read this book? They really should.

The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: A book of short stories that are all elegant windows into the lives of people who are coping with distance, displacement and dread. They cover a lot of the thematic territory she addresses in other books, but with little experiments in style and structure that usually work.

Fear City - Kim Phillips-Fine: I've been waiting for years for someone to write the history of the New York City Financial Crisis that we all need, and I just don't think this book is it. It ended up being a sort of surface level history of a handfull elites involved in the crisis that never dove into the depths I hoped for.

Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson: I didn't always care for Larson's potboiler narrative style but I think the 1900 Galveston Hurricane is interesting and important and I'm glad someone wrote a book that lots of people could read about it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Hakuri Murakami: Since I read this (all at once, on a beach), I've been drifting back to certain points of it that just seem to stick with me. It's only in part a book about running, but also about writing, and I quite like both of those things.

Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson: Apparently there are 8 more books in this series. I'm not going to read them.

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara: I can't remember the last time I was quite this obsessed with a book, to the point of being driven to read into inappropriate hours of the morning and setting aside other obligations to make time for it. I also can't remember a book so devastating and frustrating to read, that puts its characters and readers through so much trauma and then describe in claustrophobic detail how it curtails their experiences of joy and success. There's nothing like it, and you need to experience it to understand.

The Fifth Season - NK Jemisin: I didn't love this book as much as everyone else I know who has read it. The story is clearly brilliant conceptually, but something about the melodrama in the writing style just kept getting in the way for me.

Radio Free Vermont - Bill McKibben: A Monkeywrench Gang for the modern age, but with less weird macho nonsense, and a better sense of humor.

Waiting - Ha Jin: What I most admired about this book was the ascetic, unadorned language that the author uses to follow a simple but elementally powerful plot line. You do end up waiting a lot as a reader, but there's much to observe as you do.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou: You don't need me to tell you that Maya Angelou knows how to write exceptional sentences. Instead, you should read some of them and learn the real power of a well-placed metaphor, or how you honor the half-formed, overpowering complexity of a child's feelings.

The Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri: I've lost track of how many times I've read these short stories, but they destroy me pretty much every time.

Rules for Revolutionaries - Becky Bond and Zack Exley: There's some useful stuff in here.

The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri: This was the first novel of Jhumpa Lahiri's that I had ever read, and I just don't feel like she was able to stretch her voice -- which is so concise, spare and evocative -- to meet the scale of this novel.

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald: One of the greatest books of all time, a perfect picture of the spiritual depravity of money and consumption.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley: It turns out this book is very little like the pop culture Frankenstein myth -- there is only a glancing mention of dead bodies, the monster is articulate and an almost wholly private terror. Instead it's a nested doll of stories about nature, knowledge and spiritual purpose. Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks: A perfectly fine pulpy space opera. I’ll probably read more of the Culture books at some point.

[duncanwrites]

They want your soul. Why make art after Trump:

Recently I spoke with a serious artist in doubt. They told me that they had spent many of the past few years wrestling with the question of whether it was useful or meaningful to make art in a desperately broken world, wondering if it wasn't better to commit to something like social work. After a long struggle, they had come to terms with pursuing their art this past year, just in time for the 2016 election. Now they were thrown back into doubt again, wondering if it was frivolous to sing in the age of Trump.

I think the most important book or theory to understand what's about to happen to the US and the world is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein -- and I think it explains why continuing to make art is so important. In short, The Shock Doctrine is an exacting history of how free market advocates use political shocks to seize power and transform societies rapidly, unapologetically, while people are in a state of disorientation. Often, these changes are accompanied by the use of actual shocks in the form of torture applied to political dissidents. The goal is to achieve a state of numb defeat in the heart of the body politic so that they acquiesce to the changes being imposed, until the changes become the new inescapable reality. Their strategy relies on destroying the soul of their opposition.

That's what's about to happen to the United States. In this case, Trump's rabid white resentment campaign is the first shock to the system and the next will be his wave of executive orders and first 100 days policies.

Whatever you thought Donald Trump's agenda would be: prepare for it to be worse than you imagined. Nothing is sacred; they will seek to profane as much as they can as fast as they can because they want to shock us into defeat. As my friend and colleague has said often since November 9th: Prepare to lose, a lot.

To the degree that Trump has a political strategy at all, it's this kind of fast-moving controlled chaos. he forces people to react to him, and when they're taking time to figure out how to react, figures out his next move. As long as they continue reacting to him, they're losing: he sets the frame, controls the debate, and boosts his sense of political potency that is central to his brand. And in the case of the millions (!!!) of people stepping into protest the new new administration, he is hoping that a feeling of defeat will deter them from remaining engaged.

If I were the GOP, one of the biggest lessons I would take from the ACA/Obamacare fight is that focusing on one priority at a time gives your opposition a focal point to organize against. Governments (and political parties) have a comparative advantage against protestors: they can coordinate better and move faster than the mass of people who seek to oppose them. They can use that advantage to press forward on multiple fronts, while we're organizing meetings to plan next month's march against any one of their priorities. 

In other words: doing seven evil things is easier than one. The more they do, sooner, the harder it will be for their opponents to react, and the easier it will be to make people feel numb and defeated. That's why they nominated an entire cabinet of the most vile politicians possible, and it's why the next two weeks will be some of the scariest in our lifetimes.

In theory, the response is simple: steel your heart, fight everything, and never, ever, ever give up. In reality, that's hard. We only have so much emotional energy to expend on losing fights. As people get poorer and sicker as a result of Trumps’ agenda, it will be harder for them to devote limited time to things that don't appear to be working. If enough evil succeeds, history shows that numbness sets in.

That's why I think art matters. If the strategy is to make us feel numb, defeated and divided, we should do things that make us feel warm, connected and powerful.

I mean this in two senses. One is art as protest: singing is as essential to any successful gathering as speakers, beautiful objects can cultivate deep-rooted inspiration, improv timing can bring low the most stuck-up politician. Joy in moments of great gatherings is what brings people back for the long fight.  Many brilliant artists have honed this skill already, and many more should continue pursuing it.

But I also think art as art is important no matter the content -- which is the case I tried to make to my friend. There's substantial research that reading novels develops neural pathways crucial to feeling empathy. At church people sing together just to feel together; the same happens at concerts of all kinds. The best painters and sculptors strive for new ways of seeing the world that lie just outside the edge of our perception. And so forth. We need these things to survive, soul in-tact.

There's a reason that arts funding is one of the top things targeted for cuts under the first leaked version of the Trump budget. (Not to mention the flagrant, shocking and heartless call to cut Medicare and Medicaid by over 40% each, a direct contradiction of a major campaign promise) It's because they want our collective soul. If you want to stop them you have to feed the things that sustain you, and your emotional connections with the world.

I think I helped nudge this person to keep singing, but I was also trying to convince myself. The brightest part of my 2016 was working many spare hours on a novel, but I had wavered somewhat in the aftermath of Trump's election. I know that it sustains me personally to write, but I had wondered whether it was still something worth trying to share. But particularly after today, with so many people doing their damnedest to fight back, I'm resolved to keep working on it. They can't have my soul.

[duncanwrites]

Books I read in 2016, reviewed in 2 sentences or less

Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward: This is a great example of a book about personal things happening during a Big Thing and actually explaining it as well as any book ostensibly about the Big Thing. In other words, it's a story about blackness, poverty, hurricanes and growing up that is far more than the sum of its parts.

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out - Mo Yan: This is the first book by Mo Yan that I've read and it was deeply enjoyable -- it's very much like 100 Years of Solitude or another magical realism epic, but set in China and its regime of magical rules. I'm not sure if it was the translation or his style, but something about his language has this rounded solidity to it that is so pleasant to read.

1984 - George Orwell: I love George Orwell, and there are very good reasons this book is a classic. Relevant in ways I didn't expect or remember.

The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. Le Guin: I re-read this book because I kept finding myself leaning on its central metaphor to explain what depression felt like to me -- that the color and magic had run out of the world. I found out later that it was indeed written somewhat with that in mind, which was comforting somehow.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Ben Fountain: A true and worthy successor to Catch-22 (with little references tucked away for those of us who love the older book), this is a humanizing, penetrating book about the surreal times during the war in Iraq that bridges the battlefield and the home-front with dark humor. Also, an excellent take on Texas, if you're into that.

Drown - Junot Diaz: I didn't enjoy Junot Diaz's second book of short stories that much, but I thought this earlier book was terrific. It has more vulnerability and quiet without losing his insight into the cultural dynamics of immigration, language, masculinity and more.

Youngblood - Matt Gallagher: Perhaps it was the mood I was in when I read it, but this book about the war in Iraq somewhat passed me by in its emotional impact. There were moments of particular beauty and tension that were well rendered, but it never landed its punch for me as a whole.

The Collected Stories - Grace Paley: The most telling thing I can say about this book is that during the time I was reading it, I found myself coming up with more short story ideas than at any other part of the year. Paley has a skill for drawing out the drama of daily life (particularly life in New York, in and around the left), using the language of daily life, that feels wholly unique.

Katrina - Gary Rivlin: Another attempt to tell the whole story of Hurricane Katrina, in this case 10 years later, this book falls slightly short in some ways but dramatically fails in one crucial way, which is only mentioning climate change a single time in 450 pages.

Beyond Words - Carl Safina: If we talked in person this year, there's a substantial liklihood I tried to talk to you about this book on animal intelligence that is graceful, thoughtful and challenging in ways I could not have anticipated. Broken into three seconds, one each on elephants, wolves and orcas, it shows how animals live emotional lives not so different than our own, and how the efforts to draw lines between us and them has lead to all kinds suffering on both sides of the divide.

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion: A near-perfect roadmap of grief and sadness, lovingly shared for all of us. One of the best things to read in moments of personal tribulation.

Katrina: The Mississippi Story - James Patterson Smith: Most of the books you'll find about Katrina are about New Orleans, but the strongest part of the storm actually hit Mississippi. This is a detailed account of what happened at the center of Katrina's fury, though it's perhaps a bit too laudatory of the state's leadership, and it uses examples of cleanup successes to score points against Louisiana, which I found odd.

History of the Black Baptists - Leroy Fitts: If you want a detailed, but somewhat decontextualized history of the Black Baptist church in America.... I guess this is the book for you.

Love: An Index - Rebecca Lindenberg: Someone I know let me borrow this book of poems about severe and sudden loss over the course of a relationship, and it's achingly beautiful.  

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell: I particularly liked reading this Orwell book shortly after 1984 -- you get to see some of the real life threads of experience that led to his unique take on fascism. Also heartening to read in the current context because it gives you a vivid sense that at the time of its writing, people thought fascism would last forever -- and it did not.

Hell or High Water - Ron Thibodeaux: I bought this book because I wanted another take on Gulf Coast hurricanes outside of New Orleans, and it does indeed give a very detailed telling of a few hurricanes in the mid-aughts hitting Cajun country.

The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson: Some books are beautiful to read for the pleasure of their language, others are beautiful because they make you feel more alive in your own mind. This one is both, and I am very glad I re-read it.

Hope in the Dark - Rebecca Solnit: I read this book in the spring and loved it, but I found myself struggling to apply it to my daily life during the darkest parts of the year in the fall.

Hold Still - Lynn Steger Strong: The best part of my 2016 was joining a writing group that started as a Sackett St. Writer's Workshop led by Lynn Steger Strong. This is her first novel, and while reading it I came to admire her kind of truth telling and interest to push uncomfortable emotional depths than I had during our workshop.

Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin: If you only think of James Baldwin as someone who wrote about race, you are missing a lot. This is a short novel about power, love and sexuality that is just exquisite.

The Vegetarian - Han Kang: This book is unlike anything I've read before: three stories connected with threads about bodily autonomy, patriarchy, mental illness and desire. It edges frequently into the disturbing and terrifying, but never so far that you look away from what is so beautiful about it.

Another Country - James Baldwin: A classic New York novel, but so much more, I expect to re-read Another Country regularly for the rest of my life -- there's just so much to take in, on so many levels that once is not enough. Among other things, this book has the perfect title, refracting the stories through several lenses of meaning and allowing them to illuminate different parts of the world around us.

Burmese Days - George Orwell: Look, George Orwell is always a good idea: in this case, he wrote a colonial novel that actually manages to expose the cruelty and stupidity of the occupying forces.

A Brief History of 7 Killings - Marlon James: I'm glad I read this book while on vacation, because I'm not sure I could have kept up with the subterranean currents that drive the plot to this epic about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and the political forces surrounding it. The praise for this one is deserved.

Kindred - Octavia Butler: Octavia Butler is one of the greatest ever, this short novel about a black woman being flung back in time to the antebellum South is different than most of the other things I've read by her, but it still delivers the complex emotional terrain of race and power of her other works.

Exodus and Revolution - Michael Walzer: I re-read this book from college because I kept thinking about the emotional assumptions that lie beneath revolutionary thought, and Walzer (for all of his personal flaws) does a good job using Exodus as a way to explain the differences between revolutionary theory that sustains movements, and thought that drifts into totalitarianism. I have a partially-written essay about this that I have been meaning to finish since the summer.

The Road Less Traveled - M. Scott Peck: Another re-read -- sometimes I just like to check in with certain self-help books to see how they look to me now, rather than when I first read them.

Sisters of the Revolution - Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (ed): Last year I read and didn't greatly enjoy the Octavia's Brood collection, and I think this collection of feminist speculative fiction may be what it was hoping to be. Challenging, disturbing, measured -- the stories stand up on their own even without considering their political content.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - Alice Munro: Alice Munro has this lovely way of telling stories filled with eddies and sidetracks that I admire and wish I could figure out how to replicate myself. I learned a lot about Canada reading this book of short stories.

The Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, The Ones Who Leave and the Ones Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child) - Elana Ferrante: Several people independently pressured me to read this series, and I am so glad I did -- although it's often pitched as a story of female friendship, it really is that plus so much more. It's also about how poverty and wealth change people, the decades of profound change that stretched through the middle of the last century, and the waxing and waning of radical political movements. Not just that, it's also engrossing: I can't remember the last time I was so angry at characters in a book for certain decisions they made. The writing evolves as the story moves through time to evoke some of the changes of the protagonist in a way that is subtle but satisfying, and ends with an impressionistic swoop that leaves just enough ambiguity for rich speculation on its meaning. If I had to sum it all up, it's a series about the ways that patriarchy, capitalism, and chance conspire to push people into growing multiple versions of themselves, and how that stretching is at once cruel and life-affirming in different measures. Definitely, definitely read these books.

A Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, Feast for Crows, Dance of Dragons) - George R.R. Martin: I brought the first book of this series on a two week trip along with a few other things, thinking it would be enough to keep me occupied, but no: I finished it in a few days and had to keep buying the following books as I went, then when I got home, the first thing I did was go buy the next one, and so forth. Ruthlessly addicting, with indelible characters (Tyrion!) these are engrossing, with a few exceptions that really called for an editor's intervention, I am now one of the people impatiently waiting for the Winds of Winter.

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston: If you've been away from this classic for a while, or haven't yet given it a try, I recommend you fix that.

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson: This book about the aftermath of the moon exploding was the thing I was reading shortly before and for a few days after election night, making it an oddly fitting distraction from everything else exploding. Not Stephenson's best -- it meanders a bit too much, perhaps biting off more than even he could chew in one book -- if you're a fan of Foundation or other civilization-stretching epics, you might enjoy it.  

Known and Strange Things - Teju Cole: I bought this book of essays because I generally love Teju Cole, and ended up reading it next after the election because there's something about his exact, deliberate approach to language that was calming when everything else felt like chaos.

The Populist Persuasion - Michael Kazin: I highly recommend this book now for two reasons: one, it explains the central appeal of populism in American history in a way that frames Trump as part of a long history, and two, because it's just a good American history book, examining the rise and fall of a select number of political movements that shaped the country we're in now. Kazin is also specific in how he talks about populism, digging into why it works in certain moments, and why people want to be seen as populists when they do.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Solzhenitsyn wrote one of the best novels about totalitarianism, and somehow got it published under the totalitarian regime he was criticizing. A true classic. Slouching Towards Bethelehem - Joan Didion: I think this group of essays are important to read because they show just how depraved things were getting in the last 60s and early 70s, and because they show how in the right hands careful turns of phrase can do more to explain certain people and experiences than plodding, concrete parlance. And she casts such shade like you wouldn't believe.

[duncanwrites]

My Trump Confessions.

I've taken a while to write anything about Trump and the election. I've also been avoiding, for the most part, Facebook and Twitter. I needed some time to figure out my real thoughts and feelings, and when I'm online I find myself reacting to other people's reactions rather than taking the time to understand my own.

Two weeks ago feels like forever, of course, but it's also a hilariously short time to decide how you feel about something this big and figure out what to do next. In some ways the election is bigger than a move or a new job, and whenever I do either of those things it takes me months to really figure myself out. I know some people were writing long emails and blog posts the night-of, but I just couldn't take myself seriously if I tried to do the same. It's too little time, and I'm always a little slow.

Like a lot of people, I've been wondering how this happened, and what I could have done differently to stop it. No doubt much of the result could be laid at the feet of the campaigns, but I want to own my part of it too. I do this not solely because I'm heartbroken and a bit depressed, but also because I think the next few years will take all of us doing very different things, and merely analyzing the mistakes of other people in other institutions won't inspire the kind of self-work we all need to do.

With hindsight, of course, the signs that this was possible seem obvious. For one, 32 states have been under exclusive control of GOP legislatures, including many of the states we were all so surprised to turn red on November 8th. In many of those legislatures it's already Trump's dystopian vision for American government: hostile to basic rights, trapped in a racialized culture war, with unbridled hatred for immigrants.

But I certainly missed it. I think along with many other people I had been focused inward, as part of a consolidation of left tactics and strategy post-Occupy, where an avalanche of new technology and theory gave every incentive for serious organizers to look to working with the already-converted rather than taking seriously the need to engage the people who weren't already tuned in to our Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and email lists.

I know this is what I was doing because I told people as much; it was a conscious choice. I was buying into ideas about the country's demographic destiny and political evolution that made me think that Trump voters were ignorable and disposable: in the end, we would simply have more people and they would be more mobilized than the folks on other side. It doesn't work that way though, we're trapped in the country together, and they are not disposable. We have to listen and engage because we have no choice.

Some of the biggest things I worked on in the past few years were anchored fully in this worldview. It's become established gospel in the climate movement that one key to victory is uniting left-struggles around a shared demand for climate action; as if all we needed to do is speak to and align the people whose values match ours, and we will have the leverage needed for dramatic climate action. This is a strategy that takes the culture war at face value and tries to fight from within its boundaries, and in this light, it may not actually be sustainable. Instead of broadening our leverage, it could be narrowing it, reducing participation down to only the people who believe in fighting every struggle at once.

There are other examples too: the theory of change for the part of the Keystone XL campaign I worked on was largely rooted in leveraging the Democratic base against the President. We worked with other people with different constituencies in mind and different theories of change, but that was my part. I wonder if technology played a role too. As organizers in a digital era we are given all kinds of deeply manipulative feedback on our work that makes it harder to see beyond the choir. The pleasure of a retweet, the tickle of a new like -- these easily lend the impression of efficacy while still making functionally meaningless ripples in public consciousness. There's even a cottage industry of Facebook pages for otherwise-defunct left organizations that have turned speaking to the converted into profitable enterprises. I'm as guilty as anyone in participating in this way of evaluating my work.

But it's just not enough. None of the major projects and campaigns that flourished under the Obama years reached the scale of the civil rights or the anti-nuclear movements at their peak, or other projects that left deep marks on American politics. We led ourselves to think we were getting somewhere great, but it wasn't far enough. All these new tools, all these new theories, they couldn't stop this from happening.

I want to talk about something more subtle too, which I've been coming to reluctantly and am ultimately unsure of. I think there's a degree to which all of the progressive left's attempts to paint Trump as exceptional -- as a grave threat capable of undoing so much of our work -- actually served to make him stronger.

In my own work with 350 Action, in hind-sight I think we ended up syncing up with the core of Trump's message. Most people only remember the simplest version of the story we tell about public figures, and we amplified the simplest version of his story. He was saying he would change everything and completely disrupt the status quo in Washington. We said he would change everything and completely disrupt the status quo in Washington. We obviously said it would be change for the worse, but we helped build his central myth, and for anyone who resonates even a little with his message, we actually joined the hype train.

Also, it's important to understand this in light of the actual content of most right-wing popular messaging for the past decade or two, as pointed out by Josh Bolotsky, which is: pissing off liberals. The more that you point out the racist subtext of Pepe, the more people want to use it. The more that we said Trump was a threat to everything we hold dear, the more exciting it was to vote for him.

To all these points, I'm fascinated by this analysis of Berlusconi in Italy, and its potential application for Trump. It's worth reading carefully. I worry that by continuing to treat Trump as exceptional, we will keep building his brand in the way I was guilty of during the election, when it is precisely an exceptional politician that his base most wants.

A sense of normalcy might actually serve us -- by not talking about Trump's insane personality traits and their echoes of strongmen before, we could instead focus on issues that could build a real populist alignment against him, such has his blatant corruption, its connection to insider dealing by the wealthy across so many issues, and the implications of denying climate change, ripping up the social safety net, and so on.

These would also be starting points for conversations and strategies that lead us beyond our strategic niches, rather than re-litigating the campaign for the next four years, along battle lines in a culture war that will not end. But maybe not. I've been wrong before, and recently. I could be again.

[duncanwrites]

Weddings

I married young. I was twenty two and my wife was twenty three.

I remember thinking that my whole life was ahead of me. Children, a career, happiness. These are the things we imagine when we imagine marriage. Afghanistan loomed in the background, sure. I knew I would go, and I knew that I could get hurt, or worse. Honestly, we decided to get married before I left because we were afraid that the bureaucracy would lock her out if I got hurt. She wouldn’t be able to visit me in the hospital, and if I died, she wouldn’t be the one to receive a neatly folded flag from the honor guard at my funeral. Strange how such a small detail comes to mind, even now years after the fact. It reminds me how strong such thin symbols can be. Even so, I was young and in love and that was the most important part. I didn’t know firsthand what the consequences would be.

If I am honest, I feel a twinge of regret when I think about my marriage. We didn’t have much money, and both of our families struggled to make ends meet for most of our lives, so we spent very little money and did for free what many folks spend tens of thousands of dollars on. We had a wedding party in our friend’s hip Brooklyn apartment. We danced to Vanished by Crystal Castles, and D.A.N.C.E by Justice. A judge officiated our ceremony, under a chuppah my father-in-law built, in the house my wife grew up in. We were young, and alive, and the future was a cloth I could hold in my hands. I knew what my future held, but I was unprepared to contend with it. War. Death. Poverty. Cancer.

There are days when I question whether I would do it again. It isn’t that my marriage doesn’t have its joys, or that we want for love, much the opposite. I regret that I subjected someone else to my misery. Funny how self-reflexive my misery is–as if the convergence of myriad circumstances are, or were, something I could control and inflict on myself at will.  

Weddings came up at lunch today. My coworkers recounted their own with such fondness. It was alien to hear, because I can’t think about my own wedding without a feeling of profound loss. This isn’t to say that I don’t think of my wedding with fondness, but after the ceremony, there was no honeymoon. I left her in New York and drove south to join my unit. As soon as I arrived, we trained to go to Afghanistan, there was so little time to savor what little time we had together.

My wife took a teaching job in East Feliciana Parish on the border with Mississippi, almost two hours away from the base. We spent a few fleeting weekends together in New Orleans, in Baton Rouge, and I drove back and forth sleepless, because I was afraid to waste what little time we had.

I’m still processing what Afghanistan did, or meant to me, I only know that fighting there saddled me with a burden that I’ve carried ever since. The war was like a virus that I brought home with me, infecting every facet of my life.

On the plane that took me away from Afghanistan, I learned what I felt in my hands, back when I got married. It wasn’t promise, or possibility. It was the invincibility of youth, torn from my fingers by the inevitability of time.

In Andrei Dyshev’s 2007 Novel, Pokhodno-polevaya Zhena, or Mobile Field Wife, he writes of Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan–

Suddenly they understood with blinding clarity that over there, in the future, there was nothing. All was dark, impenetrable, a vacuum. If you shouted, there would be no echo; if you hurled a stone, you would not hear it land. Life was carrying them into that emptiness, unmapped, unstoppable. From now on, everything lay in the past.

[duncanwrites]

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? … No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.

Annie Dillard, For The Time Being

Full excerpt:

“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? –our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation – now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and waht are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.”

I’m rereading For the Time Being, in which Dillard tackles the question of evil head-on, and concludes: so this is how it is. It is a reminder - and a comfort - to me to think, “So this is how it is: life is struggle, but ours are neither so much worse as to allow for giving up, nor so much greater as to demand complete absorption in that struggle, and not so much greater that one should forgo setting aside times for truly remembering that also, this is how it is: life is beautiful, struggle is beautiful.”

(via megbits)

I love the dueling abysses here: the nihilism of being the last generation, those with no future, and the nihilism of all of this being absolutely routine, perhaps inevitable.

[duncanwrites]

Books I read in 2015, reviewed in 2 sentences or less

Lilith's Brood - Octavia Butler: Whenever I read any of Octavia Butler's books, I get the impression that she was somehow thinking more carefully than anyone else when speculating on her speculative fiction. This book compiling several novellas about a hybridizing alien invasion just after a nuclear war is an engrossing dive into what defines humanity and life itself.

Wanderlust - Rebecca Solnit: One of the things I like about Rebecca Solnit's books is the way she dives into common figures of speech, metaphors, experiences, and turns them inside out. This book explores the many meanings of walking, and the effect of reading it is quite profound.

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry: A gift from a friend led me to re-read this book that I first encountered years ago, and I'm glad I opened it again. It pulls no punches in showing how slippery the slope towards dehumanization is for people living in poverty during times of great political upheaval.

Malcolm X - Manning Marable: Marable gives Malcolm X the unvarnished look his life deserves; if nothing else reading this made me realize the disservice that only reading the Autobiography does Malcolm.

10:04 - Ben Lerner: This is a knowingly self-involved but still striking piece of fiction about Brooklyn, climate change, hurricanes and writing -- all things I think about very often. I enjoyed it, you may not.

Coalitions and Political Movements - Lessons from the Nuclear Freeze - Many: Early last year I became very interested in the history of the Nuclear Freeze movement. I wish this wasn't the first book I read about it: even though it has some good close examinations of certain movement dynamics, it would have been better understood in a wider frame provided by some other texts I read later.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat - Helen Phillips: I read this for a 'first novel' contest and pretty much didn't like a single word of it. Stiff, simplistic, over-loaded with adjectives.

Our Town - Kevin Jack McEnroe: This wasn't that badly written, it just wasn't interesting -- unless you're already interested in a rehashing of ripped-from-tabloid-headlines stories of Hollywood.  

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine - Alexandra Kleeman: I really like this novel, which mostly concerns bodies in hyper-mediated suburban society, not least of all because the language about those bodies is so apt, almost to the point of making your skin crawl as you read it.

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller: I've read this book more times than any other, and I still love every page of it.

Gorilla, My Love - Toni Cade Bambara: I read this on the advice of my friend Meg who gives really good book recommendations, and it was one of the more pleasant fiction surprises of 2015 for me. Short stories about life and Brooklyn that are just right-sized, and true to the voice of the city.  

Confronting the Bomb - Lawrence Wittner: This book is the one I wish I had read about the Nuclear Freeze movement first: its a brief, but evocative take on this somehow-forgotten corner of left history. Among other things, it paints the picture of how a social movement ended the Cold War and ended the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse.

Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: This is Adichie's first novel, and it definitely reads as her other two novels in-formation -- which is nothing to be held against it!

Soundbitten - Sarah Sobieraj: As an activist who is often asked by academics to participate in various studies, I always wonder where the data and reflection ends up. Now I know: it ends up in books like this, which I thought was ambitious in its intentions but shallow in its execution.

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov: There was a time in my life when I would buy every Nabokov book I would come across in used book stores. I bought this and was reminded why I stopped, at least for now.

Alif the Unseen - C. Willow Wilson: You could read this as cyberpunk-magical realism-potboiler mashup, or as a critical engagement with the post-Arab Spring state of security politics in the Mideast: either way, you'll probably find it very rewarding.

Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith: Zadie Smith is a brilliant novelist, but she might be a better essayist. This book made me laugh foolishly, read more joyfully -- and convinced me that writing a book of my own was not only possible, but also an incredibly worthwhile human endeavor.

Ataturk - Andrew Mango: I read this book while in Turkey because I wanted to understand more about how the country came to be what it is now. I definitely got that (among other things, the various wars for Turkish independence were the first real battles over ethno-nationalist partitioning), but also I learned that Ataturk was a madman who invented a language, a national history, and his own name, and then drank himself to death while in office.

A Paradise Built in Hell - Rebecca Solnit: This book made me instantly recalibrate how I looked at disaster, and the stories state actors tell about police and fire 'first responders,' when the first, and most important responders to any disaster are almost always regular people. I wish that it included more stories about the function of grassroots or informal disaster relief over months and years.

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons: I got both of these books for a total of $1 at a stoop sale on Gates Ave., and it was a very well spent dollar. A distinctly complex and literate science fiction epic.

Octavia's Brood - Many: To me, the value of political fiction is that it is easier to honor the complexity and humanity of difficult situations through descriptive prose than it is through various non-fiction forms; I don't feel like most of these stories actually wanted to honor that complexity and the result was that many were stiff. A few were distinct standouts, but perhaps not quite worth the price of admission.

Berlin: City of Stones and Berlin: City of Smoke - Jason Lutes: These two graphic novels are quiet, human portraits of life in Weimar Germany which I highly recommend.

Black Flags and Windmills - scott crow: scott crow's memoir of helping set up the Common Ground Relief in New Orleans after Katrina is a worthwhile first-person account of what it's like to experience a moment of extreme crisis, and respond with all of your humanity. If anything, my concern is that Common Ground continues to occupy too much of the left-imagination about what can happen after disaster, and so I think this is important to read with that in mind.

What Lies Beneath - South End Press: This is a hit-or-miss anthology of various kinds of writing by New Orleans residents who lived through Katrina and the aftermath. It's a short read that's a valuable companion to Black Flags and Windmills.

Path of Destruction - John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein: This is a history of Katrina that is one part a long-view look at the layers on layers of incompetence that led the city to be flooded during Katrina, and one part a blow-by-blow of the actual storm itself, where it shows once more how much the Bush Administration is responsible for the disaster in New Orleans. it goes to the absolute top.

Breach of Faith - Jed Horne: This is another Katrina 'as it happened' book, and I found it to be somewhat less rigorous than the other accounts I've read. Perhaps more human than McQuaid/Schleifstein, but I'm not sure how much new light it really shed.

The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson: Ohhh man, this book is one of the finest works of nonfiction I've ever read, weaving in theory, memoir and heartbreaking insight into something that is far more than the sum of its parts (as is appropriate to the central metaphor of the book). Really, just go read it.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown: I was expecting a different kind of story when I started this book, but what makes this history so famous is not any kind of great narrative style -- instead it's just careful research that honors the stories being told. The result is a book that makes you reconsider your relationship with an entire historical period and wide sweep of the world.

Nonviolent Communication - Marshall B. Rosenberg: Despite the kooky hippie tones of this book, it has some useful perspective on how to connect better with the people in your life.

At the Dark End of the Street - Danielle L. McGuire:  This book would go on the list of "books every organizer should read" even if it were just a look at the origins of the Civil Rights Movement in the South -- but it's also a fascinating take on the pre-history of 2nd wave feminism in the US, shoing what the usual origin-stories of that movement leave out, and what speaking out against rape looked like in the 40s and 50s. ON TOP OF THAT it's also a useful examination of the long-term impacts of what we think of as social media campaigns today -- campaigns that focus on widely sharing particular stories as emblematic of bigger struggles as a way of both explaining and advancing the fight.

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell: I re-read this book while in both Paris and London, and it goes to show how you can create timeless literature with just simple sentences and really caring about the people around you. Orwell is one of the best ever, and this shows you why.

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me is rightly considered one of the most important books released last year, and Ta-Nehisi Coates deserves the praise heaped upon him. I finished this right before the attacks in Paris, and I realized later that I was responding to them using his stories of of overt but ignored violence and bodies in space and time, while trying to imitate his plainspoken writing style.

On Death and Dying - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: This is one of the books that has so deeply embedded itself in contemporary life, the feeling of reading it is mostly a shock of recognition. Her 'stages of grief' model is hugely important; you're probably just as well reading it summarized somewhere as you are reading the entire book.

Shooting an Elephant, and other essays - George Orwell: I wish the word 'Orwellian' could be re-purposed to describe his clear, honest style of prose, because his non-fiction is one of the great gifts to the English language. Among other things, this book of essays made me reflect on how for many decades, 'fascism' wasn't just a political epithet: it was a real political movement that was the dominant trend in global politics, something I think we've forgotten.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel: This was my first book of fiction read as reward for finishing the first draft of my novel, and it was a dark pleasure: a post-epidemic apocalyptic novel about a troupe of actors and musicians struggling against an authoritarian religious figure. I felt like the apocalyptic lens was used deftly to look back at the human side of modern technology, and how it connects us in surprising ways. 

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville: Here's the only way I can describe this book: it's like Hayao Miyazaki met Neal Stephenson and Ursula LeGuin, they all took some kind of interesting drug, and co-wrote a work of strange, strange fiction. It was awesome.

White Teeth - Zadie Smith: Look: White Teeth is a a master work of vivid storytelling, delivered with historical sweep and honest to god hilarity. I will always love re-reading this book.

[duncanwrites]

Wrote this as a semi-final wrapup on Paris thoughts for now. Decided to try out Medium too.

[duncanwrites]

Paris, December 17, 2015

I walked through Republique again for the first time in many weeks. The signs, flowers and candles of the memorial have been added to -- there are more French flags than I remember, and uncomfortable Charlie Hebdo caricatures of ISIS, and, for whatever reason, small Christmas trees.

The messages and flowers are all worse for the weather, and the candles are all bunched together, with a small handful still being re-lit by passers by.

I was passing through the square because it's my last night in Paris, even though I had deliberately taken an apartment away from the attacks for my final days here. But on an earlier walk with a friend I saw from across the canal that one of the cafes that was attacked has re-opened, and I wanted to go and write my book, as I had hoped to do while I was living nearby.

I kept digging for the reason why I wanted to go and couldn't come up with anything satisfying. Eventually I convinced myself that my reasons were somewhat ghoulish, but I kept walking anyways.

I ended up walking by all the cafes nearby that were attacked, a little final pilgrimage. In front of the cafe that's open, a little memorial remains, propped up against a metal barricade that ends up pushing the flowers and knick-knacks into the street. A few steps away is another restaurant that hasn't re-opened, and the pile of flowers is collecting leaves and street trash, in front of a construction facade.

Down the street, past my old apartment, the other corner that was attacked is still closed up too. The memorials have winnowed down to small islands of flowers and messages on the curb and against a few spots of the buildings, reduced from the carpet of offerings in the weeks immediately after the attacks.

New plate glass windows with the manufacturing stickers still on them stand in their frames, keeping out the rain and cold from the silent darkness inside. The difficult part about grief for me is always the material parts, the things that must be cleaned up after even while the hurt is still there. I wonder who made the decision about what to leave and what to throw away; what to say to the first customer when the cafe opened again, or when the change will be made from these flimsy things into something permanent.  

The tidying up is needed -- the unkempt corner is its own kind of sadness, versus those that have been pruned -- but it still makes me uncomfortable in some unplaceable way. But it's no different than all the other ways I've pushed aside the things that consumed me at first. No different than proceeding with all the marches, the protests, even as those seemed so impossible at first.

All grief is meant to fade. Otherwise we would be paralyzed. But the fading is part of the sadness: it's relearning all the old habits knowing what's lost, feeling the texture of a new world without certain people. Discomfort with carving paths through the flowers isn't a reason it shouldn't be done.

But I don't think that is a reason to bury the discomfort, which I think is part of the sadness, either. I think it's all we have to fight against everything else about that night being pushed aside: the simple sentiments of shared hurt and care being turned into war, the fear being turned into prideful hate. There isn't a permanent monument that could be built to these feelings. All we can do is carry them with us to wherever we go next.

[duncanwrites]

Paris, one week later

At some point in the past week I started taking walks that went deliberately away from the memorials and bullet holes near the apartment I'm in in Paris. I needed to be able to modulate my interactions with them more, to make them less of a daily routine.

I made the decision to take other walks after the rest I was trying to take from work wasn't helping my exhaustion. I was still sleeping hours later than usual every morning, and not being able to run or take serious long walks, which are the top pleasure of Paris as far as I'm concerned.

The tiredness feels like some kind of betrayal though. Going by the memorials, stopping to see the fresh flowers and new notes, it was my way of holding on to the human dimension of what was lost, and the kind of cosmic clarity that it provides: of course we shouldn't put more bombs and bullets into bodies far away, of course we shouldn't recreate this pain somewhere else.

But the human simplicity is already being layered under full and dramatic days of other changes: a three month state of emergency, canceled marches, immediate bombings, deepening backlash against refugees in the US, and on and on. New indignities are being layered on top of the pain, requiring our vigilance and response.

And it feels like a personal affront. It took 48 hours for the French government to set bomb sites on locations in Raqqa, not much longer for US politicians to lay out their cynical strategy to punish the least of us, a few hours longer for the French parliament to upend the liberte that is supposed to divide them from their chosen enemies. We barely even had the weekend here in Paris to think before bombs were dropped in our name -- with most of that time spent being told to stay inside.

We've all been robbed of the chance to be a part of these decisions. Maybe we would have reached the same conclusions through some bigger debate -- I somehow think or hope not -- but the speed feels like an extra indignity to the people closest to the violence here in Paris struggling to make sense of the new world brought on by the attacks.

Each new development that pushes us further towards a lifetime of violence feels like heartbreak. Not the same kind of heartbreak as what exists on the sidewalks here, but something related. It feels like what happened here is being twisted cruelly out of context: like having your words used against you, turned against your most deeply held self.

I've never felt the way I feel about these responses, ever in my life. Whenever I read about it, I feel myself on the edge of unchecked anger: I want to use every word of hate I know, I want to unholster every political tool I have, I want to yell every word of my rage as loud as I can. I want so bad for any of these things to work, and I would use them if only they would.

And that's the final heartbreak. The only thing that keeps me from unleashing all this sadness on the world. I know it won't help. Because we've been here before, and the responses feel as old as time.

And it kills me, because it feels like that cynicism is burying these people all over again. That trapped feeling that this will go on forever that I felt last Friday is still here, only more well developed, sickeningly familiar. It hurts.

There is a mantra my friends and I on the left tell ourselves about the bend in the arc of the moral universe. It's time worn, but it does help some. I remember that there are intractable global conflicts that seemed like they would go on forever, and that they have ended, often thanks to the work of regular people acting on their moral principles. (being in Europe is a good reminder of this: from holy wars, to the fight against fascism, to the Cold War, there are many intractable barbarities that have been left behind).

But I'm also reminded of another saying, from the economist Keynes, about the moral blindspots of mainstream free market economics: in the long run, we're all dead. I do believe that the arc will bend towards justice some day. But I also think there is serious pain, here, today, that is worth honoring, and I think it needs stronger comfort than what can only be given by the long run.

[duncanwrites]

Paris, November 17, 2015

One of the things I love about Paris is courtyards. My little apartment looks out into one, and when I lean out my window, I can see and hear dozens of apartments gathered around little stone semi-private spaces away from the street. It's very beautiful at almost all hours, but I love in particular around dusk when the light is reflecting off of the cool grey walls, and on sunny days when windows will up with laundry in the breeze.

The downside is the noise. I've been waking up most mornings to the sound of a downstairs neighbor greeting the day with long runs of smokers' cough, and kept up occasional nights by a group of Americans down the way drinking in their apartment. You can hear everything bouncing around the concrete.

It also amplifies sirens from the street, which rattle around the little enclosure, turning one ambulance or police car into the sound of many. While at home the past few days, I've found myself sometimes jumping up at these sirens, and going to my window to listen carefully and see if they're growing louder or dissipating, then going back to my computer to look for news about another attack, wondering if it's about to start again.

These moods come quickly, and pass quickly too, but I find all of my feelings swinging back and forth faster than usual. I can find a sound floating in on the breeze, and have it whip into a tempest in only a moment, and then have it die down again immediately. It's physically exhausting too, and I'm trying to pace myself through the days and week so that I don't crash out entirely, as I did after trying to work through other moments of crisis.

I think that the real meaning of these kinds of things can only be known with time. And that's because political violence is always at least a little bit about the future - about convincing you that more could come soon, and indeed come for you.

That's what made Sunday's panic at Republique so striking: it showed that people still believe that more could be coming. I'm convinced of it too, not least of all because of the immediate overreaction of Western governments to shoot missiles into Raqqa and pledge unrelenting violence.

But when I stand in front of the memorials, I don't see anything that is asking for it. There are no messages calling for more bombs or bullets in bodies -- the most prominent symbol to emerge meshes the Eifel Tower with a peace sign. Instead of calls for violence, there are people tiptoeing through bunches of flowers to re-light candles gone out in the rain, and love notes to the city clipped together on string.

And it makes me wonder if the people closest to this kind of violence feel their vulnerability in a way that makes them immune in some way to the calls for retribution, and it's only the people who fear the future violence promised by the attacks who want more blood. I think people who walk by the the broken glass obviously fear for their future in some way -- yes, they ran -- but not in the same way as someone who hasn't been upended, who only fear for the broken glass to come.

It makes me think about the US after September 11th (and there are many parallels and important divergences between this and that moment) when New Yorkers -- who saw the smoke on their skyline, who swept up the dust and carried water to those working the pile -- turned out the largest marches against the War in Iraq, and then the Bush Administration at the Republican National Convention.

I don't know enough about the political situation in France to say what is happening here, but it feels like something essential about the pain experienced here in the moment is getting lost as we turn our eyes to what may come next.

[duncanwrites]

Paris, November 16, 2015 pt. 2

I told myself that tonight was going to be the night that I took a break from writing and would just be easy with myself, but here I am with the clock moving towards midnight feeling like I need to write again because I made the mistake of reading the news before bed.

As I'm writing this, 15 governors in the US, including my home state of Texas, have publicly stated that they do not wish to accept Syrian refugees after what happened in Paris last Friday, and I am angry to the point of tears.

I am so angry because those who want us to stop the flow refugees are asking us to lose our humanity.

The people leaving Syria now are doing so out of fear for their lives. The only sure way to put up a barrier to someone running with that kind of terror at their backs is to become more terrible than the people driving them away. They are asking us to become more repressive, more draconian than organizations who drop barrel bombs and chemical weapons onto residential neighborhoods, or those who behead prisoners on YouTube and set up industrial rape centers; the same people who left blood on the streets of Paris.

These are the same horrors that are used to paint Syrians with the brush of barbarity, and justify their continued deprivation and statelessness, and I want to say that I repeat them here only to make the point that we are being asked to build a mirror image of them in order to provide an adequate deterrent to refugees fleeing them. If our goal becomes to keep all Syrians away from our country, it will require building the moral equivalent of ISIS to accomplish it.

What’s more, they’re giving in to the fear ISIS is intentionally, obviously sowing about refugees. They are giving credence to the most ham-fisted propaganda, while at the same time increasing human misery among some of the poorest and desperate people in the word.

And I wish I had some instrument to share even my small taste of fear, my little memories of searching for safety in the uncertain dark, which are so much less than anything that has driven people across oceans with their entire lives in their arms. I think this kind of hardness can only come from an entire life lived in sheltered confidence, and I wish I could crack it open with a blow.

But I can't. And that breaks my heart further.  

I don't know any scripture, and I don't know or care about the doctrines any of these people supposedly follow. But I do know that France's most famous gift to the US, what is supposed to be an icon of our country, explains our obligations here quite clearly:  

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I have a whole other set of words which I may never write for the French and European politicians who hold themselves up as beacons of human rights who turn blind eyes to the crisis at their doorstep. But I don't think I could go to bed without setting down some of what I'm feeling right now.

I am still so so sad for all of this.