This is the second of two favorite book posts, following my overall book list that went up yesterday. This category is dedicated to books as standalone books that may or may not be part of a longer series. The dividing line for this list was whether I thought you could read just the one book from a series as a self-contained story. If the answer was no, then the series likely appears below. As with my list of favorite novels, this is both recommendation and not. The list is a product of personal taste and dim memory of when I read these books, which often speaks as much to who I was when I read them as to the overall quality. I rarely move books significantly from year to year unlessI happen to have read the book that year, though it did happen with Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I bumped up a bit this year relative to the books around it. In general, the tier breaks are more significant than the specific ranking within a tier.
A few stats:
Oldest: 1937 (Starmaker)
Newest: 2023 (The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi)
Tier 5 40. The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings (2000) 39. Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (2013) 38. The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wexler (2013) 37. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005) 36. Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974) 35. Foundation, Isaac Asimov (1951) 34. Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer (1983)
Tier 3 26. Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky (2021) 25. Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (2012) 24. Ilium, Dan Simmons (2003) 23. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (2008) 22. Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969) 21. Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)
Tier 2 20. Jade City, Fonda Lee (2017) 19. A Master of Djinn, P. Djeli Clark (2021) 18. A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (2019) 17. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (2007) 16. The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (2015) 15 The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, S.A. Chakraborty (2023) 14. Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson (1992) 13. Dune, Frank Herbert (1965) 12. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004) 11. Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (2020) 10. Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaimon (2013) 9. Starmaker, Olaf Stapledon (1937)
Tier 1 8. Babel, R.F. Kuang (2022) 7. Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993) 6. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (2015) 5. Hyperion, Dan Simmons (1989) 4. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) 2. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon (1990) 1. American Gods, Neil Gaimon (2001)
Series
The following section is dedicated to fantasy books that I think of as series rather than as individual books. These series range from three to fourteen books. Not all of the series are complete and in fact my top two and four of my top ten are as-yet incomplete. Several caveats apply to this list. First, I have to have read all of the books in the series that are out, which eliminates series of books that I quite enjoyed, including some of the books on the above list. Second: where an ongoing series ranks depends in part on my estimation of the most recent books.There is one first-book-in-a-series on the list above that I loved as a standalone, but was less impressed with how the series developed.
Tier 3 19. Star Wars: X-Wing, various authors 18. The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu 17. Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin 16. Kushiel’s Legacy, Jacqueline Carey 15. Machineries of Empire, Yoon Ha Lee 14. Tao Trilogy, Wesley Chu 13. Shades of Magic, V.E. Schwab
Tier 2 13. The Expanse, James S.A. Corey 12. Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson 11. Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb 10.The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson 9. The Daevabad Trilogy, Shannon Chakraborty 8. Liveship Traders, Robin Hobb 7. Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson 6. Teixcalaan Series, Arkady Martine
Tier 1 5. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien 4. Dandelion Dynasty, Ken Liu 3. Broken Earth, N.K. Jemisin 2. A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin 1. Kingkiller Chronicles, Patrick Rothfuss
This is the first of two annual posts that offer an update to my list of favorite books. Older lists are available in the archive, but I don’t link from year to year since the lists are largely sticky year to year.
Since the 2022 update, I have added just two books to the list and adjusted the ranking of one book. While I have enjoyed a lot of the books I have read since, the great ones have mostly been non-fiction or in genres that I am generally not tracking here. There is more movement on my science fiction and fantasy list because I have read more books in those genres.
This list is a reflection of my own personal taste. I have become a more discerning reader since publishing the initial list, but I am not primarily making an aesthetic literary judgement. In at least one case, the book doesn’t hang together as a complete novel, the author thought it was a complete failure, and yet it contains some of my favorite scenes that author ever produced.
This list combines the experience I had when I read the book with the foggy recollection of memory. I cannot promise that were I to read the book again it would land in the same place. I rarely fiddle with the rankings from year to year other than to add new books and iron out disagreements between this list and my fantasy rankings, but sometimes it happens.
I have subdivided the list into tiers because some of the distinctions amount to splitting hairs.
This list serves both as recommendation and not. When I recommend books to a particular reader, I tailor the list to the recipient. To wit, I am moved by Hemingway’s writing and thought that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest was brilliant; I rarely recommend anyone read either.
I am annoyed by lists of great novels that include series and books that are not novels. To reflect this, I have created a second list of my favorite works of science fiction and fantasy that includes both stand-alone novels and series, which appears in a subsequent post. Some works appear on both lists, hopefully in the same order.
The dates in parentheses are publication date, even when the publication was posthumous.
I once intended to make this list out to a round one hundred books, or one hundred +X, but while there are hundreds and hundreds of books in the world that I have enjoyed, not all of those made the list because I instead decided that it should serve as a collection of books that I consider all-time favorites. Once the list hits 100+my age when I publish the post books at the back end will begin to fall off.
And a few stats:
Original Languages: 12
Books by women: 19
Oldest: 1899 (The Heart of Darkness)
Newest: 2022 (The Last White Man)
Tier 5 80. Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric (1945) 79. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969) 78. Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson (1992) 77. Water For Elephants, Sara Gruen (2006) 76. The Clergyman’s Daughter, George Orwell (1935) 75. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco (1988) 74. Basti, Intizar Husein (1979) 73. The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama (1994) 72. The Time of the Hero, Mario Vargas Llosa (1963) 71. The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942) 70. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899) 69. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See (2005) 68. First and Last Man, Olaf Stapledon (1930) 67. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis (1946) 66. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh (1938) 65. Dune, Frank Herbert (1965) 64. The Brothers Ashkenazi, I.J. Singer (1937)
Tier 4 63. The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino (1957) 62. White Noise, Don Delillo (1985) 61. Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr (2021) 60. The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid (2022) 59. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse (1951) 57. Burmese Days, George Orwell (1934) 56. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (1970) 55. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004) 54. Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (2020) 53. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaimon (2013) 52. The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth (1932) 51. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid (2017) 50. Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz (1956)
Tier 2 34. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa (2006) 33. Good Omens, Neil Gaimon and Terry Pratchett (1990) 32. The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste (2019) 31. A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (2013) 30. I Saw Her That Night, Drago Jančar (2010) 29. The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk (1990) 28. The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa (2000) 27. American Gods, Neil Gaimon (2001) 26. Catch 22, Joseph Heller (1961) 25. Creation, Gore Vidal (1981) 24. Coming Up for Air, George Orwell (1939) 23. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (1940) 22. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985) 21. Snow, Orhan Pamuk (2002) 20. Stoner, John Williams (1965) 19. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987) 18. The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck (2013) 17. Lolita, Vladimir Nobokov (1955) 16. Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann (1947)
Tier 1B 15. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante (2011) 14. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) 13. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (1998) 12. The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008) 11. The Jokers, Albert Cossery (1964) 10. To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway (1937) 9. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) 8. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell (1936) 7. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926) 6. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (1996)
Tier 1A 5. Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967) 4. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) 3. Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse (1943) 2. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949) 1. The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis (1955)
I spend altogether too much time thinking about how many books I will never read in my life.
Perhaps this is thought is bleak. I read as much as I can and consider myself fortunate to have made my way into a field where not only am I surrounded by books, but also I have to read as a professional obligation. Publishing and criticism seemed somewhat more unattainable, and my current job lets me engage other passions as well. Curating to-read lists is an process I find relaxing. But while I also enjoy looking back at all of the books I have read, these processes always remind me of all the books I haven’t.
Back in January I set an ambitious but not impossible reading target for this year: 100 books across the lists I keep. For context, this would mark a 10–15 book bump over each of the past two years. Certainly not impossible, but ambitious. As of this writing, I am more or less on pace. I have finished 37 books so far and will likely push that number over 40 before the end of the month, with all three of my biggest reading months (June, July, December) still to ahead of me in the year. But this target gives me flares of anxiety when I think about it because of how slowly I feel like I’m reading, especially since there are weeks when my “currently reading” section at the bottom of this post carries over from week to week. Most of the time I am able to remind myself that these things are immaterial. Getting worked up about listing the same book week after week when it is taking me longer than anticipated is a concern about how my appearance bleeding into whether I’m reading enough, whatever that might be, and books are meant to be savored, not rushed.
But this concern then cycles back into my existential concerns about books left unread. On my to-read shelf in my home office I have 40 academic books I have not yet read, with another three that I need to re-read in preparation to teach this year. I also have 40 books I’m looking to read out of interest, along with another 13 e-books in my Kindle library. Then there are the books in my campus office and hundreds more on various reading lists, to say nothing of the books being released every week and those yet unpublished. Put another way, I already have more books in my queue than I expect to be able to read this year, even if I were to not acquire a single additional book by either purchase or library. This is not necessarily a problem since I largely subscribe to the idea of an anti-library where unread books themselves have power and value, but the numbers add up. If I were to hit my target this year and then hit one hundred books every year until I hit the age of retirement in this country, I would read fewer than three thousand books in that span, while American publishers put out 304,912 new or re-issued books in 2013. I am not going to be the target audience for all of those books, but the sheer scale of the books left unread sometimes stops me in my tracks.
This week’s varia:
Pasts Imperfect features new volumes on diversifying Classics, along with an In Memoriam for Ray Stevenson by Monica Cyrino whose work focuses on the reception of the Ancient World in film. Stevenson died this week at 58. Salve atque vale, Titus Pullo.
Amber beads from the Ziggurat of Assur dated to c.1800 BCE have been identified as coming from near the Baltic or North Sea. We know about long-distance trade taking place in this period, but every new piece of evidence for identifying the networks is exciting.
Fecal analysis from ancient toilets in Jerusalem have identified a parasite that can cause dysentery, the earliest evidence for the disease.
Monica H. Green and André Filipe Oliveira da Silva lay out some evidence that the Black Death had arrived in Europe in the thirteenth century. The old hypothesis about the Siege of Kaffa in the 1340s being the plague vector is based on weak foundations that has been proven false in recent years through multiple different types of studies, and Green is one of the pioneering historians offering a new history of this disease.
This was a cool video of the Murud-Janjira fort in the Arabian Sea.
New scans by a company called Magellan Ltd has produced high-definition scans of the Titanic, which sank in 1912 after striking an iceberg. The pictures are quite remarkable.
John Warner makes a case against the techno-futurists (my term) who see potential in ChatGPT, stressing again that this should be an opportunity to revise our assignments toward meaningful learning experiences. You know, like thinking.
Michigan graduate students are on strike and have been for weeks while (largely bad faith) negotiations drag on. Now that the end of the semester has arrived, departments are complying with pressure to make up grades.
A Republican district chair in Georgia—one who challenged Kemp for the Republican gubernatorial nomination and then refused to concede defeat—gave an interview in which she declared that globes are everywhere in a conspiracy to brainwash people into thinking that the world is round.
Arizona, California, and Nevada agreed to cut about 13% of their water use from the Colorado River, in return for compensation from the federal government for about 2/3 of that allotment and at least a temporary end to the threat of unilateral water cuts by the federal government. This is still probably too little, too late, but every little bit helps.
In political news worthy of respect, here is a piece about how John Fetterman’s recent medical issues have followed a playbook for de-stigmatizing mental health. As someone who both struggles with mental health and struggles to talk about it, the article is worth thinking about and Fetterman’s actions worth applauding.
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Proud Boys was sentenced to 18 years in prison this week for charges related to the events of January 6. Despite the sentence coming in short of the length sought by prosecutors, the judge in this case seems to be taking the threat posed by the Oath Keepers seriously, saying that he posed a peril to the country because he “wants democracy…to devolve into violence.”
The man who drove his truck into the White House security barrier has been identified as Sai Varshith Kandula, an Indian-American man, who is alleged to have stated that his goal was to kill the president and take over the country. Reminder that it one doesn’t need to be white to embrace nazism and India is one of multiple countries in the grips of an authoritarian ethno-nationalist movement.
House Republicans were joined by two Democrats in repealing President Biden’s partial student debt forgiveness plan under the Congressional Review Act—a measure that might also require borrowers to retroactively pay interest during the period when repayment was paused. The repayment plan is estimated to cost roughly 30 billion dollars per year for the next decade, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider that it is equivalent to roughly three percent of the budget for the defense department.
The Washington Post has a story about the recent wave of book bans that has a remarkable graphic: just 11 people accounted for more than 60% of all book challenges. This constitutes a tyranny of the minority where a tiny number of people can dictate what is and is not appropriate for everyone, with most of the complaints coming after the complainant heard about the book from media. One school district in Florida received a request to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” because it was “not educational and have indirectly hate messages” and could cause “confusion and indoctrination.” One might note that the complaint came from someone confused since it identified the author as Oprah Winfrey. Or perhaps it is of note that the same person has subsequently apologized for sharing a summary of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on Facebook, claiming that her opposition is rooted in anti-communism, that English isn’t her primary language, and that she isn’t a book person. The last link is worth reading because it underscores a number of concurrent issues with the current political discourse.
Mark Joseph Sterns has several pieces at Slate about the Supreme Court. In one, he talks about how media cycles tend to focus on a given case for only a short time when these decisions compound one another in terms of fundamentally reshaping society—away from justice, he says. In another, he addresses Neil Gorsuch’s facially absurd claims that Covid public health policies were “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime of this country.” Gorsuch’s decision simply ignores the long history of intrusions in this country and underscores that the court is political to its core.
The Albany Times Union has a story about how three men say they were recruited to come to a diner where they were to portray homeless veterans “displaced” by migrants. A gross political stunt on every level, and another example where people from talking heads to Kevin McCarthy picked up on the story generated by the stunt rather than the stunt itself.
A new story about scams that are using Trump’s name and his fanatical supporters to sell commemorative objects like “Trump Bucks.” These campaigns use AI voices to promise that these can be redeemed for value at banks and retailers, while the fine-print says that they are memorabilia. This story reminds me that I saw the most accursed book ever printed in Barnes and Noble yesterday: a collection of letters to and from Trump, along with “his” commentary.
During the evacuation of Khartoum, the US embassy shredded passports held there, trapping the holders of those passports in a war zone. This is standard operating procedure not exclusive to the United States, but it is also hard to ignore the people who are trapped by such a policy.
Album of the Week: Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, The Chicken Coop, vol. 1 (2023)
Currently Reading: Umberto Eco, Baudolino; Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews; Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt
Anders waited for an undoing, an undoing that did not come, and the hours passed, and he realized that he had been robbed, that he was the victim of a crime, the horror of which only grew, a crime that had taken everything from him
Anders lives in a rural town where he works as a trainer and passes time smoking weed and having sex with Oona, a friend from high school who moved home after college to help care for her mother. This town, which read to me like Britain but could easily be in the US (Hamid also uses ambiguity as a universalizing device this way in Exit West), is populated overwhelmingly by white people. That is, until Anders wakes up one morning to discover that he is no longer white, patient zero for a plague that sweeps through society.
The Last White Man belongs to a genre of novels that range from Albert Camus’s The Plague to Jose Saramago’s Blindness where either a real or metaphorical plague sweeps through a community, thus allowing the author to explore the consequences of this change. (Other reviews mention Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but, despite the echoes in Anders’ experience, I found the broader social transition strain that analogy.) Hamid’s version, the plague is a metaphor for immigration that compresses the abstract fears about replacement into a matter of weeks, thus heightening the social tensions.
Other than revealing who, in fact, becomes the titular last white man, there is little plot to explain in this slim novel. The Anders-Oona relationship, for instance, starts as little more than a liaison of convenience and only develops somewhat beyond that. The relationship Anders has with his father and Oona’s with her mother are similarly lightly-handled. Rather, this is a novel about questions the answers to which have far-reaching consequences.
What impressed me about The Last White Man was how Hamid develops two themes related to identity.
First, Hamid uses Anders’ abrupt transition to explore the experience of being a person of color. He is the same person he was on the previous day, but he also no longer recognizes himself. Moreover, his day-to-day experience of the world has become filled with menace from the people around him. Anders changes how he interprets he the actions of the people who look at him and how he thinks about the people who had been living as people of color in town before the transition, not-so-subtly gesturing at the assumptions and social cues that the majority population so frequently takes for granted.
Anders was not sure where his sense of threat was coming from, but it was there, it was strong, and once it was obvious to him that he was a stranger to those he could call by name, he did not try to look in their faces, to let his gaze linger in ways that could be misconstrued.
Second, Hamid explores how racism can work on a social level. The spreading coloration is not the result of foreign influx or migration and yet the perceived threat fueled in part by media claiming that the plague is the result of a conspiracy seeking to undermine the natural order leads to violence that ranges from suicide to the formation of lynch mobs. And yet, Hamid also leaves the reader with a note of optimism. Most people start out unsettled by the changes, but, just as Anders and Oona are able to rediscover one another, so too is the community at large able to rediscover the ties that make them into a functioning society.
I liked The Last White Man a lot, and both the themes and the lyrical prose are in keeping with the other novels of his that I have read. The simplicity of the plot and character relationships allowed the heavier social themes to shine through in a very breezy read. The simplicity placed this book somewhat behind Exit West in my estimation, but the balance put it just ahead of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In sum, The Last White Man is well-worth reading and leaves me interested in reading Hamid’s other two novels.
ΔΔΔ
I just finished reading Angela Saini’s Superior and am now reading both Umberto Eco’s Baudolino and Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews.
“After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.”
Ordinarily I start novel reviews with a plot synopsis before offering any editorial comments or analysis. This is the way of reviews. Sometimes a non-fiction book warrants an anecdote of some sort that leads into the review, but discussion of novels generally requires insight on the plot to be meaningful.
I will get to the plot of Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh in a moment, but, before I get there, I want to make something very clear: this might be the most disturbing book I have ever read.
Tender is the Flesh follows Marcos, a man who has spent his entire career in the meat industry in an unnamed South American country that I suspect is meant to resemble Bazterrica’s home country of Argentina.
A virus deadly to humans swept through the animal kingdom at some point in the recent past. Animals could carry the disease without ill-effect but any human who ate contaminated meat or was scratched by an infected animal would die. Overnight, governments worldwide exterminated all animals that had a chance of interacting with humans. Humanity went vegan by necessity, much to the dissatisfaction of most people. Meat consumption, after all, is more a political statement than a biological necessity.
(Bazterrica includes a correct detail that humans often turn to meat for Vitamin B12, but it is a poor explanation for what happens in the novel given both that there are synthetic means of producing the nutrient and that people do this because humans can’t produce it.)
It was the first public scandal of its kind and instilled the idea in society that in the end, meat is meat, it doesn’t matter where it’s from.
Old taboos start to decay in this new zoologically-deficient world. People consumed other people in secret at first. Immigrants, migrants, and other marginalized people began to disappear, prompting cynical whispers that the virus was nothing more than a conspiracy to curb overpopulation. But norms change and, soon, human meat is an accepted part of people’s diet, with distinctions made between human cattle without names and citizens, the latter of whom can only be eaten in special circumstances. By the time that we meet Marcos, his career has changed from operating his family’s cattle slaughterhouse to being a manager at a slaughterhouse for the euphemistically-named “special meat” industry.
While he removes his soaked shirt, he tries to clear the persistent idea that this is what they are: humans bred as animals for consumption. He goes to the refrigerator and pours himself cold water. He drinks it slowly. His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.
There are two ways to talk about Tender is the Flesh: the setting and the plot. Both are disturbing.
The greatest part of the horror in Tender is the Flesh builds out of the setting. I found that the inciting virus required a suspension of disbelief since its mechanics seemed rather improbable, but from that one point Bazterrica spins out a richly-imagined dystopia that is altogether too plausible given that its basic realities are transposed directly from the world of industrial meat, just adapted for humans. Thus we are given a tour of the breeding where the First Generation Pure grow up in captivity, their vocal cords removed “because meat doesn’t talk” and where impregnated females are often maimed so that they can’t kill the fetus so that it isn’t born into the hell, and to the processing centers where they are sedated, stunned, and killed.
But if the industrial side of special meat processing serves as the focal point of the novel, Bazterrica also introduces the “normal” sides of special meat consumption through parties held by Marcos’ sister Marisa and the seedier elements of the black market trade in human flesh. In a particularly grotesque examples of the latter, Marcos visits a particularly perverse establishment where, for a surcharge, a client can pay to eat the woman he had sex with and where celebrities can pay off their debts by signing themselves over to be prey in hunts.
The unrelenting bleakness of the setting only serves to underscore the trauma of the plot. Marcos’ wife Cecilia has recently left him, broken by the death of their baby Leo after years of trying to start a family. At the start of the novel, Marcos is simply going through the motions of life and trying to watch after his dying father, but things change when he receives the expensive gift of a First Generation Prime female to raise as domestic head. Marcos himself helped write the strict regulations governing domestic head since the meat industry has to keep a division between full people and meat people for the fiction to continue to exist and the idea of eating one’s own children is too horrific to contemplate. And yet, Marcos decides to first name this FGP Jasmine, then to bring her into the house, and, eventually, has sex with her in a way that suggests that he is trying to create a genuine relationship. When Jasmine becomes pregnant, the question seems to become whether one or both are going to suffer consequences from the regulators who keep trying to pry into what Marcos is hiding.
I will not reveal the final twist, but it was both shocking and perfectly in keeping with this bleak world.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the trauma that pulses through nearly every character. Marcos, for instance, spends most of the novel going through life in almost a fugue state, which, in turn, colors the rest of the story. But this trauma plays out in the person of the nihilistic butcher, the tender-hearted job applicant at the processing plant, and a sister who seems to be disassociating from the reality of what she eats. The only ones who seem unaffected, Bazterrica suggests, are the sociopaths.
But this is a novel pregnant with ideas, such that other social commentaries dance beneath the surface of the trauma. Most obvious is the critique of industrial farming that inflicts so much of the trauma. Unsurprisingly, Bazterrica has talked about how her transition to vegetarianism informs, even while saying that meat informs her identity as a participant in a carnivorous society. Likewise, this commentary is bound up in a larger discussion of capitalistic consumption. Not unlike in our own world, meat in the novel serves is the ultimate marker of social status, whether one has access to it or whether one becomes it. The have nots are consumed first and all human flesh is transactional. Thus the reader is invited to consider where they might exist along this spectrum.
ΔΔΔ
I finished Tender is the Flesh in April, but the end of semester busyness interfered with sitting down to write this. In the weeks since, I reread Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which my students loved more than I could have anticipated, and read Robert Graves I, Claudius, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man. I didn’t much care for I, Claudius, but I anticipate writing about the latter two books. I am now reading Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science and Umberto Eco’s Baudolino.
Julie Schumacher has published two novels about academic life, Dear Committee Members (2014) and The Shakespeare Requirement (2018), with a third in the series, The English Experience due out in August. The first two novels are campus farces featuring the eccentric professor of creative writing Jason Fitger who received his job and tenure at the small midwestern Payne College on the strength of literary novels years ago, though his most recent novel The Transfer of Affection both flopped and precipitated his divorce. Now he remains embedded in Payne, laboring away in a deeply dysfunctional department.
And to begin this recommendation on the proper footing: no, I will not fill out the inane computerized form that is intended to precede or supplant this letter; ranking a student according to his or her placement among the “top 10 percent,” “top 2 percent,” or the “top 0.000001 percent” is pointless and absurd. No faculty member will rank any student, no matter how severely lacking in ability or reason, below “top 10 percent.” This would be tantamount to describing the candidate in question as a witless beast. A human being and his or her caliber, intellect, character, and promise are not reducible to a check mark in a box. Faced with a reductionist formula such as yours, I despair for the future, consoling myself with the thought that I and others of my generation, with its archaic modes of discourse, won’t live to see the barren cyberworld the authors of your recommendation form are determined to create.
Dear Committee Members
Dear Committee Members unfolds over a single academic year, as told through the recommendation letters of one Jason Fitger. Professor Fitger writes a lot of recommendation letters, and takes great pride in the genre. Perhaps too much pride. Each of the letters he writes does indeed recommend the candidate for positions that range from jobs to graduate schools to administrative positions on campus. But these letters also contain flourishes that let the recipient know exactly what he, Jason Fitger M.F.A., thinks of them, their position, and the whole academic apparatus. Invariably, this commentary also means that the letters often wander into an ongoing one-sided dialogue between Fitger and his silent interlocutors such as his current department chair (a Sociologist imposed on the department), his ex-girlfriend Carole Samarkind (the associate director of Student Services at Payne), his ex-wife Janet Matthias, who he met at a prestigious writing Seminar and now is an administrator in the law school at Payne, and Eleanor Acton, their former classmate and now director of the Seminar from whom he is attempting to secure a position for his mentee Darren Browles.
Fitgers commentary traces the contours of an academic year, and the absurdity of the whole system—including letters of recommendation—is deeply familiar to anyone who has worked in it. Indeed, these are the letters of recommendation I wish I could write. Further, Schumacher offers cutting commentary about the state of the contemporary university.
Iris Temple has applied to your MFA program in fiction and has asked me to support, via this LOR, her application. I find this difficult to do, not because Ms. Temple is unqualified (she is a gifted and disciplined writer and has published several stories in appropriately obscure venues), but because your program at Torreforde State offers its graduate writers no funding or aid of any kind—an unconscionable act of piracy and a grotesque, systemic abuse of vulnerable students, to whom you extend the false hope that writing a $50,000 check to your institution will be the first step toward artistic success.
Dear Committee Members
But Schumacher cuts the comedy of Jason Fitger the difficult and absurd colleague always kvetching about something or another by making it clear that is nevertheless deeply cares about his students and will go to great lengths to help them succeed. This character trait likewise adds emotional weight to a dark plot line about the declining emotional state of Darren Browles reflected through Fitger’s futile efforts to save him.
The Shakespeare Requirement picks up the following academic year, with Jason Fitger, the creative writing professor with a lowly MFA, now at the helm of Payne University’s English Department, his colleagues grudgingly voting for him at the end of Dear Committee Members.
This novel has functionally three core plot threads.
The first follows Dennis Cassovan, aging professor of Shakespeare who loathes that while he was on sabbatical his colleagues burdened the department with Fitger, a mediocre novelist and non-scholar. What’s more, administration is requiring a “vision statement” for the department and there is a chance that that vision might exclude the Bard himself. Cassovan objects, strenuously, and the cause is taken up by his long-suffering research assistant Lincoln, who makes Shakespeare a cause célèbre on campus—much to his annoyance—after the poster on Cassovan’s door is vandalized.
Here was the future, Cassovan thought. Out with considered argument and nuance; in with publicity students, competitive righteousness, and the thrill of rage.
The second follows Angela Vackrey, a timid but promising student from a small, conservative town whose work attracts the attention of both Fitger and Cassovan. However, both men are too preoccupied with administrative and faculty issues to offer her much mentorship, and Angela finds herself adrift without any close friends at college. In part, this is how she finds herself pregnant after a single sexual experience with a boy from her Bible study. Surely this means that she must marry him?
Finally, there is Fitger himself. I am very fortunate to be in a department with an exceptionally competent chair—so much so that last year the department joked that our reappointment vote was to prevent her from stepping down. Jason Fitger is the opposite of that: a roiling mess of disorganization and impolitic observations with barely any sense of the levers of power within an academic institution. To make matters worse, his ex-wife Janet Matthias is dating the Dean who signs off on the department paperwork and Roland Gladwell, the chair of the well-resourced Economics department, is staging a hostile takeover of their shared building. Oh, and campus newspaper has run a series of articles condemning Fitger’s “Literature of the Apocalypse” course as traumatic.
The students, who have requested anonymity, claim that the reading list for the fall class—on the “Literature of the Apocalypse”—was detrimental to their mental health and “psychologically hostile.” One of the students has reported consulted a family lawyer.
Sophomore Yvetta Curtin, who was not enrolled in the class but had seen a copy of the syllabus, suggested that the selection of novels was “irresponsible” and could be dangerous for students with emotional issues or PTSD.
Fitger’s only hope may lay in the person of the department secretary, Fran, who miraculously keeps the department moving forward despite its lack of a budget. The problem is that in order to have a budget, the department must have a vision statement and, thanks to Roland’s meddling, the department must approve the statement unanimously. But Fitger will get the statement approved over Cassovan’s dead body unless it includes requires that all English majors take a Shakespeare class.
The Shakespeare Requirement retains a similar tone to the Dear Committee Members, but dispatching with the epistolary format allows Schumacher to offer wider perspective on the campus culture of Payne. Schumacher treats Payne as an every-college. The humanities are underfunded, numerous students apathetic or overwhelmed, and administrators out of touch with the practice of teaching. The hubbub about students not even in the class being outraged by Fitger’s literature of the apocalypse class might as well be a campus culture wars headline about Schumacher’s alma mater Oberlin. While some of these caricatures wore a little thin at times, I found that the wider perspective made the campus satire hit somewhat closer to home for better and for worse. Where Fitger’s (failed) romantic partnerships and his (doomed) attempt to save his mentee form the core plots of Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement follows a protracted war over the future of the school. Victory might hinge on the silliest of factors in the novel, but the fight itself is all-too real.
Education was expensive and inefficient; teaching students to think and write clearly was the same. But Hoffman, a business school graduate with the singe-cell mind of a banker, had never taught anyone anything. Her ultimate plan would be to organize the campus into two simple units: “Numbers” and “Words.”
The Shakespeare Requirement
I am a big fan of both of these novels. They are fun, light reads filled with sweeping caricatures and clever turns of phrase, but with some of the darker—and altogether human—crises of higher education hovering just beneath the surface. The comic sub-genre of campus novel is to the best of my knowledge not extensive, and the genre writ-large tends to focus on character or coming of age stories. This makes it almost inevitable that Schumacher’s books would be compared to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, which I particularly disliked. Schumacher populates her books with quirky and sometimes bad or unlikable characters, she avoids the meanness and myopia that I found in Lucky Jim. Schumacher makes it clear that however difficult and disoriented Fitger becomes, he legitimately trying and some of his most dramatic failures come from the best intentions—something that seems likely to have been drawn from experience in academia.
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This semester got away from me and I’m not sure which of my recent reads will receive profiles here. I am currently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time.
What we’re being offered appears at first to be diverse, until you realise it is the same kind of ‘diversity’ that is spreading around the globe in identical fashion; what the world buys and eats is becoming more and more the same. Consider these facts: the source of much of the world’s food – seeds – is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; from the USA to China, most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and, perhaps most famously, although there are more than 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in monocultures so vast their scale can only be comprehended from the view of an aeroplane or by satellite.
Norman Borlaug’s work and the Green Revolution show us anything, it is that through human efforts and ingenuity, food systems can be transformed. As we have seen, that transformation was only ever designed to be short-lived; it was a clever fix for feeding the world at a particular point in time. Borlaug himself believed it could only be sustained for twenty-five to thirty years, but the world became locked into that way of feeding itself.
The consequences of monoculture agriculture should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the news. The imminent extinction of the Cavendish banana and coffee are the most obvious examples, but one might also think of the recent spike in the cost of eggs attributed to a massive outbreak of avian flu or the staggering data about how little of mammalian biomass is wild. Humans have always sought to control the environment, but their capacity to do so increased exponentially in the 20th century such that the Wizards of the Green Revolution created enormously productive food systems that simultaneously made these systems less diverse and thus less resilient.
This, in essence, is the argument of Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction. As much a manifesto as an investigation, Saladino argues for the preservation of a diverse food system, in all meanings of the term.
Eating to Extinction is, in essence, interlocking case studies on a single theme. The book unfolds across thirty four case studies divided into ten thematic sections by type of food.
One set of chapters focus on how a particular heirloom variety of plant or animal can help provide sustainability to the modern food system. For instance, one chapter examines industrial chickens compared to the Black Ogye Chicken from South Korea, while others examine wheats and coffees that resilient against the effects of climate change, and another examines how wild banana strains can resist the types of blight that killed the Gros Michel and is now threatening the Cavendish. Elsewhere the threat comes from the clear-cutting of forests.
Another set of chapters focus on the cultural side of food systems that have been threatened by everything from authoritarian dictatorships in Albania to regulatory rules about how products with protected designation of origin must be produced (e.g. in terms of the cultures used for cheese) to the economic pressures that prompt young people to leave the old ways behind. Here the loss is both that of sustainable systems that evolved to survive under harsh conditions and a more profound loss of meaning that conditions people to accept what the industrial food system has on offer.
If this makes Eating to Extinction sound like a smörgåsbord of topics, you would not be wrong. These are an array of vignettes on a theme, which Saladino allows to lead him in a variety of different directions. One chapter, for instance, offers criollo cacao as a way to stimulate the Venezuelan economy without oil, a second explores how marine life can quickly bounce back in ocean preserves that ban deep-sea trawling, and still others profile individuals aiming to bring perry and traditional cheeses back to prominence in England. Every chapter follows from the same theme and works to serve the same general argument, even while often looking quite different.
What makes Eating to Extinction a compelling read is its balance between the horrors of the modern food system and an optimistic note. Each chapter interrogates the crisis of either monoculture or capitalism like modern meat chicken that matures in under a month and the Pu-erh tea that the harvesters are incapable of affording, which Saladino balances against the deep well of genetic diversity that is both under threat and offers possible sources of salvation.
Preserving these systems, he argues, is a choice, but one that is not too late to make. At least not yet.
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I finished Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members just before the last book post went up. Since then, I have nearly S.A. Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi and I am working through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I rarely read two novels at once these days, but my wife and I decided to start a book club for just the two of us where we read a set amount each week and then talk about that section over a bottle of wine.
It’s always a shock, when I look on them the first time after waking. I forget how their stock and mine have diverged since the first colony ships left Earth. She is closer to baseline than I, but then the second great rise of Earth culture was one of grandiose ambitions and a refusal to accept limits, even the limits of human form. I am much altered from my ancestors, within and without, and these post-colonial natives have changed little.
Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race belongs to a long tradition of Science Fiction that doubles as speculative anthropology, and this book would be right at home among the Hainish novels by this sub-genre’s master, Ursula Le Guin.
The book opens with a chapter told from the point of view of Lynesse Fourth Daughter, the younger daughter from the ruling house of the small kingdom of Lannesite who has taken it upon herself to seek out the sorcerer Nyrgoth Elder in his isolated tower in order to invoke an ancient compact that he would help in a moment of need. Her mother might not be moved to act, but a threat is indeed upon the world.
The second chapter introduces the central conceit of the novel.
The ancient being Lynesse calls Nyrgoth Elder is a man named Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist and the last remaining member of Earth’s Explorer Corps on Sophos 4, part of a mission to study how the first wave of human colonists had evolved in the thousands of years since their departure from earth. As a good* anthropologist, Nyr commits himself to non-intervention, but that line becomes harder and harder to hold to through the lonely centuries, even with his Dissociative Cognition System—a technological device that allows him to set his feelings aside to deal with later—activited.
Both characters undergo the same set of developments, but their experience diverges quite dramatically, since, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law goes, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Nyr cannot explain his scientific understanding of the universe without Lynesse interpreting it as magic. Tchaikovsky’s achievement in the novel is to represent both the wonder and bafflement coming from both sides, especially in the chapter in the middle of the novel where both narrators relate the epic tale of the last time Nyr ventured from the tower, riding to war with Lynesse’s ancestor, at least in the version the Lynesse tells.
But where Lynesse is driven by her quest reminiscent of traditional fantasy stories with a young, naive protagonist, Nyr’s struggle is an interior one, against both the feelings of being an inadequate anthropologist since he is now intervening in the evolution of the subject population and the crushing loneliness of centuries isolated from every other human being.
“Forgive me, Elder. If not the monster, then there is some other foe in the world that causes you concern?” The thought was dire, and yet there was something weighing on him, and surely one did not become a great sorcerer without making great enemies.
And so she wanted to know why I looked sad, and I explained that it was basically a long-term mental state and that it was all under control, but that didn’t seem to be what she heard. And of course they don’t have a precise word for “clinical depression” or anything like that.
In contrast to these themes, the plot of Elder Race is quite simple. A quest pulls Nyr from his castle to investigate the rumors of an insidious plague that threatens life on the planet. He isn’t really supposed to intervene, but nevertheless agrees to help Lynesse. But the origin and nature of that threat, let alone any question of whether they are going to triumph, are not the focus of the book. It it is a perfectly competent plot, but one that does not go much for subtlety or misdirection. Instead, Tchaikovsky layers these two dissonant perspectives atop this simple narrative in order to explore more fundamental themes of human experience.
Elder Race is a short read (about 200 pages), and I loved every bit of it, enough so that I suspect that I will be seeking out his other work in the not-so-distant future.
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My reading remains ahead of my writing about books. Since my last review post, I finished three books other than this one: Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction, a manifesto about the importance of biological diversity, Lee Child’s Tripwire, which is a perfectly competent thriller that shows every sign of Child’s formulaic process, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, which was thoroughgoing Nobel fare: a family story that traces the consequences of colonialism in Tanzania before and after World War 1. Inspired by a run of recommendation requests (four in the past two weeks), I also just re-read Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members.
Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company others….Regardless of the specific occasion, though, or of the amount of planning that has gone into creating it, the objective is the same: it’s about blocking out time and dedicating it to the work of interacting with other people, whoever they might be.
The fight for hanging out is the fight for inclusive access to scenes and places like the ones I have been description. and it starts with recognizing that hanging out at, or around, or in the context of work is, in essence, work.
I started my current job in a world shaped by COVID-19. We had a campus mask mandate, still, and students were coming off more than a year where their educational experience was shaped by trying to keep people separate from one another in the name of limiting disease transmission. One of the most pronounced effects of this caesura was the abandonment of study spaces in academic buildings. Even the library seemed abandoned that year. My building has numerous comfortable chairs and tables in little nooks that never seemed occupied.
By a happy accident, the exception to this general observation took place immediately outside my office where you could usually find several history majors in their final year occupying the four chairs. Sometimes they would be reading or working on papers, but other times they were just there to hang out. I never had any of these students in my class, but I got to know them pretty well and often offered informal mentoring. I liked that their presence made campus feel a little more vibrant—and I could always close my office door if they became too distracting.
Last semester their numbers dwindled to one. As much as I like that one student (another whom I have never had in class), the change me realize how much I missed their presence.
So I started hosting small gatherings.
I bring baked goods and offer them tea. These started as ad hoc affairs on Friday afternoons, that I have now made a standing part of my office hours once a week. There have been weeks recently where I have been too distracted to do much more than offer the food and drink and attendance fluctuates week by week, but there are 6 or 8 regular attendees and I have had several faculty members comment how much they enjoy seeing these gatherings. There is no agenda for these gatherings, nor expectations. Students can grab me for “regular” office hours activities, chat with me informally, read a book, or just hang out with anyone else who shows up. My only objective is to invite students into the building.
If I needed validation for these gatherings, Shiela Liming’s new book Hanging Out is just that.
At its heart, Hanging Out, subtitled The Radical Power of Killing Time, is a manifesto about resisting the encroachment of productivity culture. Rat-race culture is hardly new. Long before the advent of the internet, critics in the late 19th and early 20th century already complained that the pace of life was too fast, as Randall Monroe of XKCD once observed. However, Liming contends that the last twenty or so years have marked a dangerous acceleration of these trends, combined with the rise of media that allows us to simulate connection while simultaneously eliding the realities of physical space. Liming declares, “We were having a hard time hanging out well before COVID-19 came along and made hanging out hard” (xii). Thus, Hanging Out serves as a call to action, to reclaim the power to resist the the forces that grind us to dust.
The seven chapters of Hanging Out each centers a different type of hanging out—at parties, with strangers, jamming, on TV, on the job, at dinner parties, and on the internet—that allow Liming to tell one or more stories connected to her experience in that context. Every chapter is engaging enough, even if you have never, say, become friends and thus hung out with someone whose Food Network show replicates the experience of conviviality for viewers all over the country, or played bagpipe and accordion with not one but two bands in the Pittsburgh-area bands. But in each case, Liming’s broad perspective on hanging out reinforces the central message that hanging out can take place almost anywhere and the willingness to do so has a rejuvenating power.
Compared to the two examples above, Liming’s chapter on hanging out at work struck a particular note with me. This chapter blends two examples, working a bar job somewhere without much else to do and the academic conference. The latter part particularly struck a note with me, as someone who has a love-hate relationship with these events. Conferences are where academics go to present papers, network, and see friends. The share of the pie chart for each varies by the person. These can also be intimidating, isolating venues for young scholars, impossibly priced for contingent faculty, and places where “known creeps” like to turn the space hostile. Liming describes how the worst experience of her conference life spurred her to be more fully present at this conference and to commit to hanging out, those creeps be damned.
Liming describes this hanging out and the experience of rounding up an audience to hear a graduate student talk with a certain panache, but what she describes is not an easy thing to do. These can be big conferences with a bewildering number of famous and important people in your corner of academia, which can easily lead one to travel in your pack, prowling rooms and events to see if you know anyone there—and turning away if you don’t. I have presented to a room with only my panelists for audience members and delivered a paper immediately after a significant portion of the audience walked out of the room, their colleague having presented the paper before mine. I attended my first AIA-SCS conference (the big professional organization in my field) back in 2011, before the latter organization took its current name. While I started to acquire “conference friends” pretty quickly, it was only this year where I felt like I’d reached a critical mass of contacts that it seemed like I knew someone in any room I stepped into, and, even then, I met a ton of new folks or made physical connection with digital friends. However, the fact that I knew this many people made me feel all the more responsible for inviting other people into the space—especially since one of the first-time attendees was one of our undergrads. Because the reality is that hanging out in a space like this is how cross-pollination of ideas works. Nothing might happen over a coffee or drink or at that reception, but it builds out a rolodex that can result in anything from more hanging out, to an introduction to a friend of a friend, to opportunities to collaborate on future ventures.
“Hanging Out on the Internet” was the only chapter where Liming lost me, but only a little bit. She uses this chapter as an extended discussion of the Sublime, which she argues is impossible online because the digital works exists as a purely human creation. Further, she takes issue with “hanging out” online in two ways. First, the digital world creates the illusion of proximity in a way that ironically heightens the absence, while, second, the process of “searching” and curating one’s experience online is antithetical to the (sublime) power of physical chance.
I disagree with none of this.
However, hanging out in the sense that Liming calls for also requires reciprocity. I love physical mail, but a one-sided letter delivery is not much of a correspondence and I have found that the rise of digital technologies have allowed for the rekindling or perpetuation of friendships that started or bloomed in the physical world, but would have otherwise faded. These are not a replacement for friendships or activities in the analog world, but a valuable supplement to them.
The underlying message in Hanging Out is not that different from Oliver Burkemann’s Four Thousand Weeks or Jonathan Malesic’s The End of Burnout, but with a key twist. Where both Burkemann and Malesic focus on work culture, Liming wants us to consider seriously the work involved in not-work.
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I have once again fallen way behind on writing about books here, both because I am in the midst of another busy semester and because I haven’t had substantial-enough thoughts to share about a number of the books. For instance, over the last month I have read Archer Mayor’sBury the Lead and Mick Herron’s Spook Street, both installments in series, as well as Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea, which is the first of his “secret” novels he ran a Kickstarter for last year. I might have something to say about Tress, but less as a novel and more about Sanderson’s larger Cosmere project. I also read Fonda Lee’s Jade War, which I didn’t like nearly as much as the first in the series (and not just for second book reasons, though I expect I’ll read the third) and Percival Everett’s Dr. No, which was amusing enough but didn’t elicit a particularly strong reaction from me. Ironically, this is how I feel about a lot of “literary” authors. On the other end of the spectrum, I read Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath right as the semester started and while I liked a lot of the ideas I found myself having a hard time engaging with the story, which might have also been a function of my brain space so far this semester. In fact, the only book in my backlog that I know I want to write about is Marissa R. Moss’ Her Country, which is a discussion of country music industry and the recent wave of female artists who took it by storm.
I am currently reading Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction an about to start a buddy read of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with my wife.
I am a Bad Jew by many people’s standards. Other people would deny me even that, since I never had a bar mitzvah and have never belonged to a synagogue. I am only very slowly learning Hebrew. I’m mostly committed to holidays for the food and a loose sense of seasonality. This year for Chanukah I said a blessing lighting candles but decided that I didn’t want to say the others. In recent years I’ve found myself feeling a stronger pull toward my ancestry within the Eastern European Yiddish community than the Hebraic Zionism that I find problematic for its assimilationist obliteration of specific Jewish heritage before considering the actions of the state of Israel.
It was with this background that I read Emily Tamkin’s Bad Jews: A history of American Jewish Politics and Identities. For a history of Jewish people in the United States, the plural in “identities” is important, according to Emily Tamkin. Essential, in fact, because there has been a multiplicity of ways to be Jewish, so too is there a multiplicity of ways to be “Bad Jews,” in any number of respects deficient. Narratives and counter-narratives. Tamkin even includes in her introduction like the one I wrote above to explain how she might just be too bad a Jew to author this book, but perhaps that is just the point.
Bad Jews, which blends history, more than 150 interviews, and a streak of memoir, unfolds in chronologically, with each chapter constructed around two interlocking themes: what might prompt some Jews to characterize others as “Bad Jews” and how Jews fit into the broader patterns of American culture.
American Jewish history is a history, or a set of histories, of immigration and the subsequent oscillation between accepting and resisting acculturation.
While it is common to speak of Jews as a cohesive group, Tamkin invites readers to think otherwise down to the most fundamental levels. Ashkenazim from the Germany and Eastern Europe form the dominant image of what a Jewish person looks like in the United States (and have formed the majority of the population since 1730), but Tamkin notes that the earliest Jews to arrive here were Sephardim who arrived by way of the Iberian peninsula and, thus, early Synagogues followed Sephardic practices. This early arrival also inevitably entangled the Jewish community with slavery, both in terms of employing enslaved labor to construct their places of worship and owning enslaved people. She points out that the first Jewish person to hold a cabinet position was Judah P. Benjamin, a wealthy slave owner who became secretary of state of the Confederate States of America.
Tamkin weaves this same thread back in during the Civil Rights Movement when, in 1965, famously, the Jewish rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Many Jews are rightfully proud of this heritage and Tamkin cites polling form the 1950s that suggests that most Jews considered commitment to civil rights more essential for being a “Good Jew” than support for Israel. And yet, as a number of recent comments from Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, and other prominent African Americans indicate, there is also a longstanding frustration with, if not hostility in, this relationship. Tamkin builds from an analysis of James Baldwin’s essay “Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They Are Anti-White,” to identify the disconnect in that while Jewish allies of the movement emphasize the similarities in their place in American society, African Americans chaffed at the differences in lived experience when most Jews received the privileges of being white. In other words, it isn’t that Jews are not marginalized in essential ways in American society, but they also get to be the landlords.
In turn, this point again reinforces the tensions within the American Jewish community when it comes to Jews of color.
[Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Jews who participated in the civil rights movement are] American Jewish history, but…only a part of it. In the contemporary context, that means grappling with all of American Jewish history and with the various stances American Jews have chosen to take with respect to white supremacy. It also means that those who say that Jews aren’t white only to turn around and malign Jews who do not look white as not really being Jewish are only fooling themselves.
Race is a construct, but it is a construct with lived implications. And there are, in the United States, Jews who go through life as white. This is the majority of American Jews. If they—we—do not wish to be considered as complicit in white supremacy, a good place to start would be by not insisting that we’re more Jewish than Jews of color.
The issue of race stood out because of the current state of discourse in the United States and other books I have read in the past few years like Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene and Koshersoul, both of which address the intersection of his race and his Judaism, but it is only one example of the questions at the heart of Bad Jews. There is no one way to be a “Good Jew,” in Tamkin’s thesis, and thus there is a multiplicity of ways to be a “Bad Jew.” Moreover, these are contested definitions perpetually undergoing regeneration.
In many respects, the story that Tamkin tells about Jews parallels the evolution of the United States more broadly, and it is important to recognize those connections. However, “Jews” make for a compelling subject for thinking about the United States as a pluralistic polity because of the way that both mainstream Christian Americans and parts of the Jewish community have tried to articulate Jews as an eternal other, separate from and incompatible with the rest of the citizen body.
Bad Jews is not a book one can turn to for answers. That very idea is antithetical even to Tamkin’s project. Rather, this is a book that is designed to think with. I came into it with a strong sense of certain schisms within the broad Jewish community, but I quickly discovered that I had underestimated how deep and multifaceted these divisions were.
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This is the second in a backlog of books I read months ago that I still want to write about. Since I am currently re-reading several novels that I’m teaching with this semester, I might even “catch up” before the semester overtakes me too much.
Noodlings 