Blogtastic!: Janesville by Amy Goldstein

 We’ve made it to the “free square” on the 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge bingo card. I’ve decided to choose the category, “Nonfiction About Race or Class in America.” And the book that fills that category is Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.

I listened to Janesville on audio, and come to think of it, audio books offered a great way for me to branch out from my go-to diet of fiction about sad white ladies. In the final half of 2017, I listened to three audio books that filled squares on my bingo card. Yay, broadened horizons!

Janesville is a true case of narrative ethnography -- only rarely do I feel like the author steps in the middle of it. It follows the trajectory of residents of Janesville, Wisconsin after the General Motors plant closes and offers a complicated story of the declining middle class. I was most struck by the hope that gets pinned on education (workforce retraining) as a way to bolster the middle class in the face of economic change -- and, in this case, its lack of impact.

This book will clearly appeal to people wondering what happened during the 2016 election, and frankly, I think it is better than Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance – which was the book that has received the most praise for trying to explain the mindset that propelled some economically struggling white people to become Trump’s base. Goldstein brings a journalist’s eye and craft to her work, while Vance is talking about his family and his neighbors and his own history. Janesville is part of this same conversation because of Wisconsin’s Electoral College vote outcome and also because it is Paul Ryan’s hometown. It is notable, however, that this is NOT a book about Trump, and Goldstein doesn’t even mention him until the epilogue. Plus, Janesville voted Democratic during the election.

Several reviewers have noted that Janesville needs a part 2. Understanding the state of our politics requires grappling with race, and Goldstein does not do that with much depth. It’s true that the Janesville community is over 95% white, but the existence of the all-white communities is part of the story of racial segregation and exclusion that is central to American economic history. Goldstein does give a nod to the fact that Beloit, Wisconsin – just down the freeway from Janesville – is more racially diverse (15% African American and 17% Latino). The politics that led to a region that has those racialized elements is important.

Of course, there might be a bigger question at stake for readers who pick up a book about Wisconsin. What is the appeal of cheese curds? Why?!?!?!

 

Vat O'Curds

Valentine's Day Themed Curds?????

Here’s a link to a Marketplace interview with Goldstein, with an edited print transcript included. And here’s a review that I liked from The New Yorker.  Janesville won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year for 2017.

Blogtastic!: Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today I’m focusing on bingo square #2 on the 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge: Nonfiction About Gender or Gender Roles. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a letter the author writes to a friend about how to raise a feminist.

Like in her fiction (Americanah is my favorite!), Adichie is writing about her understanding of both Nigerian and Western/American contexts. Growing up a feminist is both culturally specific and more universally political, and it was interesting to think about the idea of equality with that in mind.

I listened to this book on audio, but I have since read excerpts of it in print. Though I am enjoying the way I can grow my stack of books by listening to audio versions in the car, I will say that audio does this book a disservice.  Adichie is a powerful speaker. I have used her TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," in my classes. THIS is the voice readers need to hear in their head when they read this book. The American audio reader sounds particularly disconnected from the letter in her hands.

I listened to this book before the #MeToo events of this fall, but the book is even more profound with that movement in mind. Raising a child is a political act, and it helps to be thoughtful about our language (princess?) and about binaries (can you be both feminist and feminine? Or are those opposite constructs?) I was especially compelled with her critique of the idea of “likeability.” We certainly expect powerful women to be likeable, but we don’t expect the same of men (think: 2016 election). Here’s a little excerpt, which I took from her Facebook page:

Please do not ever put this pressure on your daughter. We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to be ‘nice’ to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the ‘feelings’ of those who are hurting them… We have a world full of women who are unable fully to exhale because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.

Helping a child become a good person is such hard work. Adichie reminds us that consciousness-raising requires being conscious of all the little things. Now that the holidays are over, I'd like to add a 16^th suggestion. Can we get real about Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer? I think it might be time to stop celebrating Rudolf's story – or at least call out his sexist dad – don’t you think?

I recently listened to an interesting Atlantic Interview podcast featuring Adichie and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I downloaded it from Apple Podcasts, but the YouTube link gives you the audio. And here’s an article about her from The Guardian.

Blogtastic! The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Today I’m focusing on bingo square #1 on the 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge: YA Novel By a Writer of Color. It’s possible that The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is the only YA novel I read last year. I do find that I read fewer of them these days, despite having young adults in my house, because I’m not much into dystopia or dragons. Next year I might put a new square on the bingo card: YA Novel About Humans in a Real Life Situation. But, of course, the line between fictional dystopia and real life is getting more and more blurry…

I was drawn to The Hate U Give because of the buzz around it, but also because it ties into one of the content strands in the courses I teach. The last few years, my students and I have looked at Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. I teach about education policy, and the purpose of focusing on this event has been to look at the idea of “separation” as a tool. What does segregation do in our society? Why do we intentionally separate people, and to what end? Together, we read parts of James D. Anderson’s Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 to look at the logic Southerners used when they excluded African Americans from the public school system (and how African Americans fought back).  We listen to the This American Life podcast, "The Problem We All Live With, Part 1," to see the modern day version of that problem in the schools surrounding Ferguson, MO. And we read parts of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang to see how streets and towns and bylaws and policies were created in the Ferguson area (and most places) to invent and reinvent separation again and again.

But if I’m honest, it was not until I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me that I truly felt what it meant that the law is not on everyone’s side. The distinction between feeling and understanding is important for me. The reason that this book affected me so much is because Coates is writing a letter to his child. He is preparing him for the world, just as I have to prepare my own kids for the world. But in this letter, he is telling his son that he is not safe, that he has to carry the burden of society’s distrust and disdain.  And I felt my privilege in not having to write my own sons such a letter, and I felt through his words the pain of that process. That is what a good book can do, right? In some cases, you see your own truth validated, and in others, you get to walk in someone else’s shoes, or, perhaps, live in their skin.

The Hate U Give, which was nominated for a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last year, is a debut YA novel that looks at the murder of an unarmed black boy by police. The story focuses on an African American teen that lives in a black neighborhood but goes to a mostly white, suburban school. When she witnesses the death of her friend, she has to navigate her experience of injustice in both contexts.

I always have to dial down my inner critic’s voice when I read YA, because I tend to feel like there’s just too much going on. Too many plot lines! Too many characters! But I suppose that’s what adolescence is -- so much simultaneous intensity. What did really interest me was the move in some communities to block access to this book, as if adults should shield kids from the world they already live in. Or is there a presumption that “YA readers” are white and should be kept separate from racial violence*?

Here’s a great article about Thomas from the Guardian.

*The reason the book was removed from school shelves in Katy, Texas was, supposedly, “explicit language.”

The Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge Bingo, 2017 Edition

We are a month into 2018, and I am still considering last year. And before I stop accidentally writing 2017 on all my checks, I thought I’d revisit The Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge.

I started this challenge in 2015, when I was trying to read more broadly and encounter more points of view. The purpose of the challenge was to be more intentional in my reading life, and so I created a drinking game for myself. If I filled a row on my homemade bingo card, I would take a drink and holler, “Blogtastic!” The members of my family already think I’m pretty unusual, and the teens, in particular, aren’t thrilled when I have weird bookish outbursts. But too bad, suckers! I’m working on being a better reader and a better person.

2015 date changed to 2017. I haven't updated the card or fixed the typos because I'm lazy.

As you know, 2017 was not a good blogging year for me. It also wasn’t a great reading year, and I didn’t attempt to achieve any goals. But hey! It turns out that I filled THREE columns/rows on my Bingo card!* In honor of that success, I will post every day this week, highlighting one of the books. I have decided to focus on the center column, because that one allows me to write about some books that I didn’t cover in my “Best of 2017” list a couple of weeks ago.  Many of those books could easily fulfill squares in this challenge (4 out of 5 of them, actually). 

If you’re looking to jump down an internet rabbit hole, the We Need Diverse Books public Facebook page always has great links to articles about diversity and publishing --  not that I'd advocate internetting when you could be reading, of course.

This is a shot glass, in case someone wants to send me a gift. Cafepress.com

*Note: Three rows = three drinks! Drunk blooging is dangerous. Blogging, not blooging. Whatever (hiccup).

On Persistence

How do you know when to give up?

I admit to putting a lot of books “aside,” which often means that I’m not up for reading them at a particular moment in time. Usually this has to do with difficult subject matter that requires fortitude and attention. Take, for instance, this stack of hard things that continues to wait for me on my night stand. I will read all of these books…tomorrow.

But giving up? I don’t usually do that. Librarian Nancy Pearl has a guideline for quitting. She calls it her “Rule of 50.” If you’re 50 or younger, give a book 50 pages before letting it go. If you’re older than 50, subtract your age from 100, and use that number as a stopping point. Her reasoning is that life is short, and books are many.

I see that as a good rule for airplane reads, whose purpose is to distract you from the crappiness of travel. But I don’t think that “quality” always reveals itself to me right away. What if the “takeaway” I’d get from something is not just pleasure? What if it’s a new lens or a new idea or greater understanding?

Unfortunately, that logic made me feel like I had to struggle for 10 days through Reservoir 13 by John McGregor. This book was on the Booker Prize Long List, and it supposedly had to do with the disappearance of a girl in a small town. It sounded like a literary mystery – one of my favorite genres. But it isn't. This is a novel about the rhythms of everyday life (grass grows, sheep are born, vegetables are planted, violence happens and then ends…). The artistry, I suppose, lies in the way the author plays subtly with the idea of suspense. Are we, as readers, supposed to have hope?

And I clung to hope! I did! I waited for the exciting, spine-tingling arc! I waited for the “twist!” But as days led to more days (both in the novel and in my own), I came to realize that I was expecting a different kind of book than I held in my hands. I wanted a book where the truth became clear, where wrongs were righted.

I suppose I’m not just talking about a bookish issue. When do we stop hoping for the best in the real world? When do we throw in the towel? And what distinguishes the moments where we do the opposite, where we decide to plug away, put on our raincoats, pick up our signs, and persist?

Photo credit: http://komonews.com/

The Top Five of 2017: And the Winner Is...

I was into the big burgers this year. My #3, The Castle Cross… by Kia Corthron came in at around 800 pages. #2 The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne was 580, and #1, The Nix by Nathan Hill, is 620 pages. Do I get cosmic points for my high calorie reading diet?

So it looks like this is a poster you could buy and hang on your wall if you like bookish representations of big burgers. There's art for everyone, I guess. (on Pinterest, from Lexiconograph)

The Nix is a debut novel, and with that, this book isn’t perfect. It could be much leaner, certainly. But man, this novel hit me at a time that I needed it. That’s one thing that I’ve noticed about making a list of books that I “like.” Books can fill a need – a need to escape, a need to understand, a need to laugh. “Liking” can mean something different at different moments. This past year, I needed to place the feelings I had about our society into some sort of framework. And the best way that I can sum up my feelings about our ongoing series of awful political things is utter confusion about how I could have misunderstood people so profoundly. I clung, despite my increasing age, despite lots of historical evidence to the contrary, to the idea that people have been aspiring to a larger “common good,” even if they disagreed about the finer points of what that idea means. My idealism sat right there. I thought that when push came to shove, most people would be on the side of justice.

And how crazy was that? Of course people actively promote injustice, all the time and in all ways, political and personal. The best moments of #3 Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross... involve the relationships between black children and white children. And spoiler alert! Even with their friends, those white characters fell back into their power. At the end of the day, those relationships were unequal.

The Nix is a book about failed idealism.  The book jacket paints the story as one of a son trying to understand the mother who abandoned him after she resurfaces in a political scandal. That relationship, the one between parent and child, is so often one where idealism gets its first shake. But The Nix is more than just a family drama. At every turn, the characters have to deal with their disappointment with what they think the world is like compared to what it is really like. Higher education isn’t all about deep inquiry and building ideas. People who say they are going to protect you can be liars. The real world can be way more disappointing than the virtual one. Leaders of social movements for justice can be motivated by completely different principles. And YOU can disappoint yourself, through inaction or misstep or misplaced faith. 

So far, I bet you’re thinking that this book is a giant downer. But believe it or not, this story is funny (there’s a student/professor section in particular that made me feel like I did when I read Richard Russo’s Straight Man for the first time). I read The Nix in the summer, while sitting in the sun. It was my beach book – a beach book for troubled times.

Here’s a New York Times story about Nathan Hill, in which he discusses his World of Warcraft gaming addiction and mentions that the editing process cut 400 pages from this novel. It turns out this IS the lean version.

The Top 5 of 2017: #2

Here’s a funny thing. My #2 pick, The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, is essentially the same book as my #3 pick, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron. Both are epic stories of oppression (fun!). Both cover roughly the 1940s through the present. Both are very, very long (bang for my bookish buck!). Both connect the stories of the characters to larger moments in social revolutions.  The moral of both novels is that people are truly terrible to one another and create legacies of injustice. Also, things might get better (maybe?). But while The Castle Cross… is an American epic, The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a novel of Irish repression and transformation.

The main character in The Heart’s Invisible Furies is Cyril Avery, a boy whose unwed, pregnant birth mother was excommunicated from the Catholic Church and sent packing from her hometown and family. Once adopted, Cyril finds himself isolated. Some of that isolation comes from the particularities of his weird, new family, but a large part of it comes from the fact that he is gay. The reader follows Cyril as he navigates his country’s restrictions and bigotry. Boyne says that his inspiration for the novel was Ireland’s passage of marriage equality. How did a country so steeped in discrimination evolve?

This was my favorite thing about Ireland. It might have a repressive past, but OMG Pringles vending machines!

This is a sad book. I was worried that I was stumbling into another A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – a book that was so devastating that I’m still crushed by it nearly two years later. But Boyne does something interesting with humor here, taking painful moments and infusing them with crackly and silly dialogue. The humor gives the reader a break from the hopelessness that can arrive when encountering the struggle for civil and human rights. It’s as if he is saying, “The pain is real, but this story is just fiction.”

I find it compelling that I made my way to these tragic books this past year, a year where we seemed to be reinforcing the darkest elements of history. One of the interesting things about making an end-of-year reading summary is looking at the themes that emerge. What do the books I read say about me? What am I looking for?

You can read an interview with Boyne here and here.

The Top 5 of 2017: #3

If this 800 page novel had stopped after the first half, it would have been my favorite book of the year. I read it during the last week of December, basically non-stop. I had even planned to title this post, “You have never even heard of my favorite book of the year!”

You haven’t heard of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron because it’s a first novel with a clunky, weird title and way too huge for anyone’s book club. I stumbled upon it on a independent bookstore aisle end cap with a sign underneath it that said, “Read this. Now. I mean it.” And I’m really good at following directions.

The story follows the lives of four brothers, and the reader knows they will meet at some point over the course of the novel.  Two are black and come from Maryland. Two are white and come from Alabama. All four live in segregated contexts – but it is the nuance of these contexts that makes the author’s exploration so interesting. What did friendship across race look like, feel like? What did it mean to go to separate schools but to play together in the afternoons?

Ultimately, this is a book about dignity. What happens when we don’t treat people as full human beings? And this story is not, magically, simply black and white.

Now for the bad news. Corthron wanted to write an epic novel here, and ultimately, her story loses itself somewhat in that ambition. You know how yesterday I compared Sing, Unburied, Sing to fine dining? Well, The Castle Cross... is a delicious all-you-can-eat buffet after a long hiking trip. So tasty, but by the second half, I began to bloat. There’s just too much, and the push to cover every intersectionality (e.g. the history of the gay rights movement, disability history, etc.) strains the plot. And the issue that pulled this novel to #3 from its perch at #1 is a giant, GIANT (and unnecessary) coincidence at the end.

Still, this was an amazing read. I recommend it with all of my ringing bells (though if you have problems reading about violence of any kind – warning!). This would be fantastic for a long (very long) plane ride. I was riveted.

The Castle Cross… won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and as a side note, Corthron is in her 50s. Who says youngsters have all the fun?

You can read an interview with Corthron here.

The Top 5 of 2017: #4

I generally don’t like books that feature ghosts, and this is a novel about hauntings. But the ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward are the hauntings of injustices, and they explain the legacy of deep racism on a particular family in a particular place. On the surface this is kind of a road trip book – a family goes to pick up their father from prison in Mississippi. But while most road trip books are about the freedom of the open road, the family here isn’t yet free. The significance of the journey from small segregated town to prison is brutal.

Ward deserves all her notoriety, which includes two National Book Awards (including one for this novel) and a MacArthur Genius Award.  She approaches storytelling like a poet -- there is not a single word in her book that doesn’t matter.  Spoiler Alert: This idea will be a contrast with my Best of 2017 #s 3-1. Stay tuned!

So, basically, I knew this book would be stunning when I sat down to read it. And stunning it was, though I will admit to being more captivated with 2011’s Salvage the Bones. Reading a Ward novel is like going to a restaurant with a master chef. Every bite is meaningful and flavorful and packed with goodness. There’s no extra fat or additives, and you don’t feel bloat at the end. Her writing is, simply, brilliant.

And I’ve been struck this year how we’ve come to associate brilliance and good ideas and smart people and intellectual development with either snobbery or dullness. “Charisma” has come to mean, for the lack of a better word, shouty. I wonder what our world would look like if we read Jesmyn Ward interviews in People magazine and heard her thoughts on CNN – rather than, well, the folks that we do.

This is for sale at zazzle.com. Yay, captalism?

You can read more about Ward here and here and here.

The Top 5 of 2017: #5

This choice might come as a surprise to those of you who know me well. Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo is a nonfiction account of a very young teacher who does her service with Teach For America in the rural south. I think that the Teach for America organization is problematic in so many ways, most notably for its role in the privatization of the education system and the ongoing policy attack on experienced teachers. But. BUT. I have to say that I was riveted by this account of a young woman’s struggle with her own idealism and privilege in the face of injustice. I enjoyed thinking about the larger philosophical questions that sat just underneath the surface of her writing – What is the role of education if there’s not a larger “point?” What counts as "achievement?" What if you will never see growth gains? Good scores? Is the learning itself – and the relationship that inspires it – valuable on its own terms?

Idealism has been on my mind over the course of this past year. My belief that an ordinary person can have an impact in our society has been shaken, and I find that I am drawn to stories of people who have that faith. It seems as if that is what Kuo is wrestling with here, too.  It’s not as if this book doesn’t have problems, but for me, the problems were the things that generated my questions. And I need to keep asking questions, to keep caring about people and the society we create.

Reading With Patrick was part of my foray into audio books this year. I am in the car a lot, and I have found that I add a solid handful of books to my cosmic shelves this way.

Here’s a little interview with Kuo from the New York Times.

Happy New Year!

Hello to 2018!

My apologies for the radio silence. I don’t really have a single explanation for my year-long absence. Regular blog fatigue was part of it, but a huge issue was the state of the world and its general trumpery. Everything just seemed so terrible, and with that, it was difficult to dig into my usual leaning stack of material. You already know that I gravitate toward books that are sad, sad, sad. But for most of 2017, I was full-up on sad. And every time I tried to lighten things up, by, say, picking up a book about quirky family members getting in each other’s business, the plot would turn quickly to tragedy. I read one recently about a dysfunctional family that gathered in an old estate over the holidays. Should have been safe, right? NO. A major plot point involved Ebola (Please pass the turkey, but wash your hands! Sissy has a bad virus!). 

A gift for the person who has everything: an Ebola neck tie

Meanwhile, we decided to make some changes to our house in 2017, which required moving the family and 14 years of belongings out for seven months. During that time, the internet and its decorative rabbit holes took all of my attention. It appears that between January and March of last year I read exactly one book, but I spent unquantifiable amounts of time selecting door hinges (antique nickel vs. satin nickel???! These are different, and complicatedly so.). And did you know that if you want to paint your walls blue, you have to look at grey? My new novel: Endless Shades of Grey. The plot? A couple that has been married for more than 20 years squabbles over color nuance. 

The good news is that I have rallied, and I am working on feeling hopeful about the world again. I also ended up reading quite a few books, even if I didn't blog about them. So I thought I’d start the year with a recap of my 2017 Top 5 books. Each day this week I will be posting about a book on the list. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with all of you. Here’s to better times ahead!