📚Reading Stack for July 2023
📚Reading Stack for July 2023
a health revelation, another Twain+Offerman, a racial gem, Fitzgerald's "failure," a Virginia Woolf
I don’t read fast.
Even though I get through a good few every year, none of those “read faster” dash-mushrooms have done much. For me, reading is as much a practice as leisure, and for that reason I’ve developed a few tactics that help to hike up the amount of books I read each year:
1. Spend more time reading
In 2022 I ran my first official marathon. In the process, I discovered that reading is a lot like running. When you run more and push yourself just beyond what’s comfortable, your speed will increase over time. Like what happens with your legs and lungs, the more you read the more your brain will pace up 📈🫁
2. Listen + read simultaneously
Audiobooks are a constant for me, but I first started reading and listening to keep myself focused when reading Salman Rushdie for an early episode of GSO. I found that my eyes would always be faster than my ears. It was as if the two were racing, ears as the tortoise, eyes as the hare. Once the two aligned, I would turn the audio speed up to 1.5x. After a few minutes my eyes again would start to outpace my ears. In like manner, the audio speed crept slowly higher, and I wasn’t losing any of the magic of the book. If anything, I was retaining more by ingesting the book in two formats. Also, because my speed had gone up, I felt no shame in pausing to reread a particularly stunning passage two or three times. Reading faster and better.1
3. Groups for accountability
For the upcoming season, we’re reading one book for each decade of the 20th century. That means ten books to our normal 8, so I’ve had to buckle down and keep up pace with Dan who reads 100+ books every year. Additionally, every other week a few bookish friends and I meet for a Zoom book group. There’s something about a community focused around reading and discussing literature that makes the reading faster and more enjoyable. In my experience, when you make reading social and/or put yourself up against a deadline, you find ways to read more effectively and efficiently.
These three habits have led to my finishing more books each year, but they also mean something much more important. They mean learning more and enjoying the process.
Because the idea isn’t just to read faster, it’s to read better.
📚 With that, lets talk libros2
1. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
People know Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson and the guy from Last of Us, but I think of him as the voice of Mark Twain. I’ve been on a bit of Twain tear the last few months. It’s a shame the man’s brilliant, progressive, hilarious social commentary is wasted on high schoolers who only read the Sparknotes (me).3
The novel’s main character, a mechanic named Hank Morgan, is the archetypal of 19th-century New Englander: adept at his trade, innovative, forward thinking. He takes a blow to the head and is transported back in time to Camelot, 1300 years prior4. With his knowledge of the world, Hank soon takes over King Arthur’s court, trouncing many-a brash noble, superstitious nincompoop and conniving wizard we have all heard from the tales. Told primarily through Hank's first-person perspective, Offerman effortlessly captures the Yankee's straightforward, matter-of-fact gruffness, landing a thinly veiled critique of sociopolitical institutions that impede progress5. A heater of condemnation of the naiveté that allows dogma to thrive, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a grade-A example of Twain's sharp tongue and social wit.
I listened to this one on our drive from Austin to Asheville and it was an absolute delight.
2. Breath by James Nestor
What do you do more frequently than eat, sleep, and exercise?
No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how fit, young or intelligent we are, if we don’t breathe well, we are toast. Inhale, exhale, repeat (25,000 times a day). Nestor’s book was on the NYT Best Seller’s list for 20 weeks after publication in 2020. The journalist’s thesis is that, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, and are suffering gravely as a result. Drawing from a combination of modern research and ancient breathing techniques like Pranayama and Tummo, Nestor explains that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, improve asthma, cure autoimmune disease, and even straighten problematic spines.
Whether or not the evidence is bulletproof, Breath is a truly original take, calling into question what we think we know about basic biology and human functioning.6 A tinkerer and human guinea pig, Nestor’s book is a fascinating exploration of the science, spirituality, and evolution of the most basic human behavior—nd where it went wrong.
3. Native Son by Richard Wright
From the day he was born, Bigger Thomas was destined for jail. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful novel, Native Son, is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people of color in America. It doesn’t take long to recognize that Richard Wright was one of those singular, brilliant, evincing minds who experiences and processes the world differently than most. He was a strong voice that paved the way and influenced African American literary giants like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Wright’s most prominent novel, Native Son, tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
Identity is never an easy subject to talk or even think about. When thinking about these kinds of artificial, racial distinctions, we can become skewed, jaded, and blind to our own biases. I am no exception. That’s why I like to read fiction that deals with these issues. I could read a how-to book that makes me feel less biased, or I can read a story (like Native Son) that surfaces my own blind-spots and be less biased.
Ethics aside, the last scene of Part 1 in this book was the first time in years I stayed up long past bed-time because I just couldn’t put it down.
“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.
4. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Orlando to me is Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastical novel. Its form is, in a way, quintessential. Woolf makes use of devices that are native to, and work better in, “the novel” compared to other storytelling forms. She jumps through time and space, shirking ‘reality’ without any need for justification, and the reader isn’t upset by it.7 Though it wasn’t my favorite of Woolf’s, Orlando is a humorous, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality and in many ways embodies what reading means to me—a chance to shove off from my own life and embody someone else’s experience, only to pop out again when the spirit moves me.8
"I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."
All said and done, Orlando indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of gender in the 18th and 19th centuries and the novel ends in 1928, the year when women’s suffrage became reality. It is a ballad to love and reading and the imagination, and a break from conventions we all hang onto, perhaps too dearly. The story is at once heavy as an anvil and light as a leaf, as only a master like Virginia Woolf could execute. She’s the type of literary giant who steps out of her comfort zone and still hits home runs, and is an author I want to read more of.
5. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1932, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was hospitalized for schizophrenia; those years were the darkest years of his life, and when he conceived this book. The novel's bleakness reflects his own experiences around that time, mirroring the events surrounding his life and marriage.
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye”
Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is a tragic love-triangle between a young actress and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lavish and vapid lifestyle, leading to Dick's demise. Fitzgerald’s final (and what many call most wanting novel9) is a study of the human mind, character, and spirit. It is, without question, Fitzgerald’s most lyrical and artfully crafted work; however, at moments, the author’s own instability at the time of writing beams forth. The writing is poetic and stunning, but the plot is erratic and imbalanced, leading to an underwhelming conclusion that was likely what fueled critics. When taken as a whole, however, the novel is worth reading, both as a work of art and an artifact of history.
A long time ago
It dawned on me that I even if I read non-stop from birth until death I still would not come close to reading all the great books out there. Oddly enough, the realization freed me up to explore books of all kinds, not just the greats. While reading time gets more scarce by the day, committing to a life of books has led me to view reading as a privilege and a practice. Now, I pickup whatever sounds compelling, and write whenever I can free up a moment.
Books are magic. Learning is magic. And my biggest wish is that you treat your mind with the books it deserves.
Ok, amigos! That’s all for now.
Feel free to email me questions or thoughts for discussion, should any come to mind. Likewise, if you have a good book to recommend, please pass it along. It’s always great to hear back, especially if one of these books comes to mean something to you.
Happy August 🌊
—J
Next month:
Mastery of Love by Don Miguel de Ruiz
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
El Hombre en Busca del Sentido Ultimo by Viktor Frankl
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
My capstone for the coding bootcamp I did last year, Leyenda.is, is a lightweight version of this practice in web app form. It’s clunky but it has the bones of something; if only I were a better coder ;)
Hot month! Three 9/10’s in a row 🤯
There’s something to be said for choosing your own books. In college, I rarely read the assigned reading, but read voraciously of my own choosing. And the books I remember most in grade/high school were the ones that I had some degree of choice. Perhaps I’ll write a longer post on this at some point.
While time travel is common today, in Twain’s time it was quite unique
Late in the 1880s, Twain wrote: "In two or three little centuries the Church had converted a nation of men [England] to a nation of worms” 😂
In the internet age, there’s so much “ricochet knowledge.” Ie) people repackaging ideas and marketing them as original. More like recycled paper than card stock.
There’s something about the novel (compared to movies/series, for example) that requires less explanation. We all know the feeling of watching a show and thinking “they got there way too fast…” or being bugged by some other plot point that isn’t ‘realistic.’ But in the novel, we are far more forgiving. I have some theories why that is, but I can’t be sure. Anyone else?
Before beginning this 52-books-per-year practice, I had a tendency that some would find devastating. I would read 90% of a book and leave it unfinished. It wasn’t that I was “bored” but rather something that I dislike about the finality of being “done” and having to find something new. I still often do this with TV series, but no longer with books. Progress!
Although he temporarily achieved popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald only received wide critical and popular acclaim after his death.