Hello Readers,

A running theme in this newsletter over the last little bit has been, “Josh doesn’t have nearly as much time and energy to read as he used to.” I’m writing this little bit watching Alyce begin to stir awake for the day, not knowing how much of this or the next sentence I’ll be able to get through until I’m called away.

I think a lot about the sustainability of bookselling as a career. If you’ve read The Art of Libromancy, you’ve encountered most of my thinking about this, specifically around finding creative ways to raise wages in a cash strapped industry and ceding power to frontline booksellers to have more of a hand in the shaping the store. Within that, I talk about the time it takes to be a good bookseller. You’ve got to read. A lot. And you’ve got to retain what you read enough to be able to talk about it with strangers.

Going from reading a couple hours a day to a couple hours a week is one challenge I foresaw when I knew Alyce was on the way, but having such a tired brain to bring to that limited time was not. So, another layer of the challenge of sustainability is thrown on top of everything that flows from the relatively low wages. Of course, parents aren’t the only people who love books and would want to be career booksellers who don’t read as fast as they really need to, or who find themselves reading more slowly than they used to or retaining less of what they read than they used to. As with any industry, there will be things that exclude some people, (as with anything), but that doesn’t remove the responsibility of those who lead it to find ways to reduce those exclusions. I don’t know if I have a solution for this issue (well, a plausible solution. Working half or quarter time for my full salary would sort this right out!), especially since I will get back my some of my time and (hopefully!) my brain over the next few years, but it’s something I’m going to think about. (And now, Alyce is calling “dada dada dada, from his crib.)

Josh

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YESTERDAY

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach

It’s not just that I’m reading less as a parent. It’s also that I’m more tired and have fewer resources when I do read. Which is not to say that I’m not reading any of the weird & difficult books that I have built my bookselling identity around, but that I’m reading fewer of them and reading those slower. And, more of my reading time is being spent on entertainment. Some day I’ll fully articulate how I distinguish art from entertainment, but the important thing to know is “Different does not equal better.” Where my brain is at, I am better able to use books that require me to work less on them. Or, to put this another way, it is easier for me to validate a work that is trying to entertain me by showing a cool character hit a monster in the face with an ax, because that validation requires resources that I have; the ability to be entertained by a cool character hitting a monster in the face with an ax.

Given that, I’ve started looking for more Sci Fi/Fantasy galleys at the store. I mean, beyond the challenges of reading as a parent, I get asked for recommendations in those genres all the time & I probably need to reload my recs. So I grabbed The Sunforge. Since the author is Mao’ri, I messaged my friend from New Zealand to see if she’d heard of it. She had, but the galley I had was actually the 2nd book in the series. (One of the challenges of catching up in genre fiction!) I got the first, Dawnhounds out of the library & here we are.

So far I’m really enjoying it. It’s cool world, with cultural & national tensions expressing themselves partly in the types of material sciences those in power prefer. The current administration favors botanical alchemy and so things like steel flasks are illegal to own. There’s international intrigue, political corruption, and what seems like the reignition of an old war, that all finds its way down to a semi-disgraced former street kid turned cop who should be dead on account of getting shot in the head. Many characters are queer. The names of things are interesting. The science is cool. So far I’m digging it. Don’t *think it has the same stylistic edge, but I’m also getting Windup Girl vibes, which is high praise. Definitely worth checking out, if you’re into the genre.

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TODAY

Opacities by Sofia Samatar

Breathtaking wisdom on almost every page. Samatar's collaborative consideration of the impossibility of writing unfurls beyond the challenges of putting words on a page, to elucidate and enlanguage the many impossibilities of being alive.

For much of my life, I’ve organized the world’s various belief systems based on whether they require certainty or are comfortable with ambiguity. Universal problems with binaries aside, this framework helped explain, at least for me, a lot of the political and moral choices other people were making in the world around me. At the very least, it gave one explanation for the appeal of fascism; fascism (whatever form it takes) provides certainty. But in Opacities, Samatar showed me, that my rubric was missing a third element: impossibility. It’s not just that some (perhaps most) of our experiences are ambiguous, but that many (perhaps most!) of our desires are actually impossible. (To truly communicate, to be fully understood, to connect perfectly to another person.) How we relate to impossibility says at least as much if not more about who we are and the choices we make as a need for certainty or a comfort with ambiguity.

After seeing the “relationship with impossibility” current through Opacities, I brought a question to it I thought might be answered or at least illuminated by the idea or image that some, perhaps many, people who are comfortable with ambiguity turn away from impossibility. The question: Why did so many supposedly liberal institutions suppress pro-Palestinian speech & activism? Of course, Opacities wasn’t actually equipped to answer that question, nor was my new “requires certainty,” “comfortable with ambiguity,” and “faces impossibility,” rubric but Opacities wasn’t written to answer that question & I think that rubric still has interpretive value for other texts, phenomena, & questions. There is something about the power and importance of books in that. Books are flexible enough to be what you need them to be, but with a rigidity that can still force you to grow to reach them.

And some books are themselves, acts of growth that ask you to grow with them. They are the result that includes the process. The finished product and the sawdust from the floor. The mess an the perfection. There is much to be said for a perfect book, but I also love books that include the mess. To me, as a reader, it makes me feel like a real partner in whatever is being attempted. Or, to maybe put this in terms closer to the work Opacities is doing, it makes me feel like I’m collaborating on an impossible goal while asking what I think and feel about that impossibility.

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TOMORROW

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

I have not been as engaged with the genocide in Gaza as I should be. When I start thinking about what’s happening there, I can’t keep from my brain from thinking about losing Alyce, I can’t keep my brain from thinking about Alyce losing me, about Alyce losing everyone. So I nibble around the edges of activism because I’ve got to stay upright, you know. I have to stay engaged with Alyce.

I’m reading one poem a day from Mosab Abu Toha’s forthcoming poetry collection, written during the genocide in Gaza and his escape from it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to, in part because practically it can be hard to do anything other than absolute necessities and, also, in part, because it’s hard to think about what he’s writing about. There are, of course, many heartbreaking poems.

In my reading life, Forest of Noise is in a very complicated dialog with Danez Smith’s Bluff about the responsibilities of poetry. One of the questions Smith seems to be asking in Bluff is “Are my poems doing good work or are they just being bought and praised by white people who believe the purchase & praise counts as social justice work?” I don’t know if Forest of Noise is directly asking questions about what poetry can and cannot do in the face of injustice and tragedy, but its mere existence can’t help but say something. I have no intention of answering that question in this newsletter, if for no other reason, than I’m not sure Smith or Abu Toha intend to answer that question in their collections, but, even if we don’t know the reason, there is a reason why we write and read poetry amidst the world’s tragedies.

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FOREVER

Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

Is it really fair or even logical to consider a book a “Forever” book after it’s only been out for a few months and I’m barely a dozen pages in?

Not only is Miss Macintosh just massive, it is also dense. There is a Krasznahorkai cyclicality to the style that makes it relatively difficult to have a solid sense of where a sentence started when you get to the end of it. (At least for me now.) Though I have not, to date, encountered a several pages long sentence, there also seems to be that slow accumulation of resonating details that makes Proust’s style so exhilarating. (How’s that for a couple of references!) It is clear, even just the few pages in that I’ve made it so far, that MMMD is a work of genius and probably should be in just about every conversation about Great American Novels.

It is also clear, even just the few pages in that I’ve made it so far, that MMMD is beyond me right now. I’m just not getting enough sleep, to stay with those silt-accumulating sentences. I just don’t have enough time to read enough of it for the seed of voice to take root in my consciousness so that, like Ducks, Newburyport, for example, it is easy to pick back up and be in the narrative quickly after a long break. I put a lavender blossom that Alyce had picked one day, off the plant in our front yard, between two pages in the late middle of the book. Who will he be, who I will be, what the world will be when I, or someone else, encounters it again?

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