Hello Readers,

Here we are again. Everything is completely different now, though, of course, it was the completely different a whole lot of people saw coming. Also, it’s a “completely different” that has been a part of the daily life of many people in this country as long as there has been a country. We’ve had some wins & losses. Some really scary events & some really encouraging signs.

I think, even with plenty of dark shit ahead, we’ll get through this and I think there’s reason to believe that, if we do, we’ll also have the best opportunity, probably in my lifetime, to make great strides towards a truly just society. But, of course, who knows.

I committed to putting out this newsletter and supporting books that I think deserve and I think there is something important to sticking with commitments during times of strife and chaos, even if it’s just a way to remind yourself of what does not change about you. So here are four more books you should have on your radar.

Josh

P.S. If you like what I’m doing here the best way to support it is to help grow the list of subscribers, so share the sign up link around. Thank you!

YESTERDAY

Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman

Like most readers who came of age before there was books written specifically for young adults, I moved on from childrens books, like Roald Dahl, Louis Sachar, Jerry Spinelli, Madeline L’engle, and Susan Cooper (all hail the queen) to whatever else happened to be on my parents bookshelves. That meant, when my intellectual identity was really starting to coalesce I was an Asimov to Vonnegut guy. But there was a whole bunch of other stuff on that shelf that I got into, including the Dragonlance series. I read and loved the books on the shelf at the time, but hadn’t thought about them in, well, far more than a decade at least, until this hardcover collection appeared at the bookstore. (Have I considered buying it to reread? Yes. And if I had more time to read in general, I probably would have. Maybe I’ll still buy and gift wrap it for myself. More on that later.)

What’s interesting to me (beyond good old fashioned nostalgia) is that the only scene I vividly remember from the entire series is one that made me roll my eyes. A scene where the author lost me. One of the characters, the barbarian or fighter or whatever, was battling a number of monsters or specters or whatever that had been enchanted so they looked like his friends. And there’s a line about how he cried every time he cut one of them down with his sword (a badass variety I assume) that completely lost me. The thing was HE KNEW THEY WERE ILLUSIONS. It wasn’t (in my memory) a thing where just the reader knew. I mean, THAT’S WHY HE WAS HITTING THEM WITH HIS (badass I assume) SWORD. He had started fighting the whatevers, then they were enchanted, then he had his big feelings.

This might have been the first moment in my life as a reader that I was able to talk back to the text, to look behind the performance to some of the mechanics making it go and think about those mechanics critically. But also, I didn’t give up on the book. Sure, I rolled my eyes but I just moved on because I was still enjoying myself. Just like everything else, books don’t need to be perfect to be successful. And you don’t even need to like a book to get something out of it. If you’re willing to engage with it, on some level, even just to elucidate the books flaws and failings, you’ll learn something valuable.

Buy Dragonlance Chronicles from Porter Square Books

Buy Dragonlance Chronicles from Bookshop.org

TODAY

Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach by Antonio Lobo Atunes translated Elisabeth Lowe

There is no practical reason why I gift wrap just about every book I buy for Alyce. I guess if I NEEDED to justify the practice, I could make some kind of argument about making sure he always experiences books as special things, but if you’ve ever seen this kid run over and plunk his ass down for a story time, you’d know books being special to him isn’t a particular concern. Really I just love giving him gifts.

I’ve started buying books for myself and gift wrapping them right away. Then I shelve them on my TBR shelf and try to forget about them. They’re books I want, but know I won’t be able to read any time soon. The idea is that when I am feeling particularly down for whatever reason, I unwrap a gift. I haven’t opened one yet, so I can’t speak to the success of the technique, though, I do just kinda, like the idea that they’re around.

Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is exactly the kind of book I would charge headlong into in my past life and I just know that I will not be able to read enough of it, quickly enough to do anything truly substantive with it and or for it. (I guess we can debate the substance of whatever this is.) So it is wrapped up on my TBR along with a couple of other books (one I still remember, one I seem to have successfully forgotten) to wait until I need it. As I say whenever a customer decides to hold off on buying something, “A book is patient.”

Buy Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach from Porter Square Books.

Buy Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera translated by Christina Macsweeney

I’m not greedy. I’m generally a reasonable fellow. So I won’t say that I NEED to have a new excavation of an unremembered/misrembered woman writer that often reveals far more about the excavator and the systems that warp, inhibit, and motivate cultural memory every single year, BUT it is nice when we get a new one. In this case the misremembered writer is Elena Garro, who is most known for her relationship with Octavio Paz than her own work. Barrera is one of those authors I’ve been circling for a few years, aware of her work and certain that I would dig it, but never actually getting around to one. Of course now that she’s written in one of my favorite genres, here we are.

So far, Queen of Swords is even weirder and messier than Ghost in the Throat and Traces of Enayat, at least through the way Barrera has broken up her investigation into short vignettes and distributed them in an order whose rationale (if there is one) I haven’t determined. There are still plenty of throughlines stitching the vignettes together, and of course, we know how the story ultimately “ends,” but this structure kinda makes it feel like you’re at a party or bar or something and you’ve accidentally asked someone to explain the one thing in this world that gives their life meaning and now you are strapped in and listening. Does it cohere into a traditional storyline? Does it need to when so many fun, interesting, challenging, ideas come out of that spray. (That idea that researchers are specters, haunting the lives of the people they study is almost worth the price of admission by itself.) I think that vibe comes in large part from the fact that this book was originally just supposed to be an essay but Barrera just couldn’t shake it. I don’t think I’d say Barrera was possessed by Gallo (at least not without Barrera using the term first) but Barrera is clearly intoxicated with Gallo and that intoxication is contagious.

Preorder Queen of Swords from Porter Square Books

Preorder Queen of Swords from Bookshop.org.

FOREVER

Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, & the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman

As the conflict, battle maybe, between ICE and America intensifies, as Republicans rush to oppress trans people and roll back other civil rights protections, as they gleefully seek to erase every single fetter on capital to keep it from devouring absolutely every human and natural resource in the entire fucking world, I can’t help but think back to the conversations I had, publicly and privately, in the book community around Trump’s first election and term about how the book world should respond, about what our role in society is and what our responsibility for the state of society is.

Many people changed, of course, in big and small ways, in visible and invisible ways, but a lot of people, often but not always older, more influential, more powerful people in the industry didn’t. They didn’t see themselves as bearing responsibility for the state of the world. They clung (and still cling) to a very specific definition of free expression that (well you look at that!) absolves them from any culpability in what is done with and what is financed through the books on our platform.

Or maybe it wasn’t really that at all; those articulated positions being generated as cover for the emotions that really drove their reaction; the feeling that we had not earned the right to critique their decisions (I can honestly say that some people really acted like they thought I was still some college kid after I’d been in bookselling for over ten years); and the feeling that they resented being asked to reevaluate their Republican friends and family members. And, perhaps, also, the feeling “How dare you event suggest that I am not A Good Person?” (Some day that essay about how destructive “I want to be a Good Person” is to social justice.) Those feelings I think, are rational, even if they don’t add up to justification for inaction, and they are valid and worth engaging with, even if they are rooted in privilege and bias.

I bought Conflict is Not Abuse after reading Patrick Nathan quote so much from it in his excellent book Image Control. Since then I’ve dipped in and out of it and noticed it pop up in other essays or discourses I’ve read. Would I have approached those conversations better if I had read it then? Would those conversations have been heard differently had others read it? Who knows? How could anyone know?

There is a point at which rehashing past actions becomes counter productive, of course, and, to be honest, I’m probably there with thinking about everything surrounding The Least We Can Do, but also, there are so many forces driving the historic, political, social amnesia that is a huge part of why Trump 2.0 is possible, that perhaps there is now some value in dwelling on the past as an assertive, restorative act in and of itself. Sometimes it feels like all we would need to do see our way out of this is to just remember what has happened in the past (like, for example, when the Blue Dog Democrats joined the Republican filibuster to scuttle Obamacare, fueling the Tea Party, contributing to the flipping of the House, and, oh would you look at that, losing all their fucking seats in Congress too the fucking jackwagons!) and apply our memory to the present. We don’t always need to imagine when we can remember.

Buy Conflict is Not Abuse from Porter Square Books

Buy Conflict is Not Abuse from Bookshop.org