It has been—quite accidentally—Book Week here at Racket, thanks to two of our great freelancers. Spencer White wrote about how St. Francis reversed its school library book ban, and Deborah Copperud had some brilliantly unkind things to say about Strib publisher Steve Grove's new memoir.
So let's do one of our semi-regular reading check-ins. What's on your book stands these days? What have you finished and can't stop raving about? What couldn't you finish? What do you keep meaning to get around to? And if your schedule doesn't permit books, what have you been reading online?
I'll go first. As I may have said before, I am a weirdo who reads a handful of books at once, popping in and out of each. I can't help it—I just love starting books.
Anyway, I've got a bunch of good ones on my "currently reading" shelves. Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, an oral history of sorts that collects the voices of people who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and their many mixed feelings; it really captures how complex our feelings about politics and nationalism and freedom can be.
I'm also working my way through Jonathan Blitzer's Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, which traces the interconnectedness between U.S. foreign policy and immigration law over the past 50 years. Often rough stuff, but also lotsa good ammo for an old Reagan-hater like me.
I'm afraid things don't get much cheerier when we turn to my fiction choices—none more bleak than Ha Jin's Human Acts, but there's a well-wrought beauty as well to the short novel about survivors of torture and other violence in Korea. I also just started digging into Turgenev's Virgin Soil—he was the last of the major Russians I got to when I read and loved Fathers and Sons a couple years ago. Oh, and my years-long fraught-yet-enjoyable trudge through Proust has just reached the hundreds of pages where he freaks about the fact that his girlfriend may be bi. Great Literature is always weirder than they told you in school.
I suppose we could also discuss this Times story, the latest in an informal series on "what's wrong with men?" (what isn't?). I'm personally not so much interested in the sociological implications of whether men read fiction, though it does seem like a symptomatic denial of pleasure in favor of the "utility" of nonfiction. As with non-readers generally, I just don't get it—I can't imagine a life that isn't surrounded by as many kinds of printed words as I can get my eyes on.
More interesting to me is the hardly surprising but still weird implication that book clubs are (and maybe should be?) gender-segregated. I've never been in a book club that wasn't co-ed, and I honestly wouldn't want to be. (I've also never been in a book club that lasted more than, like, three books, but that's a whole 'nother story.)
As always, feel free to ignore this prompt and talk about whatever you want. This is your Open Thread, after all.
