Lounging On the Couch With a Book

passing the time in summer's heat and humidity

At the start of July, I decided to take a break from Instagram, in an attempt to reset my brain from its compulsion to check my phone (for mostly trivial updates) whenever I had a free moment; I wanted to reclaim my time and refocus my energy away from the background noise with which digital technologies permeate our lives. During this time, I’ve been reading more than I have in a long time; I’m spending time noodling around Google Scholar, dipping into topics related to culinary cultures and community, and Irish dance, diaspora, and tourism; it feels like my brain has been settling back into itself. The time I spend at my computer has been more pointed; my idle time more still, more truly a break. 

I’ve also been using the library more this summer, proactively requesting books that the library does or does not (shout out to interlibrary loan) have, and then doing some additional browsing when my holds come in, experiencing the serendipity that librarians fight for when suggestions to cut down on collections come with slashed budgets.

My reading habits are a bit idiosyncratic, but tend to wend between nonfiction in the forms of memoir, social history, and social critique, and literary fiction. I’ve struggled to read sci-fi (more on that later), even when friends urge me with, “but it’s about leftist revolutionaries, it’s an allegory!” Recommendations and reading habits from friends (hi Sarah) and writers (Margaux Vialleron, Alicia Kennedy, and Devin Kate Pope are big influences) help guide me to discover new ideas and perspectives that might shift my interests and philosophies in new directions, “what I read” not contained within a box, but becoming its own constellation. 

After reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone in June (borrowed from a friend), I quickly placed library holds on Visitation, The End of Days, and Kairos. After starting The End of Days, I almost just as quickly realized that this is simply not the time to read Erpenbeck, her prose is too dark and stark for high summer; I’ll return to her writing in late fall. 

From Erpenbeck’s Germany I moved on to Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Norway, finding delight in the darkly whimsical short stories that comprise Evil Flowers. I really loved Wait, Blink’s characters and the way that Øyehaug subtly intertwines their narratives (I love a good intertwined narrative). Then, I read Present Tense Machine, about a mother and a daughter who live in parallel universes. I really couldn’t get enough of Øyehaug’s refreshing, funny, yet touching writing. 

In picking up a book on hold from the library that I’ve been meaning to read for years — Technically Food by Larissa Zimberoff — I gave myself some browsing time, turning what could have been a utilitarian errand into something more relaxed and exploratory. I picked up Maylis de Kerengal’s short novel Eastbound and Grace M. Cho’s memoir Tastes Like War, two books new to me, picked up at random. I’m very glad that I did: Technically Food didn’t hold my attention. More optimistically curious than skeptically critical of tech-oriented solutions toward food and nourishment (learning more about the author and her “hard-earned belief in technology,” this makes sense), I found myself getting annoyed with her framework of “Big Food” (the corporations who control much of our food system; “bad”) vs New Food (Silicon Valley startups; “good”). Fifty-five pages in, part of the way through her chapter on pea protein, I put it down and turned to Eastbound, a swift one-to-two-sitting read about two strangers on a trans-Siberian train journey, bound to each other by one’s goal to desert his military duties. 

Tastes Like War is one of the best books I’ve read recently. Cho deftly switches timelines and locales — her childhood in Chehalis, Washington, her college years at Brown, her adult years in New Jersey and New York — always centering her relationship with her mother, following the course of her mother’s schizophrenia, connecting mental wellbeing with the violence of American hegemony. It’s a politically poignant story of identity and belonging and a beautiful, bittersweet memorial. Immediately after finishing Tastes Like War, I read Annie Ernaux’s book about her mother, A Woman’s Story, which I picked up at a combination café-bar-bookstore (a brilliant and dangerous combination, it’s good for my wallet that it’s not in my neighborhood). Reading these books back-to-back enriched the experience of reading each of them, I think — Cho’s reflections on caretaking and schizophrenia fresh in my mind as I read about Ernaux’s relationship with her mother as she aged and developed Alzheimer’s.

In researching the cultural and communal significance of all things bread (including heritage grains and milling), I came across Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s book White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, which I’m really enjoying. It’s written accessibly while packing a lot of fascinating history in, from bakeries’ notoriety during the late 19th and early 20th century for being filthy paving the way for the chemically-enhanced bread that took over grocery shelves during the postwar boom, to white bread’s role in Cold War propaganda. This book should be a nice companion to Marci R. Baranski’s The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution, which I was able to find an affordable copy of on eBay, from a seller based locally — more book serendipity. It’s impossible to read about the intersections of wheat, globalization, and sociology without reading about Russia (part of why white bread played such a role in anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War): Black Earth, White Food: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food is now on my reading list. 

This past weekend, as an interlude, wanting to sink into prose as art, as craft, I plucked Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers, an essay collection about cooking through her mother’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, off of a forgotten nook of a bookshelf. I nabbed my copy from a little free library four years ago, as I was finding distraction through cooking through my dad’s cancer treatment. For some reason, I left it sit all of these years, and came across it while weeding my books. I’m so glad I did, and glad that I (perhaps unintentionally) saved it for now, having written about so many of the same questions and themes that flow through Babine’s small but powerful volume. 

Now, I’m starting Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, for a book discussion with a friend. This is one of those previously-referenced science fiction books that has been recommended to me because of the anarchism at the center of it. Were it not for the social aspect of a book discussion, I would be much less motivated to pick up this book. It’s not the first Le Guin I’ve read (I read and enjoyed The Lathe of Heaven a couple of years ago for a seminar called Sleep, Dreams and the End of Capitalism). I have to say, though, I’m having trouble delving into it so far, and I think that mostly has to do with my brain being out of the practice of reading plot-driven narrative. The book discussion in two weeks is helping me to stick with it, and perhaps it will expand my constellation of reading interests. 

A glimpse of my recent bookstack

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What have you been reading this summer?