My Books of 2023

In keeping with the end of year tradition, here, just a week or so overdue, is the list of books I read or listened to, cover to cover, in 2023…

1. Underland, Robert MacFarlane: MacFarlane’s deeply textured prose ranges from microscopic vistas of the minute details of language and thought to the vast reaches of landscape, sea, sky and earth’s underworld – and does it all in the spirit of untethered adventure. In Underland, he travels to the depths of earth, from a physics lab half a mile under England’s coastal bedrock to the deepest natural fissures in the karst limestone of central Europe to the bone-lined catacombs beneath Paris, and like Orpheus from Hell he brings back wisdom that connects us to the wildness within. For my money Macfarlane is one of the great geniuses of our age, a writer of warmth, beauty and invention.
2. Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. New understandings of neurodiversity are one of the gifts of our moment; from the parenting perspective, I can tell you that everywhere I look the kids coming up reflect a rainbow of neurodiversity that is as mystifying as it is painful. Are we all neurodivergent, some more masked than others? Probably. Silberman, a leading science writer, approaches the subject with humility and authentic curiosity. Over the course of 500 pages he unpacks the social/science history of western approaches to autism – from the uncomfortable celebration of eccentric experimenters in the eighteenth century to the unsettling story of Hans Asperger and his contemporaries whose work with autistic children can’t be separated from Nazi eugenics – and provides a framework for understanding the current wave of neurodivergence. For anyone tempted to come up with speculative answers to why the rising generations seem so much more prone to neurodivergence than previous generations (spoiler alert, Silberman adroitly explodes the ‘vaccines cause autism’ myth) this book puts it all in perspective.
3. Unmasking Autism, Devon Price. The real authorities on neurodivergence are autistic people themselves, and we are fortunate that there is a growing literature that gives us autistic peoples’ perspectives on autism. Devon Price, a trans autistic social psychologist, illuminates the subject in a way that is both rigorous and real. As parents and all of us learn to lean into an understanding of our children’s cognitive challenges and real-life sufferings, Price unpacks the multi-dimensionality of neurodivergence in ways that are dignifying and validating. Along with the pains of a super-sensitive easily overstimulated cognition, digestive issues, physical pain and social isolation comes the devastating imperative to mask one’s way of being in order to get along in a neuro-conformist society. (For those new to the terminology, masking is, well, faking it; fronting; passing; putting on a show of conformity, which is also to fundamentally deny one’s own identity and or disability — and masking itself can be psychologically crippling.) People, the future is neurodiverse, and this book urges us to start, like, yesterday, constructing some social norms that can ease the needless suffering and cultivate the considerable strengths of the neurodivergent people among us.
4. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, T.J. Demos. With “Anthropocene” becoming one of the terms of art of the last decade and the present one, this little book caught my attention because it tickles my persistent interest in how this term is being applied and contested; if language shapes perception – it does – it is useful to reckon with the terminology coined to describe the geological epoch in which human terraforming has achieved global, and even stratospheric impacts. This little academic study wrestles with that question some (though Donna Haraway’s “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene,” does so far more and far better) – though its real focus is to survey visual art that represents the Anthropocene crisis. As a long-time climate justice activist, I found it interesting to see the set of visuals that Demos chose to unpack. In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argued that, for all its role as the greatest existential crisis facing humanity, there is, or was, precious little literature addressing the climate emergency. Most of a decade later, I’d argue that’s no longer the case, and in the visual world, from protest art to museums and galleries, a visual language addressing the climate threat is now, deservedly, easily found. So, it’s good to have theorists scrutinizing the emergence of this work. Ultimately, though, this academic study triggered for me the quip that the mid-century visual artist Barnett Newman was known to make as his large-scale colorfield paintings faced critical interpretation: “Aesthetics is for artists as ornithology is for the birds.”
5. Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The project of nationalism is by definition about inclusion and exclusion – who is part of the nation and who is not – andthe ongoing project of nation-building is by extension always about how the borders shift to include or exclude different ethnic, racial or other demographic groups.In her 2021 book, part of a massive late-career outpouring by the standard-bearer of radical history, Dunbar-Ortiz explodes the liberal trope that the USA is and has always been a ‘nation of immigrants.’ From the nation’s origins through to the Trump years, she shows how, aside from a small ethnic minority who have historically made up the majority of the U.S. population, every other group that has migrated here – Chinese, Jewish, Irish, Muslim, Latino, the list goes on – has been profoundly and often violently rejected, marginalized and abused. Through an impressive historiography, Dunbar-Ortiz shows  that the concept that we are ‘a nation of immigrants’ was a mid-twentieth century revisionist origin story invented to serve, as the subtitle names, a history of erasure and exclusion. Among the erasures of course, are the generational crimes of native genocide and African enslavement, which are the poison in the seed of the U.S. national project. (Spoiler alert: if you love Hamilton and bought the notion that Alexander Hamilton himself was Black and immigrant – social categories that didn’t exist at the time – be prepared for a change of mind. At a time when immigrants fleeing climate emergency, narco-violence and war, and seeking peace, stability and dignity are being turned, en masse, into the political currency of cowardly partisan fights on the sinking battleship that is the United States, this book provides fundamental context for facing “the migration question.”
6. The Founding of Salem, City of Peace, Benjamin W. Shallop. Of personal interest, as my own white settler colonial ancestors played a key role in founding this “City of Peace,” now best known as the site of America’s last, best witch-hunt.Helpful in understanding the nuances of one piece of early New England colonial history; packed with informative detail though filled with unquestioned assumptions. Curiously, I was reading the book on an Amtrak train from Massachusetts to Washington DC (the cradle of the nation!) – and I chanced to sit next to a woman who, as it happened, worked at the Philadelphia Museum of the American Revolution. Through this chance encounter I found that, even in the darkening Anthropocene, there exists of strange subculture of people whose chosen pleasure is to wallow enthusiastically in the long shadow of colonial history, not necessarily through the kind of critical lens I hope to take to it in order to address the deep violence at the heart of U.S. American culture – but because they like to geek out on the silver-smithy of Paul Revere, the astounding dimensions of Old Ironsides and her cannones, and the fabrication of George Washington’s wooden teeth. Go figure.
7. Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, Sara Horowitz. While many of us are bemoaning the utter absence of a ‘social safety net,’ and trapped rather in an anti-social anxiety net, engaged visionaries like labor lawyer, former chair of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, and founder of the freelancer’s Union, Sara Horowitz have been busy constructing the alternative. Horowitz, descended from a family of Jewish unionists who, of sheer necessity and visionary tenacity, built some of New York’s most enduring social institutions, shows how the social contract between the State and the People has been systematically weakened to the point of abandonment – and how a renewed effort to build what she calls “mutualism,” is key to re-establishing social stability (which is not, and never should have been, limited to “social security.”) A corollary to the multi-faceted concept of the commons (to which, see David Bollier’s latest, Free, Fair and Alive, the Insurgent Power of the Commons), mutualism is the idea embodied not by a liberal welfare state towards its citizens, but by people and communities themselves in establishing bottom-up collective economic institutions, from churches to farmers’ coops to rural credit collectives.
8. Modern Love, Constance de Jong. Picked up in an arty Lower East side bookshop during a liberated few hours in NYC, this was a fun read into a different time. (Admittedly I read only about a quarter of it but it’s a book that doesn’t demand or reward a standard reading.) De Jong is a writer, performance artist, cultural worker who grew out of the ferment of 1970’s New York (think Kathy Acker, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson) and whose best-known contribution was as collaborator with Phillip Glass on the opera Satyagraha. This book, a nice break from straighter reading, is an imploded fiction, a love story in a scrap heap that takes all the conventions of fiction, and of romance, and turns them into creamed corn. “More and more I see I know less and less.”
9. The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid. It’s about time that I read Jamaica Kincaid, and if you haven’t it’s time that you do, too. This haunting novel smells of Caribbean sweat, tastes of overripe split guava fruit, feels like wet sandpaper in your broken shoe as you walk the long dirt road to the next town to look for work. I haven’t read much Caribbean fiction – ashamed that have yet to ever read the Haitian Edwidge Danticat, for example, though I can highly recommend Texaco by the Martiniquan magical realist Patrick Chamoiseau) – and this short-ish novel made a powerful impression. Aside from the sensuousness of its images and the impact of a story of brutal impoverishment with no redemption beyond the touch, taste and small of life itself, Kincaid teaches a lesson on memory and trauma: “Parts of my life, incidents in my life then, seem, when I remember them now, as if they were happening in a very small, dark place, a place the size of a dollhouse, and the dollhouse is t=at the bottom of a hole, and I am way up at the top of the hole, peering down into the little house, trying to make out exactly what it is that happened down there. And sometimes when I look down at this scene, certain things are not in the same place they were in the last time I looked: different things are in the shadows at different times, different things are in the light.”
10. Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model, Richard C Schwartz. Back to family psychology, and the skills-building it takes to just, sometimes, get through the day.Internal Family Systems, or IFS, takes a systems-thinking approach to personal psychology, with the idea that each of us is made up of distinct “parts,” all of which are in relation to each other, and each of which were formed through the crucible of our own troubled upbringing. Outer conflicts (in family, society, etc.) are sparked and spurred on by inner conflicts, which themselves are often conflicts between parts of ourselves that have been trained to defend and protect their own interests, quite often in ways that do not serve the integrated whole (ways we might call maladaptive).The message: get to know your parts, develop compassion for them, learn to help them integrate, and maybe things will get easier…
11. Smokehole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass, Martin Shaw. Martin Shaw is a wildman from the hills and moors of Devon in the U.K.,, a turfy, growling enormous figure out of the earth of time. Founder of the School of Myth at the storied Schumacher Institute in the West Country of England, Shaw is a one-man folktale revival. Building on a legacy established decades ago by Robert Bly (Iron John) and Michael Meade (Men and the Water of Life) and the depth psychology of Joseph Campbell, Shaw puts his ear to the ground and conjures out the stories that have lived there, buried like pirate treasure or like seeds, and generously serves them up in ways that are enlivening, endeepening, and just a lot of fun. During the pandemic he did a ten-series podcast by the same name, the Smokehole Sessions, that itself is an introduction to a lovely range of mostly-UK-based writers and artists. If you don’t yet know Martin Shaw and you care anything for myth and old stories, go give a knock on the door of his hut. You won’t regret it.
12. A Confederate General From Big Sur, Richard Brautigan. The old beat hippie Brautigan, is not among the giants of world literature, and his stories reinforce some of the worst tendencies of the O.G. hippie era (sexist to a fault, for starters) – but he represents a particular slice of the old weird America (cf. Greil Marcus) and (perhaps only if you’re a cis-het white guy like me) you can forgive him his faults and he can be a fun read. (Indeed, he appears not to have forgiven himself his own faults, as he died by suicide just shy of his 50^th birthday). I’ve long loved the whimsical poetry of his Trout Fishing in America, so as a summer break read I gave a try at Confederate General From Big Sur, a $4 staple of used bookstores everywhere.With a sort of flippant narrative built on the itinerant life of a mid-sixties drifter and a delusional character who believes himself descended from the titular Confederate General, its got some of the whimsy of Trout Fishing, but none of the magic. I was supremely disappointed that there was not even a minimal exploration, jokey, hokey or otherwise, of what it might mean to have a Confederate General for a forebear. Self-consciously seeking but never finding a real story arc, this book attempts to explode the conventions of narrative fiction, but leaves nothing rewarding in its place. Summation: all praise to Brautigan for carving a unique niche in the counterculture, but … don’t bother.
13. Austerlitz, WG Sebald. Sebald, anything but whimsical, could be the anti-Richard Brautigan, though that’s a stretch, so forget I said it. A strange, difficult, and not easily enjoyable writer, Sebald’s prose is dense, packed with apparent nonsequiturs, stiff, digressive and very heavy. In some way, there’s an analogy to Jamaica Kincaid above, in that this book, andß all of his novels to a degree, is about memory and the ways that memory can trick us into false beliefs, protect us from violated parts (cf Internal Family Systems, above) and send us down long roads to abandoned places without knowing why we’re there. In Austerlitz, a man, haunted by obscure sculptures in a Belgian railway station, sets out on a series of apparently destination-less travels, punctuated by nervous breakdowns, that lead him to the eventual late-in-life discovery that he was removed from his family as the Nazis entered Prague in 1939, and grew up entirely ignorant of who he actually is. Sebald is considered by the cognoscenti to be among the greatest of 20^th century European writers; reading Austerlitz for me was the completion of my personal and rather obscure goal of reading his quartet of books written through the 1990’s (Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn being the other three), and also adds to the list of important holocaust literature (Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel) but he’s not for everyone. Sebald’s method of addressing identity dysphoria by reproducing a sense of dysphoria in every sentence can be intimidating and almost nauseating at times. But, for this reader anyway, the rewards are worth the suffering.
14. Act of Oblivion, Robert Harris. A historical murder mystery adventure tale set in Puritan times. Like the book about Salem, above, I took this one on as an act of personal research: during the English civil war, Puritans under Oliver Cromwell arrested and beheaded King Charles. After Cromwell’s defeat, those responsible for the regicide are systematically hunted down, tortured and killed. Two of the responsible parties. Whalley and Goffe, fled to colonial New England where they were protected and hidden by the Massachusetts authorities, inciting the wrath of the Crown and its minions. An especially fun read for me, as the then-little settlement of Hadley Massachusetts where the two king-killers wound up is now the strip-mall suburb where I go to buy my groceries and get my oil changed. When we drive by Whalley Street and Goffe Street I like to shout to my kids: “fun-fact! Those streets are named after the guys who killed the King of England 350 years ago.”
15. Kraken, China Mieville. A giant squid disappears from the London Museum of Natural History, setting off a chain of supernatural events that signal, not just the end of the world, but the ends of all the worlds from the theologies of all the religious cults who live in and under London. Mieville is a master of speculative fiction, and a great escape, and I may have chosen this among all his novels because its theme runs parallel to my own little novel, The Gone Rhinoceri and the Battle of Cancun. At 500 pages thick, and overly stuffed with narrative twists, Kraken is an investment in apocalypse escapism. I started reading it on a trip in London in September, and five months later I’m still reading it. I’ll tell you when I’m done.
16. Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. These letters form a strange book, a sort of advice column from a not-quite-famous young poet to a never-to-become famous younger poet. Not necessarily advice for life – The Art of War for sensitive souls? – still, the letters are filled with nuggets of precious wisdom. But moreso this is just a lovely little artifact from one of the most astonishing figures of early 20th century Europe. Gifted to me by 93-year old Joanna Macy after an evening of poetry at her Berkeley home, this slim volume now has for me an aura of the sacred about it.
17. Doppleganger, Naomi Klein. Every book Klein writes, from No Logo to The Shock Doctrine to This Changes Everything is a magnum opus that defines and expands its territory, and in Doppleganger, Klein does it again.  She takes what many of us would dismiss as an obtrusive annoyance – the fact that she is consistently confused on social media with Naomi Wolf, a former liberal intellectual turned right-wing crackpot – and builds on it to obsessively and rigorously investigate one off the most vexxing questions of our  contemporary situation: what is it in our current culture that is turning critical-thinking people into hyper-fixated polarizing conspiracy theorists able to accept and legitimize hate speech, book-banning, trans-phobia and generalized narcissism all under the guise of ‘protecting civil liberties.’ What is it that takes an educated and aware individual and turns them into someone “who can’t seem to tell the difference between temporary public health measures and a coup d’état.” I would already be inclined to give this book a ten out of ten; but the fact that Klein has the courage and rigor to take on the fraught issue of autism and vaccines with a high personal stake but without sentimentality regarding her own neuro-divergent child (referencing Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, above); and to take on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the perspective of a non-Zionist Jew with family relations in Israel and political sympathies in Palestine, for me makes this book worthy of the very highest praise.
18. A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience, Thai Jones. I was honored to be given a copy of this book by its primary subject, Jeff Jones, father of the author, and one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground and Prairie Fire, a catalyst of the 1968 Days of Rage, an organizer of the famous Weather Underground escapade that freed Timothy Leary from Soledad Prison, and countless other adventures of the radical U.S. left from Vietnam through the Reagan years. The book begins with the author recounting one of his earliest memories — as a four-year old being embraced by his mother in their NYC apartment as the FBI force their way in, bristling with automatic weapons, to carry dad off to prison. A gripping and eye-opening account of a time in U.S. history when serious efforts to challenge U.S. imperialism turned militant, and the personal and political struggles born of that militancy.
19. Okla Hannali, R.A. Lafferty. This was my second reading of thisincredibly unique, strange and profoundly entertaining little piece of historical fiction written in the ‘sixties by a then-popular science fiction writer, Okla Hannali tells the story of Hannali Innomminee, a big man among the Choctaws, who lived a full century to witness the fall and rise and fall again of the Choctaw, Chickasaws, Cherokees and other tribes of the U.S. South. It’s the story of the Indian Removal and the violent establishment of Indian Territory, aka Oklahoma, from the years before Andrew Jackson, through the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, and the ultimately futile struggle of a people to survive with vitality and dignity, not to mention culture, language and instinct, intact. Beyond its gripping narrative that revolves around the bigger-than-life figure of the “chucking Choctaw” fiddle player silversmith, farmer, builder, horse trader, gambler and patriarch Hannali, this book for me opened up a whole new sense of nineteenth century American history, to wit a section that shows that strange and beautiful tone of the book, set just after the civil war(s):

“Let us put it into context. This was the beginning of the Old Wild West Days. In most ways it was a retrogression. The lawlessness of the Old Wild West Days was a new lawlessness following on the extinction of old civilizations. Many of these civilizations appear small from our own eminence, but they were real things. The Indian Territory civilization of the Five Tribes had been the genuine article. The thin-spread civilizations of New Mexico and California had been real. The prairie peace of the Plains Indians had actually obtained. They became warlike now – as a new thing – only when threatened with final extinction. The Old Wild West Days came in an interlude following civilizations, not leading them.”

Poetry

I always tend to dip into poetry now and again, but this year I decided to be a little more thorough and read a handful of poetry books cover to cover, and these are they:

1. A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Hoa Ngyuen (Poetry): Ngyuen is a poet whose work I’ve followed for years; her overarching style is a fragmentary lyric, bringing together splintered bits of language that provoke associative leaps, often generating subtly discomforting, humorous or sensual moments, like tripping over a rake into a rosebush, where you might lie a moment to smell the petals and feel for where the bleeding is. In this her latest book, her long-perfected style lends itself beautifully to a larger project – an exploration through poems of the life of her mother, a Vietnamese stunt-motorcyclist, and the implications of memory for a child of the war and post-war Vietnamese diaspora. Ngyuen’s use of fragmentary texts of letters and documentary material interspersed with lyrical bits serves to underscore the conjunction of the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns that make up the skein of memory’s particular landing places and lacunae, the fertile dark matter that makes up so much of a human life and identity. “mother wept for not/seeing ‘home’ again  and then didn’t.”
2. New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Poetry): Vicuña is a deeply terrestrial yet otherworldly poet and visual and performance artist, born in Chile, fled to NYC during the Pinochet years, and long established as an artist whose work combines the conceptual aspects of the New York performance avant-garde of the 1970’s and a deeply chthonic, indigenous shamanic tradition out of her own bloodline and lineage. The New and Selected Poems is a gorgeous oversized bilingual (Spanish/English) 360- page volume laid out in sleek and stark Helvetica, interspersed with graphic elements and photos of her visual works and graphic. For those unfamiliar, here’s a snippet from her website explaining (some of) her work: “In January 1966 I began creating precarios (precarious), installations and basuritas, objects composed of debris, structures that disappear, along with quipus and other weaving metaphors. I called these works “Arte Precario”, creating a new independent category, a non colonized name for them. The precarios soon evolved into collective rituals and oral performances based on dissonant sound and the shamanic voice. The fluid, multi-dimensional quality of these works allowed them to exist in many media and languages at once. Created in and for the moment, they reflect ancient spiritual technologies—a knowledge of the power of individual and communal intention to heal us and the earth.”
3. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Joy Harjo (Poetry): To live in a world where Joy Harjo breathes poetry and plays her saxophone to the sun and the stars is to live in a world that is blessed. She brings the real news from Indian Country with a flavor of urban jazz under the blinking neon: “There’s something about a lone horn player/blowing ballads at the corners of our lives.” She brings the tidal weight of trauma, the dispossession, the removals, the trails of tears, the girdled and burned peach tree orchards of Chaco Canyon, the bloody shawls of Sand Creek, and she brings the music of healing that the old folks call the blues, with its own shot of redemption: “Let’s not shame our eyes for what they’ve seen, but thank them for their bravery.”
4. The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke (Poetry): I was given a book of Rilke’s Selected Poems as far back as 1988, and while I have long admired some of his work, it is an investment to dig into it, and it’s taken this long to read all the way through the bit that is generally known as Rilke’s magnum opus, the ten poem cycle known as the Duino Elegies that Rilke wrote largely during the years of World War I. They begin, “Who among the angels’ hierarchies would hear us if we cried out?” … and go on in that vein, at once celebrating the tender beauty of life as it is, questioning why the beauties of life are always and intimately entwined with suffering and loss, appealing to the angels as to why and how it is this way, and resigning to the ineffable nature of it all. At least, that’s how I’d summarize it in 25 words or less. I don’t know….You read it and tell me.
5. News of the Universe: Poems of Two-fold Consciousness, Collected and presented by Robert Bly. Robert Bly, who passed in 2021 at the ripe age of 95, is a figure in some danger of being lost to many of us, which would be a grand shame because his offering, from the fifties through to the 2010’s, was so various and generous and generative. He became known in popular culture for his mythopoetic book Iron John, which launched the so-called Men’s Movement, and with it a thousand stereotypes of new age men naked in the woods weeping for their abused inner child. Before that he was a renowned poet with a body of work rich with subtle turns of phrase, quiet music and astonishing psychological depth. But even greater perhaps than these achievements were his translations and anthologies: he brought into English Rilke, Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca, Rumi, Transtromer, and countless other “world” poets who are now, if not household names, certainly well-known. It was Bly who told his friend Coleman Barks he should dedicate himself to translating Rumi, and so Barks has made Rumi among the most widely read poets in English, largely by people who don’t much care for poetry. This particular anthology came out in 1980 from Sierra Club Books, in what seems a crossover gesture between literature and “environmentalism,” but unlike so many such efforts, in my humble view, it works, in spades. The premise of the entire anthology is that there is a great strand of poetic tradition, across cultures and peoples, whose work is to imbue the more-than-human world with consciousness, or to voice this consciousness, of trout, of stones, of salt. Neruda: “I know/you/will never believe me,/but/it sings,/the salt sings, the hide/of the salt plains,/it sings/through a mouth smothered/by earth.” Bly begins with the haters and deniers, the voices of English literary tradition who steadfastly denied consciousness and affirmed Cartesian rationalism, and then moves through the centuries to illuminate the modern strain, from the Romantics onward, that kicked back against rationalism, and then back through the river of time to bring forth the voices, Zuni, Gros Ventre, Hindi, Persian, Chinese, from the old understandings. When you come upon this pretty old book in a box at a yard sale, grab it, and then slowly, over the course of a year, read it, like I did, from cover to cover. You will be made richer.