Fifteen Books I Spent My Spring Reading

Last season's reading list ended with some speculative-fiction collections. The SF trend continued into this season, beginning with the tense, eerie China Miéville novella This Census-Taker. Miéville's novels, most of which I've read, have made him my favorite SF writer, edging out M. John Harrison by a mere hair's breadth (an irony, since Miéville's bald). This Census-Taker reminded me of why. It's as powerful as it is short, as vivid as it is obscure, as touching as it is unsettling — a perfect balance, especially since I don't want too much of any one thing while engaged in my own novelistic effort.

The next book I read was David Mitchell's 2015 novel, Slade House, which occupies a prominent place in the world Mitchell's built with his other novels, Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, and so on. Their interconnectedness rewards ardent fans, but I wonder if Slade House isn't too reliant on that mythology. Newcomers might not appreciate this quasi-haunted-house story's grand climax, dependent as it is on the appearance of a very, very old friend to those in the know. Being in the know, I enjoyed every page.

Then NW: A Novel, by Zadie Smith, revealed the sort-of sordid world of British government-housing residents. That same week, Sigmund Freud's essay collection The Uncanny (as translated by David McClintock) offered up the Austrian psychoanalyst's examination of the mind's approach to strangeness. The latter was a delightful surprise gift from Emily C., whose curiosity about human psychology rivals my own and leads us to some truly great conversations. I absorbed the Freud book in two sittings, during the second-to-last institutional lockdown I endured before my unceremonious transfer from Crossroads Correctional Center. With my cellmate so present it was hard to shift my mind into novelist mode. I sublimated the urge to write and did some research instead — something old Siggy probably would've had a thing or two to say about.

Before that lockdown was lifted, I'd borrowed a Christopher Hitchens book from Crossroads' library. The late bon vivant wrote Mortality, a short collection of atheistic deathbed essays, over the agonizing months he languished from esophageal cancer. I tore through it in a night and, the following morning, picked up the most recent fantasy by Hitchens's friend and fellow member of the unbelieving literati Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which didn't stir me as much as Rushdie's previous novels have — but they can't all be masterpieces.

To wit: the good Lady V. indulged my deathless inner fanboy with the gift of Ready Player One, Ernest Cline's massively successful '80s-obsessed sci-fi adventure. My curiosity had been eating at me for years. Finally getting my hands on a copy, though, was a mixed bag. I can't remember another book that I liked so much even while wincing at its many flaws. Judicious editing would've caught the factual/continuity errors and, maybe, massaged the obnoxious exposition smoothly into the streamlined story line. Will Steven Spielberg's film version be as fun? I'll give it a watch, even though I'm leery.

Alternating between lowbrow and highbrow for a few days thereafter, I bounced between Stephen King's Desperation and Markus Gabriel's anti-"neurocentric" I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century (translated from the German by Christopher Turner) as my mood demanded. I'd never read any of King's horror, so my friend Jenna recommended that I jump right into Desperation to see what I've been missing. The Gabriel book was from my wonderful mother, who knows so well my tastes and ordered it from my Amazon wish list. No shocker here: the philosophy book's oppositional stance to the increasingly popular idea that the fatty goo of the human brain constitutes the mind made a deeper impression than the gore-fest. At least now I know what readers get from King's fiction that draws them back again and again, even though one round was quite enough for me.

Following the riot at Crossroads was another lockdown. About sixty hours later I was en route to a different prison altogether — time used for handwriting some long-overdue letters and cards to friends, and for reading. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from a Dead House (as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, but commonly titled The House of the Dead) might not seem like ideal literature for someone under lock and key. It's Dostoyevsky's novelization of the eight years' hard labor he served, a political prisoner, in a Soviet gulag in Omsk, after sharing a letter criticizing Stalin. I was halfway through the book on the day of my transfer and finished Part Two on the opposite side of Missouri, the week after. Whether or not it's ironic that the novel ends with its narrator's escape I leave to minds more inclined to long associative leaps.

Having gotten a high enough dose of literary masochism to last me awhile, I picked up several pleasure-reads at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center as soon as I could: Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun (translated by Philip Gabriel), A Wild Sheep Chase (translated by Alfred Birnbaum), and the disappointing After Dark (translated by Jay Rubin); the late, great George Carlin's hilarious hodgepodge, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?; and Colson Whitehead's stunning speculative pseudohistory The Underground Railroad: A Novel. ERDCC's library is roughly three quarters the size of the one I left behind at CRCC, but there are enough books of interest on its shelves to pack these quarterly reading lists for a while yet.

One book that I began to read but, much to my own disappointment, abandoned after 149 pages deserves mention: Swann's Way. I had the best intentions. In truth, though, this first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part Remembrance of Things Past, in which he writes in minutest detail and at great length about his childhood, recalled abruptly and all at once after taking a bite of a little tea-cake, was just too much for me to handle. It felt like a grind the instant its novelty wore off. Conceptually, I think it has value; as a readable work, though, I find it lacking. A pity. I really wanted to enjoy this one.

The List: Reading July through September 2016

Maria Friberg, Still Lives #3

Surrounded by good books this summer, I nevertheless read less than usual. At times I felt guilty for letting so much worthwhile literature sit unregarded while I absorbed myself in other concerns (time-sensitive and fairly important though they were). There was a two-week stretch during which I only worked out once and didn't leave the housing unit for a single rec period — a pretty good indicator of my monomaniacal drive. But dammit, I got done what I set out to do.

As they so often do, my dear Mum, the good Lady Val, and Prospero's Tom Wayne collectively sent more books than my busyness allowed me to read before this quarter was up. I did my level best. Two still sit on my shelf as I type this. There's a temptation to take one up right now, but with the completion of my latest big project (HTML-related — don't even ask) I've felt the return of my muse and have been daily progressing on my long-unfinished novel, ignored these many months. The fiction on my shelf can wait a little longer.

* * * * *

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
The way it crackles with possibilities and breathes with Egan's multifarious, lifelike prose, I hardly wonder why A Visit from the Goon Squad won so many prestigious awards (National Book Critics Circle, New York Times Book Review Best Book, the Pulitzer). She created a veritable solar system when she wrote this novel, an intricate series of orbits — some closer, some farther distant — with her character Bennie Salazar in the role of its sun. Bennie's rise and fall and resurrection in the music business is the novel's ostensible plot. Leaping, skipping, shuffling, and spinning around years and continents, the book's numerous voices resolve themselves into a chorus by tantalizing degrees as their interconnectedness dawns on us, a brilliant and subtle affirmation of life's ephemerality and infinite potential.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
His luminous language always delighted me before, and this, Rushdie's second novel, from 1981, proves to be no exception. It won the Booker Prize then, and got voted "Best of the Booker" in 2008, probably because it's practically the Platonic ideal of a novel.

The story of Saleem Sinai, a "nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk's tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated […] grotesque creature," whose destiny and India's tragicomically mirror one another bore some superficial similarities, in its telling, to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. It's not derivative, though. Not by a long shot. And the only thing about reading Midnight's Children that I didn't like was the impossibility of ever reading it again for the first time.

César Aira (Katherine Silver, translator), Dinner
Twee turns sensational, then ruminative, in this novella by the prolific Argentinian, which landed flat, for me, after a perfectly nice setup: an aging bachelor and his mother, just back from dinner with a rich friend, return home and see live television footage of risen corpses slurping the brains of panicking townsfolk.

"Was it a nightmare, the result of a bad case of indigestion, poor television programming, or did something truly scary happen in Pringles that evening after dinner?" asks the back-cover copy. Thus the story plays fast and loose with certainties, dreamlike, in the manner of David Lynch films or Jesse Ball novels, only without those works' usual credulous perspective. Midway through Dinner, narration switches to an omniscient voice implying that what we're reading is only a dream, which robs everything that follows of any consequence (as well as my interest).

Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World: And Other Stories
Many short-fiction collections start strong as hell, then rapidly devolve into mediocrity…or worse. Not so, this one. The first story here risked losing my interest from the get-go. It took me two more before The Unfinished World, Sparks's genre-agnostic second published book, offered anything memorable.

By the collection's end, I understood why. Despite her often-ingenious premises — space-station janitors, Arthurian heroes resurrected to aid treasure-seekers, unrequited love between famous Victorian naturalists, an Eternal Library that physically houses abstract concepts — Sparks shines when her tales have room to spread out and develop those ideas' potential. She's competent at short-shorts and flash fiction, but since when does "competent" stir readers? The longer stories here, particularly the novella that lends the collection its title, are engaging, darkly beautiful pieces that lift The Unfinished World to another plane altogether.

Jon Duckett, HTML & CSS
Being locked away and denied computer use for an indefinite period hasn't dampened my interest in all things webby. CSS had yet to be widely adopted by web developers in 2001, when Missouri took me captive. XML was just coming into use. Flash held boundless promise. People still liked RealPlayer.

My, times have changed.

Once I got past the remedial opening chapters (this colorful book being an extremely beginner-friendly how-to), I had quite a few fun aha moments, taking me back to an uber-geeky past life when I could roll around in code for hours on end and not realize five minutes had passed. Nostalgia meets enrichment — it doesn't get much better than that.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Like Orwell's 1984, this novel deserves several readings per lifetime. (Both are on my list of forty favorite fiction works.) Vonnegut was a satirist nonpariel, and Slaughterhouse-Five is a fine reminder of how effectively humor communicates ghastly truths. His life's work consisted of fourteen novels, several story collections and plays, and some nonfiction, and although he was old when he died, in 2007, it seems like there should've been so much more.

So it goes.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Wait, a novel? More like a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale, then back again. The connective tissue of these nested narratives is the lives of the souls the book follows, the echoes and repeating motifs occurring from one incarnation to the next. Mitchell does the voices and cleverly frames them so well, the recurrances strike the reader like lightning even though they're written as mere dejá vù.

Rainer Maria Rilke (Joan M. Burnham, translator), Letters to a Young Poet
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke's six-year correspondence with an admiring unknown sparkles with wisdom and friendly tokens of affection, and it's so rewarding to read. I hesitate to say more. In his inaugural letter to his young acolyte, Rilke cautioned:

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no words has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

These letters have long outlived their sender, their recipient. They endure for precisely the reasons art does, because they are art.

Robert Kirkman, et al., Outcast by Kirkman & Azaceta, Vol. 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him
Highbrow to low-, my reading habits surprise even me at times. This comic was loaned to me, but don't be misled: I'm a true-blue comic-book geek from way back. Funnily enough, the last comic that I read was also borrowed from another prisoner, and it, too, was written by Robert Kirkman.

COO of Image Comics (Marvel and DC's only serious competition), and creator of, basically, every human being's favorite TV series, The Walking Dead, Kirkman's kind of a hot commodity at the moment. Until my friend Zach told me about Outcast, though, I was oblivious to its existence. (My subscription to Wizard lapsed a while back. I don't know if Comic Shop News even survived the '90s. I'm out of touch.) It's cool stuff.

The comic's laconic bits-and-pieces disclosure style would be familiar to Walking Dead fans. The similarities end there. Outcast is supernatural horror — The Exorcist meets Constantine. For all the demonic possessions, you'd expect more action, and my take is that twenty-two pages (the standard length of contemporary comics) is nowhere near enough for this story to gather its momentum. If I had picked issue #1 off the rack and perused it, I'd have left the shop with a back issue of Spawn instead.

The thing is, fans collect issues and read trade paperbacks like this volume, which collects the first six issues. Before I reached the end of Vol. 1, the only quibble I had was not being able to stroll over to Clint's Books & Comics, my old fanboy haunt, and buy Vol. 2.

A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
During an appearance on The Colbert Report, Professor Grayling described his impetus for "making" this book, a distillation of hundreds of distinct philosophical works, as being a desire to see a single-volume secular guide to living a good, meaningful life. The Christians have their Bible, the Muslims have their Koran, the Hare Krishnas have their Bhagavadgita, and so on, so why shouldn't humanists have our own collection of parables, proverbs, histories, and general wisdom, just without all that supernatural stuff? Grayling acknowledged how ambitious, even arrogant, the idea sounds, and confessed that the end result falls well short of perfection, but it's nevertheless an impressive undertaking and an inspiring text to absorb. Who knows, maybe a couple of thousand years' edits, additions, and redactions at the hands of others will render The Good Book a monument of human brilliance, industry, and loving kinship. We have to start somewhere.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy, editors), The Blithedale Romance: A Norton Critical Edition)
Most high-school English classes have Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter on their reading lists. I dropped out of Lincoln College Prep before any introduction to the harrowing ordeal of Hester Prynne, and didn't get around to Hawthorne until last month. In keeping with my curious tendency to not begin with authors' better-known work, The Blithedale Romance is probably his most critically derided novels (one of his peers called it "the slightest and most colourless" of Hawthorne's novels). You might ask why I do this to myself; I might be at a loss to answer.

The Blithedale Romance is, for sure, a mess, heavy on overwrought Gothic trappings and! until a totally uncalled-for death scene near the end, light on action I've heard that Hawthorne wasn't the best at structuring his plots. No one warned me, however, that I risked physical injury by reading this book. Again and again I tipped bodily forward, nearly hurling myself off my bunk, dozing. Lying down to read was safer. It was also the reason I took weeks to read this book. Being horizontal only made me fall asleep faster.

The List: Reading January through March 2016

Medieval readers were among the first to recognize the transformative power of text. They saw how reading facilitated raw knowledge by way of the facts laid down by authors, of course, but they were also perceptive enough to notice how reading inspired original thoughts, independent from the ideas explicit in the text. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria likened reading to a dream: “I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent to me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”

In that placid realm we readers know so well, there’s an exhilarated activity. Readers only appear inert. Inside, our minds are churning.

A study published a few years ago in Psychological Science confirms this. Researchers found that we readers “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about action and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences.” As this empathetic activity takes place, the regions of the brain at work are the same as would be engaged if the reader were doing or watching the goings-on in real life. Reading, you might say, is being.

Unless this is your first encounter with my blog, you know how important the written word is to me, both as intellectual sustenance and emotional lifeline. I post these quarterly reading lists because I want people to see where my mind has been recently. My “List” posts are mental itineraries, and friends say they enjoy observing my travels from afar (although, not as much as I appreciate their accounts of life beyond Crossroads Correctional Center’s walls and fences). Sometimes they follow along, if the sights are compelling enough, but usually my journeys are solo affairs. What’s important is that these people care and take an interest, despite how peculiar my tastes and habits tend to be, in reading and in life — same thing.

For the life support they’ve sent this year, I owe thanks to Adam M. and my dearest Mum. And now, on to my voyagings.

* * * * *

Annie Liontas and Jeff Parker (editors), A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors
For anyone who feels a deep connection to the craft, this anthology will hold meaning. A Manner of Being presents a trove of anecdotes, witticisms, wisdom, and writers’ testimonies about those inspirational souls who nudged, cajoled, or bullied them to higher literary planes.

As a contributor (my tribute to L., a family friend, begins on page 108), I’m recusing myself from a proper review of the book, except to say how honored I am to be published alongside such estimable names as George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Tony Hoagland, Tobias Wolff, and Tibor Fischer. Thank you, Jeff and Annie, for including me in your labor of love.

Charles Simic, Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems
Too often I arrive at a poet’s oeuvre, or am smitten by the glimpse afforded by a newly published or reprinted selection, right around the time that poet dies. It’s enough to make a man cry out, “Poets, please, stop dying!” In the case of these Selected Early Poems, the book was already on my shelf, awaiting my attention, for a good month before Simic’s death last year. A superstitious sort might make something sinister of that. I was just disappointed that the world had reached its maximum allotment of distinctive works like

Gallows Etiquette

Our sainted great-great
Grandmothers
Used to sit and knit
Under the gallows.

No one remembers what it was
They were knitting
And what happened when the ball of yarn
Rolled out of their laps
And had to be retrieved.

One pictures the hooded executioner
And his pasty-faced victim
Interrupting their grim business
To come quickly to their aid.

Confirmed pessimists
And other party poopers
Categorically reject
Such far-fetched notions
Of gallows etiquette.

It’s a poem that actually made me laugh — to say nothing of the other 150 or so poems, dated between 1967 and 1989, in this collection. Simic was never stodgy or grimly “poetical.” His way with words was astonishing.

In the four instances here when a poem failed to resonate with me, I think Simic’s surreal juxtapositions got too dense or random-seeming, but it speaks to his tremendous talent that the bizarre imagery that was his hallmark almost always accentuated the poems’ emotional heft. At their most unreal they grab you and hold you, and you never want them to let go.

Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor (editors), 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories
Anthologies purporting to be the best of the best can’t help but disappoint on some level. Either the editorial selections aren’t diverse enough to let a reader breathe fresh air, or they’re so self-consciously pluralistic as to verge on schizophrenic. I enjoy every title I read in the Best American series, which has presented a broad spectrum of voices without apparently resorting to affirmative action. This selection from the past 100 years of the series intelligently sticks with the demographics of authors most emblematic of their era. Moore and Pitlor include plenty of white males — Carver, Updike, Fitzgerald, Cheever — but segue into the contemporary multi-culti literati without it feeling forced. That every story her is a true gem helps. If any imbalance exists here, it’s in the abundance of stories first published in The New Yorker. I didn’t really mind rereading the superlative fictions that ran in the magazine over the course of my twelve-year subscription. 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories is the most delightful form of reiteration I can imagine.

Jonathan Lethem, Men and Cartoons: Stories
Some might call this collection of nine wildly entertaining tales uneven. But it is a testament to Lethem’s virtuosity that the contents of Men and Cartoons leap around in time, space, and form the way they do. Here the fantastic abuts the absurd, which itself neighbors poignant realism, which precedes straight science fiction, with the author’s witty, inquisitive voice the only thread necessary for tying the collection together.

Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufman, translator and editor), Basic Writings of Nietzsche
There’s too much to say about Nietzschean philosophy than could be encapsulated in a blog post (not one you’d want to read, anyway), let alone in my review of this collected volume. I won’t even try.

What I will remark on is how differently I read Nietzsche now than the first time. The vague transgressiveness I felt at sixteen, paging through his Beyond Good and Evil, eclipsed any significant understanding of the book’s message. I wanted to understand, but the philosopher himself commented on the futility of scholarly understanding without life experience. And what did I know about life then? Mired in depression and single-mindedness, the central formula within Nietzsche’s philosophy — revaluation of one’s ideas — was beyond my ken. I hadn’t yet endured enough. In the intervening years I suffered some truly wretched states and, by surviving them, learned and grew, just as Nietzsche describes in Ecce Homo: “[I]t was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement.”

The guy’s hard not to quote. It’s his aphoristic style, how he strung together clever phrases, one after another, to approach his ultimate point, that worked so well for and against him. Nietzsche worked by accreting refinements, coming at his subjects gradually, with finesse, like building a house by gluing single wood chips atop one another. Many readers ignored the structure and, instead, glommed on to single chips — lines or passages that seemed, divorced from their context, to support certain ideologies. Although he was unequivocal in his opposition to nationalism, anti-Semitism, and even the “Germanness” later readers attributed to him, Nietzsche’s still egregiously misappropriated and misread today.

Of course he set himself apart:

The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered profoundly — it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer — his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been “at home” in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing” — this spiritual and silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.

Sardonic, complex, and, above all, honest, Nietzsche was practically destined for a bad reputation he didn’t deserve.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks: A Novel
Its back cover declares The Bone Clocks to be the story of Holly Sikes, “once contacted by voices she knew only as ‘the radio people,’” who has now “caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics.’’ This makes it sound like a Dean Koontz book. Terrible. I trusted David Mitchell to deliver more (and better) than Random House’s marketing department promised, and I’m happy to say that he did exactly that, most spectacularly. Not fantasy nor thriller, not sci-fi nor literary novel, The Bone Clocks is somehow also all of these — a multivoiced, labyrinthine saga, touching and intimate, violent and raw, snarky and dispassionate — that plays with genre as much as with mood, and is all the more engrossing for this multifariousness.

Frank Lima, Angel
The bowled-over feeling I got from reading Lima’s poems in November’s Poetry — astounding examples of that meaningful surrealism I mentioned above — didn’t revisit after I ordered this 1972 collection. There was no magic here for me, despite the heavenly title. Maybe I should’ve waited for the posthumous Incidents of Travel in Poetry, just published in January. As of this writing (hint, hint), that one’s still on my wish list.

Alan Weisman, The World without Us
How disappointed I was to realize that this wasn’t exactly what I wanted, researchwise, nearly made me lose interest before I began reading. But I took the plunge, and not only did I pick up several useful tidbits for my perpetually in-progress zombie novel, Weisman’s exhaustively researched thought experiment — What would happen to Earth if humans suddenly vanished from its face? — astonished and freaked me out. No wonder it won so many nonfiction-book-of-the-year kudos. The World without Us is a reality check that ought to be required reading for everyone alive.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe {Walter Arndt, translator; Cyrus Hamlin, editor), Faust: A Tragedy: Interpretive Notes, Context, Modern Criticism
You know the old story: a learned man exhausts all the common areas of study — philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology — and so turns to magic in his boundless hunger for experience, only to wind up in a diabolic deal for his eternal soul. Goethe knew it, too. The folktale captured his imagination as a young writer, and he published fragments of his own dramatic interpretation to some acclaim, beginning in 1787. As decades passed, he composed a patchwork of scenes for the drama’s second part {today we’d call it a reboot of the franchise), which took Faust and Mephistopholes far, far from their original setting, making them almost ancillary characters in an allegorical sprawl, alongside classical myths and burlesques of Goethe’s contemporaries.

The Norton Critical Edition I was fortunate enough to get my claws into granted insight that otherwise would’ve eluded my grasp. Goethe himself told a friend, “all attempts to bring it nearer to the understanding are in vain.” He was speaking about Part Two, because Part One, for its somewhat patchy nature, at least carries emotional weight and coheres as a drama. Part Two rambles and rollicks so many different ways, and reeks of a poetic decadence almost too stifling to tolerate; it could never be staged.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Depth of thought. Attentiveness versus automation. The mechanisms by which we arrive at meaning in our lives. The value of literature in contemporary society. I’ve been preoccupied with these themes for years, but until hearing about this Pulitzer Prize finalist during a lecture on C-SPAN 2 (BookTV is my jam, yo) I knew of no grand unified theory for them all. As it turns out, they’re not only closely connected issues, I’m also by no means the first or only person to lose sleep thinking about them.

Carr’s subtitle for The Shallows sounds, somehow, simultaneously alarmist and anodyne. His book is neither. Rather, it’s a well-reasoned, provocative look at the culture and science of wired life. Slate dubbed it “Silent Spring for the literary mind,” and I can’t do much better in summarizing its disturbing importance. What Silent Spring warned, ecologically, parallels the mental pollution Carr shows is a byproduct of the Internet age. I wish I could place a copy in the hands of everyone I meet. The book, however, makes clear that few would read it, and substantially fewer still would hearken its message by taking conscious steps back from the intellectual precipice world culture is blindly scampering toward.