October’s Books

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays – Wendell Berry (5 stars)

I read this book over several months and I know I will go back to it. I have reams of highlights that I need to trawl through. This is a collection of essays offering an agrarian alternative to our urban culture. Now, I’m not planning to take myself off to the country, but there are still plenty of things I can do from where I am. He offers a challenging critique of modernisation and industrialisation and their disruption of the bonds of people to each other and the place they inhabit. There were a lot of essays so some points were repetitive. I don’t agree with everything he has to say, but there is a lot here that makes sense. A few of the many highlights:

“We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything-of ourselves, of each other, or of our country.” This leads to oppression of other people, overuse of resources etc

“The time is past when it was enough merely to elect our officials. We will have to elect them and then go and watch them and keep our hands on them, the way the coal companies do.”

“People seriously interested in health will finally have to question our society’s long-standing goals of convenience and effortlessness. What is the point of “labor saving” if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health?”

“If we will not limit causes, there can be no controlling of effects. What is to be the fate of self-control in an economy that encourages and rewards unlimited selfishness”

“Restraint-for us, now-above all: the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to “solve” problems by ignoring them, accepting them as “tradeoffs,” or bequeathing them to posterity.”

“We will discover that for these reasons our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them”

Harlem Shuffle – Colson Whitehead (4 stars)

Ray Carney grows up in Harlem, the son of a crook. We meet him as an adult, happily married, with a daughter and a baby on the way and his own furniture shop. The novel has three sections, set a few years apart. As the stories in each unfold we see Carney’s tussle between the respectable life and the crook’s life. New York City plays a large part in the novel, with the places mapped out. This was my second read in the last month or so, set in New York, and they have acted as a nice primer for our upcoming trip.

Lines of note:

“Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and in ambition.”

“Surely it was a sign of maturity to set aside cherished animosities in the name of pragmatism”

When confronted with the prostitute’s props: “He tried not to speculate what the objects were for, or where. They hinted at a domain beyond the missionary, off his map.”

“The walk to work was longer from the new place, but it allowed Carney to savor a few calm blocks before reinsertion into the Harlem mania. Once you walked under the elevated—look up to see the slats cut the sky like prison bars—and crossed Broadway, you were back in the Harlem shuffle.”

“The neighbourhood was gone, razed … had been demolished and erased for the World Trade Center site … if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people in Harlem amd made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.”

Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most – Miloslav Wolf, Matthew Croasman and Ryan McAnnally-Linz (3 stars)

This book walks you through a Yale course of the same name. I’ve read some other work by Miroslav Wolf that was much more focused on Christian theology. This book is for people of all faiths and none, to help get them started in thinking about what constitutes a good life. Each chapter considers a particular sub-questions that together explore the big question. Three or four different perspectives are explored in each chapter followed by questions to help the reader formulate their own response. The final chapters look at different approaches to actually living out what we determine to be a good life. Overall I think this would be a really useful book for people who haven’t really grappled with these questions, and I can see how beneficial this would be for young adults especially. I enjoyed learning a bit more about some perspectives I was not as familiar with, for instance, Confucianism. To get the most out of this book, I think you would be best to gather some other people to read it and discuss the questions together.

ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell M.D. and John J Ratey, M.D. (4 stars)

The first section on the brain and why people with ADHD operate differently was fascinating. I took lots of notes through this. It then moves on to how to harness the strengths and minimise the weaknesses of this way of thinking. This was pretty good but I would have liked more detail and practical examples. Routine is good … but how does someone with ADHD set up and maintain a routine?

Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing – Margaret Atwood (3 stars)

The three-star rating is more a reflection of where I was when reading this rather than the book as such. Five chapters on various aspects of why writers write, and what they are doing when they write. I think the mismatch for me was the very analytical approach which I would normally enjoy but was probably a bit much for the way I was feeling at the time. As always though she has such a way with words. A few delicious phrases:

Referring to the task of writing: “laboring in the wordmines” This phrase really captured that grappling, and bringing out the right word.

On finding that the nickname she had been called was not her real name: “What a revelation it was for me to discover that I was not who I was! And that I had another identity lurking out of sight, like an empty suitcase stashed in a closet, waiting to be filled.”