Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (March 2022)
This was an excellent book, perhaps for me as good as it can get for light reading. I've written about a few of Backman's other books in the past, so perhaps TOA readers will recall his tendency toward gentle, heartwarming stories that affirm his belief in his fellow human beings. One idea I'll take from the reading was a comment that young people start their careers looking for a purpose, but by the end all they really want to know is the point. I offer that this thought likely applies to far more than careers. There were also some sharp insights into our financial system - for example, the failure to consider the danger of greed in its design, or that the true societal divide is between those who can borrow money and those who cannot. One of the more memorable sections in the book led to the following note - when someone asks you if another person seems happy, you should consider what happiness means for that person.
What is Found There by Adrienne Rich (September 2021)
An excellent essay collection, but ultimately not one I will give a strong endorsement due to it being relatively forgettable a few months after the reading. Rich is perhaps better known as a poet and feminist rather than as an essayist, though I imagine the topics she wrote about here (the sub-header is "Notebooks on Poetry and Politics") will be familiar to her dedicated readers. As I dig through my notes, I see a few lines stand out from the rest - that middle-class Americans must actively find out who suffers for their comfort, that we are lazy to call white history as just history, or that poetry begins anytime two things come together for the first time. There is a wisdom in the thought that the busy culture of modern society creates a special challenge for creators, who are doomed to begin their work with a sense that they are wasting time, and I liked the pragmatism of the observation that even if race doesn't truly exist there is still the reality of racism.
The theme I notice in my notes, which I believe can be applied somewhat generally across Rich's lifetime of work, is that the act of separating marginalized experience from politics is not just misguided, but also destructive - for any person outside a culture's norms, experience is always steered by politics. However, someone who lives fully in this reality can find the act of constantly relating across barriers to be an endless source of creativity, perhaps by using art to help others see new ways to interpret how all kinds of people can respond to the urgent questions of a given time. The challenge is straightforward - is expression merely mirroring the environment, or does it reveal something known to the individual that is out of sight for others? It's a challenge that is far more difficult to accept for the compartmentalized individual, who conforms to a certain form of expression that unwittingly stifles the full range of one's capacity for art.
