Sontag had no time for the kind of faux humility that women are conditioned to perform anytime anyone shows interest in what we do. She gave no fucks, in the lingo of the internet, a particular patois she did not live to see. She became famous as a critic and essayist by being publicly serious about all kinds of culture, low to high; for elevating ‘camp’ to an aesthetic theory; for calling for an ‘erotics of art’ to replace the systematic forms of interpretation she perceived as stand-ins for engaged critique: symbology, exegesis, Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis. But she remained famous because her continued scrutiny of art, as well as her work on photography, illness and torture, was so perceptive, even morally compelling, that it gave us the primary terms in which we understand these phenomena in a cultural context.
Though access to many wild places remains a privilege, access to enchantment and meaning need not be. The more we idolise extreme or unusual experiences of the natural world, the less inclined we will be to bother looking for meaning in our ordinary lives, on our own street, in our local patch of park. But a place that appears thoroughly disenchanting to one person may bewitch another, if they tilt their heads. Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words is an exemplar, explicitly offering us words as magic keys to open up the natural world. It is no accident that this a spell book, since spells alter reality using words. As Ursula Le Guin had it: “Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” Our world may not have much room for magic, but we all speak, write and read the language of enchantment – if we choose to see it that way.
This summer, my cousin Sabina would have turned 30 years old. Instead, it will mark nine years since she was murdered. Though it’s been almost a decade, I’ve just very recently started writing about her, and her death. It always felt too raw, too sacred to pull apart for story fodder—even if I’m the one doing the telling. The thought of someone who didn’t even know her using the horrible, violent way she was taken from my family as “material” is unfathomable to me. This is what I think about when I try to watch or listen to true crime.
There’s no good reason you can’t eat a chicken-parmesan hoagie for breakfast. That’s what I decided last year when I woke up one morning, hungover and ravenous, craving the sandwich’s very specific combination of fried chicken cutlet, melted mozzarella, and tomato sauce. “Breakfast food,” as a category, suddenly felt like my middle school’s dress code: unnecessarily prim and preordained by people whose rules I should no longer heed.
I wrestled with the idea while summoning the wherewithal to leave bed. Why did a breakfast chicken parm seem so louche to me when an egg sandwich—a similar combination of protein, dairy fat, grease, and carbohydrates—seem so benign? If I marched up to the counter at my local bagel shop, which makes chicken-parm sandwiches for lunch, could I even order one at 9 in the morning? If I succeeded, would it open a Pandora’s Box of forbidden food hedonism from which I could never return? Why was breakfast food even breakfast food in the first place?
But this shifting, unsure quality, made luminous with an extraordinary descriptive brilliance, emerges as the book’s strength. The narrative is highly wrought but never laboured, and always humanly tentative, as a quest should be. The last thing Lost Property’s narrator wants is to be any kind of authority. Rather, she is a receiver, a channel for other voices, other eyes.
This is a novel that ponders visibility and invisibility. There is the public realm of clamour and the strange privacy of the earbuds. There is standing out and being hidden. There is the power of listening and the power of speaking out. There is the selfie and the fractured self. Conviction is one of those rare and perfect titles, meaning both a belief profoundly held and to have been found guilty. The genius of the novel is that it reiterates that old phrase that a wise man once said – “the truth will set you free” – and it does so via fiction.
Once More We Saw Stars is a quietly heartbreaking memoir from Jayson Greene, a music editor at Pitchfork. It’s his first book—but the last he ever would have wanted to write. He and his wife Stacy lost their two-year-old daughter Greta in a horrifying accident—the girl was sitting with her grandmother on a park bench in New York City, when a piece of brick fell from the eighth story of a nearby building and hit her. The book begins with their shock: the hospital rooms, the funeral, the realization that everything has changed. As he writes, they’re figuring out “how to breathe on this new planet.”
You know that French saying, je ne sais quoi? Which literally translates to “I don’t know what,” but is used to describe an ineffably unique quality, like the one that new velvet chaise imparts to your bordello-themed parlor? Say it in Paris, and you might as well be wearing a beret and lunching at the Hemingway cafe — because it’s something employed mostly by Americans, and rarely the French. Quelle surprise, non?
How bad are our diets, and how crazy is our relationship to food? The English writer and historian Bee Wilson sets out to discover how we have become at once enthralled and enslaved by a world of much too much food everywhere around us, and how uncertain we are of what, when and how much we should eat. Her ambition is as broad as the globe: She wants to examine dietary patterns in different cultures to see who has any kind of sane relationship to food. (Chad, Mali, Cameroon and Guyana, one study says.)
Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World was one of the most memorable books I read in my early teens. The brilliance of that book came from Gaarder's ability to make complicated concepts easier for young minds to digest. Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism does the same thing with liberalism — but for politically engaged adults.