The letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.”
The novels are not much help, either. Besides the usual difficulties involved in trying to extract a moral from works of literature, there is the problem of Austen’s irony. She is not just representing characters in her novels; she is representing the discursive bubble those characters inhabit, and she almost never steps outside that bubble. She is always ventriloquizing. Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare: “She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun?”
Most paperbacks were like that: cheaply made and intended for mass consumption, with no thought to their lasting longer than it took to read them. With one exception. Dover Publications, founded during the paperback boom of World War II, when light, easily portable books were popular with soldiers, was different. Predominantly a reprint company, Dover focused on titles in the public domain and used the money saved to create a genuine anomaly: a paperback built to last.
The last shelters on the Marangu route to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro are little structures known as Kibo huts, the first built in 1932. When Robert Hune-Kalter, a Colorado-based bank employee, reached the huts, in July 2019, he might have been thinking of nothing but scrambling to the top of Africa’s highest peak. But he found himself admiring their triangular shapes with their steep, green-painted gables and vertical black siding.
“I liked how symmetrical it was,” he said, “and even mentioned to my friend that it reminded me of the symmetry of a Wes Anderson scene.”
Marilynne Robinson’s books are open questions to the reader, each thoughtful, considered moment in the lives of her characters quietly inviting you to consider your own present moment in the world; not to compare circumstances, but to acknowledge that circumstances are always more than they seem. That your life, at this very moment, has meaning. It’s not always easy to appreciate that fact, and it’s not always an inviting task.
But it’s certainly rewarding. Jack, the latest novel from Robinson, has ample pleasures, rarely separable from the potent spiritual and existential concepts and stirring emotions conjured by her narrative.
The poet K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, “Bestiary,” offers up a different kind of narrative, full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter — and all the things in between.
People who are expecting something along the lines of the flamboyancy found in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell will be surprised at the simplicity and austerity of the writing displayed by Clarke in Piranesi. However, the book is far better for it. It is a beautiful and haunting tale that is wonderful exploration of what the mind will do when isolated.
The invention of the library as the machinery through which different lives can be accessed is sure to please readers and has the advantage of being both magical and factual. Every library is a liminal space; the Midnight Library is different in scale, but not kind. And a vision of limitless possibility, of new roads taken, of new lives lived, of a whole different world available to us somehow, somewhere, might be exactly what’s wanted in these troubled and troubling times.
Just Like You maintains that constricting societal borders, political and otherwise, can be knocked down by honest, human connection—maybe an idealized notion, but one that makes for a hopeful, compassionate read.
We’ve seen all of them appear in many stories in one form or another—misogyny and the vulnerability of women, racism and the exploitation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, the ravaging of land, fraught or broken father-son relationships. But when put together in a setting explicitly made of occupation, appropriation, and disenfranchisement, the connecting lines become clear.
Recorded history is five thousand years old. Modern science, which has been with us for just four centuries, has remade its trajectory. We are no smarter individually than our medieval ancestors, but we benefit, as a civilization, from antibiotics and electronics, vitamins and vaccines, synthetic materials and weather forecasts; we comprehend our place in the universe with an exactness that was once unimaginable. I’d found that science was two-faced: simultaneously thrilling and tedious, all-encompassing and narrow. And yet this was clearly an asset, not a flaw. Something about that combination had changed the world completely.
In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science—a scholar charged with analyzing how scientific knowledge is generated. Philosophers of science tend to irritate practicing scientists, to whom science already makes complete sense. It doesn’t make sense to Strevens. “Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence. He promises to serve as “the P. T. Barnum of the laboratory, unveiling the monstrosity that lies at the heart of modern science.”
“The Secret Life of Groceries” is part investigative journalism, part history and part philosophical meditation on how humans transfer meaning to their food choices. “The entire Michael Pollan ethos is, after all, a way of making food a bridge to the past when the world was simple and purer,” Lorr writes. Food is “the perfect stage to resolve all our tensions around consumption.” Lorr explores how the food we buy (never mind whether we actually eat it) is a proxy for our values. And as those values turn into personal choices — as well-meaning as they might be — we are complicit in the cruelties of the broader food system.
It’s happy hour at the tiki bar, and even the moon has lost
its luster—the drinks, the strippers, the lunar gravity.
In the casino at the Sea of Tranquility
my sleepless nights seem labyrinthine;
I was the first of birds to sing
I sang to signal rain