“On Freedom” isn’t a book about morality but about abolition in the abstract sense: defunding the cop in your mind. Nelson wants her reader to move past seeing individuals, or even humanity itself, as “good” or “bad.” “On Freedom” asks us, in the face of anxiety and uncertainty and in defiance of a mass culture of blame-seeking, to move past our lust for punishment into a place of acceptance.
Reading, of course, brings me a lot of joy. But bookish rituals keep me grounded. When I started looking for them, and then deliberately cultivating them, it became obvious what an important role they play in my life.
How could our insignificant little lives – our day jobs and dinner parties, unanswered emails and bad first dates, minuscule insecurities and anxieties – possibly matter in the face of looming economic, social and environmental collapse? What is the value of sex and friendship, and literature about sex and friendship, when the world is quite literally burning?
In Sally Rooney’s fiction, they still matter very much.
I found the novel’s defensiveness about the moral dubiousness of its aesthetic project kind of charming, but also frustrating. Yet, for all that, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is Rooney’s best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.
Setting a feminist story in the 12th century is no easy feat. There's always the possibility of coming on too strong and imposing modern ideologies onto a period where they may not be as believable as the author hopes.
But Lauren Groff's Matrix is an inspiring novel that truly demonstrates the power women wield, regardless of the era. It has sisterhood, love, war, sex — and many graphic deaths, all entangled in a once-forgotten abbey in the English countryside.
There's not a story in Hao that's anything less than gorgeous. Ye, who's also a literary translator, has an uncanny ability to explore the vocabularies that we build around ourselves, the ways that we communicate, and what happens when those break down. It's a beautiful collection that looks at people who have nothing but their words — until they don't.
An index is an arsy-versy tool: it enables us to sneak into a book from the rear end, saving the time it would take to advance through the text from the beginning. Jonathan Swift, quoted by Dennis Duncan in his witty and wide-ranging study of the subject, compares readers who use such short cuts to travellers entering a palace through the privy.