Barnes & Noble may not have such a radical and diverse cache of books, but it does offer the possibility of discovery in a way that algorithms and screens simply cannot. We need indie booksellers, but at this point, we need all the physical bookstores we can get. We need as many opportunities as possible to encounter books in the wild, offline, books we can pick up and be surprised by, books in spaces we can mill about and share with others.
I now know of Haunts as a strange, swim-y, cult book. In it, Sprawson works his way through every writer or artist to have ever so much as mentioned swimming. Through the eccentric swimmers who commit their lives to rivers, lakes and seas, Sprawson comes to understand the role of swimming in cultures as disparate as Weimar Germany and Japan’s Samurais. Like a conspiracy theorist he connects rough sea shingle to the class of boarding-school boys imposing themselves on politics to this day; he draws a line from octopus porn to waterfall swimming. Perhaps his greatest achievement is not that he includes so much, but that his connections, even at their most strained, are always persuasive.
Renewable energy is at a curious crossroads. It’s needed to avert further climate damage, and solar and wind power are now remarkably cheap. But even clean-energy proponents often dislike the aesthetics of the new technology. They’re happy for solar arrays and windmills to exist somewhere—just not within sight. Many homeowners’ associations refuse to let residents install panels.
This is the great new shift we’re facing. For decades, gas- and coal-fired plants were tucked far away from view. But now, power generation is visible all over. “There’s really no other energy source that people have that personal relationship with,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.
Yet this struggle has a long history. Ironically, coal itself faced a similar pushback in the early 19th century, when it was the newfangled power source that promised to solve many of the country’s problems.
Throughout Nada Alic’s debut fiction collection, “Bad Thoughts,” sunny facades belie strange, dark interiors. The stories feature a privileged millennial milieu in Los Angeles with all its carefully observed trappings — neutral linens at a baby shower, destination bachelorette weekends, social media obsessions, alternative wellness practices and a chic, spare loft “furnished with gray modular furniture resembling life-size Lego pieces.”
Alic’s characters fear environmental catastrophe and freely discuss mental illness, but it’s all casual, often glib. At first, superficial appearances, 280-character missives and quick fixes seem to take precedence over authenticity or real intimacy. “Their generation had become utilitarian, efficient, machinelike,” Alic writes about a couple in “Ghost Baby.” But eventually, each story pushes into weirder, more vulnerable territory as it captures the (usually female) narrator’s borderline perverse thoughts.
Music journalists tend to be square pegs of one shape or another, and Kessler’s is a rip-snorting account of a misspent youth well spent; a background full of secrets and lies, French skinheads and sticky fingers. You’ll feel for him. His American father abandoned the family for a second brood, prompting the teenage music obsessive to leave home (then outside Paris) and return to London to duck, dive and skim the till in record shops until he found a way to turn an obsession into an income.
Land Healer is a deeply felt, often very moving book about farming; it is also a celebration of the British landscape and a record of Fiennes’s strange, itinerant life.