My last blog post did not have a correct title. I wrote “what I am reading”, but it was really a list of the books I had finished reading by the time of writing the blog post. Right now I am reading some really interesting books, but they must wait until next time. Now I want to share what I have read. Books have been “my friends” as long as I can remember. I love to read. My imagination can always run free in books, or I can escape into books for a breather from the real world. I also enjoy reading to learn and expand my horizons, but if my world feels too crazy or stressful, I admit that will choose escape over learning. That is fine because if reading refreshes and relaxes me mentally, then I can better cope with whatever is bugging me in the world. Some of the books I read to learn can also leave me agitated. This leaves me with a mix of relaxation and agitation, which is an odd feeling. What I take from this is a building up of knowledge so I can better discuss the topics referenced in the books.
Childrens books
Take, for example, three more Danish books from Hanegal Publishers from the 1970s. (The English translations of the titles are my own, and I am not aware that they are available in English.)
- Den lille kone der ikke havde en vogn by Hans Ovesen (1975) (“The little woman who didn’t have a wagon”)
- Pigerne Gør Oprør by Frøydis Guldahl (1979) (“The Girls Revolt”)
- Peter Fidus by Sven Wernström (1973) (“Peter Gimmick”)
These were sold as children’s books, although Peter Fidus is definitely for all. I think some would call them socialist, Marxist, or propaganda. I think that is what they were called when they were published. I first read Peter Fidus over 40 years ago, and it has stuck in my mind since then. Only recently did I notice a list of other books by Hanegal that were listed on the back of the Peter Fidus book that someone in my family owns. I decided to find and read them, and my search was successful because library! All hail libraries and librarians! (Be sure to fight for them if any authoritarians, tyrants, megalomaniacs, and so on try to take them from you and your community.)
It is fun time-travelling with these books. Or is it time-travel? The writing might be slightly dated, but much of the underlying story less so! Ovesen’s book is about the value of things. “The little woman who didn’t have a wagon” meets a wagonmaker, and together, they determine what she should pay him so that he makes a wagon for her to carry her goods to the market. That is it. It is only 30 pages long, and was apparently originally a post to hang up – or to fold and turn into a book. Clever! The book presents the concept of pricing that a child can understand, but it also emphasises the labour involved. That is, it is not just what the wood costs, but also the wagonmaker’s labour. How much is he willing to sweat over a wagon just to get some of the Little Woman’s bread? It’s a very simple concept, but in today’s gig economy or small businesses like those you see on Etsy, are we paying fair prices to the individual doing the work, and is someone somewhere skimming from those earnings?
“The Girls Revolt” is a book about feminism for tweens and teens, and comes originally from Norway. I thought it was actually quite good, and would have enjoyed it when I was that age. It is only about basic women’s rights, and doesn’t address anything about intersectionality, although that concept had already been around for several years since the founding of the Combahee River Collective a few years before this book was published. (The term intersectionality would first be coined about a decade later by Kimberlé Crenshaw.) It was written at a time when boys “could do anything” and girls were restricted to “girl jobs”. One girl revolts against this idea, and gets her friends to join the protest. An episode where the girls switch the clothing on a twin boy and a twin girl to prove the father’s bias toward pink clothing and blue clothing was hilarious. I think the book can still be read today, also to show how we still have far to go, and how we are also sliding back to this time.
“Peter Gimmick” is my favourite. Peter grows up as an orphan taken in by a priest/minister and his wife. He is treated poorly by the priest, and, when he is older, leaves home as soon as he can. He has no money and begs for food. Rich people, or people who have the things he doesn’t have, won’t help him. A poor family, that is, people who also lack the basics, are willing to help him. This was a tip the priest’s wife gave him as he was leaving his home. That saves him because it is through the poor that he manages to get some food when the rich turn him away. He makes it to the big city, and here is where his wits start to make money for him. He comes up with ideas (gimmicks) that help rich people get richer. The rich supermarket owner wails that he is losing money and will have “fewer millions” on hand than normal. How “fewer millions” means poverty to this rich person is a mystery to Peter, but he helps the guy. He says people need milk and bread so… put them at the back of the store so people are forced to walk through the entire store to get the basics. The people will invariably buy other things they see as they head for the items they really need. This really caught my attention because… isn’t that how shops are designed everywhere? Peter is basically an advertising whiz, who knows how to manipulate people to buy things so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sound familiar? This book aged nicely. Unfortunately, I might add. We are still being manipulated to buy, buy, buy, and how much happiness has that brought us? For anyone who knows about Danish illustrators, this book is illustrated by the late great Claus Deleuran. His illustrations are part of what makes this a great book.
I was entertained by another middle-grade adventure in the Witchlings series by Claribel A. Ortega. Book number three is House of Elephants where the young witch, Seven, and her friends must found out who is causing trouble for spare witches, the witches who do not gain the privileges of belonging to a specific house of witches. This is obviously a story about a marginalised group being threatened by those who have privilege and want to keep it all to themselves. I think Ortega has done a fine job of telling a story that has inclusive language, strives to speak up and speak out about marginalisation, and fights for inclusion and equality. I never had books like this when I was twelve, and I think there are a ton of great books out for kids these days that are good at discussing big and important topics at a level that kids understand, but which are also written in a way that an adult can enjoy, too.
Graphic novels
David F. Walker tackled a potentially daunting task with illustrator Marcus Kwame Anderson by writing The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. I think he succeeds in giving you a high-level history in 183 pages. I am white so I vaguely remember stories of the Black Panthers as I was growing up. Those stories painted the Black Panthers as the bad guys, of course, because of the systemic racism in society. In 2020, at the Copenhagen Dox (online) film festival, I saw Dope is Death, which blew my mind. Here I learned that the Black Panthers, together with the Young Lords, had a way to fight and end heroin addiction in black and brown communities in New York City in the 1970s. That was a story that was never in mainstream news at that time. Considering the opioid crisis in the U.S., I thought it was so idiotic that society would throw away an opportunity to truly help people just because the help was coming from “the bad guys”. That is when I began to learn that there was a LOT of nuance missing from the story of the Black Panthers. 183 pages isn’t much, but this is definitely a good start to get a quick look at who was who and why things were as they were in this one corner of U.S. history.
This and that
Lucy Irvine’s book Castaway was recommended to me by a woman on the Ullapool to Inverness bus I took in late September 2023. I got it through an interlibrary loan. I have no idea why this woman recommended it to me, but it came up in our very short conversation. I even think she had recommended the movie, and since that was nowhere to be found, I went for the book. (The author lived north of Inverness for a number of years, so maybe that is why it came up.) It is a crazy story. Lucy Irvine answered an ad for a “wife” to come live with a guy on a desert island for one year! The man was an author who wanted to a wife to help him out while he finished his book on this island, which was Tuin, in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia. I concluded that Irvine had a free-spirited hippie soul that led her to say yes to this crazy idea. I read the book to find out why someone had recommended it to me. I worried that it was a story of privilege – white woman writing a book about living on a desert island and later meeting the people who lived in the area. However, it was more a story of nature (and sometimes humans doing stupid things in said nature) and Irvine’s genuine love for the island they were on and for the people who had lived in the area for countless generations. Those people, the Torres Strait Islanders, actually saved their lives. It is a wild story. Spoiler: She did not stick with the guy she lived with on the island. Thank goodness!
I’ll briefly mention two of the books I read since my last post. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. I am a sucker for books about bookshops and/or bibliophiles, so Days was a pleasant interlude. Meditations sounded like a self-help book, but I had heard so much about it, that I thought I would give it a try. I enjoyed what it did for me. It gave me time each day for 28 days to stop and think about how I lived my life and what I wanted to do with my life. There was a lot of down-to-earth advice and philosophising. A few insights were new, but it was actually a way to frame one’s thoughts about stopping to smell the roses (sorry for the cliché) and truly thinking about what you need or want in life. One bit of inspiration I got was to be better at letting go of thoughts of work when I am out walking so I can truly relax and not drag a lot of stress with me when I am out and about. One of those things that you know is obvious, but can be so hard to do.
It was a joy to read Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree. I loved his Legends & Lattes, and Bookshops is the prequel (which was written after Legends!) This is cosy queer lit, which is so soothing for the soul. The main character is Viv, an orc, who is forced to rest after a major injury in a swordfight. Yes, the bookshop of the title attracted me, but I knew Travis Baldree could deliver a comfort read. I loved the ratkin who owned the bookshop, the dwarf who had hung up her mace to become a baker (and have a fling with Viv!), and the skeleton named Satchel. Satchel’s bones assemble and “come to life” when you sprinkle bonedust on them…! Bookshops was also a necessary soul cleanser after I read Careless People.
Current events
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams was an eye-opener. I joined Facebook in 2005, to connect me to friends and family, but I never gave its owner a second thought. I know there is no such thing as a free lunch, meaning my data is what pays for Facebook. But I never noticed Facebook in the news really because I didn’t care about it. Reading this book was a painful eye-opener. Now I understand why Zuck has behaved as he has in the past year. His behaviour is not new. He has built up to this for years on his own or from the company he kept. And ugh, what a company he keeps!
This is not the first whistleblower book on Facebook, but the first I have read. I did wonder, as I am sure others will, why Wynn-Williams didn’t get out sooner. Also, how much was she complicit in going along with some of the policies, despite saying she was against them. At some times, she even seemed quite naive to go push for her ideas after seeing how her visions were definitely not aligned with the visions of the FB team. Despite wondering about these issues, I think this is not about the author, but about FB. It is the practices at FB and the stories of FB that the reader should focus on. The lack of human feeling at the top level is disgusting, and the place IS indeed run by careless people. They are out of touch with any reality. The only reality they know is their own. This is the perfect example of a book that left me agitated after reading because I was repulsed by the utterly selfish behavious at FB. This book confirms why we should all be Luddites. I’ll explain that later!
In the category “Current events”, I also read newsletters, which happen to recommend books, too, along the way. My top newsletters include:
- Blood in the Machine with Brian Merchant (and the System Crash podcast he does with Paris Marx)
- Disconnect with Paris Marx (and his Tech Won’t Save Us podcast)
- How to survive the Broligarchy with Carol Cadwalladr
- The Big Picture with multiple good writers and The Status Kuo with Jay Kuo
- Thinking about… with Timothy Snyder
- History can’t hide with Kahlil Greene
Check them out when you have a moment! By the way, the newsletters are mostly on Substack, which I know has its issues, but these are some good writers with very relevant content that I want to read. Here’s a commentary on the Substack situation (on Substack) that I think explains the dilemma for writers pretty well.