Books I'm Currently Reading

I love being home. I am easily closest with my family, and holidays with them relax me like none other.

The waffled couch in our living room is possibly the only place I have ever been able to consistently nap during the day, and I have slept for maybe eighteen hours of the last twenty-four—to the buzz of lawn mowers and toddler voices and the dogs' paws scrabbling down the stairs because they fall down them every time. My kind of white noise. I'm not sure, in the past few weeks, whether I've gotten exponentially better at cultivating peace or am just especially grateful for it.

I hope to write most of my articles for the next week with a two- or five-year old hanging onto my lap and possibly contributing a misplaced letter or two. I haven't charged my phone in at least two days, so it feels vaguely like 2015 again.

This year, I am especially glad we still have our home intact after the chaos of two(!) hurricanes that did wipe out other family and friends' homes. I'm especially happy to have a week ahead to do very little other than read. And a thousand reviews to write or transfer over from the old site as I rebuild the WLS review archive.

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And now for what's currently in my library queue.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Novel: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Release Date: March 17, 2020
Publisher: S&S/Saga Press
Format: eBook
Source: Library

From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That's how war works, right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

I've seen this book around a lot over the last year or so. It took on a new momentum after one recommendation went particularly viral, which had a complete flywheel effect. It's short, so relatively consumable, but also packed with a lot of thought. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the idea of romance at the moment, but can absolutely often be swept away by a good fictional one. Needless to say, it's the exact kind of "brain food" book that's been on my to-read list for forever.

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

Book: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
Release Date: June 1, 2021
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Format: eBook
Source: Library

A groundbreaking exploration of why we want what we want, and a toolkit for freeing ourselves from chasing unfulfilling desires.

Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there's a psychological force just as powerful—yet almost nobody has heard of it. It's responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.

According to Girard, humans don't desire anything independently. Human desire is mimetic--we imitate what other people want. This affects the way we choose partners, friends, careers, clothes, and vacation destinations. Mimetic desire is responsible for the formation of our very identities. It explains the enduring relevancy of Shakespeare's plays, why Peter Thiel decided to be the first investor in Facebook, and why our world is growing more divided as it becomes more connected.

Wanting also shows that conflict does not arise because of our differences—it comes from our sameness. Because we learn to want what other people want, we often end up competing for the same things. Ignoring our large similarities, we cling to our perceived differences.

Drawing on his experience as an entrepreneur, teacher, and student of classical philosophy and theology, Burgis shares tactics that help turn blind wanting into intentional wanting—not by trying to rid ourselves of desire, but by desiring differently. It's possible to be more in control of the things we want, to achieve more independence from trends and bubbles, and to find more meaning in our work and lives.

The future will be shaped by our desires. Wanting shows us how to desire a better one.

I actually just finished this one so will review it shortly. In the style of bro-wellness writers like James Clear, Adam Grant, and Malcolm Gladwell, Wanting pulls from social psychology, productivity research, and a strange (but delightful) array of case studies across Silicon Valley, fiction, and more to support his point that we often want something just because other people do. In the same spirit as unconscious influences and Stoic detachment and the class- and family-oriented development of our value systems, we are much less in control of our desire than we believe (but can also channel that awareness in helpful ways.) Contradictarily, we want what other people do but are seemingly drawn to people who seem not to fall into this trap.

There's so much to pick apart within this book too, from how we construct influencers/tastemakers/models worth embodying, how we often struggle with people more similar to us than different, the patterns of habits we construct, etc,. etc,. All in all, illuminative albeit all over the place. It even incorporates insights into the development of AI, the flattened globalization of the Internet, etc,. etc,.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Book: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Release Date: March 13, 2018
Publisher: Mariner Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library

The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.

A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.

In the past year or so, I've given a lot of thought to the evolutionary purpose of emotions. I would consider myself an emotional person (I'm a writer, after all) but also a very restrained and disciplined one. I've gotten better at identifying when I am feeling anything because I'm overwhelmed versus when it's actually significant. What to let pass and what to hold onto. I'm also incredibly annoying about any sort of psychological trivia i.e. the amygdala's role in our fear response came up yesterday in family discussion and I took the chance to immediately bring up this book. "Actually, we discovered the emotion isn't as centralized as we thought! Different people activate fear differently in the brain!"

Anyway, I'll pretty much read anything that promises to explain why we do something the way that we do.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Book: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Release Date: May 5, 1992
Publisher: Vintage Books
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

I have a current working theory that Cormac McCarthy is catnip for men (as I have a friend who's brought up this book every single time he's seen me out for the last month, among others.) I've read and loved The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men, but thought Blood Meridian might be a little violent for me. Even the description has me momentarily squeamish.

Needless to say, it's been in my queue because (3) separate men have recommended it to me this year and thus it feels particularly valuable to my ability to make small talk in glittery eyeshadow over a glass of chardonnay on a Friday night. Mmm, scalping and Western masculinity.