January 2025 Reads

Well, here we are, possibly at the bitter end of the American experiment, still reading books made out of paper, but for how much longer? Hopefully we'll manage to smuggle books into Musk's forced labor camps. On that cheerful note, here's what I read last month:

Fiction
​Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs. I'm writing about Boggs's nonfiction book, The Art of Waiting, (which, now that I think about it should also be on this stack, because I reread it last month as well), and wanted to get a taste of her fiction. I really enjoyed the stories that make up Mattaponi Queen--which is a series of linked stories whose characters overlap in various ways in this small, rural community in the southeast (I'm gonna say Virginia?). The characters were interesting and charming, and the stories were satisfying in a way that short stories often aren't.

While Christmas shopping, I came across this fat collection of the first three (of four) Jacqueline Kirby novels by Elizabeth Peters: The Seventh Sinner, The Murders of Richard III, and Die for Love. These are wildly entertaining murder mysteries with university librarian (turned romance novelist in later books) and amateur sleuth Jacqueline Kirby as the main character (who also happens to be one of the rare middle aged mothers of grown children who get to also be glamorous protagonists). All three books involve small, insular groups of particularly wacky characters: foreign students with art or archaeology fellowships in Rome; a society devoted to clearing Richard III of the murders of his nephews; and romance novelists and their fans. The first two have the clever device of being written from the POV of a secondary character; the third one hops around among Jacqueline's POV and that of at least two other characters in a jarring fashion. The third book also starts out with an exceptionally outrageous premise and very kooky characters, so I was prepared to not enjoy it, but it comes around over time (or one gets used to the weird cast of unbelievable people).

Nonfiction
I just happened to pick up How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell because it was shelved next to a book I was actually looking for at the bookstore. I was surprised by how little of a how-to it was, considering the title (I guess maybe we don't need to be told how to just chill, though maybe we do?). It was, in fact, a lot of philosophical musing on American culture, which I found interesting if a little slow at times. That being said, it's an excellent book for these times, considering how the way we've handed over our attention to some of the worst people on earth over the last 20 years, making them extraordinarily wealthy (through both advertising and monetizing our data) and putting them in position to destroy democracy.

Unrelated to any specific advice from the book (of which there's very little), I've done a number of things to withdraw my attention from the corporate overlords most directly responsible fore or collaborative with the current coup d'etat in Washington:

• I had deleted my Twitter account a long time ago, not long after the nazi took it over (even before he was sieg heiling on TV it was obvious who/what he was).
  
• I deleted my Meta (Facebook and Instagram) accounts. (I would delete WhatsApp too, except I'd have to download the app to do it, and I refuse to give Zuckerberg even that much of a data hit.) (Also, I deleted Twitter at least a year ago--way before it became clear that Musk was the one person most likely to bring down the USA).
• I deleted my Goodreads account. (I rarely use Amazon for anything else--maybe order off it once a year, never go to Whole Foods, never watch anything on Prime, and I have maybe six books in Kindle, which I don't care about losing. I buy books from local bookstores or off bookshop.org, and I get my audiobooks are on Libro.fm. I have a half dozen books on Kindle, which I wouldn't care about losing either. Did you know that bookshop.org now has ebooks? And of course, there's the library.)
• I'm trying to figure out how to disentangle from Google. I already avoided using Chrome, and I'd quit the search engine months ago because it had become such garbage (I've been using Duck Duck Go, but now I'm trying Ecosia). I never switched my email to gmail because I didn't want to deal with the hassle, and now I'm immensely grateful for that bit of laziness. But I have a lot of stuff on Google Drive, which I'm now downloading to my hard drive and deleting, at the rate of one folder every day or so. I'll also be looking for an alternative file sharing platform (suggestions welcome). I also have a huge archive of my old blogspot/blogger blog, which I don't want to delete, because and can't afford to turn into a book (it would cost about $1000 due to the amount of entries I have!).
• I'm trying to be intentional about minimizing time spent scrolling (having deleted those other social media accounts, I joined Substack and Bluesky, which have the same addictive qualities--especially when horrors and atrocities are being committed by the minute). Instead, I'm focusing on spending time on analog activities: reading (paper books!), walking in the woods, drawing and painting, yoga, writing letters, going to museums, getting together with friends. This, I think, is the message somewhat buried in How to Do Nothing: that for a fulfilling and meaningful life, we need to live in the real world. Attention is not only money, it is power, and what we give our attention to we give our power to; so I want to take my power back from pixels and billionaires and direct it toward things that I love.