Reading Round-Up, 6/30/2016

Happy (early) Fourth of July to my fellow Americans! I’ll be heading off to Vermont for a long weekend, and I hope everyone, from the U.S. or not, has a good weekend lined up. My weekend will be…fun, for sure, but also probably relative sleepless, as traveling with a 3-year-old has its challenges. But that’s okay.

As for recent reading, one of the highlights is Brian Blanchfield’s essay collection Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. It’s a short collection but one to read slowly: it’s rich and meaty and repays close attention. It’s hard to describe. Each essay has a theme, but they range widely, taking the reader to unexpected places before bringing the reader back to the theme again. They fit the classic definition of what an essay can be: experimental, probing, associative, voice-driven. They play with language a lot. They aren’t for every reader — they require a willingness to dwell in complex thought and language — but are beautiful and rewarding.

I also read and loved Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, a memoir about life in science. Jahren studies plants, and she writes about plants from their point of view, or at least she tries to, attempting to look at the world as a plant might, with its own concerns and interests. It’s impossible to know, of course, but it feels like she really knows how a plant thinks (or “thinks”). She describes her struggles as a beginning scientist and what it’s like to establish one’s own lab, fight for funding, and establish a reputation. She writes about her struggles with mental illness as well. It’s really great, definitely one to read for anyone who is interested in science, but good for any reader of memoir as well.

Right now I’m reading an essay collection by Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, a novel by Nicola Barker, The Cauliflower, and a memoir by Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World. More on those books later!