May was a great reading month, but I forgot to upload my notes until June was
nearly done. This month I read nine books, but one was an unpublished draft of
a novel that a friend is writing, so I won’t say more about that, until there
is more news to share. The other fiction reads this month could not be more
different from each other. Beyond the Light
Horizon
concludes Ken MacLeod’s most recent
politically charged Scotland-based near-future science fiction trilogy. The
ending was a bit rushed for my taste, but it was an enjoyable ride along the
way.
Alexis Wright’s
Praiseworthy
could not be more different. A gargantuan (736 page) novel, it reads like a
stream of consciousness. It is set in the north of Australia, with a cast of
indigenous characters making their way in a surreal world falling apart around
them. I was enchanted by the rhythm and the texture and the distinctive voice
of the words, sentences and paragraphs, while I struggled to hold the whole
thing in view. It’s not an easy read, but it is up there with the most
memorable novels I’ve read in the last few years.
For nonfiction, I’ve also been attempting to expand my reading horizon with
more indigenous and non-Western authors. So, Tim Hollo
recommended Vanessa Machado
de
OIiviera’s
Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of
Living,
I picked this up and learned a lot from her framing of our modern
industrialised capitalist society as dying, and the appropriate response,
rather than attempting to shore it up or to preemptively construct some
replacement (while our imaginations are captured by our current ways of
living), but rather to grieve the losses and provide hospice care as we live
in this time of transition.
Two nonfiction books had explicitly theological themes. I enjoyed Christian
Wiman’s
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against
Despair
for its poetic voice and insight into the human condition and the meaning of
faith, while John Behr’s The Mystery of Christ:
Life in
Death
was a useful account of a distinctively Orthodox perspective on theology.
Three philosophy books rounded out the month:
Reputation
(Gloria Origgi), recommended by Alex
Douglas, was a fun read on how our evaluations of each
other—and our self-regard for how we’ve been so evaluated—drives so much
human behaviour. A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford
1900–60
(Nikhil Krishnan) was a very helpful (and
opinionated) account of what made Philosophy at Oxford the distinctive thing
that it became in the heyday of ordinary language philosophy. (There is a lot
to say about the outsized role Oxford has played in English-speaking philosophy
in the 20th Century, both for good and for ill.)
But the most purely fun read of the month was Nick
Riggle’s delightful On Being Awesome: A Unified
Theory of How Not to
Suck.
This was recommended by C. Thi Nguyen in
conversation last year when he came through St Andrews, and I finally made time
to read it. I cannot describe how jarring (in a good way) it is to read a
serious work of moral philosophy which makes careful distinctions of the
different ways in which things might be awesome or things might suck,
taking as much care to delineate the different ways one might be down (to
take up a social opening), whether you are chill, up, or game. (Yes, when
you read this, you will find yourself nodding along as you realise that you
already have some understanding of the distinctions being drawn.) It was a
delight to read paragraphs like this
“Kant’s ethics focuses on our obligations—what we ought to do—given the mere
fact that we can ask, “What should I do?” The fact that we can ask this
question implies that we can stand back from and consider our impulses and
inclinations—we aren’t always animated by pure instinct but by motives that
are refined by thought and reflection. We can ask, “Would it suck if I never
said hello to my neighbors?” or “That person over there is doing an
impressive job. Would it be awesome to tell them that?” (On Being
Awesome,
Nick Riggle, Chapter 3.)
and to feel the motivational force of the language. Yes, it would suck if I
never acknowledged my neighbours, and yes, it is awesome to acknowledge and
others’ individuality and their efforts.
