I spent a lot of this year ruminating on time: what it is, how we measure it, and why we’re so loathe to waste it. Calendars are not just neutral containers for our weeks, months, and years, but unique cultural artifacts that shape our temporal relations with nature and each other.
Because I teach, study, and write about revolutionary and utopian movements throughout history, I’m fascinated that so many past social dreamers have attempted to reorder time as part of their plans to reimagine the world.
The Julian calendar came into effect in 45 BC, and served as the primary calendar of the Roman Empire and of medieval Europe for about 1600 years. Outdated astronomical calculations caused the Julian Calendar to add an extra day every 128 years, so after over a millennium and a half of use, Pope Gregory XIII corrected the Julian Calendar in 1582. His papal bull established what we now call the Gregorian calendar, which has become the hegemonic calendar of global capitalism.
Eastern Orthodox Christians never accepted this papal reform and continued to use the Julian system. Tsarist Russia also rejected the Gregorian calendar, which is why the thing we often refer to as the “October Revolution” actually happened on November 7, 1917 by the Gregorian calendar (October 25 by the Julian calendar). When the new Bolshevik government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, they wiped thirteen days out of existence by administrative decree: February 1 became February 14—tough luck if you had a birthday or an anniversary in those two lost weeks.
The French Revolutionary Calendar rejected the temporal imperialism of the Pope and was in use for about twelve years between 1793 and 1805, reappearing briefly during the Paris Commune in 1871. The year started in autumn and proceeded through twelve equal months of thirty days each named after seasonal phenomena. I find the French attempt to secularize time both poetic and radical. Why not obey the rhythms of the weather around Paris rather than some arbitrary ecclesiastical authority in Rome?
In honor of those radical utopians who challenged the tyranny of other people’s horology, I’ve organized my Year in Reading using the French revolutionary names for the relevant months on the Gregorian calendar.
Nivôse
I shared the longest nights of the year with Oliver Burkeman’s amazing book, 4000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which knocked me off my chair and made me rethink my entire approach to productivity. I measure my days in items crossed off to-do lists, and Burkeman’s slim volume provided the wakeup call I desperately needed. Good time management doesn’t mean squeezing more things into our already crowded schedules, but rather being ruthlessly deliberate about how we use our precious 4000 weeks. I started the new (Gregorian) year with a commitment to say “no” more often so I could dedicate more hours to reading.
Pluviôse
Angela Saini is a British science journalist and her brilliant book, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, got me through the dark, cold, bleariness of the month of Valentine’s Day. Saini and I research and write about similar things (and we are both big Star Trek fans), so reading this one was like vibing with an intellectual sister. She shows how patriarchal forms of power are not “natural” or inevitable, but that part of the secret to their longevity is making themselves appear so.
Ventôse
I finally listened to the audiobook of Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story as the days started to get longer and warmer. I’ve been a U2 fan since the early 1980s and this was one book that had to be heard rather than read because of all the musical interludes. For several weeks, I felt like I was having a personal conversation with, and enjoying a private concert from, this iconic rock & roll front man.
Germinal
I needed a little anarchism in my life to match the remarkable self-organization of the Pennsylvania spring. David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, Or the Real Libertalia, is a provocative exploration of the history of pirate settlements in Madagascar where Graeber conducted ethnographic fieldwork for his doctoral research. By examining the largely forgotten history of the radical self-government practiced by former mutineers, Graeber challenged me to reconsider the origins of the European Enlightenment once again, providing a refreshing reminder that there have always been pockets of human societies which have thrived in the absence of coercive authority.
Floréal
I was so grateful to do a launch event for my own most recent book at the Philadelphia Free Library with the incomparable Arwa Mahdawi, a columnist for The Guardian U.S. In preparation for our discussion, I dove into her Strong Female Lead: Lessons from Women in Power, which cleverly dissects the way that leadership has been conflated with masculinity. Crisply written and well argued, Mahdawi’s book forced me to confront the ugly persistence of stereotypes about competence and authority that still disadvantage those who don’t identify as men.
Prairial
Publishers sent me several advanced readers’ copies this year, and by far the most entertaining was It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and Move On by Malaika Jabali. This short, spunky, and insightful volume is lushly designed and illustrated by Kayla E. For someone curious to learn more about socialism for the first time, this book provides the perfect introductory primer to why the free-market sucks.
Messidor
My adult daughter had been pestering me for a at least a year to read The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I spent the first month of summer traveling, so I packed the paperback in my carry-on. To be honest, it took me a while to get into this one, but once I realized that the disorientation and scatteredness of the first fifty pages reflected the disorientation and scatteredness of what it’s like to be a first-year student at an elite university like Harvard, I fell in love with it. It definitely made me more empathetic to those eighteen-year-olds who show up on campus every fall at Penn.
Thermidor
Among my guiltiest pleasures are comic books, graphic novels, and manga. As the heat spiked, I devoured Volumes I and II of the omnibus collections of Saint Young Men. I only recently discovered this quirky manga about Jesus and the Buddha taking a gap year from heaven to live in contemporary Tokyo. As they try to hide their divinity and behave as ordinary young adults living in the material world, the two spiritual leaders face the challenges of modern life, a literal manifestation of the theory of immanence. Their amusing adventures provide an interesting (and sometimes hilarious) perspective on Christianity and Buddhism.
Fructidor
The beginning of my semester found me reading a piece of utopian climate fiction (cli-fi) by the debut Maine author, Nick Fuller Googins. The Great Transition follows the story of a young woman named Emi living in the post-capitalist utopia of Nuuk, Greenland. Emi’s parents are heroes of the Climate Corps, who helped the world finally achieve net zero emissions. The family is drawn into a complex web of intrigue as they travel to a ruined New York City. A page-turner chock full of optimistic ideas for how we can co-create our collective future, The Great Transition is a necessary antidote to climate doom and nihilism.
Vendémiaire
Since Vendémiaire is the official start of the new year for the French Revolutionary calendar, I returned to the theme of time. Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock is a profound and eye-opening history of our contemporary relationship with temporality and the ways in which industrialization and global capitalism have warped our ability to think of hours as anything other than fixed units to be bartered, bought, sold, or “wasted.” Odell excavates all sorts of wonderful examples of efficiency manuals, productivity secrets, and life hacks aimed at making us all more obedient to our chronometers.
Brumaire
For the penultimate month of the year, I’m reading two different books, Cat Bohannan’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution and an advanced reader copy of The Other Significant Others: Reimaginng Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen. Bohannan’s book is a sweeping work of evolutionary anthropology that has managed to suck me into an entire universe of contemporary scientific debates about, for example, the species-defining importance of female reproductive choice, about why human (and orca) menopause is among “the biggest mysteries in modern biology,” and why old-fashion sexism is no longer doing the job it was “evolved to do.” The Other Significant Others boldly explores a topic that is near and dear to my heart: how to share our lives more capaciously outside of the confines of our romantic relationships and our blood-related kin.
Frimaire
The book I plan to read for the final month of 2023 is an advanced reader copy of the latest novel by Sarah Braunstein: Bad Animals. As an ardent fan of Braunstein’s New Yorker short stories, I’m eager to dive into this tale of a small-town librarian drawn into a complex plot for literary appropriation, hopefully curled up in a heated blanket with a steaming cup of herbal tea. If I only have 4000 weeks in my life, then I want to spend as many of them as possible buried in my books!
More from A Year in Reading 2023
A Year in Reading Archives: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
