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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Gratuitous: How Sexism Threatens to Undermine the Internet
1.
In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky explains why personal blogs and social networking sites can sometimes confound us. He argues that before the internet, it was easy to tell what was a broadcast and what was a private message. A television show was a broadcast -- a message meant for a large audience of people, a public message. A telephone call, on the other hand, was a private message, meant for one other person. On the internet, though, the difference between the two kinds of media is much smaller. Is a personal blog a public or a private communication? Is it meant for mass consumption by thousands or millions of people? Not typically, and yet it can be read, theoretically, by billions.
This blurring of the two types of media is so difficult to grasp that it's produced its own near-ubiquitous straw man argument, which blogger Jason Kottke calls "the breakfast question." It comes up whenever anyone writes about social media: "Why would I care what you ate for breakfast that morning?" Shirky's rebuttal to this is succinct:
"It's simple. They're not talking to you. We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read.
I've been thinking about this particular idea a lot lately as it applies to Tumblr. For those who are unfamiliar with Tumblr, it's a blogging platform that categorizes posts into one form or another -- text, photo, chat, audio, video. It allows you to put out small bursts of content, which then goes into a feed. People can follow you, just as they can on Twitter, and they can "like" your posts and re-blog them. Tumblr offers a combination of Twitter's viral capabilities with a more customizable experience that allows for a tremendous level of personal expression.
I'm something of a Tumblr addict. It is the first thing I check in the morning -- before my email, before my Facebook page, but after I have some coffee (Some addictions are more powerful than others). What I love about it is the social interaction. I follow a large number of personal blogs that post funnier, more creative versions of "Here's what I had for breakfast." (I was following a blog that was, literally, about what people ate for breakfast, but I dropped it. I guess they weren't talking to me.) I also follow a bunch of themed blogs –The New Yorker Tumblr, for instance. They don't interact much with me, and that's fine. They're kind of like highly focused magazines, and I enjoy them accordingly.
But if that's all Tumblr was, I don't think it would be quite so important to me. It's the community that makes it special. Checking my Tumblr feed is like checking in with my friends, even if these "friends" are people I know very little about and will possibly never meet in real life. I met most of these people through friends of friends or via the social discovery that re-blogging affords. I somehow stumbled into their worlds, and they were interesting enough to make me want to come back. I interact with enough of them that I can pretty clearly say that when they post something, it is intended for me. I'm part of their small group, and I have no qualms about that.
Lisa, on the other hand, is a different matter. Lisa is a college student at a large university in the Midwest (and Lisa is not her name; I don't know whether she would want a bunch of book nerds suddenly reading her posts or not, so I'm not going to link to her blog here, either). She seems pretty smart, and she blogs about her love life, her schoolwork, her friends, and all of the other things that matter to her. I find Lisa's life very interesting, and her blog is great. But I haven't completely settled the "is she talking to me" question. While Lisa follows me back, we don't interact with each other. She uses Tumblr in a very social way, she isn't really part of the crowd of people whom I otherwise follow. And I find this somewhat troubling.
2.
At this point, I need to lay a few things on the table. First, I don't have a lot of close friends. My wife has several friends with whom she speaks on a regular basis. They talk about the things that are happening in their lives and how they feel about them. I don't have that. I'm a social person, and there are certainly people I love to have dinner with, meet at a party, etc., but ever since college that kind of close friendship has eluded me. And I think I'm okay with that, for the most part. But you could certainly argue that I use Tumblr to fill some void in my life, as pathetic as that might sound.
Also, Lisa is very attractive. And Tumblr has a way of encouraging people's vanity. On Wednesdays, for example, there's a tradition of posting a photo of yourself; this is known as Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Wednesday (GPOYW). This has the effect of sexualizing a lot of Tumblr blogs, to the point that my wife, Edan, hated it for months and months after I joined because she felt like every woman on it focused so much of her attention on her sexuality. I think she's probably right, though that was largely about who I was following (I used to run with a bad crowd, man). So let me just clear this up for you: I'm not following Lisa because she's hot or because I'm a perv. Let's be honest, if I wanted to look at 20 year-old girls, there are other places to do it; this is the internet we're talking about. Also, Edan, now on Tumblr, follows Lisa, too. We talk about her posts with each other. "She needs to dump that guy; he's bad news. He won't even hold her hand!" Edan will say. "He's a college kid. What do you expect?" I'll reply.
While I can't deny that gender plays a role here, that's not all there is to it. I like following her because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling. Following her blog is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone's daily life). She's my Jersey Shore.
But of course, Lisa isn't a reality TV character, she's a real person. Yes, I know Snooki is real, too, but celebrities are different. The fact that Lisa could walk the streets of every city in the world with complete anonymity makes her situation fundamentally different from, well, The Situation's. There are different laws governing pictures of celebrities and real people. Celebrities belong to us -- the public -- in ways that private citizens do not. And treating real people, regular people, the same way we treat celebrities, is problematic. And let’s not forget that Snooki and her ilk are paid to be in the public eye and to put up with all that entails.
3.
A few weeks ago, I went to an performance exhibition by my friend, the artist Charlie White. It was called Casting Call, and according to its website it was meant to further explore "White's ongoing interest in the complexities of the American teen as cultural icon, image, and national idea." For the exhibition, an art gallery was converted into two rooms, each separated from the other by a pane of glass. On one side of the room was a casting call for teen girls exemplifying "the All American California girl" -- blonde hair, tan skin, etc. -- between the ages of 13 and 16. White and his crew interviewed the models, took a mug shot-style photograph of them, and then brought in the next girl. On the other side of the glass, an audience -- mostly art students and hipsters -- watched. Our friend Stephanie, White's partner, pointed out that everyone on our side of the glass was brunette (except, it must be pointed out, Edan) while all of the models were, of course, blonde. White and his crew discussed each girl, both amongst themselves and with the girl, as well, but we could hear none of it. We were left to interpret the scene for ourselves. "Oh, look, they're letting that girl look at the photo. They must really like her,” I said. "Yeah, either that or they could tell she was upset, and wanted to reassure her she did a good job."
A seemingly never-ending stream of girls came through the door. What fascinated me most about the entire exhibition is how quickly we could objectify the girls. I don't mean objectify them in the way that it's commonly used -- to turn them into sex objects -- though there was certainly a tinge of the erotic about the event; by objectify, I mean to make them into something not quite human, and in turn, to talk about them as though they were things rather than people. "She's too old." "I like that one, in the leopard-print shorts. She's my favorite." "Look at how weird her hair is. Why does she look like that?" It was how we talk about people when they're on television, but these people were merely a few feet away. The pane of glass, and the contrast between the brightly lit casting room and the dim audience space, was enough distance to effectively dehumanize these girls. There were other factors at work, such as the blonde California girl's status as marketing conceit and sexual totem, but I think a big reason we all felt free to dissect and dismiss these girls is because they couldn't really see us. We were, more or less, anonymous. It was especially unsettling to turn around after watching for a few minutes and see one of the girls who had been in the call standing just behind us. How long had she been there, the girl in the leopard print shorts? And how did she suddenly become so real?
4.
The internet is such a tricky place now that anonymity actually needs to be explained and defined. There are actually a couple of flavors of anonymity on the web, and each of them comes with different issues. The first kind of anonymity is the one most of us are familiar with online, the anonymous user or commenter. This user is indistinguishable from the other anonymous commenters, and they can occasionally make some useful contributions. Anonymity can allow people to be more playful than they would be normally, maybe a little bit sexier, a little bit funnier. But they can also just be thugs. This type of anonymous user crops up on nearly every blog post, and while they occasionally voice a particularly controversial opinion, they are usually there only to spew bile and throw insults at the author of the post. In the comments of this site, I once joked that "anonymous" is always such a badass (To which Max replied, "I'd like a t-shirt that says "Anonymous: Internet Badass.""). There's a reason why some sites disable anonymous commenting of this kind; having no identity carries no threat of consequences. Even if others ridicule your ideas and effectively send you back to your cave with your tail between your legs, nobody knows who "you" are, so you can return the next day to fight again.
There's a second, more nuanced type of anonymity that is possibly more prevalent than simple anonymous commenting, and that's the disguise of the pseudonym. Every message board has its trolls, those who enjoy causing trouble, dissenting from the norm, and generally putting others down. I've yet to encounter a community online that doesn't have at least one of these people. They are rarely truly anonymous, since most message boards, social sites, and other internet communities typically require a user name. Instead, these users hide behind a moniker -- sometimes employing the same user name on multiple sites. Having some sort of identity does create some consequences. Users can be banned from sites, ostracized, or otherwise punished for their behavior.
Often, though, this type of user can simply change his name. This is another form of what Jaron Lanier, in his book You Are Not a Gadget, calls "transient anonymity:"
People who can spontaneously invent a pseudonym in order to post a comment on a blog or on YouTube are often remarkably mean. Buyers and sellers on eBay are a little more civil, despite occasional disappointments, such as encounters with flakiness and fraud. Based on those data, you could conclude that it isn't exactly anonymity, but transient anonymity, coupled with a lack of consequences, that brings out online idiocy.
On Tumblr, most people interact via their blogs which necessarily have a name attached to them. This insures that people will be generally civil. It is also an opt-in system, where you have to choose who to follow, which I think adds to the welcoming feel of the platform. It takes a while to build up a following and to create a blog you can be proud of; why throw that all away by being a creep or a jerk? The value of the blogs themselves creates an added buffer against what Lanier calls "Drive-by anonymity."
But there's another element of Tumblr that I've seen cause some very disturbing encounters. Each Tumblr comes with the ability to enable a feature that allows others to ask you a question. It can also be used as a de facto messaging system. The user can then decide whether they want to post an answer to your question or delete it. The trouble starts when the user enables anonymous questions. Some people choose to leave anonymous questions enabled because it can lead to some very interesting content. For instance, if the user wrote a brave post about a disease they had, someone might leave an anonymous note about that, not wanting to reveal that they too have the disease. A more shallow but still amusing use is the frequent comment "I have a crush on you" or "I think you're beautiful," etc.
For every one such comment, there are dozens of vile, offensive comments, meant to do little other than demean the author of the blog and make them feel worse about themselves and their lives. For instance, I follow a woman who posts lots of photos of art, gorgeous film stills, great music, and, yes, sometimes pictures of herself. One day she put up the poster for the film The Girlfriend Experience, about a prostitute who spends the night with her clients, going to dinner or a movie before having sex for money. A day or two later, an anonymous person sent this message to her: "You look like you could give a pretty good "girlfriend experience." How about it? Ever given any thought to doing something like that?" My response to this post was, simply put, rage. I posted a response along the lines of "The rest of us are trying to have a civilization over here. Take that elsewhere." I was enraged that this person had used this feature of the blog to suggest that the blogger would make a good prostitute. Keep in mind that the author of this blog didn't have to make this public. I assume she did so (without comment) to shame the jerk who asked the question. But it's worth noting that there was no guarantee of attention from anyone beyond this one particular blogger. He did this solely to mess with, belittle, and intimidate the author of the blog. And he did so with impunity.
He wasn't alone. Every day, without fail, another person I follow posts a comment or question that an anonymous user asked them. These questions range from the classically juvenile ("I'm masturbating to you right now." "Take ur shirt off!") to more pointed personal assaults ("What's it like coping with your obvious addiction to sleeping pills?" "You post a lot of photos of yourself because your looks are the only thing you have going for you." "You're an obnoxious bitch who probably has no friends."). Not coincidentally, every one of these questions showed up on a blog written by a woman. So far, three bloggers that I follow have had to abandon their old online identities when creepy people began harassing them online. All of them were women.
Why are women treated differently than men online? I suppose the greater question is why they are still treated differently everywhere -- online or otherwise -- but since this post is about the web, I will focus on that. Surely there's the garden variety sexism that permeates most of our culture, where women's opinions are discounted or denigrated, and where the female form is used to sell everything from liquor to football. But I think there is something else at work online, and in many ways, it's related to the strange feeling of watching all of those girls wait to have their pictures taken, as well as my conflicted feelings about enjoying college girl Lisa's blog so much.
5.
In her groundbreaking work "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," film theorist Laura Mulvey posits that Hollywood cinema always casts the audience in the role of the masculine spectator. The camera, therefore, becomes the male gaze, and the women on screen the passive objects of its gaze:
"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative."
She argues that simply looking is a pleasurable experience, and the cinema affords this pleasure by providing an atmosphere in which men are free to look at women, for as long as they please and with clear intent. She says, "At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other." On the internet, this seems to be compounded. We're free to look with impunity, and in some cases, we are free to anonymously harass, as well. Of course, it is sometimes pleasurable to be looked at, as well. While the internet indulges both of these impulses -- to look at and to be looked at -- it seems clear to me that we have once again forced the women more often into the latter role. Despite the great leveling effect that the web has had on the media -- it's given a voice to millions of people who would otherwise largely be silent -- we are still creating a system of "sexual imbalance," in Mulvey's terms. This is most acute where the female image actually appears -- on fashion blogs, personal blogging platforms like Tumblr, and of course pornography -- but it is present, more or less, throughout the net. In fact, I’ve often found that what provokes the anonymous assaults, more often than not, are not pictures of women but arguments made by them. This suggests that the harassment is a form of maintaining the male dominance; that it possibly (and maybe often does) come from other women is irrelevant.
The key difference between the films that Mulvey dissects in her essay and the personal blogs I'm talking about is agency. The films were made by men -- men called the shots (literally) and wrote the stories that cast women in the passive roles. Obviously a personal blogger decides what to post on her blog. But while this difference is worth noting, it doesn't seem to matter much in terms of the audience's reaction. In fact, the blogger's agency frequently becomes a weapon for the blogger's critics. "Well, if she doesn't want to be called a slut, maybe she shouldn't post such provocative photos." Doesn't this sound a bit like the "She was asking for it" argument?
6.
Which brings me back to the problem of Lisa. Feeling as I do about the internet, and the role gender is fast coming to play in it, I feel implicated by her blog (through no fault of her own). Part of this comes from the hazy status of intent. Does she want me read her blog? Strangely, not long after I began this essay, someone asked her if she was comfortable with so many strangers following her daily life. She responded that she didn't care; if they wanted to read about her and look at pictures of her, that was fine. This should have absolved me of my guilt, but it didn't. I keep coming back to Mulvey's argument: Am I deriving pleasure from looking at Lisa? I am. But I also post photos of myself, thereby enjoying the pleasure of being looked at. Still, no one has ever responded to an image of me with an anonymous note saying, "You look fat" or "Nice beard, asshole." Only women have to put up with that. And that is shameful. (It’s worth noting that the hot film of the moment, The Social Network, would have us believe that social networking, at its base, is about checking out girls and stalking ex-girlfriends. It’s why the stuff was invented, to let men objectify women from a safe distance.)
And that’s what weighs on me as I follow Lisa’s blog. I’m aware of the voyeuristic aspect of following the blog of a much younger woman, but at the same time, I feel a sort of odd friendship with Lisa. If she weren’t following me back and I were merely reading her posts, as many no doubt do, in total anonymity, I think that would be different. Perhaps following back is all the recognition I need to feel like Lisa is talking to me. And it's pretty clear from reading my blog who I am: I'm Patrick, I'm in my 30s, I live in LA, and I'm married. On the internet, being yourself is no small thing.
A year ago, I read one of those rare profound utterances that Twitter produces from time to time. It came from comedian Lindsay Katai: "The Internet: Where Ladies Promote Their Boyfriends' Endeavors. Conversely, the Internet: Where Men Make Every Pretense of Appearing Single." This rang true to me then, and I've thought of it frequently while reading Tumblr, where identities are formed one post at a time over weeks and months. The posts I most look forward to reading are the posts about people's lives -- the petty failures at work, the little strange thing they observed on the bus, a photo of themselves having fun.
I suspect I'm not alone in this. This is the pleasure of online life, it seems to me. It's the reason, more than any fancy coding or user interface, that Facebook is so successful. We want to know each other, to see what's happening in other people's lives. We want, in short, to read each other's stories. But that kind of world -- one that values openness and honesty -- can't exist if half of its participants have to be constantly vigilant lest they be verbally assaulted, harassed, or worse. If we, as a culture, don't do something to combat this, then we stand to lose more than just updates about meals and photos of pets. Like it or not, we are all going to have to live more and more of our lives online. I would hope that we could make that place better than the one we now call "real life" -- a place where people are free to be themselves, yes, but also where they are free to decide what that means for themselves, without fear of humiliation or intimidation. That's a place I'd like to call home.
(Image 1: Crazy staircase at the KPMG Building in Munich, image from 72213316@N00's photostream
Images 2 & 3: courtesy Charlie White)
Ceasing to Exist: Three Months in the Social Media Detox Ward
When I was in my early-twenties, I made a new year's resolution to stop looking at myself in the mirror so much. It didn't work, of course--what else can one do with a reflection besides look at it? This year, in my late-twenties, I set a similar resolution: for four months, until April 1st, I would turn away from Facebook and Twitter. I had grown bored, obsessed, bothered, even--I admit it--enamored with my reflection there. And lord help me if I found myself at midnight yet again, drinking a glass a wine and scrolling through wedding photos of a friend of a friend of a friend, or, come morning, drinking a mug of coffee and vainly attempting to read and retweet one fascinating article after another. J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons; I had begun to measure mine with status updates.
So I prepared my friends, my "friends," and my followers (man, the way I kept track of my followers, you'd think I was a cult leader!), and on January 2nd, a loved one changed my passwords for me. The whole internet seemed to collapse in a second, like the ocean knocking down an elaborate sand castle. I suddenly had no access to the two sites I'd grown accustomed to checking over and over during the course of my day. You see, I'm not internet savvy. I don't have an RSS reader, and I have no idea how one might procure such a thing. Not that I want to. I like visiting my favorite websites on a whim to see if there's something new; it feels a little like Christmas, reaching into my stocking to see if there's just one more piece of candy hidden in the toe. The problem with Facebook and Twitter, I've realized, is that the Christmas stocking is infinite, and infinitely full. There is always another piece of candy to claw at. One piece is delicious, but one begets two, and three, and four, and, okay, five...it's not long before you've made yourself sick.
The first week of my detox, I realized just how much I'd depended on those sites for community. Aside from the classes I teach a few nights a week, I work from home. Alone. Without my beloved internet family, the silence was frightening. I began to spend more time on goodreads, and I sometimes got sucked into g-chat. One night, exhausted from a day of reading and writing, I searched for entertainment online, and found The Bachelor. Now I'm convinced there's a patch of dead grass in my brain--it simply cannot be brought to life!
I also noticed how I kept a running Twitter feed in my head: Oh, not my crazy neighbors again!, and, Wow, has anyone read so-and-so's novel? Someone suggested I keep these in a notebook, to be broadcast at a later date. That might have been funny, but wasn't the point of my detox to wrest myself away from this real-time cataloging of reactions, emotions, and experience? I felt very much like Laurel Snyder did in her days away from the site. In this Salon article, she sums up well the magnetism of Twitter (and, for me, the live update feed on Facebook as well):
Now I understand you don’t do things with Twitter. You become a part of it. That’s why it doesn’t work when people try to use it as a sporadic "marketing tool" or check in every three days. Twitter is unspooling in real time, and so what happened an hour ago is, well, in the past. Nobody will bother to read what you tweeted four hours ago any more than people at a get-together will overhear what happened before they got there. Like any party, if you duck in and out for a few minutes, you miss all the best parts.
The pain of missing "all the best parts" has been the hardest aspect of my detox. I admit, when it was Doppelganger Week on Facebook, I felt downright bereft. I wanted so badly to post as my profile picture a photo of Anthony Michael Hall circa Sixteen Candles! Or--wait--Chloe Sevigny in Kids! Or wait...! It felt like I was missing a class field trip to an amusement park.
I realized, too, how much news I was getting from Twitter. I have never read the newspaper on a daily basis; I'd much rather listen to NPR, or read long-form magazine articles, or, as I did increasingly over the last year, get linked to news from people I follow online, journalists and novelists and poets who keep up with current events far better than I ever could. A month into my detox, I was clueless--not just about the latest restaurant or movie, but about the new turn in the health care debate, for instance. I'd felt like this once before, when my husband and I got rid of cable, and effectively, television-watching. The level of my family's discourse often centers around the best new television commercials (I always wanted to be raised by professors, discussing Marxism and whatnot, but as my father would say, "People in hell want ice water.") In the post-television days, I remember feeling a vague alienation whenever these conversations began, my sister waxing poetic about the latest Volkswagen ad, everyone else nodding. During my internet detox, I began to feel this way a lot, and not just with my family, but with my friends, too. All conversations seemed to begin with, "Did you see on Facebook..." I was suddenly an outsider, and I felt equal parts annoyed, superior and wistful.
And also relieved. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier decries the devaluation of individual thought and personhood in a Web 2.0 world. He writes:
Personal reductivism has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in reductive ways when you file a tax return. Your real life is represented by a silly, phony set of database entries in order for you to make use of a service in an appropriate way. Most people are aware of the difference between reality and database entries when they file taxes.
But the order is reversed when you perform the same kind of self-reduction in order to create a profile on a social networking site. You fill in the data: profession, marital status, and residence. But in this case digital reduction becomes a causal element, mediating contact between new friends.
I agree with Lanier here, though once your profile is set up, you can be quite creative. Many of my online friends are writers and artists, and the content they generate is by turns smart, funny, and distinct. If their status updates generate information for advertisers, well, then, fine. I'd rather "The Man" try to sell me novels and nice pens, rather than tires and thigh-masters. But Lanier makes a good point when he says, "Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality." I'm not my Facebook profile, nor am I a series of Twitter updates. And the time I spend on these sites means I have less time to write fiction and converse with people in person, two things that make me feel most alive in the world.
At the opening of his book, Lanier suggests a few ways to use the internet to promote individual expression. Spend time developing your narrative voice online. (Check.) Don't post anonymously. (Check--well, most of the time.) And, in a doozy of a sentence, he suggests that Twitter-users stop describing "trivial external events... to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would describe a machine." Amen to that.
The problem of the internet--its power, and the way it's changing how we live our lives--is a big topic these days. There's The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your In-Box by John Freeman, and, forthcoming, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. The internet age is so young that we're worried, and intrigued, by how it will shape us--we simply have no idea. The single most fascinating aspect of my detox was the number of people who wanted to talk to me about it. Almost everyone I spoke to said, "I wish I could do that!" Then they got this strained look in their eyes that meant, The internet is ruining my life! When I assured them a detox was easy to do, they weren't convinced. Or they said, "Okay, yes, next month. I'll try it." And then they wouldn't. It saddened me to see all these people, chained to their online lives, posting flattering photos of themselves, "liking" a funny status update, posting or retweeting a link. It's a never-ending race to remind others that we're here, that we exist. It reminds me of when I used to do dance routines and little plays for my mom. "Look!" I'd yell every few seconds. "You're NOT watching! Look!" It gets exhausting. And it's not really living.
So here we are. It's now past April 1st, and I haven't ended the detox. The truth is, I don't miss the two sites much. These days, I feel no pull whatsoever toward Twitter, despite the number of fabulous people there. In my mind, it's a crowded elevator where everyone's talking over one another. They're all saying interesting things, but who can keep track? Part of me is afraid to return to Facebook. Will it exert the power over me that it used to? I want to return, and I want to show restraint. And if I can't, I will have to detach once again. That might be fine. Since January, I've enjoyed the injection of mystery and privacy into the world. I don't need to broadcast my life on a daily basis. If I run into you at the grocery store, the question, "How are you?" will be genuine, and that will feel good.
[Image credit: Marcos Zerene]
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