Some number of books

It’s hard to know exactly how many books I’ve read recently, but here my notes on some of them are.

Seven Brief Lessons On Physics by Carlo Rovelli, read by Carlo Rovelli, and Anaximander: And the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli, read by Roy McMillan.

Late last summer I biked from Poughkeepsie to Ashokan. The ninety-something-kilometer ride took about four and a half hours and mostly followed rail-trails. I was riding to meet my family, on a bike that I don’t use that frequently, in a region that I’m familiar with but don’t visit often. It was lovely, and on the ride I listened to all of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and part of Anaximander before switching back to the first book I ever consumed of Rovelli’s: The Order of Time, which is narrated brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch and which is probably my single favorite nonfiction book.

I don’t have that much to say about Seven Brief Lessons, and I have even less to say about Anaximander. The former was probably made more interesting and slightly less intelligible by the fact that it was narrated by the author, who speaks with a professorial Italian accent. The latter was probably my least favorite of his books — note, I never finished it — but did connect to The Order of Time in a few interesting ways, and contained at least one observation which I have managed to retain. (I dearly hope that I don’t now butcher it: As I recall, Rovelli explains that however advanced and meticulous Chinese astrology was during Anaximander’s time, Chinese culture was so dominated reverence to the Emperor that certain basic ideas were impossible to conceive of — like the fact that the Earth is a body floating freely in space.)

But there’s something broader about Rovelli’s writing that I find deeply soothing, and while these books left a relatively small footprint on my thinking, I think they’re part of something bigger that I want to understand, or at least take note of. I have listened to The Order of Time many times over in the past two or so years, and I have also read parts of the paper book. It has affected my thinking in significant ways, expanding my understanding while at the same time making it clear that the extent to which I understand anything is quite narrow indeed. It opened the possibility that time might not need be experienced as I experience it, and that there could, conceivably, be intelligent creatures which perceive time very differently than I do. More generally, it pointed to the deep and utter weirdness of one of the most pedestrian and commonplace aspects to life: the fact that time passes with apparent seamlessness. I’m not sure what, precisely, to do with any of these realizations, but I know that once I had consumed some of Rovelli’s writing I immediately wanted more, and that my appetite for discussions of relativity and quantum mechanics is significantly larger than I had previously known.

The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger.

I read this book with SOW’s Members’ Reading Group. In it, Schlanger argues that plants are both conscious and intelligent; she bases this argument on a series of what James Coleman called “cool plant facts,” each of which is more remarkable than the last. Plants understand the proximity of close relatives by sensing the wavelengths of light that pass through their neighbors’ leaves. They sense and respond to local stimuli using electrical signals similar to those in our nervous systems, and they communicate with similar and dissimilar plants by synthesizing and releasing all manner of chemical compounds. They perceive, communicate with, and in many cases seem to manipulate other organisms in their environment, including animals that eat their nectar, attempt to copulate with them, and “farm” (aka feed, water, and generally care for) them. The list goes on — plants really are remarkable, and for every way that humans understand and modify their environment, plants seem to do something similar.

When Schlanger reports yet another cool plant fact I nod my head. When she claims that plants are conscious, I think “of course.” When she claims that they are intelligent I do the same — and yet I found The Light Eaters’ logic and argumentative style to be somewhat unconvincing. Perhaps this reflects some internal bias on my part — I’m not sure — but my ultimate takeaway from this book was that it was indeed an excellent collection of cool plant facts, wrapped in a line of argumentation that I agreed with the conclusions of but was somehow unconvinced by.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, read by Robert Fass.

I did not quite finish this audiobook, but I did see a production of King Lear immediately after listening to... eighty-nine percent of it. This feels adequate.

I had purchased tickets to Kenneth Branaugh’s Lear a few months back, and was preparing to see it. I didn’t really know what King Lear was about, and after reading a short piece in the New Yorker about the play’s portrayal of bad weather, and watching the Anthony Hopkins production on Amazon Prime, I decided that I should attempt to read (or, ideally, listen to while taking bike rides) the play itself. I failed at this; the library had no copies available of the dramatized productions of Lear, but they did have this (rather academic and somewhat obscure) history of England in 1606, the year that Shakespeare finished King Lear and wrote parts of both Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

I know very little about all of these plays, and similarly little about England in the early sixteen-hundreds. This was a time of turmoil and change: King James I, who had been King of Scotland for almost fifty years, had taken the English throne in 1603. He would spend much of his reign attempting, unsuccessfully, to unify Great Britain. He also helped to plan and execute the colonization of Ulster (the region of Ireland that would eventually become Northern Ireland). This was also relatively early in the history of the modern Church of England, which had been put under control of Henry VIII in 1534. This resulted in considerable sectarian conflict during Shakespeare’s lifetime, culminating in the Gunpowder Plot (to assassinate King James and blow up Parliament) of 1605. Note also that the King James Bible was commissioned by King James in 1604 and published in 1611.

So, King Lear was written in this context. Except that it was really more adapted than written; Shakespeare’s Lear was more of a reboot of an earlier play, King Leir. Learning this made me think of our own contemporary reboot culture, which I am prone to looking down upon as unoriginal and trite; perhaps this is naive of me.

Did I enjoy this audiobook? I suppose so, at least mildly. Did I enjoy watching Branagh’s King Lear? I would say ditto. But I enjoyed more the excuse to learn about something that I would not otherwise have chosen to study, and I enjoyed even more the fact that while I was en route to the play itself, I ran into a neighbor on the street (someone I know reasonably well and see frequently) who told me it was among their favorite plays. He made reference to one of its core conflicts: Lear somewhat generously divides his kingdom up to his three daughters, but then spitefully refuses to give anything to one of them because she won’t praise him with fawning language. He then feels attacked and neglected, until his death, by all three. I’m not sure there is a lesson here which I could apply to my own life — it all feels a little unlikely and obtuse — but the fact that I was able to understand and share a cultural moment with my neighbor was totally worth the effort.

Good Trouble: Stories by Joseph O’Neill, read by like eleven different voice actors.

I loved Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland when I read it in ~2010, and at a recent moment when I needed some easily-digestable audio content I rented Good Trouble and blasted through it. The stories were a little more adult and a little less grounded in New York City culture than I remember Netherland being, but I continue to find it enriching to follow O’Neill’s output and track the way his voice has evolved.

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill, read by Karen Chilton & Kirby Heyborne.

Similar to how Netherland was a profile of New York after 9/11, Godwin struck me as a profile of liberal America during the late Obama years. This didn’t really become clear to me until after I had finished it, and the book mentions politics almost not at all, but its mood balances anxiety and hope in a way that, sitting here in late 2024, strikes me as characteristic of the twenty-teens.

I found the book to be exciting, captivating, and mysterious. Its two main characters both surprised me multiple times, and their relationship to each other was strange and confusing in the ways that many of my own relationships are to me. They seem to orbit around each other like a binary star — the book’s oscillating point of view, and the audiobook’s two narrators, emphasize this effect — wobbling into and out of instability as other characters enter their gravitational field. O’Neill resolves his story’s tension in a way that’s both surprising and satisfying, and it closes on a note that is at once heartwarming and full of futility.

Three books

Notes from three books I read recently:

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias, read by Matthew Yglesias.

I enjoyed this book, without investing too much of myself into it. This is partly because I had the sense – from interviews he gave about the book in 2020, I think – that Yglesias had used the premise (the idea that we should roughly triple the US population) as a good-enough container into which any number of compelling and thought-provoking policy positions could be put. I enjoyed these policy positions, and was generally inclined to accept, at least for the purposes of discussion, Yglesias’ larger premise as well, and it was enjoyable to spend a couple of hours listening to his nerdy and slightly overeager thoughts on housing, transit, and technological development.

There’s also this bigger thing, which is that I don’t see how liberal policy proposals can survive in a context where liberals are seen as anti-patriotic. And Yglesias’ premise strikes me as directed squarely at this problem: He bases his whole book on an idea that is jingoistic, prideful, and a little bellicose.

Whatever you think of maximizing growth (and, in particular, birth) rates, Yglesias’ argument is conveniently agnostic to how that growth is achieved. If you’re inclined to be worried about women’s health and nervous about policies directed towards increasing family sizes, Yglesias is happy to talk instead about dramatically increasing immigration – and offers thought provoking (if unlikely) ideas about how that might be achieved. And even if you rejected his premise outright, much of One Billion Americans could be reinterpreted as a series of suggestions for improving general quality of life: Build more housing, prioritize clean mass transit over privately-owned motor vehicles, and generally enact policies that make it easier to start and grow families.

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley.

I’ve already published two things about this book: First a field trip report from when Nicola and I visited a commercial refrigerator store in the Bowery, and then an interview that SOW’s Reading Group had with Nicola a few months later.

I learned that Nicola was writing this book some time before it was published; I believe this is the first time in my life that I’ve had that experience. It felt special: Every so often I’d see that she had written a byline in the New Yorker or the Times, and if it was about cold stuff then I’d wonder how it would fit into the book. If it wasn’t about cold stuff, I’d wonder how it fit into the rest of her career — why it grabbed her attention, whether it helped her round out her journalistic or literary skill sets, how it impacted her relationships with her editors.

I imagine it would be helpful to regularly write in a more diverse set of publications, and about a more diverse set of topics. I also imagine that it would be helpful to have editors in the first place, and for that matter to have any role whatsoever (notwithstanding John McPhee’s mildly disparaging description of what it means to be a staff writer at the New Yorker) in a publication that’s larger than yourself. These are things that I thought about while reading Frostbite — and things that I think about while I read more or less anything, these days.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.

I didn’t particularly enjoy reading this book. I was looking forward to it, and was curious to learn more about its structure, and the way in which it blurred history and fiction. The first chapter was, per the acknowledgements at the end of the book, completely accurate to history save one paragraph. It was also completely horrifying and quite intense, dealing as it does with chemical warfare, mass suicide, and the Third Reich. The second chapter is no sunnier, nor the third, and as I reached the final chapter I found myself grappling with the reality that while I knew that much of what I was reading was deeply fictionalized, the historical people and events which inspired it were just as bleak and disgusting.

That said, I would at least gently recommend the book to anyone who has looked at, for instance, the Wikipedia page for Erwin Schrödinger or his eponymous cat. For to the extent that quantum superposition confuses me (and it does confuse me), I am ultimately distracted from the couple of paragraphs on how much of a sexual predator he was. Labatut, though, takes the liberty to dive into these headfirst, telling a story that isn’t meant to be precise but does seem to be accurate. More importantly, though, it’s memorable.

When We Cease to Understand the World concludes in a way that I didn’t expect, and I’m left with a somewhat mystical sense of the world, and knowledge. Labatut seems to have put his finger on something about the inaccessibility of history, and I think that the book’s structure — and the discomfort that reading it brought me — may have been instrumental to this. So while I didn’t enjoy reading it, I do appreciate having done so.