The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

 
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

edited by David Eggers

Mariner Press

2002 

 

 

I enjoyed working my way through the Best American Comic series. It was a nice way to see a selection of good works from the years it ran, and I learned the names of several artists to add to my list. There are a couple earlier comics anthologies I want to check out too, ones the BAC editors named as inspirations for the series. But now that I've read its entire run, I also want to start something new.
 
My first encounter with the Best American Nonrequired Reading series was the 2007 volume, which has a cover by Carson Ellis, an introduction by Sufjan Stevens, and which showed up in bookstores that year more than any other volume of BANR before or since. So the idea of reading maybe these someday has been at the back of my mind for awhile now. 
 
My understanding of this series was that it was meant to be an anthology for vaguely alternative culture, the kind of thing that might show up in The Believer or McSweeney's but probably wouldn't be included in the more traditional Best American Essays series. And that might be kind of right? But it's also explicitly intended to appeal to a broadly-defined young adult audience, conceptualized as readers 15 to 25. The forward by the series editor is almost shockingly optimistic about the state of writing for young audiences and about the prospects for people in that age group (people like me, at the time this was written). By now, I basically can't even remember what it felt like to imagine a near future that's not worse than the present, but in 2002, the hopeful spirit of the 1990s still persisted, even if cracks were showing in the facade after September 11th and the US invasion of Afghanistan.
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 is mostly nonfiction, with a few short stories in the mix. There actually is a McSweeney's piece in here, as well as a couple from The Onion, including the now classic "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People", and a David Sedaris piece like you'd hear on This American Life. There's even a comic, "Bomb Scare" by Adrian Tommie, whose name I recognize from BAC, about a teen boy who isn't interested in sex, and finds that's starting to isolate him from his friends who are increasingly obsessed.
 
The entries are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, so any thematic clusters are pure coincidence, but near the beginning there are several pieces of longform journalism about teens from other parts of the world that politically-savvy Americans would've been especially interested in at the time - the 'Lost Boys', orphaned refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan, a Taliban fighter persuaded to defect for the Northern Alliance by letters from a childhood friend, Tibetan teens trying to decide whether to make a life under Chinese occupation or in exile in India, the appeal of cheap methamphetamine and motorcycle racing in a poor neighborhood in Thailand. Later Seth Mnookin profiles "The Nice New Radicals" for Spin magazine, about young liberal activists who care about most of the above causes but prefer working within institutional channels. (With a start like this, there's not a piece about Kony 2012 in BANR when I get to the right year, I'll be a little disappointed.)
 
Eric Schlosser has an article from The Atlantic that's apiece with his book Fast Food Nation about the manufacture of natural and artificial flavors called "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good". Probably the longest piece in the book is Gary Smith's "Higher Education" from Sports Illustrated, a profile and obituary of a Black high school basketball coach and how he grew to be a part of the community in the tiny Amish and Mennonite town he moved to in Ohio. Rodney Rothman's "My Fake Job" is a funny account of him hanging out at an internet start-up that was so disorganized no one even noticed he didn't actually work there - but apparently by the time it was chosen for the book, The New Yorker had disavowed it because it was at least partially fictionalized.
 
I didn't think the short stories were quite as impactful, but I liked David Schickler's "Fourth Angry Mouse" about the anxious grandson of a popular comedian trying and failing to live up to his legacy, and Heidi Jon Schmidt's "Blood Poison" about a young woman struggling through a particularly hellish annual visit with her aging father. 

Shadowlands

 
 
Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

by Matthew Green

WW Norton & Company

2022 
 
 
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters. 
 
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
 
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
 
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
 
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
 
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.

Invisible Things

 
 
Invisible Things

by Andy Pizza and Sophie Miller

Chronicle Books

2023 

 

 

Invisible Things is a children's picture book that illustrates things that can't be seen - experiences from our other senses and our emotions. 

 

The book is a kind of guided meditation for kids, first walking through things we might hear, smell, taste, or feel, and then asking the reader to close their eyes and take some time to identify the invisible sensations around themselves. And then this is repeated for emotions, with a bit of extra attention given to reassuring kids that sadness and fear are normal, but also not permanent. 

 

The illustrations use cute little personifications to depict each invible thing. The song stuck in your head is a guitar with feet and googly eyes; the heebie jeebies is a hollow tree stump with little eyes peeking out of it. I think the idea is that making each sensation or emotion into a tiny monster makes them easier to think about and imagine.

The Bathysphere Book

 
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
by Brad Fox
Astra

2023 
 
 
I think there's some value in allowing your friends' interests to influence you. At one time, my sister was very interested in oceanography, so I still like to read about it from time to time. The Bathysphere Book is a history of the first really successful deep-sea diving vehicle, the bathysphere, and a biography of the explorer who rode in it, William Beebe.
 
The bathysphere was built by Otis Barton. When the door was screwed on, it was a hermetically sealed metal sphere, with only three quartz windows to see out. It was raised and lowed by a metal cable, and this was paired with a phone line so Beebe could report what he saw up to his research partner (and girlfriend) Gloria Hollister for transcription. The bathysphere carried its own compressed oxygen, had internal air conditioning, and used a chemical reactant to neutralize the carbon dioxide its occupants exhaled. It was only used a few times, mainly in 1933 and 1934, and Hollister never got to go on a real dive. Bebee and seasick Barton dove together each time, with Barton not even looking out, just monitoring the machines.
 
The purpose of the dives was to find out what the ocean was actually like, below the depths you could reach in diving helmet. As you descend, more and more light is absorbed by the water above you, first reds and oranges, then yellows and greens. Before it becomes black, the ocean glows blue-violet. Many of the deep sea creatures are also partially bioluminescent. There is more life down there than scientists had believed possible before Beebe's dives.
 
The other famous collaborator on this project was artist Else Bostelmann. She also never dove in the bathysphere, and based all her paintings on Hollister's transcripts and direct conversation with Beebe. I actually got this book because I'd seen some of Bostelmann's fantastically dark, haunting watercolors before. My favorite anecdote is that on a few occasions, she donned a diving helmet, dropped a canvas and a metal music stand, and was actually able to oil paint fish and coral, from life, at a depth of 20 or 30 feet.
 

Previously Unknown Dragonfish Circling the Bathysphere 
- Else Bostlemann, 1934

 
There are some things from the past that I guess I assumed were more widespread than they actually were. When I watched the film The Automat, I was genuinely surprised to learn there were really only ever in New York and Philadelphia. The bathysphere was unique, not the name for a general type of craft, and outside of Beebe's handful of deep dives in the early 30s, was really only used for test dives and exhibitions.
 
Fox writes in very short chapters that each relay a single thought or incident. His narratives of Beebe's life and the story of the bathysphere dives are interwoven with Bostelmann's sketches and paintings, photos of the expeditions, excerpts from Beebe's and Hollister's diaries, excerpts from the transcripts of the dives and descriptions of the undersea sightings, accounts of what else was going on historically at the same time, and then lots and lots of short biographical sketches of other people tangentially (often very tenuously) connected to Beebe and the dives. So we learn about the famous racist Beebe dedicated one of his books to, but also about Beebe's neighbor's doctor. Who indeed sounds like a fascinating fellow! The proliferation of chapters about people with only the thinnest of connections to the dives is probably meant to help provide context, but also kind of made it feel like Fox didn't really have enough material to fill a book and was padding it out.

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

Chrono Trigger

 
 
Chrono Trigger

by Michael Williams

Boss Fight Books

2014

 

 

Michael Williams' Chrono Trigger is the Boss Fight Books book about the Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. I previously read BFB's Spelunky and Earthbound books. Spelunky was pretty great, but it was also written by the game's designer, and so had insight into the creative process that will simply never be available in a book written by anyone else. Earthbound disappointed me because the author paired a walkthrough of the game with a roughly equal amount of narrative about his own life, which was not what I'd hoped for.
 
Chrono Trigger has a much better balance, I think. Williams describes the basic plot, the characters, and a few key moments, in the early chapters, then spends the rest of the book on actual criticism. He looks at the portrayal of gender, race, and sexuality in the game. He talks about the portrayal of social institutions like government, law, and the economy. He actually gets brief interviews with both the original translator who wrote the first English localization, and the one who retranslated the game for a rerelease. He even explores a bit the role of time travel in the game's narrative.
 
Williams does discuss his life a little bit, what it was like to first play Chrono Trigger in the 90s, and he mentions his time as an English teacher in Japan, but like, his reasons for doing so are obvious and help to advance his discussion of the topic at hand. He talks about himself about as much as I do in these reviews; he definitely does not put a whole memoir's worth of life stories into his video game review.
 

Chrono Trigger the game is one of the most highly regarded Japanese rpgs of the 16-bit era, with colorful pixel art, and a plot and cast that ranges across time to include a cave woman, a cursed medieval knight who looks like a frog, a robot from the future, all trying to save their world from the apocalyptic Lavos, who crashed into the planet in the distant past, and who will erupt to fly off to another world in their year 1999, wiping out almost all life in the process. Players travel back and forth in time to assemble their party, face off against Lavos, definitely lose their first battle against the living embodiment of mass extinction, then continue exploring the world at different times until they're finally ready to fight Lavos again.
 
I think Williams's work here probably represents a pretty good baseline of what one should reasonably be able to expect from the whole 33⅓, Pop Classics, Boss Fight Books format. There are a few more of these books that I kind of feel interested in, but I've also realized I'm more interested in histories of how things were made more than I am in commentaries about them. Williams provides a blend of both. But I may have been spoiled by the wealth of insider knowledge in Spelunky.

Alphabetical Diaries

 
 
Alphabetical Diaries

by Sheila Heti

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2024

 

 

The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. But that original document was doubly transformed. First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. It reads a bit like poetry. Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order.
 
There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. Without any instructional purpose.
 
What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. But I don't really know that for sure.
 
She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. Or maybe just fling with a woman. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. I feel like I'm doing that here too. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book.
 
Heti writes about her writing. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. What kind of person. How she wants to live. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes declarative sentences. Instructions to herself. She writes about money troubles. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. A noun phrase. A different noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. That stand alone here with no context. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.
 
Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. Which isn't surprising, really. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.' Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third.
 
I really enjoyed this one. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. But this is a really good gimmick! A good idea, executed well. I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. I worry about that myself, all the time. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. If it looks normal too?

 

 

A different noun phrase. A good idea, executed well. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third. A noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.

 

Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. But I don't really know that for sure. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book. But that original document was doubly transformed. But this is a really good gimmick!

 

Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. 

 

Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. 

 

First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. 

 
Heti writes about her writing. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. How she wants to live. 

 

I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. I feel like I'm doing that here too. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. I really enjoyed this one. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. I worry about that myself, all the time. If it looks normal too? In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. Instructions to herself. It reads a bit like poetry. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. 

 

Or maybe just fling with a woman. 

 

She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes about money troubles. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. She writes declarative sentences. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.'

 

That stand alone here with no context. The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. 

What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. What kind of person. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. Which isn't surprising, really. Without any instructional purpose.

Heavenly Bodies

 
Heavenly Bodies

Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

by Paul Koudounaris

Thames & Hudson

2013

 

 

Heavenly Bodies is a nonfiction history of an all-but-forgotten Catholic tradition from the Counter Reformation, the exhuming, decorating, and displaying of 'catacomb saints' - skeletons from the Roman catacombs, elaborately decorated with precious metals and gemstones, housed as relics in churches and monasteries, primarily in Germany and Austria. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris visited a number that once housed catacomb saints, and a few that still do, to learn their history, see them in their present condition, and document them with photographs. There are so many photos, this is practically an art book! The text too, could stand alone, but benefits greatly from being able to see the relics.
 
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
 
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
 
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
 

 
Skeletons from Rome were 'articulated,' or wired into a posed whole, and decorated with embroidered cloth, beads and buttons, strings of pearls, mounted gemstones, and wires and settings of gold. They were shipped to the heart of Protestant country and seen as weapons for Catholicism. They're supposed to symbolize God's power and generosity, and the luxurious conditions that await all believers in heaven. To modern eyes, they look quite strange. They are at once macabre, morbid, shocking in the amount of wealth each one displays, and also almost unbelievably gaudy and tacky. This is the Catholic faith at its most glamorous, it's most goth. It's not surprising worshipers felt awed by them. There is one contemporary motif I'm aware of that resembles catacomb saints though - the flower bedecked skull illustrations associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. The idea of claiming dead people, who possibly belonged to other faiths, and recruiting them into present-day religious practice also reminds me a bit of the posthumous baptisms carried out by the Mormon Church.
 
Once decorated, the skeletons would be displayed in churches across Germany, usually very prominently, and it seems they were successful in invigorating worshipers, including attracting pilgrims and inspiring cash donations. Many congregations devoted a special day to their saint once a year, when the body in its protective glass case might even be removed from the church and sent on parade before returning to its place of honor.
 
Catholicism is rare among religions for displaying a revering relics. The Protestant criticisms (eventually taken up by Catholic leaders during the Enlightenment in the 1800s) were both religious and aesthetic. The religious complaint is that the public doesn't understand sophisticated theological arguments about how the visible relic is the symbol of a saint who intercedes between God and the congregation to amplify their prayers - the complaint is that people worship the bones directly, and attribute miracles to the physical object, not the soul of the saint, or to god. And indeed, each relic accumulated a growing list of supposed miracles over the years, most often injuries healed and illnesses cured. The aesthetic argument is that they're silly and ugly and old fashioned. And of course, the gold and jewels are attractive targets for both criminal theft and legal confiscation.
 
Very few churches that received catacomb saints still have them, and many that remain are hidden away in storage, in attics and closets. Most of the disposals took place during the Enlightenment, when secular German leaders and Catholic authorities alike decided to hide or dispose of what they'd come to see as an embarrassing legacy, often despite the wishes and objections of everyday churchgoers who still valued the relics. That was one thing that struck me, throughout Koudounaris's account of history - how often leaders of all kinds made unilateral decisions about how the people under them ought to believe and worship, and how often those decisions were premised on the idea that the common people were stupid and must be doing it wrong.

Short Life in a Strange World

 
 
Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

Fourth Estate

2020

 

 

Usually I finish my first book of the year a bit faster than this, but 2025 has been off to a rough start. Car trouble, a broken dishwasher that replaces my leisure time with housework, extra tasks at work, recovering from being sick myself, worrying over a sick relative. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the rest of the world outside my house isn't doing so well either.
 

Short Life in a Strange World is an account of author Toby Ferris's personal quest to see all the remaining paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that exist in the world. There are 42 such paintings, and all but one are in public museums. Ferris started this project the year he turned 42, the same age that Bruegel died.
 

Short Life is a mix of things. It's structured by Ferris's trips. The prologue tells us how he got started, the epilogue takes place after he finished, and each of the dozen chapters covers one trip, where he usually visited several museums, often in more than one country. Ferris talks about the logistics of the trips, about the specific paintings he saw on each one. He talks about Bruegel's life and painting techniques; he talks about specific details and recurring themes in Bruegel's art. Ferris tells us about his own life, his brother, who is also an author, his dead father, who left behind a few sparsely completed diaries when he died. This is all blended and interwoven, and though at times the mix contains (to my mind) too much Ferris and not enough Bruegel, I generally liked the way he integrated all this material, the way a single detail in a painting would require a bit of history about the 16th century Netherlands, and relate to an incident in Bruegel's life, and remind Ferris of something his father did when he was younger.
 

 

Dulle Griet via Wikimedia

 

The Triumph of Death via Wikimedia

 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Wikimedia

  

 
Before reading Short Life, my most vivid images of Bruegel were probably his apocalyptic paintings, scenes where early modern warfare mingled with scenes of Christian eschatology, like Dulle Griet, The Triumph of Death, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels. These images are sometimes falsely attributed to fellow Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But many more of Bruegel's paintings are scenes of peasant life, like Children's Games or The Wedding Dance, and they often depict winter, like The Census at Bethlehem.
 

 

Children's Games via Wikimedia

 

The Wedding Dance via Wikimedia

 

The Census at Bethlehem via Wikimedia

  

 
This is what Bruegel is best known for - his dense, detailed paintings of the communal aspects of village life, often blending realism with allegorical meaning, often including those at the margins of peasant life, the poor, beggars, people with injuries or disabilities, children.
 
Bruegel lived during a time of dramatic change, as Europe was convulsed by the effects of the Gutenberg printing press and the arrival of new goods from the Americas, as leaders sent soldiers and mercenaries to slaughter and burn in the name of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel's legacy was also spread by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who used sketches inherited from his father to paint copies that now far outnumber the originals.
 
Ferris is a person who likes numbers, and seemingly doesn't really like other people. He hates crowds, and on most of his trips, the route from the airport to the museum was all the sightseeing he did. He made a spreadsheet to track his project, and he talks about it far, FAR too much. He calculated the total square footage of Bruegel paintings, and each chapter lists the percentage of that total he saw on that trip.
 
In the shortest chapters, Ferris visits a single museum to see only one painting, and whatever thoughts he shares sound trite. The longer chapters are better; my favorite was probably the chapter about his trip to America, where he talks about the risk of encountering bears while camping, getting angry at his brother while camping, a bear that appears in a Bruegel painting, a violent 'game' similar to bear-baiting that appears in a different painting, bears as a symbol of anger, and Bruegel's depiction of allegorical figures like the embodiment of anger. It's a chapter where Ferris's interlacing really works.

 

It wasn't particularly deliberate on my part, but I'm glad I read this in the winter, during my own Bruegel year.

Wuhan Diary

 
 
Wuhan Diary

Dispatches from a Quarantined City

by Fang Fang

translated by Michael Berry

Harper Collins

2020

 

 

Wuhan Diary is a book that collects a series of 60 daily social media posts by the Chinese author Fang Fang that she made from her apartment in Wuhan, starting at the beginning of a strict mandatory city-wide lockdown in late January 2020, and lasting until late March when the re-opening date was announced.
 
Last year, I read Deadly Quiet City by Murong Xuecun, a journalist who entered Wuhan just after the lockdown lifted, and who interviewed people from a variety of stations in life about what they did and how they survived. If you were only going to read one account of the Wuhan quarantine, I would recommend Murong's. Fang Fang's diary has value as a direct account at the time things were happening, and Murong notes that she inspired him to do his project, but she's also just one person, a fairly affluent older woman with a lot of friends and family members able to deliver food to her doorstep. Her experiences in isolation were not too different from mine! But Murong was able to interview a doctor, a delivery person, an unlicensed cab driver - people who had a much more direct experience with the coronavirus outbreak.
 
Each day, Fang Fang notes how long the outbreak has been going on, talks about the weather, discusses whatever news about the coronavirus has been making the rounds that day (often the death of a doctor or another public figure), she shares updates about how she's getting food and how her family members are doing, she comments on the latest specific rules of the lockdown, she reports on conversations she's had with friends who are doctors or who know other important information, she calls on her readers to follow the quarantine procedures and help each other as best they can.
 
And, as time goes on, her diary comes to be dominated by a few other topics - questioning the government's early inaction on the coronavirus, calling on government officials and hospital administrators who made mistakes to admit them and resign, talking about the lengths she has to go to publish each new day of her diary when her social media accounts have been suspended and each new post is often taken down by the time the next day's goes up (due to her large audience resharing her words, they stay in circulation, but corporate or government censors try to limit her reach), and responding to the nationalist 'ultra-leftist' trolls (who sound a lot like America's alt-right) who denounce her, threaten her, slander and lie about her, and who generally attack anyone who shares negative information or who criticizes the government.
 
Especially early on, when the lockdown has just started, and the diary itself has not become a topic of discussion, Fang Fang's experiences in quarantine remind me a lot of my own early isolation in mid-March 2020. Like me, she started off fairly optimistic - a two-week shutdown that will stop person-to-person transmission and reveal all the people who are already infected but haven't shown symptoms yet, allowing them to get treatment. Like me, like a lot of us, I think, she quickly realized it wouldn't be that easy, and that the quarantine period would need to be longer, and was forced to stare into the blank space where the future used to be and wonder what would happen next.
 
Early on especially, but kind of throughout her diary, Fang Fang remains pretty optimistic that the quarantine will work, the coronavirus will be brought under control if not defeated, and she mostly has a very vocal, positive faith that people are trying their hardest, doing their best, and that people cooperating with government regulations would be the cause of an eventual return to normalcy. Honestly, this annoyed me, and at times made me feel sick. I don't want to be unfair to her, especially how much she got pilloried by Chinese readers for the opposite reason, but her positivity was sometimes upsetting to me.
 
It's also hard to square with her acknowledgment that the city government of Wuhan and the national government of China both did everything in their power to hide the existence of the virus, to deny that it was contagious, to conceal how many patients were coming into the hospitals and how many doctors and nurses were getting sick and dying while treating them. They knew, for sure, by the end of December 2019, and should've know weeks sooner, and instead of announcing the existence of the virus and trying to keep it contained, they attempted to keep it secret and allowed it to spread around China and across the world. For at least 20 days, the Chinese government allowed mass events and huge movements of people associated with New Years festivities, and during those 20 days, any chances of preventing a pandemic were lost.
 
Arguably the American government, and our largest agricultural businesses, are doing the same thing, right now, with the bird flu. If H5N1 becomes another pandemic, it won't be because it evolved too fast for anyone to stop, it will be because everyone chose to prioritize secrecy and quarterly profits over making any real attempt to prevent another plague. (Incidentally, this is the actual reason for the much-vaunted high price of American eggs right now, even if none of our politicians will say that out loud.)
 
There's a sick dramatic irony to reading Wuhan Diary, because by mid-March, just as America was going into a panic, the new coronavirus cases in Wuhan were finally (and only temporarily) going down to zero. By the end of the diary, Fang Fang's city is about to reopen and she thinks her life will go back to normal. And meanwhile, the worst was still yet to come, not just for Wuhan or China, but for the whole world.
 
Fang Fang also thinks the ultra-leftists and the people within the government who pushed for secrecy will be discredited, that they still might be forced to resign, and that the public will turn away from them and demand something better. Staring down the gun barrel of my own dark future, I admire her hope and optimism. But again, there is terrible dramatic irony in knowing that the censors and authoritarians were actually empowered, that Xi Jinping was about to start a massive consolidation of power, making China less free and less democratic, and probably more like what the ultra-leftists want it to be. I fear similar changes are coming to America, and I can't muster any optimism of my own right now.

EarthBound

 

EarthBound

by Ken Baumann

Boss Fight Books

2014 

 

 

When I was a kid, in the 90s, I had a Super Nintendo, and for awhile, a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Games had basically the same price back then that they do today, usually $50 new, which is sort of incredible when you consider how much inflation has happened since then, and the general purchasing power of 1990s dollars. Even more incredible, a lot of the SNES games I owned, I got by saving up my allowance, $5 a week, for like 2½ months per game. Because of Nintendo Power, there were a lot of games I knew about and was fascinated by that I never had the opportunity to purchase. One of those was the game EarthBound, a weirdly postmodern rpg about modern American kids who awaken psychic powers, and travel the country saving it from aliens.
 
EarthBound the book is the first in the Boss Fight Books series, and the author, Ken Baumann, is the graphic designer for the whole series. I read another of these last year, for the game Spelunky, that was written by the game's creator, Derek Yu. The Spelunky book was excellent, combining insight about the game and the decisions that went into making it with biographical details about was going on in Yu's life at the time, and how that impacted the game too. EarthBound also blends writing about the game with the author's memoir, but the problem here is that Baumann isn't the game's designer, he's just some guy.
 
Technically, Ken Baumann is a very minor celebrity. He was an actor on the show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and when the show ended, he helped found this book series, and created Sator Press, which has since been acquired as an imprint of my favorite Ohio indie press, Two Dollar Radio. In his early 20s, he had a major health scare that almost killed him. His life story is moderately interesting, moreso than mine. But with respect to EarthBound the game, he's just some guy, and all the pages he spends talking about his biography are pages he doesn't spend talking about the game, its influences, its cultural impact, etc.
 
Some of it seems relevant! Baumann is about a decade younger than me, a Young Millennial instead of an Old Millennial, but he was also a 90s kid, and he did buy a copy of EarthBound and play it back then. He bought it again and played it again when, after about 20 years out of circulation, Nintendo re-released EarthBound as a downloadable game for the WiiU, which gave the game a new and much larger audience, including a lot of people like me and Baumann, who remembered our childhood fascination with it. So the parts about Baumann's life when he first got the game do help to inform his reactions to it, especially things like his engagement with things like horror movies and 90s gross-out humor that were part of the same cultural milieu that gave rise to EarthBound. But a lot of this felt like Baumann used the existence of the book as an opportunity to write about himself in a way that only occasionally contributed to the ostensible purpose of the project.
 
EarthBound is a game about kids on a journey. The hero, Ness, discovers he has psychic powers the same night a meteor crash lands in his town, and aliens kidnap some of his neighbors. Ness uses baseball bats and yo-yos as weapons. He stays in hotels, calling home when he needs money, or feels lonely or homesick. He joins up with a psychic girl who he rescues after she was kidnapped for her powers, and later with a child prodigy and a young Tibetian monk-in-training. The mechanics of the game are similar to the Final Fantasy series, but the visuals are a distorted 1950s Americana (50s revival was an important element of 80s culture), and the style is surreal and parodic, closer to Thomas Pynchon or Philip K Dick than to Tolkein or D&D. And at several key points, the game breaks its own rules to create unique, patience-testing challenges, like a door that can only be opened by not touching the controller for several minutes, a special item you can only receive as a random drop by defeating hundreds of extra enemies, or a boss fight that's won not by fighting, but by prayer.
 
Baumann structures the book around a walkthrough of the game, and his dual experiences playing it as a kid and an adult. He does talk about cultural influences on the game, and its tepid reception in the American market in 1994. I would have liked more of that, honestly, especially since he had no real access to information about how the game was made, or any way to interview anyone involved with making it. (Though both would've been nice, if he could've managed it!) And while I found the amount of autobiography to be excessive and distracting, he did at least manage a close parallelism between the events of the game and the way he ordered telling the events of his own life. Someone a little more interested in the author than I was might read this and see a real achievement. It's definitely a better book about Ken Baumann than it is a book about EarthBound. I'm left wondering if Yu's was the best book in the series, and if all of them lean so heavily into memoir, or if others more closely resemble the journalism of the 33⅓ series.

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

 
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

The Best of Early Vanity Fair

edited by Graydon Carter

Penguin

2014 

 

 

It's been kind of an eventful month, right? I've probably spent more time reading the news than reading any of the books I have started. Plus I took a trip, and spent almost the whole time visiting and chatting. But in typical booklover's hubris, I packed my bags with the answers to the questions 'what if I finish my book?' and 'what if I finish my backup book?' and, embarrassingly, 'what if I finish my BACKUP backup book?' Well, I didn't finish anything, and carried a lot of extra weight for nothing, but I was glad that my main read was a collection of short essays, just the thing for times when there are too many competing demands on one's attention.
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells is a collection of articles published in Vanity Fair in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Of the 400 or so pages, the 1910s and 30s each get about a hundred pages, and the 20s fill half the book with the other two.
 
Compared to An Editor's Burial, which was a tightly focused collection of New Yorker articles meant to show off certain authors and specific subjects, BBFS is clearly intended to show off Vanity Fair's range, and I suspect, to flaunt as many famous names as possible, even if it's hard to believe that what they wrote was in any sense 'the best' of anything. (I'm thinking especially of AA Milne's dull account of publishers thinking his author bio was too boring...) These pieces are all much shorter than the New Yorker reprints too, usually only 3 or 5 book pages long. I bet most of these would've fit on a single magazine page, maybe two if they had to share space with advertising or illustrations.
 
Most of the articles are nonfiction essays, although there are a handful of short stories and a smattering of poetry by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and TS Eliot. The best of these, I think, was ee cumming's "When Calvin Coolidge Laughed," which blurs the line between story and prose poem and depicts nationwide rioting and disorder in a sing-song tall-tale voice in response to the shock of hearing Coolidge sound happy. Colette's story "The Woman Behind the Mask," which shows a husband's jealous shock at spotting his wife having an awfully good time at an Eyes Wide Shut style masked orgy, which he'd snuck out to after telling her he'd never go to such a thing, was also pretty good.
 
The nonfiction pieces are a blend of trend reporting and profiles of famous people, and depending on how you look at it, those might not even count as two different kinds of things. My favorites were the satirical trend pieces, which rather than straight reporting, subjected whatever fad or style to some gentle fun. I loved PG Wodehouse's "The Physical Culture Peril" about the danger that fitness and exercise will make you a boring conversationalist; Hyman Strunsky's "Are Odd Women Really Odd?" in defense of women's suffrage, employment, and sexual freedom; and F Scott Fitzgerald's metafictional "This is a Magazine," which is a script for a short play where all the characters are different types of magazine articles.
 
Much of the regular reporting lacks flair by contrast, even when the subject should be intrinsically interesting, like Samuel Chotzinoff's condensed (and kind of racist) history of jazz or Bertrand Russell's explanation of behaviorism. There were a few that stood out to me, both for their quality and foresight. Robert Sherwood's "The Higher Education on the Screen" fears what kids are learning about the world from the movies. Walter Lippman's "Blazing Publicity," which depicts newspaper and other media coverage as a spotlight that subjects certain people and events to intense scrutiny, one at a time, before moving on to the next thing, and leaving whatever happens outside that spotlight comparatively 'in the dark,' which still sounds more or less like how it's done today. Walter Winchell's "A Primer of Broadway Slang" surprised me, because I knew almost every term he mentioned, a few from watching so much Looney Tunes growing up, but mostly because they left the backstage, entered the common tongue, and are still in circulation now.
 
While women's rights are mostly referred to positively, especially earlier in the book, Aldous Huxley got an essay to complain that sex outside of marriage shouldn't be considered 'modern' (or by implication, 'good'); DH Lawrence warns that while women seem to enjoy having sex for pleasure, they're sure to soon regret jettisoning romance and marriage; and Clarence Darrow totally beclowns himself by waxing nostalgic about the great discursive community that used to be found in barbershops before men could easily shave at home, and then concludes that it's women voting and getting short haircuts that's really ruining things, and that men are now an oppressed minority. Yes, even a hundred years ago, there were men whining that any little advance for women meant that men were being persecuted and we'd better turn back whatever gains we'd made toward equality before it was too late. It's sometimes hard to tell if these guys are sincerely panicking or making a cynical bad faith argument in the hope that it's more persuasive than raw misogyny would be, but it hardly matters because they're always wrong. They always think any step toward equality is 'too far' because what they really want is more in-equality, specifically the kind that favors themselves. (There's a similar sort of White reaction to any advancement for people of color that's just as awful.)
 
The celebrity profiles again mostly seem like editor Graydon Carter simply wanted to show off all the people who wrote for Vanity Fair and all the people they wrote about. We get so-so stories about Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Harpo Marx. The best one, I think, was Janet Flanner's "The Grand Guillotiner of Paris" about how even in the 1930s, being a French executioner was a hereditary position endowed by the state, and the family privately owned the only working guillotines in the country. Darwin Teilhet also has an interesting piece about the then-ubiquitous Tarzan and the many, many licensing opportunities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to get the character into books, magazines, the movies and Sunday newspaper comic strips, and working as an ad spokesman for countless products. Unlike a lot of the others pieces, those seem to be here due to sheer quality, rather than because they talk about something modern readers are likely to strongly associate with the time period.

Beautiful Useful Things

 
Beautiful Useful Things

What William Morris Made

by Beth Kephart

art by Melodie Stacey

Abrams

2022

 

 

Beautiful Useful Things is a children's picture book and a biography of the Victorian polymath William Morris, though it's very light on biographical detail.
 
Today, most people who recognize that name probably know Morris for his detailed patterns, which are still used on wallpapers and rugs. But Kephart focuses on Morris's love of nature and his work designing and handmaking a variety of goods, especially books. Rather than trying to reproduce Morris's dense patterns, Stacey uses similar natural motifs, but paints them big and loose, with a lot of negative space.
 
More than anything else, I think this book is trying to capture how Morris thought about things, and encourage young readers to adopt that mindset, at least for the length of the book. We learn about Morris's close observation of nature, and his desire to preserve artisan production in the face of industrialization. The cadence of Kephart's text, and the way the paragraphs are spread across the pages encourages slow reading.
 
The author's note mentions that Morris was an environmentalist and a founder of the Arts & Crafts movement in England, both of which show up clearly in this book. He was also a socialist, although I think you'd be hard pressed to guess that just from this book. The one-paragraph author's note also contains more historical detail about Morris than the entire rest of the book.
 
Stacey's watercolor art demonstrates the idea of reproducing natural images, and they're accentuated by images of knights and princesses, which reference the kinds of stories Kephart says Morris loved to read and to write himself. Fittingly, the font of this book is very pretty.
 
There is an irony, I suppose, to the way that Morris's drawings have become something else that's mass produced. His philosophy isn't dead, but it also isn't enacted nearly as much as he'd like, and his name is associated less with the content of his ideas than with the appearance of specific patterns. This book depicts Morris hand printing and sewing hardbacks of his own text - but is itself produced in the usual way. I wonder if any young readers will notice that disconnect?

Mudlark

 
 

Mudlark

In Search of London's Past along the River Thames

by Laura Maiklem

Liveright

2019

 

 

Mudlark combines journalistic accounts of specific mudlarking trips author Lara Maiklem took while writing this book, memoirist accounts of both her earlier life, how she got into the hobby, descriptions of her own and other mudlarks' notable finds, the laws governing treasure hunting in England, the effects of climate change on the river, bits of British history, and imaginative accounts of how people might've used (and lost) some of the items she finds. 'Mudlarking' here refers specifically to searching the muddy shoreline of the Thames, in England, at low tide.

The book is organized, kind of, by location, starting at the Tidal Head where the river Thames first starts rising and falling with the tides, passing west to east through London, and ending at the Estuary where the river flows into the North Sea. Each chapter starts with an epigraph from British literary history, mostly unflattering descriptions of mudlarks from times when they were very poor and collected river debris to resell, as a career, out of economic necessity, a far cry from Maiklem and other modern mudlarks, who are hobbyists, mostly treasure hunting as a leisure activity.

Each chapter also has another theme or two, although Maiklem moves from thought to thought without being strongly bound to a single topic. I imagine this conversational style would make Mudlark an enjoyable audio book. I think I would've preferred the book to be a bit more structured, though I acknowledge that as personal preference. But my favorite chapters were the ones with the strongest themes, like 'Hammersmith,' which is mostly about a famous lost font that the original typesetter dumped in the river rather than giving to his business partner. That story's been in the news in the last few years.

The thing I think would've liked best, I think, is if the book had included photographs. Maiklem is acting a bit as an amateur archaeologist and hobbyist museum curator - I would've liked to see the shore, and more of her found objects than fit on the cover. Her descriptions are very good! But photos would've added something.

Photos would especially drive home a point she makes over and over - that nearly everything she finds is either broken or very small, or both. She finds buttons, beads, pins, coins and metal tokens, parts of clay pipes, and an awful lot of fragments of glass bottles and pottery vessels. Almost nothing is large or whole. Some things get lost in the river, many are thrown away because they're already damaged, and while the anoxic mud preserves, time and salt water both destroy. Maiklem is a treasure hunter, but these are treasures for their historic and sentimental value, not because they're worth a lot of money.

I think lots of kids have collections like Maiklem did, of interesting looking rocks and shells and other found objects, though hers sounds much larger and better tended than mine was. There was a book I loved as a kid, a guide to treasure hunting, that was fully illustrated, and I checked out over and over from the school library. I never got into the real thing, but the vicarious, imaginative thrill of discovery is part of what I like about games like D&D. I'd kind of hoped I would like Maiklem's book the way I did that one as a kid, which was probably too much to ask for. But it was interesting to see what the real life of an actual hobby treasure hunter looks like.

Black Sea

 

Black Sea

Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

by Caroline Eden

photographs by Ola Smit and Theodore Kaye
Quadrille

2018

 

 

Black Sea is a book that seems to deliberately defy classification. First and foremost, it's travel writing, cataloging author Caroline Eden's trip around the Black Sea coast, starting in Odessa, Ukraine, passing through Romania and Bulgaria, then crossing Turkey, from Istanbul in the west to Trabzon in the east.

Admittedly, travel writing is always an eclectic genre, mixing narration of the author's voyage with tidbits of local history and current events, and it's often combined with food writing, as in this case, where Eden seemingly describes every meal as she travels the coast. But Eden's emphasis on food goes beyond a secondary focus - you could also think of this as food writing that happens to describe travel. She even includes recipes between each stop, usually 2-4 from each place she visits, adding up to dozens over the course of the book. So this is also kind of a cook book.

It's also also kind of a photo book. There aren't images on every page, and the book itself is novel-sized, not coffee table, but there are a lot of photos, usually getting a full page or two-page spread each. In a lot of travel books you get none, or else a few pages of color plates in the center. I don't usually talk about the physical qualities of the book I'm reading, but Black Sea is gorgeous. The hardcover has silver foil and an embossed surface making the wave pattern. The pages are edged in ink so that the closed book is a solid block of black. The paper is heavy, and the photography crisp and attractive.

And the thing is, this genre hybrid, this eclectic mix, it works. Eden marches on her stomach, and you follow along, eating your way from Odessa to Trabzon. There are local variations, but the recipes often involve garlic, rice pilaf or bulgar wheat, yogurt or cheese, honey, leafy greens, hazelnuts or chestnuts, and lots of fish, especially sardines and anchovies, which are beloved across the region. She buses between cities and has local guides and drivers in each one, eating at a mix of restaurants and hospitable family homes. Like me, she's curious about the famous 'mad honey' made from rhododendron pollen, said to be intoxicating in small doses, toxic in large, but she doesn't manage to try any.

Besides food, Eden's other big interest is immigrant communities. She writes about the Jewish and Italian communities in Odessa, Swiss farmers in Romania, Russians loyal to the tsar fleeing Lenin in Istanbul, and Turks who came back to Trabzon after generations in Russia. She's arguably more interested in these smaller communities, their culture and food, than she is with the majority population anywhere she goes. Eden gives special attention to writers, mostly but not only Russian authors exiled by the Soviets, so it would be easy to compile a reading list from books she mentions along the way.

Eden is not, for the most part, interested making any overt comments about politics. There's an obvious reason her journey doesn't start in Crimea or make it out of Turkey into Georgia or Russia - but she never mentions it. Ceausescu only comes up to explain why so few Anglophone travel writers have visited Romania. The Russian seizure of Crimea and territories in East Ukraine, the attempted Turkish coup and Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown afterward - Eden mentions them only in passing, and only when absolutely necessary.

I say this not to cast judgment, just as a description of what she wrote. There's a new edition of the book coming out this year with some supplemental writing about Putin's full invasion of Ukraine. It's hard for me to imagine this won't feel tacked on and dissonant with what's already there. Another writer, or perhaps even Eden herself, could write all about the historical and present-day conflicts and injustices in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, but I feel like that would belong to a different book, a different way of experiencing the region than what we get here.