a handful of apples / october

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Cypriot limestone hand holding a piece of fruit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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A photograph of unpeeled apples by Richard Tepe, ca. 1900-1930. The Rijksmuseum.

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Bruised stone apple, from the archives of criticalEYEfinds.

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"Apples," folio 48 (verso), from Florilegium (A Book of Flower Studies), 1608. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Doris Ulmann, "Women Gathering Apples," ca. 1930s. Ogden Museum of Southern Art. 

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Italian marble half-apple bowl.

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James Nasmyth,"Back of Hand & Shrivelled Apple. To illustrate the origin of certain mountain ranges by shrinkage of the globe," ca. 1870 (in or before 1873). From The moon : considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite.

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The composer's white summer suit rests on a hanger in his study; his broad-brimmed Borsalino and stick are on a nearby table. Here is the Steinway grand he was given on his fiftieth birthday (though he composed in head, not on the piano); there is a run of the National Geographic Magazine covering the last five years of his life. On the Russian oak desk at which he worked from the time of his marriage in 1892 lies the wooden ruler Aino carved for him, with which he ruled his scores; also, an empty box of Corona cigars, and an elegant Tiffany photo frame, containing a portrait of Aino, through which the light streams. Open on the desk is a facsimile score of his greatest symphony, the Fourth. But the homely is never far away: in the kitchen, screwed to the wall, is an apple-coring machine Sibelius brought back from one of his trips to America. Made of black cast-iron, it is a Heath Robinsony contraption of prongs, screws, and blades that will peel, core, and slice your apple at the turn of the handle. From the same trip he also brought his wife a Tiffany diamond; but it is the apple-corer that sticks in the mind.

Julian Barnes, from "Ainola: Music and Silence." The Lives of Houses, ed. by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee. 

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The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.

Henry James, from New England: An Autumn Impression, 1905. Via The New York Review. 

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The white October sun circles Kirchstetten
With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens,
And bronze and golden under wiry boughs,
A few last apples gleam like jewels.

Stephen Spender, from "Auden's Funeral."

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I always think of those curious long autumn walks with which we ended a summer holiday, talking of what we were going to do–‘autumn plans’ we called them. They always had reference to painting and writing and how to arrange social life and domestic life better … They were always connected with autumn, leaves falling, the country getting pale and wintry, our minds excited at the prospect of lights and streets and a new season of activity beginning–October the dawn of the year.

Virginia Woolf, writing to her sister Vanessa Bell, ca. September 1927.

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a shell collection

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Syrinx aruanus (Australian Trumpet shell), ca. 1950s.

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Shell lamps from Tennant New York.

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Alyssa Goodman, "Crooked Tree." Watercolor on seashell.

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19th century shell-work figure of a lady, from Doe & Hope.

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Marsden Hartley, "Three Shells." Oil on board, ca. 1941-1943. Via Peter Shear.

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Earrings by Alana Burns/la ma r.

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1920s shell-art work in Davenport, Iowa. Via Anonymous Works.

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18th-century scallop-shaped marble sink, via The Marble Dog.

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Ca. 1900s-era glass-plate x-ray of shells, via wilds.things.

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Engraved 18th century Turbo Marmoratus shell, from the V & A. 

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Superfolk "Shells in my pocket" print.

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Photo of an Ordovician fossil bed in Ohio by coryfinds. 

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Nagasone Tojiro Mitsumasa, "Helmet in the form of a Sea Conch Shell," 1618. Via sacredgrounds_.

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Edward Weston, "28 (Cross-section of a nautilus shell)."

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On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells...

John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid.

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Erasmus Darwin's bookplates bore the motto E conchis omnia—"everything from shells."

various suns / midwinter day

Donald Baxter MacMillan, "The last row of suns," 1913-1917. Taken on the Crocker Expedition.

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Erich Fried, "Toys," translated by George Rapp. Via Drifting Lament.

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15th century French pilgrim's badge of the sun with a human face. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Rylands Medieval Collection, Latin MS 53, f. 58v. Christianus Prolianus and Joachinus de Gigantibus (?), Astronomia, 1478: "Comparative view of the magnitudes of the Sun (a large disc of burnished gold), the Moon (silver), Mars (gold), Venus (gold), Mercury (gold) and Earth (pale)." Found at Demonagerie, via A London Salmagundi.

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Jan Luyken, "Vrouw houdt bij het kijken naar de zon haar hand voor de ogen (The woman holds her hands ovr her eyes while looking at the sun)," 1687. The Rijksmuseum.

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Bernadette Mayer, from Midwinter's Day, 1978.

odds and ends / 10.12.2023

 

Harold Anchel, Wind. 1935-1943. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Glove, ca. 1840-1880. Bronze and paint, 1 1/8 × 7 7/8 × 4 7/8". The Menil Collection, Houston.

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Osborne's Superfine American Water Colours travel set ca. 1830, via criticalEYEfinds.

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Melissa Catanese, Figures #6, 2021.

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Still from Himali Singh Soin's "The Spiral," via Ignota Books. 

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It has long been the task of the humane left to reject the line of reasoning that would sacrifice civilians on the altar of 'historical inevitability,' whether in its Stalinist or Third Worldist guise—to protest the idea that untold innocents must die in the service of some grand telos. The humane left insists instead on the possibility, on the moral imperative, of bending what others take to be history’s iron tracks. The humane left’s north star is no flag or banner but the unflinching belief in the inherent, even divine, worth of every human life.

After all, it is this same belief out of which the humane left stands in steadfast opposition to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of the Gaza Strip, that drives our opposition to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, our protests against the injustices of apartheid, our demands for a long-term and equal resolution to this conflict. Just as the humane left abhors Hamas’s attack and demands the immediate release of the hostages, the humane left rejects with all its force the exterminationist logic now promulgated by officials in Netanyahu’s government and right-wing politicians in the United States. There is no contradiction here. The left must be humane, or it is no left at all.

Joshua Leifer, "Toward a Humane Left: To hold everyone's humanity—that is the task of the hour." Dissent, October 12, 2023. 

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Related: "It's so hard to have humanity here."

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On December 15, 1811, the London Statesman issued a warning about the state of the stocking industry in Nottingham. Twenty thousand textile workers had lost their jobs because of the incursion of automated machinery. Knitting machines known as lace frames allowed one employee to do the work of many without the skill set usually required. In protest, the beleaguered workers had begun breaking into factories to smash the machines. “Nine Hundred Lace Frames have been broken,” the newspaper reported. In response, the government had garrisoned six regiments of soldiers in the town, in a domestic invasion that became a kind of slow-burning civil war of factory owners, supported by the state, against workers. The article was apocalyptic: 'God only knows what will be the end of it; nothing but ruin.'

Kyle Chayka, "Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I." The New Yorker, 9/26/2002. 

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The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening—it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery—especially when it's been around for a while—not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work—to be ''worth'' that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass—the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero—who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war.

Thomas Pynchon, "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" The New York Times, October 28, 1984. 

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At this crisis certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactures of the North which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened. Distress reached its climax. Endurance, overgoaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. But as is usual in such cases, nobody took much notice.

Charlotte Bronte, Shirley. 

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This movie deals with the epidemic of the way we live now.
What an inane card player. And the age may support it.
Each time the rumble of the age
Is an anthill in the distance.

As he slides the first rumpled card
Out of his dirty ruffled shirtfront the cartoon
Of the new age has begun its ascent
Around all of us like a gauze spiral staircase in which
Some stars have been imbedded.

John Ashbery, "This Configuration." The Paris Review, Issue 79, Spring 1981.

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"It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult."

odds and ends / 5.9.23

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G.W. O'Grady, "Pink roses in vase," ca. 1915. George Eastman House Collection.

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Maria La Rosa pendant socks.

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“Ice Music” by Jim McWilliams, performed by Charlotte Moorman for the International Carnival of Experimental Sound, London in 1972, via fluxusgram.

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A Japanese mother of pearl-inlaid lacquer box and cover. Meiji period, late 19th century, via Freeman's.

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Seiryu Inoue, "Men lying under cherry blossoms." From Kyo no miyako, 1960/1970, via la jardin robo.

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We live in undeniably ugly times. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding—many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best. Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle. This drab sublime unites flat-pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design: an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering—of a slightly duller, worse world.

"Why is Everything So Ugly?" n+1, Issue 44 "Middlemen," Winter 2023.

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When [Brendon] Babenzien’s first J. Crew collection débuted to great acclaim, last July, [Derek[ Guy noted that the designs were virtually indistinguishable from more expensive, fetishized brands, such as Margaret Howell, Drake’s, Aimé Leon Dore, or Beams Plus. "If your purchases at ‘edgy’ brands like our legacy and visvim are limited to boxy tees and ever-so-slightly different jeans . . . you also look like you’re wearing j crew,” he wrote in a Twitter post. “Everyone is in jcrew. this is the reality.”

Hua Hsu, "J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep." The New Yorker, 3/27/2023. 

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"What is seen, not infrequently ... is a lot of affable, well-composed, of-the-moment mediocrity by people who could afford it, whose parents could afford it."

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All the sailors get depressed when they’re becalmed. The mood of Kirsten’s calls into headquarters has varied wildly, depending on whether she has wind. No stranger to adventure—she cycled alone from Europe to South Africa when she was twenty-two—she is the kind of person who, when not racing, likes to swim away from the boat “just to get that feeling of vastness, that sense of eternity, that if the boat did sail away, it would be, basically, eternity. And it is a scary thought…but it’s also kind of intriguing…to get that little bit of distance from yourself and the boat in the middle of the ocean.” ... In the last few days she seemed to think she was heading for certain defeat, having been stuck in the Atlantic doldrums for almost a month: “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel…. I guess I’d be more excited if I knew I had a chance of getting there first.” Assured that fans will be waiting to welcome her, she starts to sound a bit like Moitessier, the French sailor who declined to return to normal life back in 1969: “It would almost be better to disappear onto some mysterious piece of land and vanish, and, you know, not have to go through the whole…”—she trails off.

Jé Wilson, "Swimming Away from the Boat." NYR, 4/27/2023. 

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Fuzzy interfaces present users with complex, artful scenarios that must be learned and mastered—a novel departure from the unconsciously simple, spoon-fed manner in which interface design has become accustomed, toward a craft-like engagement in which the skill and mastery of an object must be acquired slowly, over time. Another advantage of fuzzy interactions is that they slow us down, creating what Ezio Manzini refers to as ‘islands of slowness’ that allow us to think, experience, and re-evaluate. The relationship between subject and object becomes evolutionary, as the subtle exchange of feed-forward and inherent feedback creates the illusion of mutual growth. Of course, fuzzy interaction is not for everyone, nor is it universally applicable. […] Nevertheless, alternative modes of interaction serve to remind us that perhaps the streaming of endeavors of modern times has inadvertently stripped the world of all its charm.

John Chapman, quoted by Derek Guy in "On Emotional Durability" at Die, Workwear, found via Lin. 

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The academic and psychotherapist Lisa Baraitser has argued for a definition of “maternal time” as a temporality specifically related to the repetition of maintenance labour and the “tenuous processes of maintaining familial relations across and between generations”: to do so, she draws on Denise Riley’s work on maternal grief. In Riley’s account of the way loss can create a kind of “suspended time” in her book Time Lived, Without Its Flow, a gestational temporality is identified in which the future literally unfolds within the present over the nine months of pregnancy, and then unspools in both parties forever, reaching backwards and forwards simultaneously. “My time is your time,” the mother says to the child, and vice versa. 

Helen Charman, "The Eternal Daughter." Another Gaze, 2/26/2023.

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The photographs may have a disembodied hand reaching out to steady an infant propped up in a chair, or the edge of a mother’s body may be visible as she crouches (mostly out of sight). In other less subtle photos, a child will be seated on her mother’s lap while the mother is entirely covered with a large cloth draped over her head and body. Perhaps the most unnerving of the Hidden Mother photographs are the ones in which the mother’s face was visible in the final photograph– and was then scratched out and obliterated. 

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I was a girl then, in Morris County, New Jersey. My favorite day of the week was Thursday, when I had piano lessons in Florham Park, not because I loved the piano especially, but because we always had time to kill between school and my lesson, time my mother used instead to take me to the Frelinghuysen Arboretum, where we’d walk through the woodlands and meadows. What I liked about those afternoons was that it was just us and the flowers. After my lesson, we’d circle back to the library across the street from the arboretum, and I would check out as many books as I could carry. Flowers, music, books, all within the same circumference, which I now recognize as a gift my mother gave me. She took me by the hand and introduced me to beauty, and while I put it off later in search of knowledge, I’ve come around to seeing that the two are related, that beauty is indispensable, and that books are the reproductive proof of it.

Susan Barba, from the introduction to American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide.

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A palmful of crinoids and ammonites.

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"What more do you want?"

odds and ends / 4.11.2023

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Evelyn Dunbar, April (1937/38). Oil painting of illustration originally commissioned for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary, found thanks to Susannah Clapp.

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Hayashi Kodenji, Vase with Chrysanthemum Design, c. 1900. LACMA.

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Walter McClintock, Meadow of Pink Flowers. Lantern slide created 1941, published 1905. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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From Charles Moore's introduction to Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows.

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Transitional Gottschalk dolls house with original tiled roof, wall, and floor papers from around 1907, via.

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Keepsake hat by William Ellery, here.

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Shafi' 'Abbasi, Drawing with Flowers, Butterflies, and Insects. 1649-1640. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Horticulturalist Clarence Elliott in his greenhouse, via Upstate Diary.

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She drew, but had no art instruction. After graduating from high school in 1955 she visited the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) on a whim. Dazzled by the atmosphere of freedom and energy—students painting in the hallways and playing bongos in the courtyard—she bought a pair of arty earrings and submitted a portfolio of her pencil sketches of movie stars.

Regina Marler, "Joan Doesn't Give A Damn." The New York Review,  March 9, 2023.

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Marriage to a pirate with a decent stash of plunder might offer a young woman the opportunity to set herself up as an independent trader, and also to escape the strictures of what could be a violently patriarchal society. ... The arrangement appears to have allowed the women a good amount of autonomy. Since a pirate husband had no social standing, and usually couldn’t even speak the local language, he ceded almost all economic and social responsibilities to his partner. By marrying a pirate, then, a woman could at a stroke gain freedom from the control of her family and move into a position of economic, social and, it seems, sexual independence, with nary an in-law in sight. Ports and villages on the coast sometimes became ‘cities of women’, where trade and contacts with the outside world were controlled by a new class of female merchants, who ‘constituted the backbone of such communities ... no decision of importance could be made without them.’ Graeber thinks that by throwing in their lot with prestigious, wealthy outsiders, young Malagasy women had seen a chance to ‘re-create local society’ according to their own lights, ‘and with the creation of the port towns, the transformation of sexual mores, and the eventual successful promotion of their children by the pirates as a new aristocratic class, this is precisely what they were able to do.’

Francis Gooding, "When Thieves Retire." London Review of Books, March 30, 2023. (Made me rush out and buy a copy of Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment.)

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“Stealing jewelry, it was just exciting. It also became a social outlet for me. That was my everything,” the nonagenarian says of her 60-year criminal career. “I don’t regret being a jewel thief. Do I regret getting caught? Yes.”

Aaron Rasmussen, "Ice Queen: The Story of the Notorious Jewel Thief Doris Payne." Grazia, Winter 2022. 

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Climbing up through the site we saw plaques with images of excavated objects that were now in the museum. One that I had particularly wanted to see was the colossal head of one of the Elefsina caryatids, balancing her sacred basket. I had recently visited her twin at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. According to the plaque the twin was ‘stolen’ by E.D. Clarke, a Cambridge mineralogist, in 1801—incidentally, or not, the same year that removals were begun by Elgin’s agents on the Parthenon. But the case of the Caryatid is different. Her abduction was unequivocally legal—Clarke had obtained clear permission from the authorities for her removal—but also entirely immoral. Clarke didn’t have Elgin’s theoretical (if disputed) claim to archaeological altruism, rescuing a neglected monument from the depredations or indifference of the locals; the locals revered the statue, piling dung about her to bless their fields, crowning her with flowers, lighting candles before her. And as her face is eroded featureless, there could be zero claim to artistic value.

He wanted her because she was hard to get.

A.E. Stallings, "Eleusinian Mysteries." The London Review of Books Blog, March 29, 2023. 

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When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the “time lady”—an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out—who would announce, with prim authority “at the tone,” the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time. I would stare, transfixed, at the Foucault pendulum at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry as it swept slow traces through its day; or gawp at the patinaed green clock, topped by a scythe and hourglass-carrying temporal patriarch and marked with a single word—time—that adorned the Jewelers Building on East Wacker Drive. But nothing felt so immediate, so curiously satisfying, as having the exact time delivered through the intimacy of the phone’s earpiece. 

Tom Vanderbilt, "In Search of Lost Time." Harpers, April 2023. 

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I have always been a reader, but I tend to get into ruts where I simply read the same passages over and over again. These include the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which the narrator tells you about his cave of lights; Marcel Proust’s description of place names; Joan Didion’s expressions of pointed indifference in Slouching Towards Bethlehem; the scene in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son where Fuckhead, the protagonist, stands outside a woman’s window; the introduction to Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (with the dinosaur skin); some random sentences in Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex; Orwell’s matter-of-fact conclusions in “Reflections on Gandhi”; every word of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son; the last stanza of Marilyn Hacker’s poem “For K. J., Leaving and Coming Back,” which reads “Although a day alone cuts tight or lies/too limp sometimes, I know what/I didn’t know/a year ago, that makes it the right/ size:/owned certainty; perpetual/surprise”; the list of items in Zooey Glass’s bathroom in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey; the postscript to Borges’s story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” as well as his love letter titled “Delia Elena San Marco.”

I’ve come to realize that I function like a more curated but less efficient version of GPT.

Jay Caspian King, "What's the Point of Reading Writing by Humans?" The New Yorker, 3/31/2023. 

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Which face is real?

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"This “quiet luxury” notion that people with “true” wealth only wear discreet, conformist UNIFORMS is nothing but absolute nonsense."

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Leonora Carrington and friends, sleeping.

books that might make good gifts, depending on the recipient

Each December, I compile a list of books I hope to read in the coming year, if time and brain space allow. While that's in the works, I thought I'd share something a little different, too—a list of books I have read that I'd happily give as gifts. 

Giving books can be somewhat fraught, at least according to The New York Times, so I've organized these by hypothetical recipients, expanding beyond the usual categories to encompass some giftees that might be particularly tricky. These are not exactly grouped by age or genre; it's a happy jumble.

We'll start with some easy ones ...

For the littlest readers:

In the Town All Year Round by Rotraut Susanne Berner. A possibly perfect book, nearly wordless, with so many stories to discover in the cutaway views of a town and its residents moving through a year, losing and finding things, including pets and wallets and love.

Contrary Dogs by élo. Fun and funny, this deceptively simple pop-up book is worth reading to smithereens, because tugging ears and tails to transform ridiculous dogs is irresistible.

The Chirri and Chirra books by Kaya Doi. Two cherry-cheeked children pedal through a gentle world of dreamy adventures, including soaking in hot springs scented with flowers, snuggling with friendly badgers, and making tourmaline candies. For even briefer adventures that skew surreal and gnomic, try the Sato the Rabbit books by Yuki Ainoya.

For picture-book fanciers:

Professional Crocodile by Giovanna Zoboli and Mariachiara Di Giorgio. A dapper crocodile wordlessly goes about his sophisticated, surreal urban life. (Look for the cheetahs in the Metro.)

Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis. A book of bugs written in bug language; 10/10.

Mr. Watson's Chickens by Jarrett Dapier and Andrea Tsunami. Mr. Watson's love of chickens nearly causes his loving (and extremely tolerant) partner, Mr. Nelson, to fly the coop, but the flock finds a surprising new home just in time. (Sidebar: For more chicken drama with a helping heap of quantum physics, see Skunk and Badger.)

For readers of chapter books:

The Arabel and Mortimer books by Joan Aiken. The hilarious adventures of a sweet child named Arabel and her agent of chaos/sulky, opinionated, and ever-hungry raven, Mortimer. (I have read each of these books aloud at least four times in the last six months.)

The Real Thief by William Steig. Steig stories are like Montessori knives; scaled for children, but they cut. This compact tale is about a goose accused of stealing, and, of course, the identity of the real thief. Steig encompasses complicated issues like justice and blame, obligation and forgiveness with an empathy, humor, and wisdom that eludes many so-called grown-up novels.

The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay. A grumpy, opinionated pudding that never runs out and can become whatever its owner wants it to be causes hijinks involving a sailor, a koala, and a penguin bold, members of The Noble Society of Pudding Owners.

For fantasists:

The Adventures of Anatole by Nancy Willard. A compilation of wonder tales involving the surreal quests of a kind boy named Anatole who occasionally finds himself in the company of talking cats and girls made of glass and women who can make the weather.

The Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. Any time anyone ever asks me to recommend a book, I will recommend this one, even though I know this a book readers need to find for themselves: it is so rich and strange and singular and unforgettable. 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Oh, I love this book. Do you secretly yearn to wander grand, decaying marble halls that stink of the sea and echo with waves? To unravel mysteries written in bone? To step into the other world that shadows our own? Then this is the book for you!

For young (and old) adults:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Boarding school coming-of-age with a bioethical twist. 

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Hunger Games and its ilk are weak sauce; slip the kids in your orbit the hard stuff. They can take it. And after they read this, they may cross categories and become ready for the next category ...

For doomsday preppers:

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. Overnight, the world changes, and a woman finds herself alone, with only a cat, a dog, and a cow for company. What does it take, and what does it mean, to survive? (One of the best books I read in 2022.)

Harrow by Joy Williams. A teenaged girl wanders, looking for a home; meanwhile, radical oldsters foment futile acts of ecoterrorism in a world of epic environmental degradation. A savagely funny, piercing read.

For romantic scientists:

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes. I think I have read this three or four times now; it's wonderful, absorbing fun, delving into the conceptual pivot that happened in the late 18th century as modern scientific thought started to coalesce, and tracing astounding discoveries and feats of ingenuity that shaped the world of science as we know it. It's also how I learned about Caroline Herschel, comet-sweeper.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut. While some may sniff at the liberties this book takes in imagining the processes of mind that lead to the signature scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, they should get over themselves, because this is an exhilarating conjuring of, to steal from Holmes, the beauty and terror of science, how what's possible can change, and dark shadows cast by brilliance.

For curious gardeners:

Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf. An engrossing look at the early 18th-century partnership of John Bartram and Peter Collins—Bartram collected seeds and saplings from across the colonies of what would become the United States and sent them to Collinson, who was in England, remaking English gardens forever. Wonderful for anyone who has wandered through a garden center and wondered where a plant came from.

Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid's memory of a seed-gathering expedition in the Himalayas is sharp, unsparing, and spellbinding, a look at the strange places our hunger for beauty can drive us, and the unsettling relationships and power dynamics that result.

For the irreverent:

I Am God by Giacomo Sartori. So, God is *maybe* having an existential crisis? And then there's this woman—he can't stop watching her, though he really has better things to do. In this, his diabolically funny diary, he tells all and vents about the woeful problems of being an all-powerful deity.

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin. A wildly entertaining account of actual "accidental gods"—humans venerated as deities, usually in their lifetimes and often under protest. (Think Christopher Columbus, James Cook, Douglas MacArthur, Haile Selassie, Gandhi, various petty colonial administrators, and, tragically, Donald Trump.) Like spaghetti strands twining around a twirled fork, the stories of these happenstance gods wind into one big bite: the story of how whiteness became divine, the ultimate false idol to overthrow.

For the solastagic:

The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy. A beautiful and enraging, deeply personal account of the denudation of the natural world.

Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity by Emmett Gowin. A gorgeous, heartbreaking documentation of over 1200 species of moth, individually photographed and arranged in 51 grids of 25, based on when and where they were seen. The plentitude of moths, each so special, each so particular, seen all together, intoxicates, a visual manifestation of our great dumb luck in getting to live alongside such creatures, though of course we (meaning me, meaning humanity in the aggregate) are our doing our relentless best to ruin their world as fast as we can.

Gigantic Cinema, edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan. A selection of poems and excerpts culled from various writers organized to chart the changing weather of a single day.

For mathematicians and spies:

Dr. No by Percival Everett. This book is about nothing. It's hilarious.

For noir enthusiasts with an appreciation for the surreal:

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge. Human-like beasts and beastly humans mysteriously coexist in an industrial city somewhere in China where it always seems to be dark and rainy, and one woman is determined to sleuth the origins of the strange creatures around her, creating a singular field guide to the oddities and sorrows of their lives. 

For people who only read mysteries:

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. You gotta stick with this one til the end; it's not what you think.

For bell-ringers (and people who only read mysteries):

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers. I have read this four or five times, and each time, I marvel at what Sayers accomplishes here—not only patterning a whole book around the obscure practice of change bell ringing (the "traditional English art of ringing a set of tower bells in an intricate series of changes, or mathematical permutations (different orderings in the ringing sequence), by pulling ropes attached to bell wheels"), but also writing a mystery of profound humanity. One of her four greats, alongside Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon.

For evil financiers and crypto enthusiasts:

JR by William Gaddis. Let's just say the investments don't go to plan. (And if you happen to know an art forger or a sun-worshiper, Gaddis has them covered, too—try The Recognitions.)

For clout-chasers:

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. The story of the canny and orchestrated Gilded Age rise of Undine Spragg, who if she lived now would totally have, like, 400k followers and a wellness MLM.

For the complicit:

All for Nothing, by Walter Kempowski. For a German family at the end of World War II, life goes on as usual—until it doesn't, and their comfort and inaction exacts an epic cost.

For the misunderstood, in sympathy with their sore, wild hearts:

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker. This is the only novel Barker wrote (it was published when she was 51), but why bother writing more if you can write something as absolutely perfect as this? Here, Barker relates the story of Janet, whose brief life is shaped by place and misunderstanding and circumstance as she grows up in a world of squalid privilege in mid-century Scotland. The feeling for nature is extraordinary, as is the depiction of the ways that innocence can be misconstrued and misunderstood, and how difficult it is to be a self that does not fit in the world in the expected ways. This is writing that reveals the gap between what is commonly considered beautiful and true sublimity.

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One more bookish thing: I am trying out bookish newslettering; if you are interested in intermittent dispatches on what I am reading and what I thought about it, with links to blog posts, here's the link.

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A sidebar on giving books: Sometimes, it's hard to get a copy of the exact book you want in time for whatever occasions giving it. When that happens in our family, we like to take a page from elementary school days when kids sometimes got to draw replacement covers for library books (those books were always the most fun to check out, anyway). We scribble out our own version of the cover and give that with a promise that the book is coming soon (the handmade covers make for funny and memorable bookmarks).

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City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, ca. 1959, photographed by William J. Eisenlord.