Roblog

I meant to link to this earlier this year, but just stumbled upon it again in an open tab (yes, from August, so shoot me) and remembered how good it was. Sam Kriss takes on the now-ubiquitous “book lists”, taking aim first at the middlebrow blandness of Barack Obama’s, then the angsty teenage boydom of Reddit’s:

“What we’re looking at isn’t really a list of the greatest books ever written, it’s a bunch of examples of one very particular type of book: the long, morose psycho-philosophical novel. Like every list of books, it’s an exercise in summoning an aspirational type. This time, it’s the brilliant sensitive young man, quiet, maybe lonely, misunderstood, a creature with hidden depths. The long, morose psycho-philosophical novel is what this type of person is supposed to read.”

It’s hard to argue with his prescription:

“I’m sick of lists of books. Reading lists, top tens, flowcharts, curriculums, canons, counter-canons, the lot. Pathetic activity. Someone could write out the name of every single book I really love, ranked impeccably, with no omissions and no interpolations, and I’d spit cold venom in their face. I think the only way to read with dignity is to read organically, genealogically, backwards, by touch. Not running down a list, but excavating, following the seams where words bleed into each other.”

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For years, a mysterious figure has been using deception, hacking, and subterfuge to steal unpublished manuscripts from literary agents and publishers.

The puzzling things is: nobody really knows why:

“This was a setup Stieg Larsson would have admired: a clever thief adopting multiple aliases, targeting victims around the world, and acting with no clear motive. The manuscripts weren’t being pirated, as far as anyone could tell. Fake Francesca wasn’t demanding a ransom. ‘We assumed it was the Russians,’ Mörk said. ‘But we are the book industry. It’s not like we’re digging gold or researching vaccines.’ Perhaps someone in publishing, or a Hollywood producer, was desperate for early access to books they might buy. Was the thief simply an impatient reader? A strung-out writer in need of ideas?”

Reeves Wiedeman dug into the story, and found himself tied up in knots, as obsessed as the thief themselves. #

The end-of-year lists are trickling out; Christmas must be around the corner. The Economist’s best books of 2021 is well worth a dig.

Three highlights from among many:

“Empire of Pain”, by Patrick Radden Keefe

“This is the tragic, enraging story of the Sackler family, the previously low-profile owners of Purdue Pharma – which in 1996 introduced the drug OxyContin. The author shows how an epidemic of prescription-opioid abuse morphed into a worse one of illicit heroin and, later, fentanyl.”

“We Are Bellingcat”, by Eliot Higgins

“How did a bunch of self-taught internet sleuths help solve some of the biggest crimes of recent years, such as the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine and the Salisbury poisonings? Bellingcat’s founder chronicles some of the outfit’s investigations, and its efforts to galvanise citizen journalists, expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation. An antidote to cyber-miserabilism.”

“Fallen Idols”, by Alex von Tunzelmann

“Ranging from George III to Saddam Hussein, India to the Dominican Republic, this account of the fates of controversial statues – variously dumped, destroyed, moved and re-erected – offers insights into the times and places they were put up and taken down. Statues simplify history, the author says; what is really educational are the arguments they provoke.”

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John Merrick reviews Alberto Prunetti’s new memoir (of sorts), Down and Out in England and Italy:

“Prunetti is no genteel returnee, instead acting as our Virgil leading us, the latter-day Dantes, deep into the recesses of the capitalist inferno. His leaving and returning is not from the solidity of middle-class life to the working-class of old, but rather from one form of manual labor to another. We follow him from the stable, unionized, masculine labor of his father’s generation in the steel mills of that crucible of the Italian workers’ movement, Livorno, into the new world of dreadful temp jobs, deep into the abyss of long hours and poor pay, followed by heavy drinking and a fight on the weekend. The working-class hero, our Virgil tells us, is no longer the celebrated blue-collar worker on the picket line but the tabarded underclass cleaning p*ss and sh*t from the floors of the nation’s toilets or serving up reheated slop to dead-eyed consumers in suburban shopping malls.”

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