Books I Read - June 2020

I'm restarting the blog in earnest with a monthly review of the books I've read. I've been keeping lists of the books I've read since my last years in college, with the loose goal of reading 50 books a year (it's been a long time since I've hit that mark). Recently, I've added at least a sentence or two about the book to my list, so that an impression lingers longer. This monthly post is, for now anyway, a way to expand that and to try to make connections or just share what I'm looking at. So, here goes - I read the following three books in June.

1.      Daphne Brooks, Grace (Non-Fiction)

This is the first 33 1/3 book I've read in a while. The 33 1/3 series contains almost 200 books on music albums of all different sorts. The books are chapbooks, usually ~140 pages in length. I've read maybe 15-20 in total, and it's very tempting to just buy the whole series and go through them. The length of a given entry is short enough to devour in a day or two, and long enough to get to some interesting places. Usually, those places fall short of profundity because 140 pages on one album isn't that long, after all, but they are great all the same.

I think Daphne Brooks's book on Jeff Buckley's Grace jumped to the top of my list because of something she said about Nina Simone, possibly in this Pitchfork piece but maybe elsewhere. I can't remember what it was, and it may just have been her describing how impressed she was by Buckley's performance of Simone's "Lilac Wine", which is track 4 on Grace. I have it in my head, apocryphally perhaps, that she was impressed that a white man could handle Simone's work so deeply. I like and own Grace on vinyl, but given my recent thinking on Simone, that would have caught my eye.

Brooks is a professor and her approach in this book reflects that. She underlines a lot of themes, and then underlines them again - Buckley's feminism, his learning from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his inversion of Led Zeppelin's power. Her breakdown of the music was a little modifier heavy, but it sheds new light on the structures of the songs and on the path Buckley took to get to Grace.

Writing or talking about music is tricky. It can be done - there are ways to draw out the power of music, even if much of that power is elemental or indescribable. The more common way is by illustrating the musician, talking about who they are to translate that to their music. The more challenging but, I think, rewarding way is to get into the notes and lines of a song, of an album. To explain why people like the popular parts, and to highlight the less noticed parts that make a song work.

Brooks takes both paths here. I think she handles the background on Buckley better by not reducing everything to biography - I learned about his (non-)relationship with his father, about his views on the world, and the conscious way he approached the beginning of his career in New York, but this was not obsessive about his person, even as it was well-researched. The analysis of the songs ranges wider, though it still doubles back on some of those themes I mentioned above, but I learned quite a bit from her analysis there as well. I wouldn't have thought about Dream Brother as having a raga feel to it, for example. And she gets full credit for devoting relatively few pages to "Hallelujah", the best known track on the album (and when this was published, it was really in pop culture ascendancy).

All in all, I think the goal of the 33 1/3 series, at least for me as a reader, is to learn more about the subject and to get excited about listening to the album a few times. This achieved that goal.

2.      J. Anthony Lucas, Common Ground (History)

2020 has been a time for grappling with our privileges, for better or worse. I think about my time studying history in high school and college. I majored in history in college, but had 1/10 of my credits earned from high school, which also fulfilled all the US history I had to study - I took two medieval Europe courses but zero college US History courses.

That credit carried over from AP US History, which I took my junior year in high school. I always loved learning about history, but somehow I was less than a serious student. Junior year required the grand research paper, which had to be at least six pages (I think I got a shorter requirement because I took a final exam as well). Showing no real curiosity, I wrote about Title IX enforcement since that was relevant to me as a wrestler. Dr. Quattlebaum rightly gave me a D on the paper, calling it a polemic (a word I learned then and there) and a C that term; when I checked if he would be open to writing me a college recommendation, he said it's a good idea sometimes to get a fuller picture on a student, even the classes that don't go well. I did not end up asking him for a recommendation.

I grew up in a suburb of Boston, and was proud of the Boston history I knew - the city's role in the American Revolution, the number of presidents born there, the importance of our universities, even the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. attended Boston University. And yet, despite growing up in the 90s and 00s, some 25-30 years after the events depicted in Common Ground, I had no real knowledge about the busing crisis in Boston. It was something in the air, maybe the Boston Globe would mention it time to time, maybe a knucklehead WEEI radio host would get in trouble for a related issue. But it was just a thing in the recent  past of a place I wasn't curious about, and that I had the privilege to ignore.

All of which is to say, Common Ground has a lot to teach me. The writing itself is cinematic, getting into the lives and heads of the three focus families, as well as seven key figures in Boston in the 70s. That approach - based on years of reporting with the families - allows for empathy in a situation that at least sounds as polarizing as our modern times. It's not a voice from nowhere, but a voices from specific places - the South End, Charlestown, Dorchester, Lexington, etc. - and while I might guess where Lukas's sympathies lie, it's only a guess.

If one were to lazily assume based on the first chapters, the 'villain' of the book might be the working-class Irish McGoffs, who are resisting the integration of Charlestown and standing in the way of equality and progress; while the yuppie Yankee* Divers are putting their money where their mouth is, moving into an integrated neighborhood and working for inequality. The Twymons, the Black family studied in this book, would then be typecast in the victim role, held back from getting ahead.

*Lukas uses Yankee as a term for patrician, old-money Bostonians and folks in the suburb, with general English descent. I didn't really hear that term as a kid, and I'm unclear if it's just a synonym for upper-class WASP (white anglo-saxon protestant) or something else.

But that's not at all where Lukas goes, in part because he doesn't go anywhere, he lets the characters walk through their own stories. Which takes the Divers out of government work and to the point of hitting muggers with baseball bats on the South End streets, before they move back to the suburbs; the McGoffs to tentative acceptance and understanding; the Twymons holding on to their apartment and in a semi-reconciled family situation, even as a lot of tragedy took place. It was hard for me as a reader to not groan or cheer when different characters took the right or wrong step, and in the end more steps ended up being wrong than right, which reflected the twisted and stacked situation.

There are direct echoes to our modern times, for example over the role of objectivity in the press. Of course the book also fits in with the issues of racial injustice, and is a potent testament of how deep those issues go and how wide they stretch - from housing to education to economic opportunity to health to justice and further.

I did have one complaint in reading - the seesawing chronology made the narrative hard to follow, e.g. Colin Diver would leave the mayor's office, then we'd go back to a scene in 1970 with the Divers when he was still there. But it's a trivial complaint within the broader context.

I've been on a US city history kick, with certain cities specifically catching my attention - Detroit for a while, Chicago, New Orleans, and most recently Memphis (I'll throw in the Mississippi Delta from John M Barry's Rising Tide to this kick as well). It's odd that I didn't have the same desire to dive into Boston history, and came upon this sort of sideways. But it's a reminder that there are always problems close to home to solve.

3.      Angelika Schrobsdorff, You Are Not Like Other Mothers

Europa Editions has been a source of good European books - usually translated novels - for me since college. I remember reading Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment in 2005, which was a total eye opener in a number of ways. Ferrante has become a big star, of course, and the publishing house has also put out authors like Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of The Hedgehog), Alina Bronsky (The Hottest Dishes Of The Tartar Cuisine), and Yishai Sarid (Limassol), among the authors I've read.

This book was recommended to us by a friend who lives in Sofia, Bulgaria, where the last section of this story takes place. The internet and print sources are ambiguous on whether this is a novel or a memoir, so I'm taking it as an exaggerated retelling of the truth, in the sense that Schrobsdorff uses novelistic techniques like writing from her mother's perspective, but most of what happened really did.

Anyway, this is a World War II, rise of the Nazis and escape from them memoir, and it's a tale of the limits of assimilation, of the Weimar Republic and the Roaring twenties in Berlin, of ignoring the rising reality of Hitler, of promiscuity and loyalty, of the pressures of wealth on normal relationships and of the greater pressures of losing wealth on those relationships, on how much of the sticks Sofia was like in the 40s, of an unsympathetic self-portrayal of the narrator, and really about history. The book races the rough the history, it's hard to put down and easy to breeze past, but like the great works of this style, it compresses life into some hundreds of pages (500 plus in this case), in a way that makes you feel like you've lived it all, the regrets and the rushes, and that now that it's over you're sorry and wish you could do it all again. Better to feel that regret and yen 'artificially', where we have a chance to then re-seize our day to day.

The book, as any honest one from people who lived through those events, asks important questions about the balance of freedom versus responsibility, and of how to recognize aberrations when we're seeking normalcy in our day to day lives. It is more a book about the run-up to the war than how to survive during that period, and really it's more about the mother who is the subject of the story, Else, and of Else's loving but fraught relationships with her children and, to a lesser degree, her men. Those sorts of stories, focused on characters amidst the times, are what resonate best with me.

Again, I have a trivial nitpick, which is that outside of Else and the narrator, Angelika, the characters were a little pale. But there was plenty to cover with just those two characters.