Bunker and Books

Almost done digging my bunker, just in case 2025, you know, takes a certain shape...

Just kidding. Although I'm sure the planes overhead and the military choppers heading into Kirtland AFB probably suspect another prepper in action, I'm actually making a sunken garden, an idea for getting plants out of the scorching heat. Buddy has been a big help, as you can imagine.

I've been hatching several plans lately to increase the strength and resiliency of the mechanisms through which I meet my basic needs. Growing my own food is part of this as is reducing my reliance on money. Case in point: I found the sandbags (empty, of course, thank goodness) for free and as I continue along, I'm determined not to spend any money on this project. I'll keep you posted. At root: a desire for strength and resilience. Which brings me to the meat of this post: BOOKS.

I spent last evening (New Year's Eve) reviewing my reading journal from the past year. The practice of deep reading combined with writing about the ideas in those books seems to have strengthened a muscle I'd allowed to atrophy. Stepping into a new spin about the sun, I thought I'd share a few insights or thoughts about seven of my favorite reads, work that fortifies me for whatever's coming in 2025, and has made me stronger and more resilient.

1. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolf Anaya. This is a book about the universal quest for answers and trying to discern which answers help us make sense of our experience. I resonated with Antonio's (the chief protagonist) search for understanding: trying to figure out who you are apart from aspirations others may have for you, leaving behind the childlike expectation for simple answers (or that answers exist at all) and embracing the questions that arise amid the complex experiences we have in life. We also must figure out what to do or where to turn when a source fails us or fails to provide what is sought: is the problem the source, what we seek, or something else we cannot yet see? Finally, the protagonist's journey reminds me of the difficulty of living in a space where contradictory ideas are simultaneously true.

2. Babel by RF Kuang. This central thrust of this novel is the tie between language, translation and empire, essentially that colonial expansion and oppression is enacted through language translation. This novel scratched my political philosophy itch as a thought exercise around social systems, power, and agency. Two "sides" arise in the effort to end colonialism (as depicted in this story): one side believes in changing hearts and minds through existing structures and laws, while the other side believes only violence will cause people to change. What are the other options? My mind buzzed with the novel's import for the year-long election cycle, global issues, and how impossible it seems to fix anything. Without giving any spoilers, I will say that I spilled a lot of ink in my journal on one chilling idea from this book: "impotence is contagious."

3. White Noise by Don DeLillo. "I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters" (122). And this, "Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country" (246). What's that slogan, oh yeah, "make America great again" ... And then, "Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom" (274). White Noise was published in 1985; I read it and wrote about in January 2024 and then we all lived this through the election cycle and the events of the last year, at least this was how the book was useful to me in trying to wrap my little brain around a second helping of Trump.

4. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Takes my prize for best read of 2024 and earned retention on my shelf for the yearly re-read and life ride (I'm starting to get rid of books that I know I won't re-read, recognizing that I won't be able to read all the books in the world before I croak--and a book must be special to earn the re-read, because there's all these books in the world, you see). My 40s was a decade where I felt rather lost and bewildered, insecure and dependent on external affirmation and influences. I hated myself for being and feeling that way and tried all kinds of fixes for it. I'd read Emerson in my 20s and didn't get much from it because I was then in the firm grip of religiosity, and I wonder what might have happened if I'd found him again in those turbulent 40s. Now in my early 50s, my reading of Emerson gave me the courage to take some big steps this past year. In numerous ways I left conventional expectations behind--"I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not a spectacle." I recognized the bars of the prison I'd built for myself, my willingness to repeatedly return to the cage--"Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere." Emerson helped me embrace my life story--"The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks." In Emerson is most of the lifehacks making the podcast rounds these days: embrace discomfort, the problems with virtue-signaling, the need for self-reliance and self-education, the power of nonconformity (subtle art of not giving a f*@k), not being afraid of failing and being indifferent to circumstance. And being willing to contradict yourself, to do something new and different from the past 'you,' to let go of the "corpse of memory." Many, many pages in my journal are dedicated to Emerson's essays, helping me heal and grow stronger. It was one of the best parts of 2024 for me.

5. Practical Anarchism by Shuli/Scott Branson. Despite my fear of breaking rules (or being caught breaking rules), I am an anarchist at heart, at least spiritually and in my political viewpoints, but in the anarchism of Kropotkin, Proudhon, "mutual aid" stuff, not the "let's burn it all down" crowd. I've had a few very magical moments in life when someone in a position of power within a bureaucracy or institution decided to help me do something that the rules said they couldn't. I felt a genuine human connection and such gratitude for them and this small thing they did for me that it's kind of startling and awful that I noticed. While I'm sympathetic to many of the ideals of the Democratic Party, I find the bureaucratic nature of the "answers" frustrating and dehumanizing. Health care, welfare, food system, housing, all these systems in place to address these huge "issues" and that's the rub: people become issues and numbers and cases; the systems get more rigid, more expensive to administer, more degrading and ineffective. Branson looks at the both the necessary dismantling of these dehumanizing systems and offers practical suggestions for what should take their place. I'm sure most would read this book and dismiss the ideas as impractical, naive, too difficult, just as often happens with consensus-building or feminist ethics of care or cooperatives. To go back to DeLillo--"I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters"--and to Kuang--impotence is contagious--I see this little book on practical anarchism as extremely helpful in identifying my own complicity in and furtherance of these dehumanizing systems and as offering practical suggestions for action I can take to live otherwise.

6. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this big book. Dumas is a good storyteller, and I was all-in from the get-go. What changed this from a good read to a soul-sounding was this: I thirsted for revenge on his behalf and eagerly anticipated the comeuppance for each person involved in the initial injustice. But as the revenge unfolded, what started as something quite human and relatable (who doesn't want to see their enemies punished?) was tethered to the divine: God's punishment of evil, the human being as Providence's agent, and God's vengeance and justice. I grew uncomfortable and then had to ask myself all sorts of questions about justice itself and, beyond that, what if you're wrong about what you think God has appointed you to do? Don't we have all sorts of examples of people murdering, bombing, torturing, etc. on God's behalf, because God told them to, and so forth? And what to make of justice these days, how money is meant to compensate for loss, whether the death penalty is justice, how to account for the lost life of the innocent man released from prison after 30 years? What to make of law and politics, of corruption? I needed all 1200+ pages to do my thinking on these things. No surprise, I reached the end of the book but no real conclusions. I'm nervous and deeply skeptical about the notions of both man's and God's justice.

7.The Reckoning by Louise Penny. Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series is my guilty pleasure discovery and great love of 2024. It takes me back to the 90s television series Northern Exposure in how much I'd like to live in the world depicted. I love the "not-on-any-map" world Penny built in Three Pines, the magic of her mind evidenced in the questions she's pursuing in each book, and I love, love, love her characters. I especially love that they are smart, witty, rural, and complex, and that they eat. I love authors who have their characters eat. Weird, I know, but I look for that in books. Haruki Murakami is good at that, too, and I love him for it. Anyway, I read all 19 books in the series in 2024 and think they are all terrific, but the best of the bunch for me was The Reckoning. I'm not going to say too much because I don't want to spoil anything for future readers of this series or this book, but I'll just say that this book rammed home the strength involved in kindness and how those who live from kindness might not only heal themselves but achieve what justice never can.

I had a great year reading and writing and am looking forward to the same in 2025, both in the deep reading practice books I've selected and in the other titles I'll take on as well outside of that effort. What I can say definitively is I leave 2024 stronger than I entered. Without meaning to boast, I feel wiser and more grounded. I feel more open to other people and less open to influence and frenzy. Instead of escaping into books and theory, I feel my reading drove me more deeply into living, into life. I think I lost my way with books for a while there (okay, for like 20-30 years) when I got a little too enamored of theory, academics, with trying to be smart. Books have slid back into the role of journey companions--good friends who help me think, act and live well. I hope you find a few good book friends for your 2025 journey, too.

Happy New Year, my friends.

PS: still time to get in on the deep reading project and discussion for this year. Just send me an email about which of the books you'd like to read and discuss (see previous post for the list and syllabus) and I'll make sure you get the zoom link. I'm well into George Eliot's Middlemarch and am surprised how much I'm loving it--some find it quite the slog, I guess. I've delighted in a few of her wickedly good one-liners and the kind of erudite prose that makes me feel very American with my English.