March Reading List

Here’s my list of books read in March. Last month’s list is here. This goes out to my book patron, known as PS, who sends me books that make up a good portion of the fiction list.

SCHOLARLY READING:

1. Traci Brynne Voyles, The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). The environmental disaster that is the Salton Sea is well known–an accidental lake that developed out of white American schemes that briefly teemed with fish and birds before massive pollution from surrounding farms turned it into a toxic dump that suffered enormous fish kills. Voyles look at this history with a new light, leaning very heavily into the settler colonialism theme so popular with scholars in the last decade or so. She focuses especially on the Cahuilla people, their history and fights to maintain their rights to the land that is now the Salton Sea, and calls for a decolonizing environmentalism that seeks to restore the Colorado River, end the militarization of the Southwest, and return sovereignty to the tribes. Good luck with that, but sounds good to me. Solid monograph.
2. Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020). Nelson has the ability to combine the research and insights of an academic historian with the writing skills of the popular historian. As I’ve said before, there’s an irony that the field of history has seen the best writing since it became an academic discipline in the late 19th century happen at the same time that it has been slashed across academia, and not only in the United States. Nelson’s history of the Civil War in the Southwest, driven by characters defining each chapter, reminds us that to understand the Civil War period, we have to center the Native American experience because both the North and South had different visions of empire that were central to both projects. As the North won the war in the Southwest in 1862 after the failed Confederate invasion of New Mexico, the Union then implemented its visions of empire on the Navajo and Apache, to great horror. And honestly, she could have called this book The Four-Cornered War because there is another character and that’s the arid environment. Buy this for your history reading dad. Better than the plagiarized dross of Stephen Ambrose or the thesis-free bloviations of David McCullough. Real history for the everyday reader.
3. Martin A. Nesvig, Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2018). I love this book, maybe more than I’ve ever loved a book about early Mexico, but I do have to say that the title is a bit misleading. It’s a history of Michoacán, not the entirety of New Spain. Now, Michoacán was a lot bigger then than the modern Mexican state, but still…..In any case though, Nesvig writes a history of early Michoacán that emphasizes not only the lack of real control Mexico City or Madrid over the place but how filthy and violent it was, with different monastic orders burning the others’ monasteries, people laughing at the Office of the Inquisition, different colonial leaders beating the shit out of each other in the street, and other forms of violence that demonstrate the sharp limitations of the colonial project on the ground. Nesvig has a good time here. Chapters are named “I Shit On You, Sir; or, a Rather Unorthodox Lot of Catholics Who Didn’t Fear the Inquisition” or “The Crown’s Man: An ‘Incorrigible Delinquent,’ in Which a Bunch of Sketchy and Murderous Dudes Wrought Havoc in Colima.” And the book cover is literally a monk with a meat cleaver in his head. If you like your history in the muck, you should read this fun book.
4. Huping Ling, Chinese Americans in the Heartland: Migration, Work, and Community (Rutgers University Press, 2022). This is a decidedly minor book, but that’s OK. We have a big literature on the Chinese in America. Ling looks at the Chinese communities in Chicago and St. Louis to see how it compares. It’s more or less the same as California or New York, but in smaller numbers. There’s nothing wrong with a history like this. It adds to the overall picture in a valuable way that other historians will use in the future.
5. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin, 2008). Somehow I had never read this important book, so I solved that by assigning it in my graduate seminar. Many historians do this–it’s a great way to get caught up on literature that you know is important but you haven’t read yourself. We should all know of the Camp Grant Massacre but few of us do, largely because we as a nation simply don’t care about Native history even compared to other racial history. I mean, liberals still laud William Tecumseh Sherman because of Georgia without noting that he was an absolute Indian hater who loved genocide. Sorry, but we need to know the whole story here. Anyway, this massacre was in 1871, when Anglos, Mexicans, and O’odham attacked a camp of Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches and killed 144 of them, one of the worst acts of genocide in this nation’s history. In addition to bringing this back to life, Jacoby tells it in a fascinating way, bringing in four distinct world views, with four languages’ terms for each other and ways of telling history. There’s no way to create a single narrative around this event, but this book does a remarkable job of exploring what he calls the intimate violence of the borderlands.
6. Cynthia Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy, Liz Skilton, eds., Rethinking American Disasters (LSU Press, 2023). Solid edited volume of essays bringing together new scholarship on disasters in the United States. Usefully, they avoid any of the artificiality over what is a “natural disaster,” as if that term even makes sense anyway. Essays cover everything from the relationship of Covid to diabetes and misinformation reporting on disasters in the Early Republic to how hurricanes exacerbated dispossession of freed people from the South Carolina Sea Islands in the late 19th century and connecting slavery to the present in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.
7. Kyle Smith, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). I really enjoyed this book, but it’s worth noting that the title is weird. It’s really a history of the Christian cult of the dead, as opposed to Christianity in general. The focus is on the saints and the miracles and all the weirdness from pre-Reformation Christianity, which some discussion of the Reformation as well. Well, whatever. Smith is a fantastic storyteller and this engaging book really gets into the extreme weirdness of Christianity. I know that there’s a strong anti-religion bias among the secular liberal internet world, but this really is worth your time if you are interested in the topic at all, including if you hate Christianity and need more reasons to think it is ridiculous. Also, excellent images throughout. Very good book.
8. Jason Resnikoff, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (University of Illinois Press, 2022). This is a very smart and prescient intellectual history of American automation discourse after World War II. For all the promises of automation to “free” the worker, in reality it just means the remaining workers have to labor at tremendously fast rates and control over work becomes centered in the hands of the employer. Moreover, Resnikoff gets into the arrival of anti-work discourse in both the New Left and feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. This still exists today (see the UBI proponents) but there’s a huge problem, both then and now, which is that working class people don’t want or believe in any of this. One of the reasons working class people have moved toward the Republican Party is that it is seen as the Party of Work. Democrats need to learn this. This is an especially important issue among the Latino populations, for whom the Covid shutdowns were a sign that Democrats were not on the side of their American dream. Regardless of the public health merits of those shutdowns, the political downside here is real. The larger automation discourse is related, even if it is pushed by people in both parties to different extents and in different ways. Anyway, very smart book.
9. Shaun Scott, Heartbreak City: Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress (University of Washington Press, 2023). This is a basically a history of Seattle and thus America through centering sports. It doesn’t change your view of either Seattle sports (though good title, let me tell you about heartbreak….) or the larger historical narrative. But it’s a great way to get your Seattle dad to read some real history in a context he will approach it and it definitely has value there. Given Seattle’s significant history of racism and Seattle’s equally significant history of denying that racism, reading about the intersection of race and sports would be useful for a lot of Northwesterners. And exploring the hypocrisy of supposed liberal Seattle is definitely Scott’s political project, which he skewers with rightful delight. Scott is himself a relatively well known Seattle socialist, so he knows this history well.
10. Moramay Lopez-Alonso, Measuring Up: A History of Living Standards in Mexico, 1850-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2012). The author here leans very heavily into social science methodology for a very deep dive into living standards over a century, with a particular emphasis on exploring height through Mexico. It’s a quite interesting study, though like a lot of social science, like half the book is about the methodology.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION

1. Anne Enright, The Green Road. I had heard about Enright for years but had never read her. Thanks to my patron who sends me books, this showed up at my house and I am so glad it did. A classic Irish family novel, it’s the kind of thing where you wonder how it is going to come together. The first half of the novel discusses each of four children–very different, at different stages of their lives, dealing with an extremely difficult and depressive mother. So you have a sense of these characters, but not really their whole stories. Then in the second half of the novel, they all come together for Christmas. One son is a gay ex priest, another works in the worst places in the world as an aid worker and is pretty hardened for it. One daughter has a pretty normal family life and the other is a hopeless drunk. And then there’s mom. And things happen and family dynamics are laid out here in one of the best novels on the topic I’ve read. Fantastic book.
2. Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy. Roth’s shortest novel (I think) has a legitimate claim to being his best, or at least close to it. Here, Nathan Zuckerman, recovered from his tiresome psychosomatic disorders of The Anatomy Lesson, goes to Prague to recover the writings of the father of a Jewish Czech emigré, only to face both the desperate absurdity of those artists who remained in Prague after the Soviet invasion of 68 and the evils of the Czech Communist state. Long a favorite of mine that remains well worth revisiting every few years.
3. Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro’s second novel remains one of my favorite books ever, a great novel about an aging Japanese painter who became a far-right nationalist hack in the 30s and now has to deal with the consequences to his reputation and family in the postwar aftermath. He’s a very traditional man and a huge egoist who slowly comes to realize that his time has passed and maybe at least some of his ideas were misguided, though this guy is never really going to come to a true reckoning with his life. It’s not only a fantastic book about this moment, but also about Japanese family life and how the ways that Japanese art mentors worked could create situations where fanaticism became real easy to both emulate and teach. Ishiguro never published a book strictly about Japan again and soon became super famous for his outsider but pitch perfect novel about the same period in English life with The Remains of the Day. Since then, he’s published all sorts of stuff and has received a very deserved Nobel Prize. I still like this better than anything else, though both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go are absolutely first rate works too.
4. Shion Miura, Kamusari Tales Told at Night. Miura is a popular writer in Japan and her Kamusari books are about a small timber community in the mountains inland from Nagoya. This is a somewhat silly coming of age story about a young man and terrible student whose parents forced him to go work in this town to make him grow up. We never find out why this town or anything about the parents or how this all worked out. It’s cute, but decidedly minor. But the Japanese translation market in the U.S. is pretty real and this is exactly the type of book, a sort of simplified Murakami, that is going to get translated. The one thing that kept this interesting enough for me (other than being a very easy read) is that it clearly demonstrates the ways that urban Japanese hold their dying rural towns in their thoughts and culture, all while making sure they never spend time in them. That’s very different than the U.S., where no one is paying attention to the dying towns of western Nebraska or eastern New Mexico, places with no romance about them. Maybe it’s the natural beauty of small town mountainous Japan that allow them to be romantic in the Japanese mind, unlike the physically ugly and desolate small town Great Plains here.
5. Belén López Peiró, Why Did You Come Back Every Summer. This is not the easiest novel you will ever read. Actually, that’s not true. In one sense, it’s quite an easy read. It’s just that it’s an easy read by a novelist who very lightly fictionalized the sexual abuse she suffered from her uncle, who also happened to be the police commissioner of the Argentine town where it took place. This is the first of two novels she wrote on the subject. At this point, the case is just going toward trial and she is being forced to tell the story again and again. If it helps you to take the plunge, the son of a bitch ended up getting a 10 year sentence because of course he did it to so many girls. Formally, this is a great book. The short segments–sometimes only a sentence of two–are a combination of her thoughts, various family members either coming to grips with what happened or refusing to acknowledge it and blaming her, and police documents of testimony. The translator decided to separate each section by a page to give the reader a moment to breathe and while I don’t know what this looked liked in the Spanish, it certainly served that useful purposes. I read it on an airport layover in O’Hare, so it doesn’t take too long to get through if you can handle the subject matter. But the real subject is Peiró taking control of her own life and you cheer for her throughout. Powerful, remarkable. Would be very good in a number of courses as well, which says how readable it actually is.
6. Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You. This highly-lauded debut follows a character who might very well be Garth Greenwell and his exploitative and slightly scary relationship with a young man in Sofia that he hooks up with in a museum bathroom and it goes from there. Greenwell was an English teacher in Bulgaria and so is the character, for example. The extent to which any of this is true, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. This book however is a fantastic novelistic memoir of being a guy escaping your American family who has rejected your sexuality by going as far away as possible, but of course you can’t really escape your family or its trauma. The 43 page paragraph on his horrifying father who eventually kicks him out of the house as a teenager for being gay is both a hell of a thing and surprisingly readable. Thought this was a pretty super book.
7. Kathleen Alcott, Emergency. This powerful collection of short stories generally revolve around women who grew up poor or otherwise distressed and/or unstable and how they end up getting married to wealthier, usually older, men and how uncomfortable they feel around their newfound economic security. Like a lot of late capitalist literature, the political critique here is not overt, but rather subtlety hits you, story after story, about the instability of modern life where wealth does not make you happy nor allows you to move beyond your background. There’s no political project, just a general malaise. But reading these stories won’t give you any malaise. Alcott is an energetic writer and writes with a pretty masterful prose. I need to read her novels now.