Greetings, friends!

Happy April, and I hope spring is warming the world wherever you may be. Lots of links today, and a few books to share.

In real life: continuing to expand the repertoire of Wordle-adjacent games I play daily (I’d say my current favorite is Semantle... what’s yours? Or are you just over it?); went to South Carolina with fam and braved some chilly Atlantic waves; had some really nice beach and lake runs... overall, trying to get used to a new way of livin’ my life.

What’s up in your world?

Cheers,

Maya

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Links

As usual, a plethora of negative environmental news...

• How climate change is affecting your jam (the fruit kind, you know)
• An older article, newly award-winning, questioning whether the destruction of the Amazon should be considered ecocide— and what exactly “ecocide” entails.
• Coffee’s getting more popular… but caffeine is hurting marine ecosystems. What to do?

But some positive developments too!

• I don’t really get how this works, but a cool alternative to dams involving electric trucks running downhill?
• An inspiring story of an Indian community turning the fish guts that once polluted their beaches into functional products
• New potential for geothermal energy is exciting and maybe transformative for our energy grid
• How beef (in a different agricultural system) could be good for the planet. A long read, but fascinating and countered a lot of my underlying assumptions.
• A fascinating story on the reintroduction of species to a devastated rainforest.

Just some cool nature ideas:

• I love thinking about the concept of urban wilderness, including the view presented in this article of protecting the “spontaneous nature in cities.”
• Also regarding escapades: why local communities are essential for sustainable travel
• On design with biomaterials, the positive effects of nature on our mental health, and the future of cities
• The pure logistics of research in humpback whales are incredible, and the amount of data these creatures carry is likewise
• Vanilla is complicated and amazing, and I learned very much about it from this article

On writing, wisdom, sleep, and more:

• High school students got some rare advice on writing from the usually stoic Cormac McCarthy (who also has two new books coming out soon, which I’m very excited about!)
• I have a weird fascination with the olfactory system, so this article on attempts to integrate smell into VR experiences caught my eye…
• Words of wisdom, encountered by Mari Andrew
• What permanent daylight savings actually will entail, and what cities get the short end of the stick (with lots of cool maps)
• Related: I’d never before imagined the idea of circadian justice, its need in our society, nor how impossible it would be to enact.
• How far would you go to get a tattoo? My limit thus far has been NYC, but… I get the transcontinental travel, too.

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Overall thoughts and connections

• How coincidental to listen to a book organized in alphabetical order (The Book of Difficult Fruit), and then to learn the history of alphabetical order itself (A Place for Everything)!
• Quite a few books that weren’t really worth the read but had some good quotes thrown in.

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March 2022 books

• The Book of Difficult Fruit — Kate Lebo

  • Charming and quirky stories tangentially or directly related to charming and quirky fruits, from A to Z. I learned quite a few random facts— who knew kiwi could be a meat tenderizer? — and enjoyed Levi’s assortment of personal anecdotes and opinions mixed in with the history and culture of some of our more obscure fruit friends.

• Animal — Lisa Taddeo

  • First impression: no quotation marks. Second impression: very sexual. Third impression: I still want to know what happens.

• Intimacies — Katie Kitamura

  • Written in a similar style to Animal, with a rarely-named female narrator musing on her relationship to men, Intimacies struck me as much less dark than the former, despite the setting of the court of war criminals. The book shone a light into the world of interpreters I’d never before considered, and the more familiar rootless life of one whole grew up travelling and could never really settle.
  • An open, unfinished, and yet hopeful ending. Just satisfying enough.

• Under the Sky We Make — Kimberly Nicholas

  • She says she won’t dwell a lot on the negative here, but much of the book thus far (even just into the “solution-oriented” Part 3) discusses current failures and gives little evidence to her claims that “each individual can make a difference. Prove me wrong in the remaining chapters?
  • Not quite.

• Love Me Back — Merritt Tierce

  • What is it with the lack of quotation marks around speech these days? It drives me crazy!
  • Very sexual, but also— as the cover blurb states— devastating.
  • Was not quite sure of the plot (maybe I just missed it somehow?), but some good quotes:

  It hurts but it feels good. I mean it feels like relief. The pain is real and synchronizes all the pain in the rest of my self that I cannot manage to organize. Draws it up to my neck and tells it what it is: You are pain, this is what you feel like.

  Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it, I said. Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.

• A Place for Everything — Judith Flanders

  • The history of alphabetical order— which, of course, relied first on the use of an alphabet, and developed incrementally as an alternative to ordering by other categories
  • For a book with the possibility of being exceedingly boring, this is surprisingly.. not. Now, it’s not particularly gripping, but I’m keeping up with the story Flanders is building on the foundations, dispersion, and significance of alphabetical order.
  • Has also inspired me to think about creating my very own, very alphabetically-organized, “commonplace book”
  • Words of wisdom, somewhat co-opted from Churchill— “Alphabetization is the worst way of ordering things, except for all the ways tried before.”

• Honor — Thrity Umrigar

  • India book.
  • Umrigar skillfully weaves an analysis of cultural and religious differences into the plot of this novel, which starts of rather slow but nevertheless kept my interest.

• Running is a Kind of Dreaming — J. M. Thompson

  • Overall, this memoir was probably more therapeutic for the author to write than it is for anyone else to read, but some quotable passages:

  See that all things are full of light. See the Earth, settled in the midst of the All, the great nurse who nourishes all terrestrial creatures. All is full of soul, and all beings are in movement. -Corpus Hermeticum XI: The Mind to Hermes

  Ultrarunning can sound like insanity to people who don't do it. But ultrarunners understand its mad logic: running for days and nights nonstop brings you right up to the edge of breakdown but also to the opportunity for breakthrough. It's chaos, in a container: a kind of organized insanity that can help keep you sane.

  But if you break your leg, don't look at the person in the bed task next to you with two broken legs and dismiss your own leg pain as undeserving. Join the brotherhood of the broken ones. Join the sisterhood of survivors.

  Everyone should see the horizon from a hill. Down below you see someplace you know from ground level. You spot somewhere else familiar. Then you see how the two places stand in relation to each other, the trails that link them together. The links have always been there. But down on the ground you couldn't see them. Maybe down on the ground, the other side of town seemed like a different reality.

• Pure Colour — Sheila Heti

  • A novel, or maybe a mythology, set in a world akin to ours but imbued with spirits, with souls, and all our usual problems of life, death, love, and change. Weird, but calming, even listened to at 1.25x!
  • Imagine, we’re living in the first draft of our existence— and the ones of us that try to fix things are the most fatigued, because the gods consider us dangerous.