What I’ve been reading at the start of 2025
As in what I’ve been reading in January
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (originally 1948)
Relevant, for reasons I mention when talking about the book below.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940)
This one’s a Western. I watched the 1943 film with Henry Fonda back when I was still receiving Netflix DVDs in the mail. My reading of the book was colored greatly by current events and having just read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. If I were still teaching, then I might try and work this bit of genre fiction that uses the rounding up of a posse in the name of justice to examine how masculinity is often a mask of conformity co-splayed by individuals camouflaging their vulnerabilities. It takes place in Nevada in the late 19th Century, but it was written in 1937 and ’38 and published in1940. In trying to square those parallel settings, author Walter Van Tilburg wrote of his novel’s reception:
A number of the reviewers . . . saw it as something approaching an allegory of the unscrupulous and brutal Nazi methods . . . . They did not see, however, or at least I don’t remember that any of them mentioned it (and that did scare me), although it was certainly obvious, the whole substance and surface of the story, that it was a kind of American Naziism that I was talking about, I had the parallel in mind, all right, but what I was most afraid of was not the German Nazis, or even the Bund, but that ever-present element in any society which can always be led to act the same way, to use authoritarian methods to oppose authoritarian methods.
Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone (1965)
The family finished this one. The Grail currently sits in a museum. Now the kids keep making up relics to look for and place behind glass.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
Been a while since I’ve opened this one.
Scott Howard-Cooper’s Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty (2024)
Books like this always strike me as interesting because Kareem, Wooden, Walton, anybody, could have at any time taken a different route.
Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986)
Doubt I finish this one before January ends. Had it on my list to read since College Board used the scene that acts as an unofficial prologue on the AP Literature test a few years back. Picked it up recently because the weather’s been cold and icy — the book takes place in North Dakota mostly.
S. H. Fernando, Jr.’s The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast (2024)
I’m a sucker for books about artists, and I’m a sucker for this one. It’s also got some great epigraphs for every chapter/section, and I’m a sucker for those also.
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)
Read it. The book is about 168 pages. The book is divided into small sections. Each section hums with relevancy and eerie parallels to current events in addition to providing insights into the past and future of movements, their participants, and their leaders. And somehow ends on a notion of hope. Maybe.
Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters (2014)
Two authors I never associated with Johnson kept popping up in my head as I read this one: Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald. That also started me on thinking about links between Conrad and Fitzgerald that I’d never really thought about before. 2025 is the centennial anniversary for The Great Gatsby, but I’m thinking I might swerve into some unread copies of Conrad with their pages all yellowed that I’ve gathered over the years and never read. Boats against the current. Boats and books.
Richard Ovenden’s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (2020)
I’ve read the Introduction and the first chapter. The first chapter is about the library stocked by Ashurbanipal. I was struck by this clause about the Assyrian king: “he used his military victory as an opportunity to enlarge his own library through the enforced sequestration of knowledge” (25). I was struck by that enactment of the cliche knowledge is power. Then I started thinking about efforts to consolidate all communication on the internet, to stagnate the algorithms, to dope up the videos, and how the value of a library is always in its use and how the use of a library is different under a human eye than the toxicity that blooms from the coding of artificial influence. The point of the library isn’t all the books in storage, but the single book in the hand and how the brain with effort grafts that book onto a lifetime of experiences. That’s different than speaking with an amalgamation’s echo. The effort is what gives flesh to that void, and it has always been true that ignorance is weakness, at least dating back to the cities wasted by Ashurbanipal.
