the one book you should read in 2019

I. Reading in the Age of Trump
The final exclamation point on my MFA program was meeting various book-industry folks in NYC at the end of my third year. One of them, an editor at Random House, surprised me by discussing how reading was on the wane in 2018 because everyone was too distracted by politics and the news. Not everybody, of course, but the people most likely to read books and buy new books and so forth. Coexistent with this trend, however, are the various think-pieces which insist that certain books are more important than ever if we're to understand how our country succumbed to Trump, as if Hannah Arendt reading parties might topple the presidency.

That's me being cynical. Me being hopeful is the essay I wrote that was published in The Millions today, which I hope you at least glance at for the sake of my non-career(:

What people need in this fractured age is a book that can accomplish two seemingly contradictory goals. The first is escape, but not your usual escape. By all means, subsume yourself in far-away worlds or cozy cottage deaths; the news shouldn’t play subtext to every waking hour. Additionally, however, is the escape of concentration, an escape that feels especially rare amidst our collective din of notifications. A friend remarked a year or so ago that she found her usual diet of novels more of a tonic than ever because nowhere else could she find as undistracted a mind in action. That perhaps romanticizes the literary experience. Good. We need brighter and more idealistic visions of reading. Concentrate, we should tell ourselves, and thereby feel a little freedom.

The second and more trumpeted goal for reading right now is that we need books that can give us context or insight into what has been (for many of us) a disorienting time. To what extent should we anticipate political dysfunction collapsing into political violence? What factors have contributed to this era of open corruption and rising tribalism, and how do we search for solutions? Here, we are told in various listicles, are books that have answers. And yet there’s one book that is missing from these types of lists, and it isn’t one of the books folks should read, it is the One Book everyone should attempt for 2019. A distraction, a challenge, a historical saga, a spiritual referee, a book so big that back-cover salesmanship and listicle logic shudder under its romping, magisterial shadow. Considered her magnum opus, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a witty and good-spirited bully, a masterpiece of honest investigation that is as irreducible to the current moment as it is relevant.

II. Fathers Make Us Human, Apparently
Good news, procreating males:

[T]here is one aspect of human behaviour that is unique to us but is rarely the focus of these discussions. So necessary is this trait to the survival of our species that it is underpinned by an extensive, interrelated web of biological, psychological and behavioural systems that evolved over the past half a million years. Yet, until 10 years ago, we had neglected to try to understand this trait, due to the misguided assumption that it was of no significance – indeed, that it was dispensable. This trait is human fatherhood.

The article even explains why fathers become more sensitive, which might clarify my own emotional life changes. Spoiler: I cry a lot more. At everything, but especially at the movie Arrival. The best news? Fatherhood is supposed to be exactly what most of us make it:

Fathers and their children have evolved to carry out a developmentally crucial behaviour with each other: rough-and-tumble play. 

(Although, qualifier: brain science is so often a moving-goalposts game, who knows how long this will stand before being roundly rebutted. Still, a good article!)

III. The Case for Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton doesn't need any defending or popularizing - not really - but Bill and I give it a go in our latest podcast anyway. If Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is the one book you should read in 2019, then Napoleon of Notting Hill is the book you should read to recover from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. An absurd, short masterpiece, Napoleon of Notting Hill even addresses West-ian issues of Balkanization and patriotism, enough so it was recently used to introduce a Current Affairs piece on nationalism. The podcast is fun, but not quite as fun as this (go figure!) Rebecca West take-down of Chesterton and the young men who love him:

In these days I am constantly meeting a certain type of self-satisfied young person who imagines that he is saved as a social and spiritual man because he drinks beer in a priggish manner and experiences feelings of sentimental distension on such occasions as sunset, and that he has solved the problem of poverty because he dislikes Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. Such persons state that it is Mr. G.K. Chesterton who has made them what they are. I believe them. I have the greatest possible admiration for “Tremendous Trifles” and the other fairy tales – Heavens! how I can see Mr. Chesterton’s beaming face crying happily, “But that’s just it! Life is a fairy tale!” Heavens! – but I believe his view of life to be based on a misconception. To put it in a theological way, he denies that God made the brain as well as the heart.

IV. Opinion
None! Except that I'm probably going to get on Facebook to pimp my Millions piece, and doing so will make me feel extremely dirty and shameless and shallow, which is the essential Facebook experience.