I just finished the final book in Tana French's body of work (so far) and I don't think I've ever so voraciously enjoyed a bunch of novels before.

If you haven't read (or heard of) Tana French, she writes murder mysteries set in Ireland. At times they even flirt with horror. The mysteries are compelling, but her character writing is even better. She writes in the first person and is particularly skilled at writing an unreliable narrator. The book I saved for last, the Witch Elm, did this in a way I will be thinking about for a while. It was a takedown of white, male privilege that unfolds in a slow burn throughout the book. It had me questioning my own life at times in some real introspective ways.

The book confronts you with questions of whether or not you can trust your own memory on how certain events played out, especially when it comes to assumptions of how those events may have affected other people. My own adolescence is somewhat wrapped up in a haze of generalizations and a certain degree of distance or detachment. Like the narrator, at times a lot of my memories feel unmemorable. This book challenges the assumption that others, particularly people less inoculated by privilege, experienced things the same way.

"When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve." (Brown, Pleasure Activism)

This is something that I think about a fair bit. As someone who suffers with a degree of chronic pain/discomfort and anxiety, I find it to be a rare time that my body actually feels like it's in a good place. What I have found, however, is how to pursue those few times that it does. Walking, for instance makes me feel good. Being outside in the fresh air, moving at a brisk pace, puts both my body and mind at ease. Pain is reduced, my anxious thoughts are calmed, and life feels good. I'm more energized for relationships or creative things. Conversely, when I go for long periods of time without walking, my body and mood deteriorate. I become irritable and just want to lie down and be left alone. I'm a worse person all around when I'm not walking.

“Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.

On a broad level, white people, and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough… or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them.” (Pleasure Activism)

Whew.

As someone who has benefitted from the system as it exists, I need to still understand (and disentangle) how my own relationship with pleasure has been broken as a result of this delusion. How have I bought into and perpetuated this system for my continued benefit? And how can I begin to seek a healthier approach to pleasure?

"We learn to love by loving."

A short line from an essay in a book I am revisiting (started a while back and got sidetracked). It's an idea that resonates deeply with me. Many years ago I remember seeing a collection of short films and one of them contained this idea of a man who reinvested his time to care for his dying wife; despite planning on leaving the marriage before finding out she was sick. The film ended with this line, "by choosing to be a man in love, he became a man in love once again."

Now, I don't want to oversimplify this; there are all sorts of considerations when dealing with relationships like this. But the thing I want to come back to is this idea that love is learned through practice. Specifically, I want to highlight the spirit that the author of the above quote is coming from. Love, not just in a romantic sense but as a revolutionary act, is something that needs to be practiced. Self-love, self-less love, self-giving love—these aren't things that you can feel your way into. You can only learn them by doing them.

I've been thinking quite a bit about how we discover and engage with media over the last few days (see my previous thoughts on this here), and it got me reflecting about my personal collection of books that is scattered, with varying degrees of intentionality, around my home. I'm pretty sure every room contains a small (or large) assortment of books in some corner, cabinet, shelf, or carefully stacked atop surfaces to catch the interest of someone sitting nearby. As I took some time to pay attention to these piles, I realized just how strange my book collection really has become.

There's the shelf in my bedroom that holds everything from fantasy series to Russian classics to short story anthologies to folklore. There's the pile on my subwoofer of deep dives into specific albums I like (including one on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love). There's a bookshelf in my living room with bird and animal studies, oral histories, essay collections, and bordering on what might be considered too many books on mushrooms and foraging. My office (which is only about the size of a large closet) contains all my so-called higher interest books (read: boring), ranging from history, theology, sociology, tech-criticism, economics, urbanism, design, and more. There's even a small collection of various editions/translations of The Hobbit sitting above my record player.

My tastes in books are wide and eccentric, and they have arrived here in all manner of ways. I have haphazardly picked up books from places I have visited and deliberately tracked down certain books because they piqued my interest at a certain time. Friends and family members have gifted me books they thought seemed like something I'd like. Other books hold sentimental value in some way (like a couple I was given from a professor who made an impact on me).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think an algorithm can ever really capture this sort of collecting. While it can distill all of this into suggestions for me to buy something else, it can never replicate the various motivations behind the acquiring of those books. It can't replace human thoughtfulness.