The first time I fell asleep at the wheel, I was 19 and a few miles south of where the 101 drops out of Downtown into the 5. I was in typical Los Angeles afternoon stop-and-go traffic, which always starts around 3:00, sometimes even on the weekends. I caught my head falling against my neck and told myself, out loud, to wake up. I turned the radio louder, kept driving, and, despite the warm Californian day, left the heat turned up. The car was my sanctuary; it was a place to relax, my own private world. My backseat was filled with heeled boots and crumpled jeans. Stained coffee cups were piled up in the median, and a gold medallion hung from the rearview. The environment was mine. I chose the conditions, and I liked it to be hot. My body melted into the driver’s seat like a warm bath.
When I came to once again, I was being propelled toward two bright tail lights too fast. I instinctively slammed my foot as hard as I could on the brake, but it was too late. The front of my car crumpled easily against the vehicle in front of me. I was spending a lot of time on the road then, commuting to L.A. for work multiple times a week from a small town in North County, San Diego. If I left at 4:30 in the morning, I could do the trip in an hour and a half, but it usually took me closer to four. This is when I’d fall asleep: sitting in gridlock traffic, cozy from the heat and lulled into a dream-space by the monotony of the drive and the West Coast sun. I had two more accidents during this year of commuting. Luckily no one was ever hurt.
Research by Samson and others in primates and nonindustrial human populations has revealed the various ways that human sleep is unusual. We spend fewer hours asleep than our nearest relatives, and more of our night in the phase of sleep known as rapid eye movement, or REM. The reasons for our strange sleep habits are still up for debate but can likely be found in the story of how we became human.
At its best, the tender and fragmented narrative feels like a metaphor for experience – how we only ever know part of the story of our lives and control even less. Since grief and trauma hold space alongside the laughter, it's best for readers who like to be put through their emotional paces before the happy ending.
“The Last Days of Roger Federer” doesn’t begin, or end, with Roger Federer. He shows up now and again, as an example of a talented individual in the last days of his career, facing the decision all tennis players must face, of when to put down the racket for good. (As of this writing, the 40-year-old star says he will be back on the court in the fall.) This is one of the themes of “Last Days”: When do you stop? How do you know when something is over?
Geoff Dyer is interested in a lot of things, many of which make their way into this book. Anyone who picks up “Last Days” expecting a book about Federer, or about sports — and not, say, about Bob Dylan, or the painter J.M.W. Turner, or Beethoven, or the book about Turner and Beethoven that Dyer wanted to write but never will — will be in for a surprise.
As a Shakespeare scholar, Emma Smith is known for her work on the First Folio, a newly-discovered copy of which she authenticated in 2016. But it was with This is Shakespeare (2019) that she reached a wider readership, delighting non-specialists with her subtle yet no-nonsense insights into the plays. That book was based on a series of podcast lectures, its oral origins traceable in the lively accessibility of its literary voice.
Her talent for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose, is apparent in Portable Magic, which transforms the dusty scholarly discipline of bibliography into a world of wonders. Despite the subtitle, this is not a conventional history in the sense of a chronological narrative. Instead, it is a series of freewheeling essays, based on case studies, in which Smith explores what she calls “bookhood”: a concept that focuses on the material culture of the book, while revealing how inexorably it is tangled up with human desire, aspiration and power.
After I lost my breast, I became a woman
sutured by a kind of knowledge.