There is something about churning through books that induces envy and even admiration, never more than at this time of year when piles of finished tomes are splashed across social media. Bragging rights seem to go to those who have read lots of books and read them quickly – how many times have you seen someone boast about finishing 10 books in a year? What about five?
But there is power in reading slowly, something the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li tells her creative writing students at Princeton University. “They say, ‘I can read 100 pages an hour’,” she says. “But I say, ‘I don’t want you to read 100 pages an hour. I want you to read three pages an hour’.”
When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years old, his father decided it was about time he started learning to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq kid growing up in Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska, where a healthy store of beluga meat was part of making it through the winter. Each summer, thousands of these small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts were an annual tradition. Whale skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not only as a form of sustenance and a trading commodity, but also because of the spiritual value of sharing the catch with the community.
Now, nearly seven decades later, Schaeffer is one of only a few hunters who still spends the late weeks of spring, just after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, waiting for belugas to arrive. Many people have switched to hunting bearded seals, partly out of necessity: There simply aren’t enough belugas to sustain the community anymore.
It doesn’t set out to diagnose all our political and social ills or make sense of our moment. It tells one small story and tells it well. But it’s also very smart and very funny, a slangy, brainy, expletive-laden, occasionally touching pleasure to read from the first page to the last.
The result is a tranquil yet compelling meditation on life and death, darkness and light, from a reliably thought-provoking novelist.
In the colorful “Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England,” Nino Strachey explores a place and time when queer life blossomed, thanks in part to a learned, middle-aged vanguard that orbited around Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. For the older members of the Bloomsbury circle, Nino Strachey credibly contends, interacting with even more radical young people affirmed the progressive social and aesthetic transformation the elders had begun. For Young Bloomsbury members, the connections provided a surrogate extended family when their families often looked askance at the emerging group’s life choices — sexual, artistic and otherwise.
This book measures 25cm by 21cm. It is elegantly designed, with beautiful photographs printed on hefty paper. The publisher is the Royal Institute of British Architects, which also produces books such as “Inspired by Light” and “The New Country: City Style for Rural Living”. It even smells nice. It is a lovely book on the distinctly unglamorous subject of British council estates.
How we exist in the world
depends on how we describe it.
Have I always been in the world?
No, I’ve been autumn in the middle of August.