For the past two years, a group of friends and I have gathered each Wednesday to discuss our progress on a famously grueling book, beginning with Infinite Jest and The Power Broker and continuing with Ulysses and Gotham, a 1,400-page history of New York City that often reads like the world’s most tedious Wikipedia article. The Difficult Book Book Club didn’t start as an explicit strategy to wrest our attention from screens, but that’s what it became: We were nostalgic for school, or rather for a version of school that no longer exists, one where you couldn’t count on ChatGPT to concoct a 500-word essay on postmodernism in a matter of seconds or Zoom into class half-asleep with your camera off. Instead, we discuss the 100 pages we assign ourselves each week, seminar style, returning to book after book in lieu of far more immediately entertaining content (or less depressing, as is the case with our most recent read, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). “As someone who was once in graduate school and now orders pants for a living, I missed the factor of my life that was educated and well read,” says Laura, who works in film costume departments. “I do think I’m getting dumber,” she adds, and we all nod in agreement. “You forget your brain is a muscle,” says my friend Lars, who works in what remains of the country’s public-health sector. The brain is not, in fact, a muscle, but the point stands.
What does it mean to build a new world from the wreckage of a broken one? This question lies at the heart of Jennifer Mills’ mesmerising fifth novel, Salvage – but it’s one that her gruff, defensive protagonist Jude would rather avoid. For most of the novel, Jude has her head down and is hard at work, cooking, fixing engines, caring for other people. She’s a survivor whose adaptative mechanisms involve leaving everything and everyone behind: “Things will be simpler when she’s on her own. Belonging nowhere, carrying nothing.”
There’s something deliciously odd about writing a “biography” of something that has never drawn breath. But in Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi makes a compelling case that a great work of art can lead a life every bit as dramatic, chequered and instructive as the artist who made it.
What he delineates is not so much a history of how The Divine Comedy came to be nor a canto-by-canto analysis but an exploration of what Dante’s epic has meant since its publication; how its reception, reinvention and occasional rejection have shaped its cultural afterlife. And how this epic journey can highlight key moments of our own intellectual and artistic history.
One of the most enjoyable things popular science can do is surprise us with a new angle on how the world operates. Yon’s book does this often as he draws out the implications of the predictive brain. Our introspection is unreliable (“we see ourselves dimly, through a cloud of noise”); the boundary between belief and perception is vaguer than it seems (“your brain begins to perceive what it expects”); and conspiracy theories are probably an adaptive result of a mind more open to unusual explanations during periods of greater uncertainty. This is a complex area of psychology, with a huge amount of new work being published all the time. To fold it into such a lively read is an admirable feat.