Bookworm: November 2024
'The Entire Sky,' 'The Covenant of Water,' 'Twilight of Democracy,' 'Lady Tan's Circle of Women,' 'Uncertain'
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This November, I’m grateful for you. Thank you for reading what is essentially my book diary. I hope you are finding some titles and authors of interest.
Programming note: My least favorite thing about the Substack app is that it’s easy to miss the final “Publish” button when scheduling a newsletter to go out. Therefore, my last newsletter didn’t send when I intended it to. Catch up with the October Bookworm newsletter. You can always see all past Bookworm newsletters at the Bookworm archive.
Table of contents
Western: “The Entire Sky,” by Joe Wilkins
Historical fiction: “The Covenant of Water,” by Abraham Verghese
Politics: “Twilight of Democracy,” by Anne Applebaum
Historical fiction: “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women,” by Lisa See
Social psychology: “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure,” by Maggie Jackson
“The Entire Sky”
Take an accomplished poet, turn him loose in prose, and you get the absolutely gorgeous writing of Joe Wilkins. After reading his debut novel, “Fall Back Down When I Die”; listening to his sophomore novel, “The Entire Sky”; and seeing him talk about literature and craft at this year’s Portland Book Festival, I am ready to sign up for the Joe Wilkins Fan Club.
I’m not much for audiobooks; I can read much faster and love the feel of pages. But a library hold on “The Entire Sky” wasn’t coming through, my Spotify Premium subscription included access to the audio edition, and I wanted to finish the book before Wilkins’ talk. So, in went my earbuds.
In this case, I’m glad I listened. Wilkins’ words and dialogue are the definition of lyrical, and narrator Justin Price does honor to them. Price also has the perfect voice and intonation for the wry humor that rustles through this poignant story of people losing and finding one another and themselves in the wide Montana prairie.
I’m also not much for Westerns, generally speaking, but this is no throwback tale of cowboys and Indians in the Wild West. It’s very much a modern story, set in the 1990s and infused with the uncertainty and angst of that decade. Wilkins braids the stories of a 16-year-old on his own, the aging sheep rancher who takes him in, and the sheep rancher’s daughter who has come home during a family crisis. He fleshes out his characters with ample nuance and compassion.
“The Covenant of Water”
I’m lucky to live amid some discerning readers. One of them put Abraham Verghese’s novel “The Covenant of Water” in a Little Free Library, and I promptly brought it home. But its length was daunting — more than 700 pages — so I put it on the shelf for someday.
Then it turned out that Verghese would be speaking in my city in November. Someday had arrived.
As in his similarly epic novel “Cutting for Stone,” Verghese intertwines family, history and medicine — he’s a doctor and a Stanford Medicine professor — over generations. He traces lives ebbing and flowing between 1900 and 1977 in the fictional riverside settlement of Parambil in southern India, starting with Mariamma, a 12-year-old girl who arrives in town as the new bride of a mostly silent 40-year-old widower and father. Mariamma soon learns that she has become part of a family tree in which every generation includes someone with a mysterious and fatal relationship to water.
Reading this novel was like boarding a raft and riding a sinuous, absorbing current of a narrative, complete with dramatic rapids and serene pools. Sometimes the raft plunged into a tributary farther downstream for awhile before abruptly returning to the main branch — all the more fun. In the end, 700 pages felt about right.
“Twilight of Democracy”
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum published “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” in the summer of 2020, as Joe Biden and Donald Trump were vying for the White House. During the subsequent Biden Administration this book sat in my “To Be Read” pile, until we got to this year’s presidential campaign. I decided “Twilight of Democracy” would be an apt Election Week read.
Applebaum is married to Polish politician Radoslaw “Radek” Sikorski (their union merited a New York Times wedding announcement) and from that vantage point she offers a couple of Eastern European case studies, Poland and Hungary, in democracy and authoritarianism. Given President-elect Trump’s much-publicized admiration of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, this alone makes the book a worthwhile read.
Applebaum argues that all societies eventually turn away from democracy. What’s stuck with me the most about this book is her summary of what triggers this shift:
Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.
In a world where increasing complexity has become a constant, I find this all too akin to a prophecy.
“Lady Tan’s Circle of Women”
I’ve never been able to resist a good novel about medicine. And I enjoy the novels of Lisa See, who’s long focused on stories set in historical China. So I couldn’t pass up her latest novel, “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women,” based on a real-life woman doctor, Tan Yunxian, who lived in the 15th century.
We meet Lady Tan when she’s still a child but already learning the fundamentals of medicine from her grandparents, both doctors in a household of high social rank. The young Tan is well aware how rare her situation is and how careful she must be to avoid any appearance of impropriety if she wants to treat actual patients. To drive this point home, See creates a foil for Tan. Her family approves the daughter of a local midwife as a suitable playmate. While the two girls become best friends, the class divide between them is ever-present.
See has done her homework on the corporeal matters that preoccupied women in that time and place, explaining them through Tan’s eyes in sometimes-graphic detail. (The scenes involving foot-binding, which began as young as age 5 in households that could afford to curtail their female members’ mobility, are not for the faint of heart.) Tan is eventually entrusted with the care of the women and girls in her multigenerational household, then allowed to treat patients outside the household. Eventually she achieves such skill and renown that her best friend, now an accomplished midwife herself, encourages her to write a book for women without access to health care providers. Together, they choose 31 cases that represent common maladies and medical situations.
That book, “Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor,” is in print today — I found a translation on Amazon. Lady Tan would no doubt be thrilled.
“Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure”
This book, a colleague’s recommendation, was an unintentionally interesting juxtaposition with Anne Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy.” Author Maggie Jackson champions “uncertainty as a path to progress,” asserting that being too sure of oneself can slam the door on innovation, creativity, compassion and achievement:
Far from automatically miring us in cognitive paralysis, uncertainty plays an essential role in higher-order thinking, propelling people in challenging times toward good judgment, flexibility, mutual understanding, and heights of creativity. It is the portal to finding your enemy’s humanity, the overlooked lynchpin of superior teamwork, and the mindset most needed in times of flux.
That’s a grand promise. Jackson backs it up with gobs of research from fields that include medicine, art, electoral politics, neuroscience, astronomy and artificial intelligence; her notes citing interviews, studies and other sources run for nearly 90 pages. She tells story after story of how those unable or unwilling to consider and discuss new knowledge or other perspectives found themselves reckoning with failure.
I’m pretty comfortable with uncertainty, gray areas, change and novelty. I’m the kind of person who regularly throws ideas at the wall knowing full well most of them won’t stick. But I have to wonder: Is Jackson too certain about the advantages of uncertainty? I think of a long-ago co-worker who consistently showed good judgment, who was flexible and interested in mutual understanding and highly creative, and who abruptly quit because, he told me, he no longer wanted to deal with the level of uncertainty in our workplace.
It seems like a Goldilocks situation, where the trick is to find a level of uncertainty that’s not too much, not too little, but just right. And that, of course, is certain to differ for each of us.