2021 Reading Run-Down

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss (second read)
The Fire This Time by James Baldwin
Soccer Vs. The State by Gabriel Kuhn
Ragtime by E.L. Doctrow
Peter And The Wolves by Adele Bertei
Like Dreamers by Yossi Klein
What Unites Us by Dan Rather
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
Football Against The Enemy by Simon Kuper
Playing Bass With Three Hands by Will Carruthers
I Hear Your Voice by Young-Ha Kim
We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group And Their Forgotten Battle For Post-War Britain By Daniel Sonabend
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
The Revolutionary Ideas Of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos
So Many Roads by David Browne
High-Rise by J. G. Ballard. 

Blue Night

“So much of Didion’s writing is about the formless nature of our lives and the inability of ‘thinking’ to get us anyplace new. The way the days accrue without any inherent purpose, how the possibility for cruelty simmers under our intimate relationships. The gap between our archetypes and reality, the dreamy songs of true love and white dresses juxtaposed with the black eye. … There are no good guys, no heroes, and whatever meaning we find is entirely self-imposed. What to write in the face of that chaos? If trying to think herself out of it didn’t work, what else for Didion to do than pin down the world as she saw it, follow the images that have that internal urgency, what she called a ‘shimmer’? How else to make sense of a world without any intrinsic narrative, no teleological release?” -Emma Cline, Joan Didion's Specific Vision