I’m having a hard time concentrating this week. Instead of reading a book before bed, I’ve been reading the news, which is like choosing insomnia for your nighttime adulting elective. Studies in Sweet Dreams? The Physics of Weighted Blankets (Duvets for Dummies)? Nah, sign me up for 2am Debate Team! Topic: Is the world ending?
I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s, graduated from high school and college in the 90s, and crossed the Y2K threshold into adulthood. I was 25 and coasting on the fumes of the first dot com boom when the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001. For the first quarter century of my life, nothing objectively bad happened in my world. I was white, middle class, and privileged. My parents got a nasty divorce when I was 13, but so did half of everyone else’s boomer parents, so whatever.
A faded fallout shelter sign on the basement door of my high school drama classroom was the only indication that our generation had lived through the Cold War. Vietnam was a movie genre. WWII was the backdrop for novels about plucky women pilots (seriously. there. are. so. many. of. these). The 20-year War on Terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen was bookended by George W.’s “Mission Accomplished” farce and the official White House position of “Oops, my bad” in 2021 when the Taliban took back Afghanistan in 10 days.
Until this week, a war in Europe was mostly just a historical plot point for Gen Xers and Millennials. Our struggles and trials were internal, domestic, and identity-driven. America was reckoning with race, but the moral arc of the universe felt like it was bending towards justice. Human rights meant that everyone should be free to be themselves. We worried about climate change, but only fringe lunatics argued that conspiracy theories invalidated peer-reviewed science. Roe v. Wade was not up for debate and an attempted government coup by an armed militia led by a sitting American president was inconceivable. Democracy was a given.
Five years ago feels like a different world. Suddenly the specter of nuclear war is back on the front page and it is fucking terrifying, y’all. No one is sleeping well. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, author of Twitter and Tear Gas, suggested “doomreading” history books as an alternative to doomscrolling social media.
Tufekci writes, “Doomreading is not about getting depressed. The opposite. It's empowering and clarifying. It helps resist the artificial hopeful arcs common in popular history stuff.” She recommends reading Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, The Guns of August and The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman, and The Dead Hand, by David Hoffman.
This echoes a theme we heard from Silent Book Club readers during Covid: that reading pandemic fiction was a surprisingly hopeful experience (Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel came up a lot). But I can’t say that this was my personal genre of choice over the past two years. I found comfort in nostalgia, most recently time-traveling back to The Nineties with Chuck Klosterman.
Listening to the audiobook narrated by the author, I could almost feel the CD-RW drive in my brain spinning. (That’s “compact disc-rewritable” to those of you not up on your late-nineties tech.) I had the distinct impression that despite my lived experience, my memories were being written over by Klosterman’s deadpan spin on the decade. He simultaneously confirmed all my Gen X biases while reframing them in present day context and updating them to neatly flow into the broad historical narrative of our time. (To be fair, I didn’t need Chuck to tell me that Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites is a dbag. Winona deserved better.)
What will historians and cultural commentators have to say about the 2020s? The truism that “history is written every day” feels a little less tired today. None of us know what tomorrow will bring. Not that we ever did, but the decades of complacency for my generation are behind us. This week, an autocratic despot threatened nuclear war in Europe, and the leading Republican candidate for the 2024 U.S. presidential election called him a genius.
Talk about doomreading history.
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Bookmarks
Book-related links and other good stuff online
Call Number is library-inspired book subscription box celebrating contemporary Black literature and authors. Cratejoy
Understanding the Ukraine Crisis: A Comprehensive Reading List LitHub
6 Books to read for context on Ukraine The New York Times
10 Ukrainian books worth reading in English LitHub
More than 80% of Americans oppose book bans School Library Journal
Fiction in a post-truth age London Review of Books
Where to find an online Silent Book Club meetup SBC Blog
What Pachinko author Min Jin Lee wants us to see The New Yorker
My young mind was disturbed by a book. It changed my life. The New York Times
12 Authors Share Their Favorite Black-Owned Bookstores Oprah Daily
62 Books by Women of Color to read in 2022 Electric Literature
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Books we loved this month
A Little Devil in America, by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Nineties, by Chuck Klosterman
Bird by Bird: 25th Anniversary Edition, by Anne Lamott
Reckless Girls, by Rachel Hawkins
What are you reading? Share your recommendations
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