"Natural Causes" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2018)

You would imagine a book that tries to marry biology with religion, psychology with philosophy, quantum physics with selfies, astronomy with medicine, oncology, sociology, holistic wellness, immunology, history, exercise, cellular anatomy, diet, and humanism to be a bit of a mess. And it is, very much so. But I will say after reading it, the everyday behavior of many people I know now and have known then seems flat-out moronic. Four stars.

"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)

I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.

*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.

"Kieślowski on Kieślowski" Edited by Danusia Stok (1993)

Basically an oral autobiography, which ends while he's in the middle of making Three Colors. If you come here looking for insights into films that are notably *not* passive entertainments, then you might actually find them—it's a little refreshing when someone is talking and you can sort of tell that they're not trying to sell anything, or burnish their reputation, or relive past glories, or even merely turning themselves "on" for the crowd: they're just talking, trying to be as sincere and as in the moment as possible. How can you tell? Well, at one point he starts musing out loud about how, if none of us individually believes that we have an ounce of evil within us, how is it possible that evil can exist in the world? And later he goes on a long, somewhat sloppy, cigarette-fueled rant about how terrible Polish people are. Three stars.

"It's Not Easy Bein' Me" by Rodney Dangerfield (2004)

If you didn't have a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation before you started this book, you will have one afterwards. It's jarringly odd to hear him talk about bouts of severe depression. Oddly, the most I laughed out loud was the chapter he talked about his best friend, the funniest guy he knew, a non-comedian named Joe Ancis. Two stars.

"If Only We Could Know! - An Interpretation of Chekhov" by Vladimir Kataev, Translated and Edited by Harvey Pitcher (2002)

One: Someone at the College of DuPage Library clearly has a hard-on for Anton Chekhov and, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person living in the district who appreciates it. Two: Yes, it's an academic book. So let me just say that the only reason I feel I should highlight it is because, as far as my experience goes, the interpretations of Chekhov's works are ALL OVER THE PLACE. And part of the reason for this, as far as I can gather, is that Chekhov's irony is bone-dry: for instance, in "The Student" a depressed character by the end reaches a grand, uplifting epiphany, struck by the eternity of human beauty, which leaves you the reader feeling pretty good unless you ask yourself, "How is a 22-year-old student supposed to confidently know all that?"; but you're barely force-fed the question, and if you miss the question it's easy to miss the point of the story. So the reason I'm highlighting this book is because I think (naivety pending) Kataev probably gets closer to what Chekhov was actually trying to do through his work than anyone else who has tried to explain him. Which is, basically, point out that not one person living on Planet Earth could ever possibly know what the hell they're talking about.* Chekhov, I imagine, died a lonely man. Four stars.

*Excerpt: "'Why should a little one have to suffer so much before dying?' the grieving Lipa asks the old man 'from Firsanov' (In the Ravine) / 'We can't know all the whys and wherefores,' he replies. 'A bird's meant to have two wings, not four, because two's enough to fly with; same thing with man, he's not meant to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. He knows as much as he needs to know for getting through life.' This is a very rare example in Chekhov of a character who accepts not knowing 'everything' calmly, as the inevitable lot of human beings."

"Having and Being Had" by Eula Biss (2020)

As far as meditative, book-length nonfiction prose poems about capitalism go, as far as I know this is the only one. Four stars.*

*Biss spends great deal of time ruminating over what is actually expressed through a single word.

"Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Essays on Contemporary America" by Greg Tate (1992)

What's truly shocking as you go through the essays, some full of jazz-like riffs and others more baldly academic, is how little cultural criticism I've read over the years was written with a proudly Black voice (in one essay, he criticizes an Afro-centric art book for assiduously excluding white influences: "Black art historians shouldn't just talk about how the massive mandalas of a painter like the Africobra school's James Phillips draw on Coltrane's modal solos and African textile patterns, but how he proposes fresh uses for African-inspired geometry in painting when Cubism and Constructivism were thought to have exhausted them.") Though this may explain why I had never run into the work of Greg Tate before he died last year. It's hard to explain how this realization makes me feel. Kind of like I've been duped. Like I've been had. At one point he laments the lack of a cohesive Black artistic community because white corporate America is offering them enough money to work as a Creative Director and buy a suburban home. Probably an oversimplification. Then again, no mainstream outlet would ever, EVER, publish great, insightful, perspective-shifting stuff like this. Unfortunately, white people got the money. And they prefer their edges smooth. Three stars.

"Fire on the Prairie - Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race" by Gary Rivlin (1992)

An imperfect book, only because occasionally it gets muddled telling an extremely complicated story with many ancillary characters. But for the most part it's clearly written, and not at all hagiographic towards its subject. It's a book forged from old-school, objective journalism. On a personal level, the book upset me at many, many points: it helps me understand why I so desperately hate a city that I can't help but love (Why do people from Chicago tend to have great bullshit detectors? Because, if so many people are trying to fuck you over from seemingly all sides, you learn to develop a good sense of the kinds of people you should trust. Also, no one who has ever grown up in Chicago knows what "controlling your emotions" means, for better or for worse.) Four stars.

"Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2006)

I suppose all books like this bend the truth, it's only a matter of degree ("The Dawn of Everything" apparently bends the truth quite a bit in service of its ultimate point.) So, was public celebration really discouraged by the rise of Protestant discipline-fed capitalism? Was ritualistic dancing really seen as a threat to public order? Do we really live according to the dictates of a culture that sees benefits in our separation, that celebrates individualism and identity both as a triumph of selfhood and as a method of organization (if you identify as "gay" then I know what to sell you,) that peddles products to alleviate the dismay that the culture itself causes? Is what we're experiencing now the result of centuries of human repression at the service of power, control, and money? Beats me—most of the relevant information I know comes only from personal experience and this very book. Once again, Ehrenreich starts by examining something simple, in this case "joy", and spins it out into all sorts of enormous threads—Why do we, as humans, relentlessly seek out so much pointless joy? And why do people seem to find this so threatening? I can't tell you if she's onto something for certain. But it's something to think about, for sure. Four stars.

"Creating Fiction - Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs" Edited by Julie Checkoway (1999)

Imagine my delight upon seeing someone's recommended list of writing books and discovering that I had already owned five of seven—a validation of my instinctive ability to sniff out quality writing advice! That included this and the benefit of this book over others as far as writing instruction goes is you get a variety of teaching styles in one sitting—you don't just get one person's theory, you get about thirty of them! Some very insightful and high quality, some of them asinine: the advantage of confidently declaring yourself an "expert" in a field like creative writing, a field that very few people actually understand, a field highly susceptible to wistful, windswept sentimentality, is that the chances an impressionable young hopeful will listen to you with unquestioning, shining adoration are very, very, very high, which is an attitude that’s remarkably easy to exploit. Some of these writers seem guilty of that. But, because of the book’s scattershot nature, the chances you'll run into unusually considered and highly worthwhile wrinkles of narrative craft are also very high. So, on the whole, I think it's rather good. At the same time, I've read this book before, as an unquestioning, shining, young idolator. And I think I wrongly took away lessons from the more flashy, inspirational teachers than from the ones who preached classical, grinding restraint in a minor key. Now that I look back, I think it's their fault. Three stars.

"Contagious - Why Things Catch On" by Jonah Berger (2013)

It's written in that extremely annoying "This American Life"-inspired conversational style which was in vogue during the (awful, just purely awful) 2010s. Plus, it's directed towards people who work in marketing and advertising. Nevertheless, the ordinary person gets a breezy, Wharton-kissed explainer about six major ways people try to manipulate your behavior. For instance, "Stories thus give people an easy way to talk about products and ideas. ... They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement." Read it, and maybe you'll be able to see through a lot things that typically slip past your bullshit detector. Now, if you happen to be an evil person, (1) you've likely already read this book; and (2) I'd think a person who had committed themselves to evil would be able to handle much more sophisticated reading material. Three stars.

"Commodify Your Dissent - Salvos from The Baffler" Edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (1997)

Its attacks on 90s pop culture—from Details Magazine to Donna Tartt to Henry Rollins to Quentin Tarantino to Wired Magazine to alternative rock (geez, how the hell did they set up Q101 just six months after Nirvana "suddenly shocked the world"?)—are still pretty thrilling, at least perhaps to me, someone who lived through it all as an impressionable teen, some of it I ate up, some of it not. The attacks on everything else are kind of boring, as if the pop culture stuff were the things the writers were most familiar with. Some of it seems dated, some of it seems hyperbolic, but mostly a lot of it just seems like precursors to issues we still deal with (there is an advertising executive here who preaches "disruption".) Most strikingly, they call out how we spend money on things that feel liberating or purposeful or rebellious or even meaningful to our identities when, all along, we're doing exactly what a bunch of people in a board room had planned and budgeted for. It may sound a little simplistic, but are our movie theaters filled with comic book blockbusters because that's what we as an audience demanded? Or did a corporation steer us towards a product that was highly addictive and, thus, easier to predict and reproduce? Three stars.

"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition" by Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors (1999)

It's a 500-page book about classical rhetoric, so I'll try to keep this brief. Maybe it's too late for you to become a stronger writer, but in the event your child shows a knack for words it might be a good idea to get this book on their radar. For some reason, I went through most of my life never once hearing about it, until it was referenced in an academic paper I was reading about advertising. Which means either the state of the humanities had been in decline for much longer than we thought, or narrow-minded parents were desperately dissuading their children away from writing as a career. I've found, if you dissuade a talented, budding writer away from a writing career, you're pretty much sentencing your peculiar, creative child to a long, sad, unfulfilled life (an unusually large number of these children grow up to be financially secure, emotionally damaged Asians.) So if you want to spare those kids a future, decades-long SSRI/Xanax dependency, just know this might actually be the best book on the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing I've ever read. (Sidenote: I can now recognize, thanks to this book, the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, in their heyday, more than anyone else, made use of classical rhetoric precepts in their work.) Five stars.

"Black Dada Reader" Edited by Adam Pendleton (2017)

What I thought I could finish in two or three days ended up taking two-plus weeks. It's interesting; I often put the book down and found myself dizzy; I enjoyed the deep dives into art school academia; I did not quite enjoy the art. Gertrude Stein was a great poet. Gertrude Stein was a Nazi sympathizer. Am I convinced abstraction is an equalizer? I can be talked into it. Three stars.

"Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought - Selected Letters and Commentary" Edited and Annotated by Simon Karlinsky, Translated by Michael Henry Heim (1973)

The audience, I'd imagine, is limited. And you can pretty much tell what you're going to get from the title, so let me just add this: Every letter features extensive footnotes which offer a look at 19th century Russian history through its street life and pop culture, if that sort of thing interests you—it might be the collection's leading virtue. Also, Karlinsky takes on an oddly catty tone throughout, gleefully debunking the many misperceptions of the man, Soviet-bred or otherwise (maybe he adopted that tone because a lot of the selected letters are kinda flat.) As for the letters themselves (185 here, out over 4,000 to choose from) one thing I noticed, having read other collections, the letters here seem much more even-keeled and less emotionally all over the place—you get the impression that Chekhov was a person who tried to maintain his sincerity in all situations, but only once in a while does any of the messiness sincere people tend to get themselves caught up in, and that I've seen expressed elsewhere, peek through the editing process (he, memorably, in more than one letter, brags about banging a bronze-colored Hindu woman under a tree in Singapore; his final recorded words involved mocking the way German women dressed; and he sent the following letter in its entirety to some kid who asked him to take a look at their story: "Cold, dry, long, not youthful, though talented. -Chekhov.") It's kind of funny how the truth about sincere people somehow becomes badly mangled, actually—one collection I read painted him as an eternal fount of saintly wisdom, one as an emotionally messy, deeply flawed human being, and this as a practical, sober-minded, stately celebrity. I'm betting the messy, flawed one is the honest one (somehow the story of a trained doctor who flat-out ignores his own tuberculosis for nearly 10 years, and the story of someone who said he wanted to be married as long they remained independent and apart, frustrating his new wife who was shocked to find out that he actually meant it, tends to get buried.) Three stars.

"An American Summer - Love and Death in Chicago" by Alex Kotlowitz (2019)

Two things alarmed me recently. One was hearing a Radiolab producer say that they never once aired a story that didn't have some sort of positive ending. The other was when I noticed how obsessed YouTube reviewers are with "character development". Alarming because that means people's idea of what the "golden rule" story consists of is becoming narrowed and calcified, which means a lot of stories that do not fit that idea do not get told. So it's downright shocking to read a nonfiction book full of stories that don't end well, that have no justice, where characters don't grow, where those that try to grow can't, where moral behavior is not rewarded, where immoral behavior is not punished, and where people's stories end more confused than where they started. Of all the books you hear tossed around anti-racism book clubs, I'm floored that this one never seems to come up. Because I would think that understanding how inner city people actually live their daily lives is far more valuable than understanding theories of systemic racism. Will you feel uplifted when the book ends? No, most certainly not. Because many stories worth telling aren't clean like that, and assigning quality to the satisfaction of character development is what unthinking, ignorant people do. Five stars.