Two Books I Will Read Again & Again in 2022
So, What About Them??
It’s 2022, and I’m starting a book blog. Yes.
It’s 2022, and I’m starting a book blog. For you? For me? For you.
It’s 2022. And I’m talking books. So far, this year is like the previous two.
We are working remotely and reading or watching and dining and everything else we’ve been doing from home, living out introvert bliss. (This does not satisfy all of us — the majority of the working class has been on the front line since the outset of the pandemic).
That said, it is 2022 and has been for a several weeks. But does it feel like the new year?
Much as it was a few months into 2020 and all of 2021, this year feels more like junior year of the covid era. And unless some of us are graduating and walking down the aisle and flipping the tassel for real, the rest of us can pretend and start counting this year and next in high school numbers. (Nostalgia is a cliché fallback for us millennials). So what are we reading during junior year of covid?
Probably everything from history books to anti-racism literature to Jordan Peterson self-helpers and Sally Rooney to whatever is on BookToks (now a section in some bookstores), text on TikTok itself, or finally taking the time to (re)read the “classics.”
There are a few books that have stuck with me, kindled a newfound passion, or left me clamoring for more from the writer, and so I thought I would share my thoughts.
Why should I? I have friends with whom I can vent, complain, and commiserate over books; to discuss plot and character and the merit of both. All the local bars have received plenty of my money to do just that. But. I thought I’d share some of these books with you because you deserve to read them.
I will sometimes offer detailed accounts of the books, but, a la LitHub, will always provide synopses and thoughts and recs.
Here are some books from which I learned a great deal or read to pass the time to put my mind at ease. Said time passing includes crying and yelling and laughing — a summation of March 2020-present:
New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Thomas Dyja
A common occurrence during covid was the mass exodus both out of Los Angeles, where I live, and New York City (Brooklyn included) of young families to rural areas, which created a radical drop in rent prices. Those openings became enticing to so many of us on the west coast looking to make the cross-country coastal move. Less than two thousand a month for a two-bed in the Lower East Side or Williamsburg?
Sign me up.
It made reality one of my lifelong goals — to be a New Yorker. But beyond endless hours scrolling through the Street Easy app and spending several months apartment swapping with friends, I never made the permanent move.
However, my partner and I muscled out a four-month stay in New York last year. Before the trip, I bought a copy of Thomas Dyja’s New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation.
Expansive in its outlook, it stays true to its subtitle. Dyja’s focus, at times broad and others concise, operates within four decades of the lurching transmutation of New York. He does so by anchoring these changes in four sections (Renaissance, Reconsideration, Reformation, Reimagination) and ties it to the reigns of four mayors (Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani [RIP], Michael Bloomberg).
The book covers economics, infrastructure, racism, politics, government, and Wall Street triumphs and malfeasance, art and music, and an eclectic and diverse collection of people (the city’s most potent allure to outsiders, foreign and domestic, and an invaluable weapon against insular, racist, and xenophobic thinking permeating many corners of our country).
At the start of the book, Dyja takes us to 1960s/70s Ed Koch New York and handholds us through the grimy, human- and dog-shit littered streets in a city collapsing under a drug epidemic, loose regulations, and crumbling and racist infrastructure. Yet, he finds progress within calamity: punk, hip-hop, and art. We meet artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Russell Simmons, the haunts they frequented, and the power of their work. The Koch renaissance includes housing and middle-class job initiatives that simultaneously sparked progress and revolt, which, as we’ll read, is a common theme in New York’s embattled history.
An embattled history is not without fits and starts and rubber band reactions. The second Mayor in the book, David Dinkins, was a reaction to the Koch era: a liberal, Black leader who fought his way to the big office, however reluctant he seemed to want the job. Taking over business-friendly policies (private enterprise owned much of New York), Dinkins initiated well-intended but toothless public-private policies. The economy collapsed, budgets we slashed, people were out of jobs. Heavier police involvement led to a decrease in crime. Throughout it all, New Yorkers hid in their apartments, preferring to watch the suddenly culturally relevant Knicks on tv. Luckily, Dinkins ushered in the renewal of Times Square, which, maybe unluckily, ushered in the truly reactionary Rudy Giuliani.
Self-defined as a leader for a city that wanted one, Giuliani was tough on crime, tougher still on criminals, a believer in Clinton/Gingrich Laissez-faire capitalism, and provided a series of tabloid headlines. Marrying his cousin and divorcing another wife on her cancer bed was tabloidy. Yet, his pro-immigration stance was positive, so was fighting for LGBT domestic partnership rights. And we must admit that his cross-dressing showed decent humor. However, rather than lead and reform, Giuliani exercised order over people and transitioned into what we today call identity politics and culture wars. Whatever order he honed became disorder. A disorder that could have further compounded when 9/11 occurred. Instead, he became America’s Mayor, or the father of New York, a role in which he played rather well and benefitted from — that sense of unity sprung from disorder.
Dyja spends little but significant time during the immediate post-9/11 atmosphere, describing the city as having regained its innocence, or what Rebecca Solnit calls “disaster utopia.” New Yorkers experienced an uneasy calm, one through which they rallied together, however fleetingly, to rekindle citywide collectivism across race and class. It was an attempt at progress, even if it meant retying old bonds more than likely severed beyond repair. It was an exercise in hope and progress in all its grandeur, what the New York experiment always proferred.
SIDE NOTE: It was around this time that I first visited New York City. In the summer of 2002, my parents brought our family to ground zero — and a Yankees game and to every hot dog vendor and to see 42nd Street on Broadway — and what I witnessed during this time was a camaraderie between every New Yorker, an unbroken bond that I hadn’t seen before and since haven’t seen. Yes, disaster and tragedy can bring us together. But in a city known for its attitude (a result doubtless due to the city’s daily grind), this was a brief glimpse of a people undivided, of a renewed human nature. There was a verve in the air. As if for merely walking down the street in awe at everything the hot dog vendors would give me a free hot dog. Ha. I’m not naïve, I know these things are temporary. It was only a few years later we were dealt the Patriot Act. But my timely experience presented to me a New York worth working toward.
Then came Michael Bloomberg. 9/11 helped his surprise win, and at first, he re-created a sense of service and erred on the side of private enterprise. Not to mention his infamously xenophobic and racist police stop and frisk policy, which led to higher incarceration rates and shadow police. But if you ask him, it was a success.
But Bloomberg and the Mayors are just four people, like the rest of us. New York is the city and its people. It is about the future.
Whether or not you’re looking to move to New York, or, like me, you feel magnetic energy emitting from its streets, not just from the people, but from the architecture, the grime, the subway, and the opportunities and struggles it offers, and yes, even the rats, even its darkest history, this book showcases the fits and rages in what we call progress. Dyja promises the city is worth the fight, that the process itself is worth it.
That idea is difficult. I know. One of the worst consequences of the pandemic has been the polarization of, well, all of us. It’s hard to think of America as forward-moving, progressing toward anything admirable. But I say what we have always been and will continue to be is a young nation perpetually in motion, transitioning, and forever grinding and clashing to ensure a future resembling the messy process it takes to get there.
Dyja offers something similar in his epilogue:
“…New York’s greatest work of performance art took place the foggy August day when Phillippe Petit walked step-by-step between the Twin Towers, carefully maintaining his balance as he seemed to float in midair. New Yorkers take that walk every day, maintaining our balance between Order and Disorder, inside and out, public and private, trees and steel, constructions and destruction, rich and poor, we and me, here today, gone tomorrow. Living in New York requires using all your muscles — that’s what’s so exhausting; the going back and forth. But it’s also what makes us so strong and resilient; we are constantly adjusting, constantly in flex. What’s next is in our hands.”
I’ve read up on the few competing ways how to complete a lot of books throughout the year, and part of this is the know-how of pairing books together. The method I apply is a simple one, and that’s reading books that are companions, generally one nonfiction and the other fiction (or graphic novel). Say, if I were looking to pair New York with a companion novel, I’d find something set in the city like Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, etc. (both novels I might discuss). Less often, but no less beneficial, is reading books that contrast and maybe pairing a denser book with a lighter read. Though I wouldn’t classify New York as a dense read, it is expansive and covers a lot of ground, whereas the next book, is a quicker, lighter read, one that maybe you can get through in a day or two.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Literature sustains the mind and whatever it is we consider to be the soul, but there are a few books every year that make a lasting impression, that make us cry and laugh, that make us want to rip out the page or experience transcendence. One of those books for me is Rachel Yoder’s debut novel Nightbitch.
Nightbitch is an introspection of the converging experiences of young motherhood, womanhood, and art. Terrifying, hilarious, and observant, we follow a mother, a lifelong artist, who has halted her career to raise her son (while her husband is perpetually working some uninspiring job in some random nondescript cities), an experience that’s not as amazing as she anticipated. Struggling to reconcile her past art career or find a spark to rekindle it, she descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare and slowly turns into a feral dog that roams the town at night. Hence nightbitch.
I am not a mother. I do not have children. And I’m not an artist like our narrator. Nor am I involved in a multi-level marketing scheme like our narrator. (I’m a writer — or at least I enjoy considering myself mired in a long windup of becoming one.) Even though I’m bereft of all those skills on my resume, Yoder understands perfectly well how to get me to give a damn about this young mother and her experience. She knows I have the same experiences! And you too!
Whether we are dealing with motherhood, womanhood, career, depression, lack of social mobility or agency, or time, we artists (or non-artists) know that laboring for our art to no avail is to suffer. We stop and start until we succeed or die. Bottom line? Yoder gets it. We get it.
Good writing like Yoder’s turns us readers into little empaths. We need not live the life of the unnamed narrator. We know the struggle so well, and it’s within that struggle that she comes to life that we’re better for it. Reading Nightbitch and good books like it allows us to see our fellow artists and friends and even strangers through an adjusted lens. When presented with multitudes of cultures, of voices, of decisions made, and obstacles to overcome, we are gifted exercises in empathy, where we learn to love or hate, both necessary to live, freeing us to step into another world for however many pages sitting between the covers.
This culture happens to be that of a suburban mother, ex-artist, who grows her canines and patches of black doggy hair on her nape, and who digs some shit up in the yard. But there have been times when, if I’m not howling or letting my neck hairs grow like a nightbitch, then I’m letting my mind plunge into depths that are foreign to me but which allow me to seek out what inside me is hungry that needs to get out and onto the page. Damn do I know that feeling. I’m helpless but to sympathize with her and to understand her plight. (Hypothetically, once I put her book down and start to write mine, I know there are millions of folks like me — ditto the narrator — going through the same). We are all searching for that cure to help us understand what the hell we are doing.
It also helps when we approach life with a sense of irony and satire, which Rachel Yoder poignantly captures in her writing. If we don’t at least attempt approaching life like that, we will all turn into dogs and end up…well…you’ll see if you read it.
RECS:
The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream — Thomas Dyja
Milk Fed — Melissa Broder
The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
