The Shape of to Come

 A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Becky Chambers (2021, 2022)

"What do people need?” A curious robot seeks to answer this question by being the first of its kind in generations to interact with humans. Centuries before, humans and robots parted ways and technological trajectories following what is alluded to as some moment of both realizing that the latter had attained sentience and were thus inherently deserving of self-determination.

Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot duology, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, follows the mundane travels of Dex the Tea Monk and Splendid Speckled Mosscap as they wander around a rewilding Earth-stand-in moon named Panga. Along their buddy road trip, the protagonists interact with various groups of people and other animals and other things. Each interaction provides the characters and reader opportunities for reflection on how we differentiate concepts like agency/dependence, human/nonhuman, sustainability/waste. The civilized/wild cut is most visibly rendered, as humans are taught to stay in their designated areas and pathways and to not wander into or disturb nature. The conversations around these designations are juxtaposed by the dual human and robot protagonists, who are signified by pronouns “they” and “it”, respectively, revealing an in-universe awareness of the arbitrariness of binary thinking.

The books are often categorized as “solarpunk”, and if you are familiar at all with the designations “steampunk” or “cyberpunk”, then you can probably guess the general direction where stories of this genre are going to take you. Here, “solar” signifies an ecologically positivist worldview of smaller agrarian-adjacent communities based around shared culture and religion, a gesture towards veganism and animism, and a minimal reliance on mechanized and computer technology. In literature, “punk” can co-signify a techno-dystopian future, an alternate timeline that maintains Victorian aesthetic as the preferred dress and decor, or an optimistic spin on climate doomerism à la Station Eleven or that tear-jerker episode of Last of Us with Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.

Without trapping myself in an argument of what is/n’t “real” and at the risk of saying distinctions don’t matter, the “punk” angle makes sense if one embraces the music’s anticapitalist and anti-institutional ethos over expected markers of dress and instrumentalization. Arguments for expanding the genre across music criticism platforms rarely win over adherents, but I’ve found pitches for the Pogues, They Might Be Giants, Public Enemy, and Los Tigres del Norte as punk convincing in their temporary utility and self-awareness. Green Day was punk, and then they weren’t enough, and then they were again, at least according to 924 Gilman.

Later in the story, Dex’s father asks Mosscap what robots need. Splendid Speckled Mosscap, echoing every human it had asked across the two books, doesn’t have an immediate answer and is even somewhat taken aback to be asked. This anticipated inversion of plot’s catalyst draws some attention to the subjective nature of consciousness, autonomy, and being, which the books graciously leave undisturbed.

2023: My Year in Books

“By teaching us how to read, they had taught us how to get away.”

Six years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022) now, logging my book reading. It's a streak bested by "favorite songs/albums" and "movies that came out last year that I didn't watch but would like to some day" EOY lists.

Here is every book I read in 2023, with some superlatives, followed by holistic observations. Re-reads are indicated by an asterisk*.

1. The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff (2022) - 01.11 Book I'm Most Likely to Refer to When in an Argument about Originalism
2. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd Ed., Ernst Breisach (1983, 2007) - 01.13
3. Places of My Infancy: A Memory, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961) - 01.13
4. Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson (1995) - 01.30
5. Educated, Tara Westover (2018) - 01.30
6. In Praise of Shadows, Junichirō Tanizaki (1933, 2001) - 01.31
7. Whose Truth, Whose Creativity? Why Postmodern Art Theory Is A Culturally Damaging Mistake And How Neuroscience Can Prove This: A 21st Century Manifesto, George J. E. Sakkal (2022) - 02.03 Book I'm Least Likely to Return to
8. Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry (2019) - 02.05
9. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley (2018) - 02.12
10. LaserWriter II, Tamara Shopsin (2021) - 02.27
11. On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care, Victor Ray (2022) - 03.03
12. The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays, Julia Koets (2019) - 03.13
13. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe (2019) - 03.18
14. Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies: A Practical Guide, Jo Mackiewicz & Rebecca Day Babcock, Eds. (2020) - 04.02
15. CounterStories from the Writing Center, Frankie Condon & Wonderful Faison, Eds. (2022) - 04.11
16. High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, Jessica B. Harris (2011) - 04.30
17. Hopscotch, Julio Costázar (1966) - 05.01
18. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies, Sara P. Alvarez, Yana Kuchirko, Mark McBeth, Meghmala Tarafdar, Missy Watson, Eds. (2022) - 05.16
19. Dis/Rupting the Center: A Partnership Approach to Writing Across the University, Rebecca Hallman Martini (2022) - 05.16
20. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard P. Feynman (1999) - 05.17
21. Bluets, Maggie Nelson (2009) - 05.27
22. Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen (2008) - 06.05
23. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2022) - 06.15
24. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Charles Darwin (1872) - 06.17*
25. The Seas, Samantha Hunt (2004) - 06.17
26. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, Jack Schneider & Jennifer Berkshire (2020) - 06.24
27. The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy, Paige Williams (2018) - 06.25
28. Explorers of Deep Time: Paleontologists and the History of Life, Roy Plotnick (2022) - 07.05
29. The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach (2011) - 07.11 This Year's "Book to Read While at CCL Games"
30. The Story of The Earth and Man, John William Dawson (1873) - 07.12
31. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles, Denny, Harry; Mundy, Robert; Naydan, Liliana M.; Sévère, Richard; & Sicari, Anna (2018) - 07.14
32. Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life, Rev. H. N. Hutchinson (1897) - 07.28
33. One Life, Megan Rapinoe (2020) - 08.01
34. Dinosaurs (With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections), William Diller Matthew (1915, 2006) - 08.04
35. Animals of the Past, Frederick A. Lucas (1913) - 08.12
36. The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom, H. W. Brands (2020) - 08.12
37. The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (2013) - 08.20
38. Impossible Owls: Essays, Brian Phillips (2018) - 08.26
39. Cheddar Off Dead, Korina Moss (2022) - 09.04 Best Title, Possibly Ever
40. Stay True: A Memoir, Hua Hsu (2022) - 09.04
41. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer (1951) - 09.13
42. Actual Air, David Berman (1999) - 09.13
43. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien (1971) - 09.14*
44. Institutional Ethnography as Writing Studies Practice, Michelle LaFrance & Melissa Nicolas (2023) - 09.15
45. A Death in the Family: My Struggle 1, Karl Ove Knausgård (2009) - 09.17
46. Devil House, John Darnielle (2022) - 09.27
47. I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy (2022) - 10.01
48. The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle (2012) - 10.10*
49. Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration, Alejandra Olivia (2023) - 10.12
50. Sent for You Yesterday, John Edgar Wideman (1983) - 10.26
51. The Last House on Needles Street, Catriona Ward (2021) - 10.26
52. Keywords in Design Thinking: A Lexical Primer for Technical Communicators & Designers, Jason C. K. Tham (E) (2022) - 11.02
53. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon (1988) - 11.03
54. The Creative Act, Rick Rubin (2023) - 11.03
55. Madvillain's Madvillainy, Will Hagle (2023) - 11.10
56. Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, Isaac Fitzgerald (2022) - 11.21
57. The New England Grimpendium: A Guide to Macabre and Ghostly Sites, J. W. Ocker (2010) - 11.24
58. A Man in Love: My Struggle 2, Karl Ove Knausgård (2009) - 11.25
59. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Donna J. Haraway (1989) -12.02
60. Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror, Ellen Datlow (E) (2023) - 12.05
61. Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera (A, 2009), Lisa Dillman (T, 2014) - 12.09
62. A Research-based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines, Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle (2022) - 12.15
63. The Axeman's Carnival, Catherine Chidgey (2022) - 12.18
64. King Lear, William Shakespeare (1608-1623) - 12.30*
65. Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, Norm Macdonald (2016) - 12.31
66. Boyhood Island: My Struggle 3, Karl Ove Knausgård (2015) - 12.31

Patterns and trends I noticed in my reading, beyond the usual anticipated seasonal (St. Patrick's Day, beach reads, Halloween, winter holidays) and travel (Massachusetts, New Zealand, Pittsburgh), had more to do with style and genre.

Not by design, at least not at first, my reading over the past year was marked by writers writing about themselves: autoethnography, memoir, autofiction, first-person narrative, autobiography, manifesto. Hsu felt like hearing a beloved college friend tell stories; same with Fitzgerald, except it was high school. Macdonald's Not a Memoir was as factual as Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and as silly, too. I plan to talk about Knausgård elsewhere when I've finished the set, so I'll save my thoughts for summative assessment. McCurdy, Herrera, and Westover started with me feeling miserable for the authors, but then respectively hopeful, in reverence, and somewhat letdown. Rapinoe's book left me with a greater sense of respect for ghostwriters.

Three instances of writers writing about other people — Say Nothing, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, The New England Grimpendium —not coincidentally with ties to my home state of Massachusetts, caused me to seek out additional works by their authors.

Three that I've had in the queue for a while and that I finally made space for invoked different recognizable aesthetics that I would broadly attribute to 21st century writing. Impossible Owls picks up where the blog era left off, but shows the benefits of working with an editor that even the best writing of the pre-social media moment lacked. The Seas is lyrical and magical-realist, the latter in my favorite sense of that genre, when you can't tell if the magic is real and knowing the distinction might not matter. LasterWriter II juxtaposes straight fiction, fictionalized non-fiction, and fourth-wall breaking practical advice.

Finally, the longest gap between my first read and the reread, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. You might recognize the title from the animated film The Secret of NIMH, part of Don Bluth's absolutely killer 1980s cv, which along with Dragon's Lair, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven, is a run that rivals any animation studio before or since. If you're familiar with the accelerating conflict of the story, which can be read as character versus nature or technology depending upon where you scale a bunch of rodents who can read and write, you'll recognize why it was silly of me to select this as an autumn reading. The header quote is from this book.