What I Read in March 2020
Here’s what happened in March: I read three books. All three of these books were mentioned in my last blog post, as I started each of them in February. In the ten days since March ended, I have finished reading another book—bringing my grand total to 11, so far, in 2020—but the specifics of that book will be saved for my next installment.
Books I Finished Reading in March 2020
Like I said, three books:
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell
Two thirds of these are non-fiction. The trend continues. The trend in which my non-fiction consumption looms above my fiction reading. 80% for the year. Two novels and eight books of non-fiction.
Then, the books I read some of. There were a lot of these in March.
Books I Partially Read in March 2020:
These are the books I did not finish in March but that I read, at the very least, bits and pieces of:
Beloved by Toni Morrison
This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith
My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgard
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Can you believe it? Three of the four are fiction! (If, that is, you agree with the idea that the My Struggle books are novels and not memoirs. Which, apparently, is what they are, according to the author and the marketing of the books.)
Now, let’s discuss the books I finished reading.
On Design and Other Things I Know Little About
I discovered Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men through a podcast. That’s a surprising thing to say, as I am not a big podcast person. The specific entity that led me to this book is the 363rd episode of the podcast 99% Invisible.
This podcast.
I was once surrounded by people who listened to 99% Invisible, when I worked at a traditional “creative” advertising agency (referred to henceforth as P________) and was a member of their Connected Experiences (i.e. digital) team. Most of the team was designers of one kind or another. User interface designers, user experience designers, people with “architect” in their title. Then there were other talented people who sat near me and also did design of one form or another. These people designed things from cereal boxes to websites. I often felt like the odd-person out, both within that team and the agency as a whole. None of my work was something that anyone took any pride in. The one cool project I worked on now ends in a 404. (Yes, not even a 301 redirect, because creative advertising agencies don’t know or don’t care or don’t think it’s worth taking the time to deal with what 301 redirects are.) The disconnect was so great between what I did there and what the rest of them did and understood me to do that an account director once looked at me and said you are not a writer because, well, to him I was an SEO strategist. Which I am. I am an SEO strategist, but I am other things, too.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I started listening to 99% Invisible because everyone there was a designer and 99% Invisible is a podcast for designers and so all of them listened to it weekly and talked about it daily. It was like when everyone watches Game of Thrones or The Bachelor and you’re the one person without a TV. (I’m not a person without a TV; I watched all of Game of Thrones but never The Bachelor; I am a person who deleted the Apple Podcasts app from my phone.)
So, to summarize: working at P________ surrounded by designers led to spending occasional time listening to 99% Invisible which led to listening to their episode where Roman Mars interviewed Caroline Criado Perez about her book Invisible Women which led to listening to the entirety of the audiobook Invisible Women, written by and narrated by Caroline Criado Perez.
This book. (And unlike most of the designs the book references, this is one well-designed cover. I think.)
Do I recommend this book? Yes. Do I think you should read it right now? That depends. I read Winners Take All in January and recommended that book to several people. One of them started reading it and texted me “does this book get any less depressing?” I texted him back: “No.”
Invisible Women would prompt a similar reaction. It took me several months to get through. The full timeline, I believe is:
Listened to 99% Invisible episode in autumn of 2019
Started recognizing that non-fiction books make for good Audible credit usage, during late 2019
Bought Invisible Women with an Audible credit in December 2019
Finished Invisible Women in March 2020
The three months required to read this book results from it being an exhausting and frustrating read. Of course, even making that statement comes from a place of such extreme privilege—”It’s hard reading about the plights of the forgotten demographics”—that I am reluctant to say it here.
Invisible Women also reminds me of both Winners Take All and How to Do Nothing—books I read in January and February, respectively—in that the author does not hold any criticism back. She does not lean into optimism. She does not reframe her intellectualism as thought leadership. The book is an endless torrent of negative anecdotes facts, with only the smallest bits of positive anecdotes and victories sprinkled throughout.
However, there is one solution the author keeps at the center of the book: we need more, better sex-desegregated data. Every design flaw and societal issue she identifies has the same underlying cause. And the same solution. This is not a criticism of the book. It’s a good thing and reinforces the optimism one can have, if this book and the ideas in it have the impact they should.
It’s a convincing argument and one that—like Winners Take All and How to Do Nothing—inspired me to pause and take stock in many of the assumptions I have. It prompted me to ask questions like “how should GDP be reconsidered to account for unpaid work?” or “how should the education system be adjusted to avoid driving children toward preconceived roles based on their sex” or “what should the default sex of an emoji be?”
The idea that “one-size-fits-all” really means “one-size-fits-all-men” is one idea the author hammered home, successfully. I had not known that heart attacks are often misdiagnosed for women because women have different symptoms than men—and a man’s heart attack system is considered “typical” while a woman’s standard symptoms are considered “atypical.” This alone should spark a reconsideration of so many of our assumptions.
So, again, do I recommend this book? Yes.
Is it the book you should be reading right now? I’m glad I read it and finished it. In particular, I think men should read it, although I can think of a lot of men who either would not read it or would not read it with the right mindset.
Meanwhile, I know that there are people who crave escapism and joy and serenity in their reading right now. This book will not give you those things—but, if you consider the suggestions and ideas proposed by Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women, it might give you hope.
On Escapism
Was The Ocean at the End of the Lane my quarantine escapism? It’s a fantasy novel, sure, maybe, but I don’t think it did much in the way of escapism. I first read the book in 2015, on a cruise—a concept seemingly being erased from this world in the current era—and I remembered most of it. The sweeping themes, at least. What I remembered most of all was the epigraph of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
This book.
It’s that epigraph that drew me back in. The same epigraph that got me into a habit of buying Where the Wild Things Are every time a friend has a baby. Plus a copy for myself that I can’t find now, because I either lent it out or gave to a friend’s baby, meaning I have to buy a new copy for myself.
This is what it says:
“I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.” - Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993
It started rattling around in my brain somewhere in the middle of the month. Inspired by comments a friend of mine sent me about a writing project that he and only he has read. The project is called The 90s Kid and it could have the same epigraph as The Ocean at the End of the Lane if Gaiman hadn’t already used it. I won’t say more about that project, not now, not yet, but I will say that no one should mistake The Ocean at the End of the Lane for escapism. Perhaps a lot of fantasy books shouldn’t be mistaken for escapism.
But there was a book that did serve as escapism, it’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell. Or, as I described it to a friend, “what if great gatsby but true crime?”
Yes, yes, it’s true. I read another true crime book. I’ve now read two true crime books in 2020. I don’t know if I’d ever read a true crime book before 2020. On the surface, these two books are as similar as two books can be. Both involve a famous American writer. Both involve multiple murders. Both books follow the famous American writer to the end of their lives and both end on notes both bleak and hopeful. Both arguably fall short at living up to the promise described by their marketing.
Careless People does achieve its purpose in telling the story of Fitzgerald’s creation of The Great Gatsby. It says things about Gatsby—and Gatsby—that had never occurred to me. It delves into Fitzgerald’s letters, his ledgers, the newspaper articles of his day. It describes lunches between his contemporaries, sometimes without explanation of how these lunches relate to either Fitzgerald of the Hall-Mills murder. It tells of the Fitzgeralds’ time in France and the dissolution of their marriage. It’s a tragedy, well-written and compelling to anyone who loves The Great Gatsby. (And probably an exhausting slog to anyone who doesn’t care for Gatsby or Fitzgerald.)
The one thing Careless People doesn’t do particularly well is prove the thesis upon which it’s founded. Ostensibly it’s a book about how a certain unsolved double murder—the aforementioned Hall–Mills murder case—inspired Fitzgerald in his writing of The Great Gatsby. Unfortunately, there really isn’t much to support this idea and it appears as if Churchwell knew that, either from the beginning or certainly by the end of the book, entirely forgetting about her thesis by the book’s final chapter.
I’ll say that I liked Careless People considerably more than Furious Hours. Its narrative unfolds largely chronologically, jumping between storylines, while Furious Hours was told in a needlessly way that still bothers me—of course, this chronological storytelling is part of the issue with Careless People, in that the last two decades of Fitzgerlald’s life can’t even be tenuously connected to the unsolved Hall-Mills murders.
Oddly, I’ll add that there’s something fun about Careless People, in the same way there’s something fun about The Great Gatsby and, I suppose, true crime in general. It’s the sort of fun with terrible sadness lurking beneath its surface—but fun nonetheless.
“You are not a writer.”
Let’s return to a moment I mentioned earlier in this blog post. Something I hadn’t realized I’d be writing about until it jumped onto this screen. When an account director at P_______ told me “you are not a writer.”
It’s odd to suddenly write about that moment without realizing I was about to write about it. Perhaps it’s the influence of reading Knausgaard right now. The result of reading a book where the narrator writes about anything he wants at any given moment, all of it inconsequential and minute and dramatic and sweeping all at once. A man telling a story of a time he smoked a cigarette after a child’s fifth birthday party and remembered the other time he walked down a street and had coffee with a friend and how while he walked down that street he thought about a book he read. That’s My Struggle—elliptical tales that continually fold back onto themselves, the Seinfeld of literature, a novel about nothing, a memoir posing as a novel.
Perhaps I should save this for my next blog post—by which point I hope to have finished the second of the six My Struggle books—but many moments in Knausgaard’s work remind me of the line in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story in which a character says:
You're gonna have to give him a moment, son. Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays.
The thing is, the account director didn’t mean harm when he said that. We needed something written about a new product a client was launching and I had done the keyword research for this product, put together a search strategy for it, outlined the three web pages that would tell this story and capture the searches. I never had enough to do at P________ and so this would have given me a way to spend my time. I would wander around the building, realizing meetings were happening involving projects I was on that no one had remembered to invite me to because no one remembered that the websites we made had to find their way into search engines and maybe even get some traffic.
So I would write the articles myself. The “what is [new product from client]” and “[client’s unique product offerings]” and “why you need [product]” pages. It would give me something to do.
“I’ll just write them myself,” I said.
“No,” the account director said. “You are not a writer.”
“You are not a writer” reminds me of this piece of criticism I once received on a short story: “this is not a story.”
In context, he wanted me to focus my time on search engine optimization strategy. The thing they paid me for, whether or not I had anything to do and whether or not they understood that SEO inherently involves writing. In context, the words still weren’t great. Out of context, they really sucked. (Although I think it plays a part in why I have such a fondness for Ken Cosgrove.)
What I have learned since then is that no one can tell you you’re not a writer. Unless you let them.