Despair is what the fascists want, though. The book I read this week is something of a helpful story, in the sense that it feels like the characters are going through the same bullshit and handling things as best they can. This is the rare book I\u2019d recommend my parents\u2019 book club and<\/em> to all of my literary friends and<\/em> to anyone who maybe doesn\u2019t read a lot, but wants to read something based in the same reality we live in (as opposed to the reality the fascists are trying to wishcast, where burning fossil fuels is good for the Earth and mass deportations bring about a happy culture). <\/p> What I\u2019ve Been Reading Lately: <\/strong><\/p> I had a Nick Hornby phase near the end of high school\/beginning of college. I loved (still love, though I haven\u2019t read the books since then) High Fidelity<\/em> and About A Boy<\/em>. Shoutout Nicholas Hoult, shoutout Toni Collette, shoutout yr man Heretic<\/a>. I really enjoyed A Long Way Down<\/em>, and genuinely wonder how I\u2019d feel about it now that I\u2019m not 17-19. Then I read How To Be Good<\/em>, and I found it so irritating, cynical, and resigned that I stopped reading Hornby altogether. That\u2019s unfair. Probably had more to do with the fact that I was starting to take writing workshops and reading contemporary writers that seemed cooler than Nick Hornby (ie, their books hadn\u2019t been made into movies my parents also enjoyed). I know<\/em> that if I re-read those first three books, I\u2019d have a good time. However, Dinosaurs <\/em>by Lydia Millet is the book I wish How To Be Good<\/em> was.<\/p> Dinosaurs<\/strong><\/em> by Lydia Millet:<\/strong> I love this book. The economy of style and clutterless discussion of Real Big Issues reminded me favorably of The Trees<\/a><\/em> by Percival Everett<\/a>. Millet is very much a nature novelist, if such a thing exists (I feel like something of a nature poet, and want to explore this idea of a nature novelist). But the drama is all human. Our main character is Gil, a humble trust fund recipient who begins the book by getting broken up with, selling all his stuff, and walking from Manhattan to Phoenix, where he makes friends with a family of four next door. <\/p> I realize that\u2019s a hell of a sentence. Gil is<\/em> a humble trust fund recipient, though. He\u2019s an orphan who was raised by his grandmother until she died when he was a teenager and he was shuttled through various wards. He grew up eating peanut butter sandwiches and getting little for Christmas. Then when he\u2019s 18, he learns that actually, no, he doesn\u2019t have to work for a living. What he does instead is volunteer for upwards of 50-60 hours a week and play pickup basketball (talk about a good life). When he gets to Arizona, he helps babysit the 10-year-old next door, while making fast friends with the parents. There isn\u2019t the kind of \u201cand then the wife and him start an affair\u201d or \u201cand then the husband and him have a midlife crisis together\u201d that I feel like I\u2019ve been conditioned to expect, which was refreshing. Show me all the werewolf<\/a> and vampire<\/a> gore you want, show me a text about Kashmir\u2019s loss of innocence<\/a>, show me a haunted house story that begins with a paramilitary massacre<\/a>\u2014all that I can handle. Bedroom farces, though? I gotta read peeking through my fingertips<\/a>.<\/p> The conflict here comes from a bunch of shit that you and I probably already feel powerless about. Volunteer at all the women\u2019s shelters you want, men still do violence towards women. Send money to the drunk driver who killed your parents because he\u2019s spent his life in prison or addicted but he\u2019s trying to make good and you feel sympathy, but it won\u2019t stop him drinking til his liver explodes. Have you gotten into birding? Some Arizona gun nut is shooting birds\u2014including birds of prey\u2014under cover of night just to leave their corpses lying around. Oh, it\u2019s illegal to kill birds of prey? Fuck you, it\u2019s the Trump Era, laws are only real if you have money, you na\u00efve motherfucker. Millet handles all this with some combination of Aimee Bender\u2019s airy prose and Percival Everett\u2019s blunt frankness. Chapters are like 20 pages long, but sections within the chapters are sometimes as short as one paragraph. The effect is that the prose kinda mimics that disorienting nature of, say, scrolling a social media feed, though that\u2019s not an explicit goal of Millet\u2019s. It\u2019s comfortable, being around Gil and the family next door, and the woman Gil eventually starts dating. It\u2019s not without interpersonal drama\u2014families and lives never are\u2014but there\u2019s this feeling, kinda similar to the movie end of About A Boy<\/em>, that the best you can do is find your people. Try to do some good where you can, and don\u2019t let it get you down that you can\u2019t save the world. Try to be of use, as the epigraph says. <\/p> Will it all ultimately be worth it? Who cares. The real question is: can you afford not<\/em> to try to be of use? <\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> Something to listen to while you browse? A warm weather jam I\u2019ve been re-introducing to the rotation is lophiile\u2019s The Good Days Between<\/em>. Put that record on feel at peace. Put that record on and no one can touch you. Here\u2019s \u201cIn Some Way,\u201d the only song off that record I can find on YouTube, for some reason. <\/p>![](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/85e215f7-f966-48ed-bc4f-ea3ee64e0abb_3024x4032.heic\"\/)
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