It’s been a year! In addition to all the big news of the world, I spent much of 2023 going slowly but inexorably blind with early onset cataracts. But a bit of surgical intervention finally patched me up, and now I’m better. To celebrate (and because I’ve fallen way behind on my posting goals), let me talk about some of the wonderful fiction I still managed to read, even if at times very slowly and with much squinting.
My household has spent a lot of time escaping to Discworld lately. We started visiting during the beginning of the pandemic (I’d long heard good things). We’ve been returning on a regular basis ever since. And fortunately, the borders have stayed open! With only a small wait time occasionally spent in quarantine (waiting for the volumes we really wanted to read to become available).
I’m a big reader, and I love fiction. When I began reading, as a kid, I mostly dove into fantasy and science fiction. These days, I read more broadly (I’m currently half way through Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth*), but I often return to fantasy and science fiction (NK Jemison’s The Fifth Season preceded Commonwealth on my nightstand, and was in turn preceded by Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death).
All of the above are highly recommended.
At some point I became a sociologist. And I’m sometimes struck, as a sociologist, by the limited attention we pay to stories. Take this line from Mario Small’s reflection on a small body of narrative theory in Villa Victoria (p. 71):
The theory suggests that individuals understand their lives as narratives with ongoing and complex plots and that they tend to act not necessarily when acts are rational but when the actions accord with such narratives.
Small draws upon three citations to establish this lovely claim, and before reading his book I’d never heard of any of them. I’ve tried to make similar reference to the importance of stories in my own work, especially insofar as they establish lines of action for people. But I think a lot more could be done with this. The power of stories is real.
Here’s the latest example, The Guardian’s piece on the attempts of a Russian oligarch to seriously work toward restoration of a Tsarist Monarchy. In the oligarch’s own words:
“When I was 14, I read two books which had a huge impact on me,” he recalled. One was the memoirs of a former tsarist officer who went on to publish an émigré newspaper in Argentina, while the other was Lord of the Rings. “The image of Aragorn returning to Gondor was my second image of monarchy. It also affected my monarchism,” he said.
There you go. A pretty good case for the power of stories. And also a pretty convincing case that we need more diverse and more creative fantasy!
*- I haven’t read the linked review of Commonwealth yet! Don’t want to spoil anything! But I’m really enjoying it so far.
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