The Book World Often Breaks My Heart, and the Books Stitch it Back Together.

I work in publishing as an editor, and I also write books and I also read lots of books. In metaphorical terms, I enjoy a well-made sausage, I often try to to cook them for others, and my day job is spent shoving pigs into the pig-grinder.

(It’s not that gross, I like my job.)

Books are Broken, Which Breaks Me.

Still, it is hard sometimes to be immersed in books as a commodity and also to hold them dearly as my favorite form of art. These little chunks of someone’s soul stitched together with the loving hands of editors and designers and printers are often only on the shelves of bookstores for a matter of months, if at all, before being replaced by newer soul-chunks.

Best-seller lists are gamed and awards are cheated. Brilliant writers and writings are rejected because they lack the requisite instagram following. Books are ghost-written and co-written because people want cookbooks and kid-books and memoirs by Real Housewives.

Books struggle to find an audience because the title lacks search engine optimization or because the topic is too specific or too broad; too complex or too simple to be properly captured in marketing copy.

And there are the numbers, the numbers! I have a co-worker who, every Monday, sends me a screenshot of how many new releases there were the week before. It’s always over 1,000. This is only in the four main genres of books and doesn’t count self-published or most small press releases. Every year, there are something like 3 million books released (and recent studies suggest that there are only about 10 people left in the whole country who read books anymore¹).

My coworker does this to crush my spirit, and I appreciate it. We point at the pig grinder and say “it’s too many pigs.” This is how friendships work sometimes.

And sometimes four bazillion books are too many, and some blog (or, ugh, story about a bunch of thumbs dressed as tech-bro disrupters grifters who just raised 16 million dollars to put out 8,000 books next year (Jane Friedman wrote a great piece about this in The Hot Sheet, which you should subscribe to if you’re interested in the publishing world at all)), or some person I kinda know writes a book that does really well and I’m not jealous or anything and it’s not like I write books like that at all but still, and even though I love books, I point at the grinder and shout ‘IT’S TOO MANY PIGS’ and wonder if maybe if it’s all bullshit.²

But I Believe in Books

And then, I read a book that does something that no book has ever done, or that does the exact thing I needed a book to do, or that shows why some things need 80,000 words and not an ai-generated google summary³, or that is just good. And I remember that I believe in books.

I believe in books and writers and stories and ideas. I believe in the face punch and tummy rub or words placed just so, of words, that, as Verlyn Klinkenborg⁴ wrote, “Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.”

Damn. “Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.”

I believe in books., and it’s been a year of good books.

I published one book, 50 Strategies for Learning without Screens (and yes, 50 is too many strategies to write without spraining your brain) and wrote four more (chapter books for Elementary students that will be published in August and I’m so excited for I can’t even (and yes four is too many books to write in a year, and only three will be published right now anyway)).

And because people are still reading my first book from almost ten years ago (which is like 4,000 in book years, I guess), I get very nice emails now and again and got to speak to a few classrooms of prospective teachers. And because way way fewer people are reading my second book⁵, I just about exploded when this writer I really respect emailed me out of nowhere to tell me he read it and cried and his wife read it and cried and, I don’t know how many emails like that make a book worth it for most people but my number is one.

I worked on a bunch of books that came out this year (or will come out shortly) for teachers and parents. Like Raising Awe Seekers, and Gender Inclusive Schools and Neurodiversity Affirming Schools and The Empathic Classroom and There’s Research for That and, well… I guess let’s just say that my job is often neat, and the authors and editors I work with are my freaking heroes and also every one of these books is, well, important. They will do things in the world that will make whole lives better.

Books to Mend a Broken Book-Heart

I started this piece in order to share books that saved my love of books this year. And 1,000 words later, here we are. When the realities of publishing and profit and lost media and bad books and the existence of Melania on the shelves of book stores breaks my little book-heart, these are the books I chewed up all gummy to stick that heart back together (I don’t know what the deal with gross metaphors is today).

Conversations with Monsters — Charlotte Amelia Poe

This is my favorite book of the year, one of my favorites of all time. It reads as stream-of-consciousness, but I can’t even fathom the amount of internal and external work it would take to remove every instinct and pressure to hide your neurodivergence, and instead embrace and amplify and wrap it with words. This book is a tuning fork that hit my brain so perfectly I could feel it buzzing with every word.

Line that Made Me Fall in Love: Or is a very big word for two letters.

A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire — Emma Southon

I worry the inclusion of this book lumps me in with the stereotypes of straight dudes that we 1: Think about the Roman Empire all the time (I don’t), and 2: Don’t read novels (I do, but fewer this year). I heard Emma Southon as a guest on the Bechdel Cast (all roads lead to Jamie Loftus) discussing the movie Gladiator, which led me to this book by her, and soon all of the others. Each chapter tells the story of a different woman from the Roman Empire, and Southon does incredible work giving rich context and depth to each story while making the book read like you’ve taken a historian out for three drinks and asked them what their favorite stuff is.

Line that Captures the Vibe: Cures for infertility listed by Pliny include wearing a plant named a Squirting Cucumber as a necklace. Watching videos of the squirting cucumber has made me weep with laughter while writing this so I highly recommend you do that because it really is aptly named.

Beyond Molotovs — A Visual Handbook of Authoritarian Strategies

Each chapter of this book highlights some form of artistic resistance across the world. It’s a glowy ball of inspiration. It’s gorgeous. Things have been bad before, have been worse before, and there are things that people did to fight it. You can download the whole PDF here, or order from Columbia University Press. Read, take notes.

Chapter Title I Opened to Randomly When Showing This Book to my Kid: Communicating Displeasure Through Nakedness

US Conductors — Sean Michaels

A love story? A spy story? A story about theremin? Whatever. It’s a novel, and I felt like I underlined every other sentence because of all the cool things that words do in it.

Fave Line: I was born on August 15, 1896, and at that instant I became an object moving through space toward you.

An Immense World — Ed Yong

Have I sat you down to tell you all about how Monet could see UV light? If so, I learned it first here. Have you sat through a rather large failure of a training when I tried to compare the different ways that hawks, humans, and snakes see the world with the writing of effective op-eds? This book is also (partially) to blame. This book was a profound experience in, to use scientific terms, pulling my head out of my ass. To even imagine the different ways reality is seen and experienced is a powerful thing.

Favorite New Word I Learned: Umwelt

Zine: Paranoid Tree

If you subscribe to them (and you SHOULD), you get short stories delivered to your mailbox. Each is one full page with original illustrations, and the writer and illustrator get paid and they are gorgeous, gorgeous things.

To book writers, readers, and makers:

Bless you, bless you, all you book writers and readers and makers. I am currently reading Imagination: A Manifesto, by Ruha Benjamin, and though it is too smart for me and so I must read it carefully and slowly, but the end of the first chapter works well as a prayer, I suppose, for the coming years:

“Look around: humanity is in the eye of multiple storms. Will we continue shutting off the power of the masses so that a minority of people can stay warm, or will we build the necessary infrastructure so that everyone can thrive? Like author Arundhati Roy, I believe “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. . . . On a quiet day, if I listen carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

FOOTNOTES

¹ https://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/96819-i-suck-at-doing-research-how-to-get-better/

²

³

⁴ Best name ever, and wrote the best titled book, Several Short Sentences About Writing. Yes, despite the footnote two up, my favorite book on writing is all about how short sentences are great.

⁵ Writing and publishing one book has been a dream of mine since I was like 8 (when I was told that writers read a lot, and so I gave up and wanted to be a fireman, but then in 5th grade my teacher got me hooked on a series of books whose title would/should get me cancelled for even writing, and so I started writing again), and YES, writing “my second book” feels very weird and also, like, I feel so lucky that I wrote one and enough people were like, “how bout more?” (see footnote 2).