On the windswept, wild, and foggy Farallon Islands, off the coast of San Francisco, a group of scientists live in a cabin, where they research the life of the landscape: birds, sharks, whales. The Lightkeepers tells the story of Miranda, a traveling photographer who makes her way to the islands and finds her place amongst the socially-distant scientists. The novel is framed as a journal, written by Miranda to her long-dead mother, chronicling the events on the islands over the course of about a year.
Miranda, quiet and thoughtful, observes her cabin mates as they might observe the birds. The six other characters on the island—including the grizzly Galen, the scrawny Forest, the big friendly Mick, the sharp and manic Lucy—are all richly detailed and brought to life, believable in their quirks and fragility. However, Miranda, as the narrator, is painted unreliably, with her journal omitting information and leaving the reader guessing at her true nature. Just as one often fails to understand oneself, the reader cannot quite grasp who Miranda really is, for her letters reveal only who she thinks she is, and perhaps not who she really is.
Even Miranda’s name is rarely spoken, as from the get-go her cabin mates get it wrong—believing her name to be Melissa—and she opts not to correct them, eventually being called anything from Melissa to Mel to Mouse Girl.
Miranda accompanies the scientists around the islands, capturing photographs of wildlife and landscapes while contemplating loss, grief, and life. She assimilates to the solitary lifestyle on the islands, and she finds her niche within the community of seven. Yet, as we see through her writing, she never quite connects with her co-inhabitants, always remaining distant. As much as she learns the ways of life on the islands, she pushes away, seeking a solitude even from limited human contact.
During her time on the islands, a mystery arises, made murky by Miranda’s uncertain, incomplete accounts. Effectively paced, Abby Geni reveals details of the truth as if revealing distant peaks behind fading fog. While the plot lines may be guessed—as they come logically, eventually—Geni’s evocations of the islands and its inhabitants are enough to carry the reader through the novel. The reader wonders not just what truth lies behind a mysterious death, but also what lies behind each character. What type of person chooses solitude on the Farallon Islands, preferring the company of jagged rocks, birds, and marine life over the company of people? What are the motives behind these individuals?
At first, the characters might feel like lab specimens, interesting in their quirks and differences. However, as Geni enriches them with detail, they become relatable, and before long, one wonders if one might enjoy the rugged solitude of the islands oneself. One might come to think that the rapid rush of cities and suburbs are just a different kind of rugged, solitary, and unforgiving life.
As The Lightkeepers unravels, and Miranda glimpses the reality of her time on the islands, the reader is left with the novel’s name to ponder. The lightkeepers, the story in the novel goes, were those on the island that lived there to keep the light going in the lighthouse, to prevent ships from crashing ashore. The lightkeepers, as Geni seems to imply, are those that observe the loss, love, and tragedy of life, and yet keep a light of stewardship going, so that we might keep learning, keep experiencing, and keep living.
Geni writes:
“There are two kinds of people in the world. There are eggers and lightkeepers. The former are driven by acquisition and avarice. The latter are driven by curiosity and caution. Eggers take what they can, consequences be damned. Lightkeepers take what they need, nothing more. Eggers want to have. Lightkeepers want to be.”
Despite the tragedies of life, some must keep the lights on, must keep us from falling into darkness. Those are the lightkeepers.
I’m not a crier. Not necessarily by choice—I’d say it’s healthy to cry—but I’m just not brought to tears often.
This book just about brought me to tears, which is something no other book I’ve read has done (and yes, maybe that just means I need to let my emotions out more, but that’s a topic for another post).
Pachinko is a multi-generational family saga of Korean immigrants moving to Japan, spanning from 1910 to 1989. Such a premise will surely drive away many readers—and it nearly drove me away too, as I’ve never been drawn to historical fiction. However, on a whim, I picked up Pachinko, and oh boy am I glad I did.
Pachinko starts with Yangjin, a Korean woman in a small fishing village who gives birth to Sunja, the life of much of the novel.
Sunja grows up to be a hardworking daughter, but she is drawn to a wealthy man she spies at the fishing docks. This man slowly encroaches upon her life, until she is in youthful, misguided love. She is still just a girl when the wealthy man, Hansu (who is decades older than Sunja), impregnates her on a hidden away beach near the village.
Hansu promises Sunja everything she might ever need, with his wealth apparently endless. However, when Sunja realizes she is pregnant, and that Hansu wishes to marry her and take her far away, she refuses. Sunja feels deceived, and her unwed pregnancy, Sunja and her mother know, will bring immense shame to the family. So instead, Sunja marries an ill minister visiting the village who hears Sunja’s plight and wishes to help. Together, Sunja and the minister set off for Japan, with Sunja leaving behind all she has ever known, including her home and her mother.
Thus kick off the events of a family saga filled to the brim with devastating loss, enraging struggle, and empowering perseverance. Sunja and her family’s story encompass historical details from Korean immigration to Japan and the associated prejudices to the Second World War from an underrepresented perspective.
Min Jin Lee has captured themes of just about every kind in Pachinko, ranging from the immigrant experience and the struggles to make it in a foreign land, to love, death, sacrifice, and parenthood.
Lee paints the histories and landscapes of her novel with a detailed brush, and both her characters and settings bustle with life. Pachinko reads quickly and simply, but carries a profound heft in meaning with its words.
In the end, Pachinko is about the struggle to eek out an existence in a society blind to individual sorrows. Pachinko is about a search for meaning in a murky world, amidst arcs of history that seem to play out around oneself, in separation from oneself.
Pachinko’s name refers to a mechanical gambling game called pachinko, which is popular in Japan. This name smartly sums up the essence of the novel:
“There could only be a few winners,” Lee writes, “and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”
Pachinko is the kind of book I search for, hope for, and read for.
The reading of books is changing. I’ve heard lots of remarks from people older than me that people used to read more books. I want to ignore these claims, or throw them into the bin with all of the other remarks wishing for some better past (like that one political slogan I’m not going to write). However, according to the statistics, these claims are correct.
Over the last several decades, the number of Americans that report having not read a book in the last year has steadily increased.
Presumably, this change is largely the result of technology, which gives us other ways to spend our time besides reading: social media, video games, internet browsing, and so forth.
Unsurprisingly, technology has not only changed how many books we read, but how we read those books. In a 2016 PEW study, 65% of U.S. adults reported having read a traditional print book in the last year, while 28% reported having read an ebook, and 14% reported having listened to an audio book.
To get a better idea of who’s doing this reading, we can look at 2017 numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Simply put, older Americans read more than younger Americans, and Americans with higher levels of formal education read more than those with less. (It’s important to keep in mind that more reading doesn’t necessarily lead to more formal education—it’s also possible that more formal education leads to more free time for reading, or that those who like to read in the first place simply tend toward college and beyond).
Globally, the United States finds itself somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to book reading. In the 2013 World Culture Score Index, which surveyed thirty countries around the world, the US ranked 23rd for time spent reading books per week, at 3 hours and 6 minutes. Other countries surveyed included Russia at about 7 hours, China at 8 hours, and India, which topped the list at 10 hours and 42 minutes.
Thus, it’s clear that book reading is changing, and there’s no reason to believe it’s going to stop. The ways in which we read will likely keep shifting into more digital formats, and the people who read will shift to whoever seeks out the most books—which may change significantly as more countries develop their education systems and raise their literacy rates. I believe books can change lives, so I will keep my eye on just whose lives, exactly, they’re going to change.
A brief note: I don’t claim to be an expert on any of the things I write about here. I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinions. However, on the topics of colonialism and the historical erasure of indigenous knowledge, I think it’s important for anyone from a colonizing country to discuss and face the true basis of their society. With that in mind, read on!
As humans, we don’t know everything. We will never know everything. But perhaps we don’t know as much as we should, because we have forgotten things, and we have ignored things.
The first human cultures of North America, or Turtle Island, as it more accurately may have been known by the natives of the continent, knew much about its environments. There is a tendency to portray the indigenous of North America as noble savages and romantic spiritualists in touch with the land. This is a stereotype, and it’s unsurprisingly incomplete. The “noble savage” narrative only worsens the tendency to put indigenous cultures into a box of people that existed only in the past, in the days of hunter-gatherers.
The native people who inhabited Turtle Island still exist, and still live throughout the continent. They live in all sorts of places, including cities, suburbs, and reservations. They are not one people or one thing. They are not primitive, or people of the past. They are modern human beings.
This map shows the modern distribution of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Courtesy of Locoluis from the Wikimedia Commons.
Of course, those of European descent have historically marginalized these people, and disregarded all the things they knew and still know. We (I speak as someone with entirely European heritage) assumed we were right, and that we knew everything, and that we were superior. We were wrong.
Take, for example, the disastrous state of the environment today. The tons of greenhouse gas emissions that we’ve emitted into the atmosphere, by way of vehicles, agriculture, manufacturing, and conveniences. We obviously don’t have things under control. Wildfires, in the past several years, have wreaked havoc on drought-ridden lands across the west coast, and they’re only expected to get worse. These fires have been so disastrous at least in part because of decades of fire suppression, which has led to buildups of fire-fueling material on forest floors. Only now are firefighters regularly attempting to reduce the amount of fuel on forest floors with prescribed burns.
Smoke billows west from the Northern California fires of October 2017. Known as the Northern California firestorm, around 250 fires burned at least 250,000 acres and killed at least 44 people. Image courtesy of Copernicus Sentinel Satellite.
However, it was not always this way. Before the invasion of the continent, the indigenous people did not fight fires, and according to M. Kat Anderson’s 2005 book, Tending the Wild, many natives used prescribed burns to clear areas for crops, which may have helped reduce fire fuel buildup. Interestingly, Anderson writes, “California Indians have never advocated leaving nature alone.” Instead, Anderson suggests, the indigenous peoples tended towards intimate interactions and coexistence with the land around them, seeking to balance their appropriation of nature with its ability to renew—though she admits that not all indigenous interactions with nature were perfectly balanced, leading to the degradation of some species.
The cover of M. Kat Anderson’s 2005 book, Tending the Wild. Image courtesy of Goodreads.
The ultimate point is that the indigenous people of today’s Americas understood things about the ecological functions of the environment. This was not just some religious, spiritual connection to the land that made them understand these things intuitively. Rather, these methods of land management were the result of thousands of years of observation and experimentation. To put it another way, these methods were the result of science. While modern science is understood as an institution for those with degrees, science, or at least the scientific method of understanding the world, has effectively existed since the beginning of humanity.
Thus, it should be clear that indigenous cultures have known, and do know, much about the world that we still fail to see. As Cutcha Risling-Baldy, Native American Studies professor at Humboldt State University, has repeatedly told me and her Introduction to Native American Studies class, she likes to keep a folder for “all the things natives have been telling white people for years that they haven’t figured out yet.”
This kind of knowledge has a name: traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. The name is fairly self-explanatory, but there is much to learn about it online and elsewhere. However, the name isn’t without its critics. As Cutcha says, the word “traditional” signals a primitive knowledge that may or may not have some relevance in the modern world. However, in Cutcha’s opinion, TEK is science, plain and simple. TEK is based on centuries of observation and experimentation, making it just as valid as any modern science. Labeling this knowledge as traditional undermines its potential to help all modern humans establish a sustainable, smart society.
TEK thankfully brings me to the book I am ostensibly reviewing: Peter Høeg’s (pronounced like “who”) Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a 1992 Danish novel that digs deep beneath its cover as a detective thriller and delves into a cultural examination of the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Historically, Greenland has been colonized (or at least attempted to be colonized) and claimed as Danish land. Importantly, while most of Greenland’s population is Inuit, the country still exists as a part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Needless to say, this has created a longstanding tension between the Greenlandic Inuit and the Danish.
Peter Høeg’s 1992 novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Image courtesy of Goodreads.
Smilla, the protagonist of the novel, stands with one foot in both Greenlandic and Danish worlds. Her mother was a Greenlandic Inuit, and her father is a wealthy Danish doctor. Growing up from a young age in Denmark, Smilla never quite fit in, instead living a mostly alienated life as she tries to understand her place in Denmark with her mixed heritage.
The novel kicks off with the death of a young Greenlandic child, Isaiah, whom Smilla had befriended. The Danish police quickly conclude that Isaiah fell off a snowy roof while playing, but Smilla is suspicious. Smilla knows snow, and she believes Isaiah’s footprints show that he was chased off the roof. Troubled, Smilla seeks answers, but the police ignore her and obstruct her investigations.
From there, the novel spirals down into an ambiguous Danish conspiracy. Despite facing constant discrimination and sexism, Smilla struggles, sneaks, and manipulates her way to the truth, at which point the novel ends.
Smilla repeatedly relies on her intuitive environmental knowledge and senses—things she learned from her Greenlandic mother as a child—to uncover the cause of Isaiah’s death. The truth, as Smilla eventually realizes, lies within a certain colonial impulse to constantly grow, objectify people, and relentlessly dig into the earth. Thus, the conspiracy behind the murder mystery serves as a metaphor for the destructive mentality behind colonial imperialism and ideas like manifest destiny.
As Peter Høeg and his novel suggest, colonial claims to other lands have destroyed environments and cultures, leaving behind centuries of accumulated wisdom while devastating future environments. Peter Høeg himself is Danish, so the novel, I imagine, is very much an exploration and attempt at reconciliation with his own culture’s history of colonialism over Greenland.
While Høeg promotes some fairly radical views for a novel from 1992, he also fails to provide any concrete solutions. The novel ends ambiguously, with the reader unsure of how the story resolves. The ending feels purposeful, and perhaps it’s a glance at our own modern setting, in which the repercussions of colonialism and its companion ideologies still reverberate throughout the world. While colonialism as an active process may be over, the effects are still seen in lost cultures, marginalized minorities, and wasteland environments.
The novel, unsurprisingly, leaves you feeling cold. However, as one of my peers stated in the class I read the novel for, “reading Smilla’s Sense of Snow is kind of like watching a horror movie—you know you’re going to get scared and hate it in the moment, but by the end, you’ll be glad you watched it.” (I’m sure my memory is distorting those words, but that’s the essence of what the classmate said.) Høeg’s story is not particularly enjoyable as you read it—it’s gloomy, dark, and uncomfortable—but it keeps pulling you along, both with its mystery and its underlying cultural conflict. Much like reading about an atrocity in a history book, you hate to discover the details, but you know it’s something you ought to do. Høeg makes you think about some rather disturbing possibilities—for example, I found myself wondering if colonialism is simply a result of a natural human impulse toward exploration, exploitation, and domination. If so, can we trust our selves to explore in ways that do not destroy?
In any case, in 1992 Høeg wrote an important novel that still contains relevant critiques. While there are certainly other ways to look into the repercussions of colonialism—including reading indigenous authors, rather than authors of the dominating culture, like Peter Høeg—Smilla’s Sense of Snow makes a necessarily harsh critique of colonialism and all that it has stood for. In the context of the modern aftermath of colonialism, and the ways in which imperialist societies have trampled upon centuries of legitimate knowledge and understanding, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is simply a book you ought to read.
Humboldt County’s population numbers less than 150,000 people. Naturally, there aren’t a ton of stores. However, the stores that do exist have a certain rural appeal unattainable in larger cities. As I mentioned in my brief note on bookstores, bookstores in particular serve an important purpose in small towns.
With that in mind, here are the four main bookstores in Arcata and Eureka, each with their own unique brands:
Tin Can Mailman-
1000 H St, Arcata, CA. The Tin Can Mailman has served Arcata for over 40 years. The store houses an eclectic collection of used books of all types, including textbooks for students. They also have a trade-in program for store credit or cash. Come here if you’re looking to save money, or find lesser-known titles from better-known authors. Website here.
Northtown Books-
957 H St, Arcata, CA. Just across from the Tin Can Mailman in Arcata, Northtown Books can satisfy all of your new-book needs. Around since 1965, Northtown Books packs a punch in its small space. While the store might not have everything, if Northtown Books’ curated collection doesn’t contain what you’re looking for, maybe you don’t need it anyway. Website here.
The Booklegger-
402 Second St, Eureka, CA. The Booklegger brings a cozy, dungeon-like aesthetic into its space in Old Town Eureka. The Booklegger’s name suits it well, as the store offers used and rare books that you might not find elsewhere. If you’re looking for an older, used title, try the Booklegger. (No website.)
Eureka Books:-
426 Second St, Eureka, CA. Eureka Books offers an historic experience with your bookstore-browsing. Located in a Victorian store built in 1879, Eureka Books carries new, used, and rare vintage books. Of the four listed stores, Eureka Books carries the broadest collection, with two open stories. Come here if you want to find pretty much anything… Or if you want to check out the fortune-telling Zoltar machine out front! Website here.
Hopefully, this gives you some idea of what to expect from these stores. Each has its own offerings and its own unique tastes. If you can, check them all out!
The Tin Can Mailman stands strong in the the rural city of Arcata, California. The Tin Can Mailman has served Arcata for over 40 years.
You’re walking down a street. You see a used bookstore. You wonder why you’d want to go there. You approach the store, and step under a sign like the one above.
If you weren’t aware, bookstores in the U.S. and across the globe are in decline. Over the last decade, chains like Borders have closed down, while Amazon has grown its share of the book market, both physically and digitally. Part of the decline in bookstores has to do with our decline in literary reading, but part of it also has to do with where we buy our books. Simply put, the state of the independent bookstore is fragile.
Books line the shelves, cramping the small building up into the second floor. The Tin Can Mailman offers books of all types, including textbooks for college students.
You stumble in. You look around. You see some things familiar, many things foreign. You grab a book off the shelf and flip through it.
Such is the beauty of a real, physical bookstore. Real bookstores have character, and they offer you an experience curated by other humans, not just algorithms.
At the bookstore, you find something you like. You think, why not?
So you look at the cover for a price, expecting a prohibitive price of at least $15 dollars. Then you spot, on the inside flap, the hand-scrawled price of just $7. Not bad.
You go to the counter. You get a compliment on your book choice. You leave with a new book, and it becomes one of your favorites. You later come back and pick out more books, finding some gems and some bombs. The bombs you sell for store credit.
Walk around a bookstore long enough, and a book inevitably calls your name. The Tin Can Mailman offers reasonable prices and a trade-in program, in which you can receive cash or store credit for your old books.
These are just some of the benefits of choosing real, physical bookstores. While these stores might be in a small revival, they still need your help. Unfortunately, most book buyers are older white college graduates—which undoubtedly points to other systemic issues—but at the very least, this should push us to go and out support independent bookstores, thereby setting a better example for those around us.
If you read books (and if you don’t, please do), find a local, independent bookstore. I used to buy books on Amazon, because it was simple and convenient. But I’ve come to understand that buying books in stores is a vastly more rewarding and comforting experience. (It’s also a great way to save money if you trade in the books you’re done with. )
Even in our age of decreasing reading rates and online skimming, there’s a beauty to the independent bookstore.
Thanks to Arcata’s Tin Can Mailman, a longstanding used bookstore, for letting me take photos.
Imagine you’re standing in a thick fog. Imagine that what you can see around of you—just a few feet in circumference—is your perception. Everything else, all that is hidden by the fog, is the rest of reality that you can never know. Now take a step back, and recognize that this is the case for all of us.
Yes, there is much to the world that we can never know. And yet, we must live our lives and assign meaning to our actions, just hoping that we make the right decisions. Perhaps, with this in mind, we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant, makes this argument, in its own way. The Buried Giant tells the story of the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice, living in a medieval time of Saxons and Britons and monsters roaming the land. Axl and Beatrice set off at the novel’s opening to find their son, who they have not seen in years—and whose reasons for leaving they can’t quite remember.
That’s the thing about the land of The Buried Giant—nobody seems able to remember much at all of their past. A thick mist has enveloped the villages and hills for years, and it seems the mist has clouded over not just the mountains in the distance but the memories in everyone’s minds.
With little to guide them but a few uncertain details remembered here and there, Axl and Beatrice embark on a quest probably too strenuous for their years. Over the course of the novel’s numerous encounters with knights, monks, and monsters, a twisting thread of love, loss, conflict, and clouded motivations unravels. Through it all, the fickle nature of the characters’ memories throws uncertainty onto the very things the characters have built their lives around:
Axl and Beatrice are lifelong lovers. But are they forgetting things they’ve done to each other, and said to each other?
Axl and Beatrice loved their son, and they believe he left after some sort of argument. But where did he go, and why?
All around them, the Britons and the Saxons grit their teeth on the edge of war. But why are they fighting, for what are they fighting, and who is on whose side?
The Buried Giant dumps cold water over our notions of integrity and having a strong moral compass. Instead, Ishiguro colors the whole world with shades of grey, with everybody conflicted and nobody faultless. Meanwhile, those capable of doing so manipulate flamboyant and fragile feelings, throwing characters into doubt, anger, and war. As Ishiguro writes, “Who knows what will come when quick-tempered men make ancient grievances rhyme with their fresh desire for land and conquest?”
Such a question resonates rather deeply today.
The story of Axl and Beatrice, at the story’s core, will surely wrench your heart out by the novel’s end. Ishiguro, if you’ve never read his work, is a master of subtly unwinding a story that you only appreciate by its end. By The Buried Giant’s end, Ishiguro has broken down the fictions his characters have told themselves, and they only have each other to try to hold on to.
The Buried Giant certainly takes its time—possibly to a fault—but Ishiguro makes it worth your while. Compared to his other novels, The Buried Giant sways more definitely into a specific genre than any other—in this case, fantasy. Yet, at its core, The Buried Giant carries itself as essential Ishiguro material, filled with his signatures themes of love, loss, muddied memory, and understated profundity.
On the windswept, wild, and foggy Farallon Islands, off the coast of San Francisco, a group of scientists live in a cabin, where they research the life of the landscape: birds, sharks, whales. The Lightkeepers tells the story of Miranda, a traveling photographer who makes her way to the islands and finds her place amongst the socially-distant scientists. The novel is framed as a journal, written by Miranda to her long-dead mother, chronicling the events on the islands over the course of about a year.
I’m not a crier. Not necessarily by choice—I’d say it’s healthy to cry—but I’m just not brought to tears often.
Imagine you’re standing in a thick fog. Imagine that what you can see around of you—just a few feet in circumference—is your perception. Everything else, all that is hidden by the fog, is the rest of reality that you can never know. Now take a step back, and recognize that this is the case for all of us.
Wilde About Books 