Friday Joy: Actual Books

Our brains like them. Plus they photograph better.

Welcome to Friday Joy! This is a weekly short piece on something that is making me happy, and a few recommendations for books, recipes, and other things to check out. I hope it brings something good into the end of your week.

E-books are great, and convenient when you read voraciously. I lived in Japan before e-books were widespread, and English-language paperbacks cost like $25, so I got in the habit of only buying epic novels, to maximize my investment. Libby would have changed my life, if it had existed then.

But lately I've started placing holds at the library for the hard copy of a book, instead of the e-book version. In my ongoing quest to make my moments of relaxation truly replenishing, I do what I can to remove screens completely when I'm relaxing, so I can just be. I can just read. With no one else intruding.

There's also something about real books. For our brains, they represent more than words on a page. Any reader knows the experience of mentally picturing where on the page a certain passage was printed, or flipping back to the approximate section in the book where you thought you first read a character's name. Research has found that our brains may interact with a physical book the way we interact with a physical place, creating a mental map of the space as we move through it.

I think we have all experienced the mental effects of disconnection from the physical: faces in Zoom boxes instead of sitting across from us; food eaten from a takeout box instead of in a restaurant; movies on an iPad screen, not sitting in a theater buzzing with excitement, munching warm popcorn.

Curling up with a book reminds me of being a kid, and how it felt to come home with a giant stack of books, so excited to dive in. I liked smelling the pages. I don't know why old hardcover library books smell different, and so good.

(I just opened up one of my newer library books and sniffed, but it didn't smell like anything special, so maybe it has to do with the book’s age. Or possibly I was just a weird kid.)

Maybe I am a Luddite who just hates how people look all hunched over and absorbed by a screen, and doesn't like being one of those people. I like how people look reading books though, especially in public. (Did you catch this lovely New York Times feature over the summer, of people reading outside?)

Maybe I just love how my eight-year-old immediately starts reading in the backseat of the car when we pick up a giant stack of books for him from the library, too absorbed to respond to my questions, but sometimes reading funny snippets out loud.

Maybe I want to recapture that feeling of anticipation and discovery and delight, reading a new book, which doesn't feel the same in an e-book. Whatever it is, it is bringing me joy—even though it's looking like I might have to pack a few hardcover books on my travels next week, if I want to finish them before they're due at the library. 

It's worth it, I think.

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What I’m into this week

Reading

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet. I really liked Lydia Millet's last novel, A Children's Bible, but what endeared me to her forever was this recent profile, describing the way her values are embodied through her life and work, her deadpan humor "like some kind of Gen X duchess," and her feelings of awe and wonder at the natural world. I think each of those shows up in Dinosaurs, a novel about a lost but very likable man named Gil who, in looking to change his life, walks from New York to Arizona and there becomes enmeshed in the lives of his neighbors, whose glass-walled house faces his. It is funny and moving, but not sappy, with some perfect passages describing desert birds.

annehelenpetersen

A post shared by Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelenpetersen)

Listening To

How to Make Work Less Hostile to Parents - Work Appropriate. This episode of Anne Helen Petersen’s new podcast will be cathartic for any parent with young children, and probably eye-opening if you don't have kids, but work with parents. It's full of little gems of great advice for surviving in a work world that doesn't support parents, including forming alliances with other parents and making requests together, and being very wary of a potential job at a workplace with no primary caretakers in its leadership. It will also make you extremely mad about all the small ways society neglects the needs of working parents and forces us to come up with individual, piecemeal solutions for a systemic problem.

Cooking

Spicy Tofu Crumbles from Bon Appetit. I've been making this recipe for years, and it’s good for this time of year, when you want something quick and not too heavy, that you can double and eat for lunch for a couple days. I usually double it and use about half the suggested amount of gochujang, to make it more kid-appropriate. (For the two-year-old, I set some aside plain after it is cooked.) It is super quick, very flavorful, and tastes great as leftovers because the sauce keeps soaking into the tofu as it sits. I usually serve it with rice, packages of gim (Korean seasoned seaweed), and roasted broccoli or sigeumchi-namul (Korean spinach with garlic, soy sauce, and sesame) with lots of sesame seeds on top. My kids don't touch broccoli or greens, but both love putting the rice and tofu into the sheets of seaweed and making their own "sushi." 

What are you reading/watching/cooking?

Programming note: I will be taking next week off to spend time with my family and watch my kids gleefully wrestle with their cousins nonstop for five days. I'll be back in your inbox on November 30th. Have a good week!