Booknotes 3.28

Nonfiction

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, published 2015. An anthropological look at capitalism through the lens of matsutake mushrooms, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. The book rhymed well with Seeing Like a State and carries interesting ideas. In particular, the idea of contamination as transformation through encounter has — dare I say it? — contaminated my mind, and it now crops up in my thoughts frequently. Fascinating, too, that matsutake can’t be cultivated by humans, and fungal mosaic bodies immediately went on my must-learn-more list.
• An Autobiography, by Anthony Trollope, published 1883. As it says on the tin, it’s Trollope’s autobiography, written before he passed (startling, I know) but published afterwards. In some ways I wish I’d waited to read it until after I’d read more of his books so I’d be familiar with more of them, but it was still interesting. Rough childhood, his. And consumption ravaging his family was awful, too. His late bloomer mother started writing at fifty and wrote, um, 114 books. Whew! Trollope talks a lot about how he’s a character writer, offers frank criticisms of each of his novels, and makes the case that writing faster is in fact better for quality. I also enjoyed the parts on contemporary novelists (he was friends with George Eliot and Wilkie Collins and Thackeray and knew Dickens, among others), the U.S. Civil War (he traveled around the States during the war), and, near the end of the book, his amusing encounter with Brigham Young when he was in Utah.

Fiction

• The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Nayler, published 2024, science fiction. Really liked it — quite a bit more than The Mountain in the Sea, actually. Mammoths! Interesting throughout.
• The Warden, by Anthony Trollope, published 1855, fiction. I read this before the autobiography, and for the first two-thirds of the book I wasn’t sure how I felt about it — it’s a change from my usual fare — but by the end I’d grown rather fond of it. Forcing myself to slow down allowed things to sink in more, which was good for me. The warden’s imaginary cello playing was delightful. I also enjoyed Trollope breaking a hole in the fourth wall to comment on the length of novels.