How does narrative help us process tragedy? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself all weekend, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School led me down a rabbit hole of stories about school shooting.

As details about the shooting was trickling out on Friday afternoon, I was glued to the television and online news sources trying to find more information. That’s my impulse when tragedy occurs, to just find as much credible information as I can. I have no patience for cable news speculation or “expert” interviews. I just want to know, from people who are close to the situation, what is going on. This is not unique to me, I’m sure, but I think it helps explain what I did next.

As I was getting ready for bed on Friday night, it got to a point where there wasn’t going to be anymore information available. We knew some things, but the answers to so many other things were going to have to wait until morning. I was sad and frustrated… and then had this impulse to read Columbine, journalist Dave Cullen’s definitive account of the school shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

At the time (and truthfully, even now) it seemed strange. I figured I’d start the book, decide it wasn’t really what I needed, and move on. Instead, I read almost straight through the book, starting with about 100 pages on Friday night and finishing it up with a long morning marathon read on Saturday morning.

Reading a book on one school shooting in the middle of another, on some level, doesn’t make any sense. But for me, I think reading Columbine helped give me a narrative that I was looking for, even if the narrative had nothing to do with what was actually going on in the world. Cullen’s book is not an easy read — he goes into incredible detail about the day of the shooting, then simultaneously backs up and moves forward to show what led two teenage boys to attack their school and how the community responded as those affected tried to recover. But for me, I think it emerged as a difficult and necessary read at this moment.  

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Title: Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
Author: Steven Johnson
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2012
Publisher: Riverhead
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: It’s embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to write about Future Perfect, which I read almost as soon as it arrived in the mail in September. It was also a book that I seemed to read exactly the right time, a book that articulated a new-to-me political philosophy at a moment when the limits of a two party political system were starting to wear me down. Future Perfect is an exploration of a political worldview that is deeply optimistic that progress is still possible and that new solutions will emerge as we all learn to work better together.

I tend to really like Steven Johnson’s ideas and writing. His fourth book, Everything Bad is Good For You, is one of my favorite books about popular culture and the benefits of all sorts of high- and low-brow entertainment. In The Ghost Map, Johnson looked at the way radical thinking could change society. And I while haven’t read Where Good Ideas Come From, his book about innovation, if it’s anything like these three I know it will be good. In general though, I love the way Johnson approaches his subjects looking for the positive and articulating ways in which we can look at the world as a better place. And Future Perfect is no exception.

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Title: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Author: Katherine Boo
Genre: Narrative nonfiction
Year: 2012
Publisher: Random House
Acquired: Library
Rating:

Review: I have wanted to read Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers since it came out in January, but didn’t make the effort to request it from my local library until it received the 2012 National Book Award in November. It’s a real shame I didn’t pick up the book sooner, as it has easily been one of the best books I’ve read this year. First, a summary:

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi. (Source)

The thing that makes Behind the Beautiful Forevers bigger than “just” a book about poverty in India is the lens with which Boo, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for her work reporting on poor communities in the United States, uses when approaching the stories of Annawadi. Behind the Beautiful Forevers isn’t a book about the results of poverty, what Boo calls the “poignant snapshots of Indian squalor: the ribby children with flies in their eyes and other emblems of abjectness that one can’t help but see within five minutes of walking into a slum.”

Instead, it’s a look at the institutions and structures of India and what it takes for individuals to navigate that infrastructure to try and lift themselves out of poverty. It’s a book about whether there is even a possibility for an “Indian Dream,” and which people benefit from the institutions put in place to try and make those dreams possible. It’s a slightly different focus to think about poverty, but a focus that makes all the difference in elevating this book from simply good to truly impressive.

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Winter has finally come to Minnesota with our first big winter storm. It’s been snowing pretty steadily since late last night, after a warm up storm on Friday afternoon. At this point I think we’re at about six inches, but it’s also very windy which makes it hard to tell. West Central Minnesota is under a blizzard warning until tonight, with wind chills expected to hit -35 degrees overnight. Yay!

While I get that people who live places without wintry weather can feel nostalgic about walking in a winter wonderland, I do not share those feelings. The hour I spent shoveling my driveway this morning is enough to kick any warm fuzzy feelings I have about the snow right out the window. But anyway, enough complaining… it’s going to be a long winter if I have an attitude about the snow already.

Before I went outside to unearth my car from the frigid drifts, I got to spend the morning reading a book. I’ve gotten in a nasty habit of starting my day out with television instead of reading, which has been good for keeping up on my shows, but not so good for my reading life (or, frankly, my mental health — reading helps keep me sane). It was nice to spend a few hours with a cup of tea, a big fuzzy blanket, and a fun book — Taft 2012 by Jason Heller.

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