In June of 2019, when somebody left a new paperback of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for adoption in front of my brownstone, I blindly grabbed it, feeling finally inspired to read this epic about war between man and Nature. Then just after I finished this opus, the PBS documentary When Whales Walked grabbed me as I was channel surfing, mesmerizing me with facts (did you know whales can live to be 200 years old?); and next, interlibrary loan delivered a copy of John Ironmonger’s 2015 novel Not Forgetting the Whale, jogging me with a parable about the end of life on earth as we know it due to a worldwide pandemic and introducing a different perspective on our assumed nature of self-interest—a perspective that sees altruism as our true nature. Then a couple of days into my reading of Ironmonger, the New York Times published “What’s Killing Pacific Whales“—self-explanatory. All these things had the cumulative result of making me both contemplative and very alert.
A year later, quarantined in my New York City brownstone during a pandemic that eerily resembled what Ironmonger “imagined,” my book selection became intentional. To educate myself, I read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and a very accessible YA adaptation (by Jason Reynolds) of his book Stamped from the Beginning: Racism, Antiracism and You. All of these books awakened me to past racist actions of my own that make me cringe and a more informed understanding of the true history of racism and therefore how it stamps the lives of Black people from early childhood.
For years I’ve read Indigenous writers, but in July of 2020 a new synchronistic cluster suddenly popped into my life in the form of a book editing gig and a request from author Tiffany McDaniel to read her August release, Betty. Both books involve the agony of First Nations people at the hands of white people.
Add to these books the availability of an advance reading copy of one of my favorite authors, Jess Walter, whose novel The Cold Millions immersed me in the brutal beginning of the labor union movement in Spokane, Washington, in 1909, much of which was reprised in the brutal nonfiction People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (which caused in me a reaction that exploded in blog form), and then there was a book recommended by a trusted friend—Patrick McGuinness’s Throw Me to the Wolves about an idiosyncratic teacher who is arrested and vilified for a crime he didn’t commit. And voila, I had a title and subtitle for this cluster:
UNFAIRNESS: War against nature + pandemic + ongoing unfair human destruction of one another = death of humans and nature
During 2021, I continued my self-education, playing catch-up to learn all that I’d missed in my 1960s small-white-town education—when history was taught from a white perspective and anybody who is not white was essentially erased. Shame at my present ignorance gave way to rage at the whole system that created and supported this bogus story of my country and the world, but that soon morphed into awe as I realized all the inspiration I’d been denied by not learning about all the heroic, everyday people who have fought for freedom and justice (easily available in first-hand testimony in William Still’s The Underground Railroad Records: Narrating the Hardships, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Death Struggles of Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom published in 1872!) as well as famous people way ahead of their time (The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells by her great granddaughter Michelle Duster) and current teachers such as storyteller/sociologist/polymath Bertice Berry, PhD, (The Ties That Bind and a new book for 2023—I’ll get to that in a moment). This incoming book cluster information became quite personal when I was able to fill in likely family history about my mother’s early life by reading Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel—my mother was born on October 27, 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; how much of my life was informed by trauma she may not have been aware of from being birthed five months after one of the worst race massacres in American history—completely excised from public school history books? So stunned was I by what must have happened to her and her family—who left Tulsa, becoming proverbial “wandering Jews” following the debacle—that I ended up writing an essay published in Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace.
With each new bit of knowledge through many more books—fiction and nonfiction by Black; Native; Middle Eastern, Arab, Persian, and Jewish; Asian and Pacific Island writers—my life and world came into sharper focus until I felt as if my former view had been through a scrim.
In 2022, I found myself enhancing this new clarity with books that seem to be saying: See “it” (people, the planet, life) as it really is, and deal with that! Not some uncomplicated fantasy.
In Chouette by Claire Oshetsky and Bewilderment by Richard Powers, parents with “other-abled” children refuse to see them as defective and instead opt to find ways to draw out who they naturally are.
In Jason Mott’s National Book Award-winning hilarious and heartbreaking novel Hell of a Book, a normal human being who lives in a Black man’s body sees who he really is and negotiates life in an insane world of fear, illusion, and prejudice.
Similarly, there is rage, clarity, and exhaustion at this never-ending negotiation in Percival Everett’s brutal and funny novel Trees, Dara Horn’s brilliant book of original thought People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, and Steve Almond’s April debut novel All the Secrets of the World about a Hispanic family’s trip through the American Justice system.
In In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, Amy Bloom deals with the reality of her husband’s Alzheimer’s—what it really means to survive to the end of it and his decision not to by finding “accompanied suicide” help. In this case surrender to death was an act of love.
Many of the books I’ve read (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, Once There Were Wolves and Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore) are warnings for the price of refusing to deal with reality and refusing to live in love.
Message:
Pay attention! Stay grounded. Even if it’s uncomfortable, accept “what is” as reality. And act from that place of fearless clarity, loving the existence of life itself.
In early 2023 Dr. Bertice Berry’s astounding new novel BlackWorld came like a blast of love. In a fantastic tale that moves like an unstoppable “over-ground railroad” of vital information, a young Black doctoral student finds herself “conducted” into a metaphysical adventure where she discovers that all the known and unknown eminent figures—dead and in spirit—in Black history, art, culture, and science are not only thriving but are infusing the world we know with inspiration to know true history and heal. “Love, Love, Love!” is the immutable message.
I’m glad I keep a dated reading list. Otherwise I might miss this form of whole-book bibliomancy. How I interpret these clusters is entirely up to me. But I wonder:
How many of us are getting messages from clustered themes that seem to haphazardly bombard us?
If we notice them, if we question whatever they are delivering and thereby question ourselves, can we alter our actions and help our culture heal before it completely self-destructs?
What can I do with what I’ve learned through the immersion in whale death and people abuse and systematic refusal to accept what really is?
I can be kinder, more aware of my thoughts, impulses, and actions, but there must be more. Perhaps I can share the experience itself—of practicing the Socratic method by questioning myself, of noticing theme clusters in the books that so often seem happenstance, showing up outside my building or appearing via a friend recommending me as an editor to a Native woman in Alaska.
What if we all just slowed, stopped, noticed, and took actions—no matter how small—on the messages that are bellowing at us through books?
Can we save ourselves?
Betsy Robinson writes funny fiction about flawed people. Her novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg is winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2013 Big Moose Prize and was published in September 2014. This was followed by the February 2015 publication of her edit of The Trouble with the Truth by Edna Robinson, Betsy’s late mother, by Simon & Schuster/Infinite Words. She published revised editions of her Mid-List Press award-winning first novel, a tragicomedy about falling down the rabbit hole of the U.S. of A. in the 1970s, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, when it went out of print. Her articles have been published in Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, The Sunlight Press, Prairie Fire, Salvation South, Next Avenue, and many other publications. Betsy is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
