What I've Been Reading (October 2024)
Middlemarch by George Eliot. Inspired by How to Read a Book, I tried to read something “out of my league.” Middlemarch was written in 1871, but this was one of the most enjoyable fiction books I’ve ever read. I found myself looking forward to reading it whenever I had a chance.
The book focuses on “Middlemarch,” a small town in 1830s England and the people who live there. There are a number of different characters whose stories interlink like in Love, Actually. It touches on themes that are still relevant today:
How do you know you’re marrying the right person? Is there a way to know?
Is it possible to have a happy life with an unhappy marriage?
How much should you be focused on “marrying up or marrying down”?
When is it OK to compromise your beliefs and values? When is it not OK?
Is gossip always bad or can it serve as a force for good by enforcing certain norms?
How much should someone’s past sins and misdeeds be held against them?
The last “Great Book” I read was War and Peace in 2019. I liked Middlemarch much more. I found it more focused on relationships and “feelings” than War and Peace, which could be abstract at times given its focus on competing “theories of history.” Eliot does an amazing job of creating rich characters and deeply exploring their inner lives and thoughts.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild. Account of how King Leopold II of Belgium managed to seize control of the Congo, where he personally owned the “Congo Free State.” He did this by positioning himself as a humanitarian looking to “civilize” Africa, playing different countries against each other, and manipulating public opinion by exerting influence over the press and cultivating supporters within foreign governments such as the United States.
What happened in the Congo was horrific.
At first, the main natural resource was ivory from elephant tusks, which the Belgians traded for or seized from locals. But then they discovered rubber trees. The rubber trade was tremendously lucrative, but extracting rubber was miserable work, so miserable that you couldn’t pay people to do it. It involved spending days deep in the forest, collecting the sticky and caustic sap from rubber vines, and trying to not to be eaten by a jaguar. So, the officers would go into a town and take the women or children hostages until the men picked their quota of rubber. They might massacre any village that didn’t produce its quota.
Soldiers would cut off hands of those that had been killed to “prove” that bullets hadn’t been wasted. Sometimes hands were cut off as punishment.
In 20 years, the local population halved, decreasing by 10 million.
Over time, these atrocities were brought to light by brave journalists and activists, eventually forcing Leopold to sell his territory to Belgium.
This was well-written and a fast read. I’m glad I read it. Like many people, I had read in some high school history class that Leopold did bad things and was pilloried by Mark Twain, but the specifics of this book left a much stronger impression.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in The Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Nonfiction account of two women and their families living in the Bronx and navigating constant hardship: poverty, teenage pregnancies, family members and boyfriends in prison, sometimes for life. LeBlanc author followed the main characters for over a decade as they went through their lives. The book reads like detailed fiction and that’s in part because LeBlanc was there to capture it. While I found it bleak, I’d recommend it.
It could be easy to judge some of the characters’ choices - dropping out of school, dealing drugs - but LeBlanc does a good job of showing empathy and writing in a very evenhanded way. There were a couple of themes that jumped out at me:
The friction of everyday life. As it’s been written about extensively, poverty makes life more difficult. Getting access to birth control is more difficult if you don’t have a regular doctor and are busy raising 4 kids as a solo parent. If your boyfriend is in prison upstate, you might spend most of your weekend taking a bus to the prison for a brief visit.
The cycle is self-perpetuating. The hardest parts of the book for me to read were about the children growing up in these environments. One or both of their parents might be in prison; they might be abused, physically or otherwise. A former teenage mother tells her daughter not to get pregnant, but six months later, she is. Drug dealers are the highest-status and best-off men in the neighborhood, which attracts the next generation.