The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is that we stop paying attention. Reflection is the antidote. Habits plus deliberate practice equal mastery.

We sat there talking and drinking for a long time. I started to get tired and a little drunk. I couldn’t think of anything witty to say and it was hard to arrange my face in a way that would convey my sense of humor. I think I laughed and nodded a lot.

At any moment on our planet there are at most a few dozen novelists working with great power, for a broad audience, with the material of consciousness, which is what the novel is so uniquely good at handling, how it feels to be inside us, what it means, the devastations and beauties it brings.

I hated all authority, was an opponent of the whole limited society I had grown up in, with its bourgeois values and materialistic view of humanity. I despised what I had learned at [high school], even about literature; all I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to. I wasn’t interested in money or status symbols; I knew that the essential value in life lay elsewhere. I didn’t want to study, had no wish to receive an education at a conventional institution like a university, I wanted to travel down through Europe, sleep on beaches, in cheap hotels, or with friends I made on the way. Take odd jobs to survive, wash dishes at hotels, load or unload boats, pick oranges �

Men are not that interesting. So why then do intelligent, insightful women spend so much time thinking and talking about them? Why do they hyper-analyze the meaning behind every word, every gesture as if they were deciphering code?

If you have ever wondered why on earth two women would spend 95% of their time together talking about boys instead of talking about themselves (or really, anything else), then Elif Batuman has a narrator to put you at your wits end.

To be sure, this is intentional. As Batuman says in a “By The Book� by the New York Times Book Review:

After #MeToo, I reread “Eugene Onegin� and “Anna Karenina� and, although I could still see everything I had loved about those books as a teen, I also saw a message I hadn’t been attuned to before: something like, “Great literature is about a young woman who ruins her life over a guy who isn’t that smart.� Where had such messages led me?

It seems such messages inspired her to write this novel about Selin, a sarcastic Turkish-American freshman studying linguistics at Harvard, and her all-encompassing crush on Ivan, a Hungarian math major (with a girlfriend) who is planning on going to California for graduate school. But before he does, they (sorta) spend a summer together in Hungary.

Batuman is an ideas writer, but she doesn’t overdo it. Her descriptions and dialogues are entertaining enough that she can get away with asides like:

At first I was excited about Against Nature, because Gary said it was about a man who decided to live according to aesthetic rather than moral principles, and that was something Svetlana had recently said about me: that I lived by aesthetic principles, whereas she, who had been raised on Western philosophy, was doomed to live boringly by ethical principles. It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic.

Or this:

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

We’re never really sure if Selin is in love with Ivan, or just his emails. When she arrives to Harvard in the mid-90s, she had never before used email. But as Lara Feigel writes in her review, “she quickly discovers that she can create an email relationship more real than those she’s experiencing in the flesh.�

Listless and searching for meaning, she visits a campus counselor, who offers good advice she chooses to ignore:

This is not a fellow who’s going to be there for you. Not in the short run, and not in the long run. From what you’ve described, it sounds as if he barely exists at all. He’s just a voice from behind a computer. Who knows who or what is behind there—behind the computer? He obviously enjoys hiding. And you, too, are hiding behind the computer. This is perfectly understandable. Human beings, all of us, hate to take risks. We all want to hide. And thanks to this e-mail”—he said it like it was a word I had made up—� thanks to this e-mail, you can have a completely idealized relationship. You risk nothing. Behind your computer screen, you’re completely safe.

There is no real plot or purpose to this novel. It doesn’t resolve. Like Teju Cole’s Open City or Knausgaard’s My Struggle, it’s more like a vibe, an opportunity to see the world through someone else’s neuroses. In an essay for n+1, Batuman talks shit about “crisp� writing. In fact, her willingness to talk shit every few pages is part of what makes her writing so endearing.

I picked up The Idiot after reading a fawning review of its sequel, Either/Or. The reviewer admonished the reader that we dare not start with Either/Or without first reading The Idiot. And so I started, and I didn’t want to stop. I need a short break from Selin and Ivan, but I’ll be ready for the sequel soon.

Call it historical schadenfreude: I’ve been greatly comforted over the past couple of months by reading historical accounts of just how much worse things used to be a century or two ago. Take the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as an example. I already knew that it destroyed 80% of the city and killed around 3,000 people, but I had no idea that up to 500 of those deaths were caused by soldiers shooting unarmed residents during an anti-looting order that put the whole city on curfew, even as buildings and houses were burning down. As Gary Kamiya describes his 2013 book Cool Gray City of Love:

Dennis Smith argues in San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire that the presence of often undisciplined and trigger-happy troops, combined with Schmitz’s draconian shoot-to-kill order, prevented San Franciscans from fighting the fire themselves—which they could have successfully done.ĚýAgain and again, residents or neighbors were needlessly driven from their houses or offices by zealous troops and police, and the buildings they had been defending were left to burn or blown up. San Francisco archivist Gladys Hansen estimates that 500 people, many of them innocent, were shot by soldiers—one-sixth the total number of casualties.

See, doesn’t that make you feel better about our current situation?

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland in 1953, just two years before my parents were born a mile or two away. But I relate to him as if he’s of my generation, a brother from another mother. He was raised in a half White, half Japanese-American household, dropped out of college, worked in a shipyard, then as a taxi driver while studying literature, and eventually becoming a journalist � first at the Examiner, then as a co-founder of Salon.com, a columnist at the Chronicle, and now the executive editor of San Francisco Magazine. (It’s hard to imagine Kamiya, a cerebral and scholarly lover of literature, overseeing pieces like �.�)

Cool Gray City of Love, it seems, is the enviable result of making the most out of a double-knee replacement. He dedicated his time recuperating to “doing the knowledge� � reading dozens of books and archival accounts of San Francisco’s relatively brief history. Then, once his knees were back in working order, he starting “doing the work,� hopping on his bike to explore every nook and cranny of the city’s 46 square miles. Inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s 1820s series of woodblock prints �36 Views of Mount Fuji,� he set out to narrate San Francisco’s history and geography with the subtitle �49 view of San Francisco.�

I started reading the first of the 49 chapters during my week one of “sheltering in place.� It turned out to be the perfect companion to get through a pandemic. Each night, I’d read about a new place and its history, and the next day I’d hop on my bike to visit during my lunch break. To make this easier, I created a with the relevant excerpt saved as a note for each location:

The book is a breeze to read and I easily could have finished it in a couple of days. But it was more rewarding to take it one chapter at a time and spread it out across a couple of months. I came to appreciate and enjoy my city even more. At points, I felt embarrassed that there was so much of San Francisco and its history that I didn’t know. I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in high school, but I had no recollection that a major plot point of the book is her family’s move to San Francisco during WWII, as the Western Addition transitioned from mostly Japanese American to mostly African American; Blacks migrated from the south to work in the shipyard while Japanese Americans were taken to internment camps.

Somehow I had never once visited Lily Pond in Golden Gate Park or Mountain Lake in the Presidio even though I ride my bike past them both nearly every day. I reread Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums a couple of years ago and was entranced by its description of the Six Gallery reading, where Allen Ginsberg first performedĚýHowl. I had always assumed that the gallery was somewhere in North Beach and had no clue that it was in the Marina neighborhood in what is now an upscale taqueria across the street from my cycling club.Ěý

I should have read this book when I first arrived to San Francisco, but better late than never. At the end of the book is a helpful bibliography, a long list of diverse readings to continue deepening my relationship with San Francisco. I’ve also been digging into Kamiya’s column in the Chronicle, which includes entertaining descriptions of the city’s past with headlines like �.”�

Cool Gray City of LoveĚýwas a reminder of why I read: it simply makes life a bit more interesting.

A state which produced a kind of animation that looks like anger. One's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience. One wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas. One becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One assumes that everyone else is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public.

To most people, the distance between themselves and another person—physical as well as emotional—is a deep moral fact: it makes a profound difference to their sense of duty. A person who is far away, whom you cannot see or hear, and with whom you have no memories or loyalties in common, cannot compel your help in the same way as a person who is right in front of you, or who is in some sense one of your own. Ignoring the cries of a drowning child is a violation of the most basic kind of compassion; anyone who did that would seem less than human. Cultivating sympathy for unseen and unknown people, on the other hand, seems an abstract, second-order, extra-credit sort of moral emotion—admirable enough, but more than can be required of an ordinary person.

The philosopher Susan Wolf has written that a morally perfect person would be an unappealing, alien creature, driven not by the loves and delights of ordinary people but by an unnatural devotion to duty. In a life devoted only to duty, there’s no room for art and little for enjoyment. “Morality itself,� she writes, “does not seem to be a suitable object of passion.�

It's the idea that a child who grows up with at least one parent who is non-functional either because he or she is an alcoholic or severely mentally ill, or for some other reason just does not function as a parent. And the idea is that this child may take on the burden of fixing his family. He wants desperately to make everything OK, and he feels it's up to him, and so he may try to become the perfect student, he may do the housework, try to cook the dinner, try to take care of his siblings, even his parents. And the idea is that this child may, when he grows up, feel an outsized sense of moral duty to fix the world in the way that he tried to fix his family when he was a child.

At first I resisted this idea as I had resisted many psychological ideas about altruists because it seems designed to suggest that extreme altruists were mentally unhealthy, that there was something wrong with them, that it was simply a matter of trauma. But then I thought about the people I wrote about in my book, and it certainly is striking that almost every single one of them falls into this category. Almost every single one has a parent who is alcoholic or is severely mentally ill. And, in that sense, I think that particular kind of suffering demonstrably can lead to a true moral commitment.

Selflessness was, in Freud’s view, usually suspect. The devoted, self-sacrificing mother, for instance, he found to be part masochist, part tyrant, enslaving her child with chains of guilt ... Excessive altruism tended to preclude real intimacy with another person, because intimacy was a business of giving and receiving, but the overly moral person could not receive, only give ... The moral narcissist’s extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not.

There aren't many do-gooders in fiction, which is odd, because many fiction writers, like do-gooders, are driven by moral rage. But most such writers would rather show the thing that enrages them than show a character trying to fix it. You could say that do-gooders are rare in life, so their rarity in realistic fiction is not surprising -- though they are rarer in novels than in real life.

What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.

The bicycle saves my life every day. If you’ve ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you’ve ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you’ve ever wondered, swooping bird-like down a long hill on a bicycle, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental.

Real change happens on the level of a gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It's the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to his wedding; the woman who decides to spend her Saturday mornings in a drawing class instead of scrubbing the toilets at home; the writer who won't allow himself to be devoured by his envy; the parent who takes a deep breath instead of throwing a plate. It's you and me standing naked before our lovers, even if it makes us feel kind of squirmy in a bad way when we do. The work is there. It's our task. Doing it will give us strength and clarity. It will bring us closer to who we hope to be.

But why, I wonder, should chocolate be so intensely and so universally desired? Why did it spread so rapidly over Europe, once the secret was out? Why is chocolate sold now on every street corner, included in army rations, taken to Antarctica and outer space? Why are there chocoholics in every culture? Is it the unique, special texture, the “mouth-feel� of chocolate, which melts at body temperature? Is it because of the mild stimulants, caffeine and theobromine, it contains? The cola nut and the guarana have more. Is it the phenylethylamine, mildly analeptic, euphoriant, supposedly aphrodisiac, which chocolate contains? Cheese and salami contain more of this. Is it because chocolate, with its anandamide, stimulates the brain’s cannabinoid receptors? Or is it perhaps something quite other, something as yet unknown, which could provide vital clues to new aspects of brain chemistry, to say nothing of the esthetics of taste?

I had imagined, ignorantly, that civilization started in the Middle East. But I have learned that the New World, equally, was a cradle of civilization. The power and grandeur of what I have seen has shocked me, and altered my view of what it means to be human. Monte Albán, above all, has overturned a lifetime of presuppositions, shown me possibilities I never dreamed of. I will read Bernal Díaz and Prescott’s 1843 Conquest of Mexico again, but with a different perspective, now that I have seen some of it myself. I will brood on the experience, I will read more, and I will surely come again.

I myself may be the only single person here, but I have been single, a singleton, all my life. Yet here this does not matter in the least, either. I have a strong feeling of being one of the group, of belonging, of communal affection—a feeling that is extremely rare in my life, and may be in part a cause of a strange “symptom� I have had, an odd feeling in the last day or so, which I was hard put to diagnose, and first ascribed to the altitude. It was, I suddenly realized, a feeling of joy, a feeling so unusual I was slow to recognize it. There are many causes for this joyousness, I suspect—the plants, the ruins, the people of Oaxaca—but the sense of this sweet community, belonging, is surely a part of it.

This has been a lovely trip. I have not enjoyed one so much for many years, nor can I analyze, at the moment, quite what is soĚý…Ěýso right.

A therapist. Writing is clearly a therapeutic act for Knausgård. As he tells Ryu Spaeth in an , “there must be a place where you can be, where you can write, where you can think, without a façade at all.� For most people, that place is a therapist’s office. But toward the end of Book Six, as he describes his wife’s worsening mental health (which he fears he caused by sharing so much of her life publicly), he writes:

She wanted me to help her go back into therapy. Most of all she wanted us to go together. She had wanted that for many years. She knew I would rather die than go to couples therapy, and actually I meant it. If there were a choice between couples therapy and death, I would unhesitatingly choose death.

It’s much better now—I think I’ve managed to fasten my gaze somehow—but I’ve struggled with that throughout my life. Because nothing is as defined in life as it is in literature or in art. If everyone fastened his gaze on life, there would be no art.

When Orhan Pamuk published The New Life in 1995 it . (1995 was the same year that along with several other authors for his support of Kurdish political rights in Turkey.) The book reads like a cross of Franz Kafka with Paulo Coelho. The Coelho half (fate, destiny, love, a cyclical plot) explains the book's mass appeal; the influence of Kafka points to Pamuk's desire to become part of the post-modern canon (something he writes and about frequently).

This is , and about the transformational power a single book can hold - especially on the youth:

I had heard of others who had read a book only to have their lives disintegrate. I'd read the account of someone who had read a book called Fundamental Principles of Philosophy; in total agreement with the book, which he read in one night, he joined the Revolutionary Proletarian Advance Guard the very next day, only to be nabbed three days later robbing a bank and end up doing time for the next ten years. I also knew about those who had stayed awake the whole night reading books such as Islam and the New Ethos or The Betrayal of Westernization, then immediately abandoned the tavern for the mosque, sat themselves on those ice-cold rugs doused with rosewater, and began preparing patiently for the next life which was not due for another fifty years. I had even met some who got carried away by books with titles like Love Sets You Free or Know Yourself, and although these people were the sort who were capable of believing in astrology, they too could say in all sincerity, "This book changed my life over-night!"

All lovers of great fiction have experienced this feeling, right? I've had it many times; that after reading some novel an element of life that previously was blurry or entirely unseen comes into crisp focus. But it tends to happen in such a way that the realization itself is impossible to aphorize. You simply have to read the book.

Which is why we do. In fact, I'm convinced that those minor glimpses of personal enlightenment - and the satisfaction they give - are a major part of why I continue to read, even if I tend to forget the books themselves a few years down the road. Those books - the kind that really change your life, the ones you recommend to everyone and then grow despondent when they merely shrug their shoulders after coming to the last page - can do both harm and good. They could bring you closer to your family, relieve you of stress, convince you to live a healthier life. But just as easily, such an influential book could make you paranoid, drive you away from you friends, convince you to kill the president of your country, or the world's most famous rock star. (Two infamous assassins, - John Lennon's assassin - and - President Regan's attempted assassin - were both found with copies of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.)

The New Life is mostly about the second kind of effect books can have, the kind that destroys lives and relationships. Still, Pamuk manages to insert : East Vs. West, the nostalgia of local material goods, the paranoia of conservative Islam, the Turkish empire in its final and complete decline, the ever-present irrational variable that is love and lust:

When I press my lips on that semitransparent skin between your ear and your hair, when the electricity of your hair gives fright to the birds that suddenly swoop past my forehead and face, raising the scent of autumn in the air, and when your breast stiffens like a stubborn bird taking wing in my palm, look, I see in your eyes how full and right is the unattainable time that reawakens between us: now we are neither here nor there, not in the land you have been dreaming about, not on some bus or in a dim hotel room somewhere, not even in some sort of future that can only exist within the pages of a book.

Despite the occasional piercing paragraph like the one above, this book, for me, failed to deliver. It is too much shoe polish, not enough substance. It's the girl with the heavy eye shadow who speaks in half-allusions and riddles to hide the fact that she really has nothing to say. I'm sure that if I re-read the book from start to finish I would discover that some of those riddles and oft-repeated abstractions actually point back to clues sprinkled throughout the book's first half. But I don't read novels for the thrill of a crossword puzzle. I seek beautiful ideas expressed beautifully by characters I come to care for, or even loathe. In The New Life there was none of this, and much of the writing (or at least its translation) was awkward and clumsy, something the narrator even apologizes for:

So, Reader, place your faith neither in a character like me, who is not all that sensitive, nor in my anguish and the violence of the story I have to tell; but believe that the world is a cruel place. Besides, this newfangled plaything called the novel, which is the greatest invention of Western culture, is none of our culture's business. That the reader hears the clumsiness of my voice within these pages is not because I am speaking raucously from a plane which has been polluted by books and vulgarized by gross thoughts; it results rather from the fact that I still have not quite figured out how to inhabit this foreign toy.

Many of the novel's abstractions intend - I believe - to encourage the reader to think about how we each interpret and appropriate the books we read, as I am doing now. Appropriation, a around these parts, is something that Pamuk seems to obsess about. Jillian, having attended one of Pamuk's Norton Lectures, the professor who introduced Pamuk for referring to "world literature" as an "emerging field," of which Pamuk is an undeniable force. I think that Jillian is right to point out the parochialism of ignoring millennia of storytelling from all human groups since the evolution of language, . ("Did language develop first and storytellers evolve from the use of it? Or did language evolve as a way to express the internal experiences of storytellers?" asks Becky Hahn.)

But it is worth pointing out that Pamuk himself, , says that the modern novel is a European invention, and, further, the most universal medium of storytelling. (Many radio, TV, and even video game producers would surely beg to disagree.) Pamuk says that the challenge for novelists living outside of the West is to appropriate the form of the novel for themselves while still building upon the work of its European masters, and not just reacting to them. I think it remains to be seen: Is the novel so rooted in European culture that only a new form of storytelling can escape that continent's longstanding literary hegemony? Or, for that matter, will the novel as a medium and format, continue to exist at all?