Why write criticism?

Or, why do I write about books?

Somehow we’re at Labor Day, when it feels like the summer was just starting. I hope your summer has gone well and that you have had some time to rest.

Last weekend, I flew to Chicago for a cousin’s wedding.

What’s not to love about a wedding?

There was a time when I went to Chicago quite frequently—mostly for work—but it’s been a minute. In between wedding festivities, I had a little bit of time for sightseeing.

Summer mode: sea anemones at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

I’m now hanging out at a lake in New Hampshire preparing to return to my regular commitments. I am a swimmer, but it’s usually in my local swimming pool.

Swimming is divine here.

As I think about heading home, I have been pitching books to review. Pitching is part of my work schedule. The common conception is that books simply get assigned to reviewers, but nothing in book land is simple. We reviewers are in a constant hustle. Given the amount of work, people frequently ask me why I review books. I have many answers to this question. Here are a few.

• Books need to get out in the world. We are overwhelmed with stimuli, so one job of the critic is to befriend and champion books. Books transport us to new planets, new ways of being, old ways of being, things we have never heard of, things we’ve heard of but know nothing about, things we know a lot about but need to know more. Books are meant to be read and shared. I’m all in on anything I can do to contribute to that process.

• We need diverse books. Obviously. We need to read different and new and opposite and rare points of view. We need to read about other traditions and cultures and countries and stories. We need to read books in translation. Americans live in one of the most diverse countries in the world, yet we do not know our own diverse history. Between book banning and the widespread efforts to crush the teaching of Black history—which is to say, American history—we need books now more than ever.

• We need to support independent presses and independent bookstores. There has been much consolidation in the book industry in the past few decades. Good books come from many channels, but one of the joys of being a critic is lifting up books from independent and nonprofit presses.

• And while I’m at it, please give a little love to your local library. I would be lost without mine.

I’m excited to share two of my book reviews that came out this week.

The first review is about Sune Engel Rasmussen’s TWENTY YEARS: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, which I wrote for the Washington Post.

It’s always difficult to capture the essence of a book in a review. Rasmussen makes an indigestible story digestible by writing about a range of characters differentiated by culture, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

I wrote that the “characters speak for themselves, their lives filling out and putting an intimate face on Afghanistan’s fraught history.... Rasmussen’s subtle drumbeat of criticism about U.S. policy is more obbligato than the driving force.” Rasmussen, whom I have never spoken to or met, tweeted that this was what he was going for.

The second book I reviewed was an epic novel called THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY by the Turkish British writer Elif Shafak. I loved the sweep of this novel, from Ninevah and the Tale of Gilgamesh, to a nineteenth century British man who figured out how to decode Cuneiform tablets, to a family of modern day immigrants in the UK. I look forward to reading Shafak’s other novels.

Here’s to a wonderful holiday and a great start to the school year.

Love,

Martha

ICYMI, here is last week’s newsletter: When the fog lifts.