In this episode, we interview Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing and chat about reading in 2021. We talk about new books we're excited to read and discuss our personal reading goals. We also reveal this year's library reading challenge categories. Then, Jenny Odell shares how persuasive design keeps our attention in digital spaces. She talks about connecting offline, reflecting on values, and redefining productivity.
Recommended Reading
Find books discussed in this podcast episode. A few of the upcoming titles mentioned aren't yet available in the KCLS catalog.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of our show notes.
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If you'd like to get in touch, send an email to deskset@kcls.org.
Credits
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to the Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about reading in 2021. So we'll talk about our own goals, some books we're looking forward to and we'll announce the reading challenge categories for 10 to Try 2021.
Britta Barrett:
Then I'll chat with Jenny Odell, the author of How To Do Nothing.
Britta Barrett:
Happy new year!
Emily Calkins:
Yay!
Britta Barret:
Goodbye 2020.
Emily Calkins:
Goodbye, 2020. I am not sorry to see you go.
Britta Barrett:
Thank you, next.
Emily Calkins:
So thinking about the new year and reading in 2021, have you set goals for yourself? A goal?
Britta Barrett:
I think this year, I'm less focused on a number and more on following just that feeling you get when you read a really good book. And I think sometimes if you go too long without doing it, it'll surprise you when you pick up a great book again, you're like, "Oh, why have I not been reading? Why did I think this was too hard or not just the thing that I wanted." To nurture my love of reading and not assign myself homework books like, "Oh, this very important new literary title has emerged, I should read that."
Emily Calkins:
I love the idea of sort of chasing your reading bliss in 2021. I am going to set a goal, a number goal for myself because it's something that's helpful for me to kind of stay on track. But my real goal for the year is to actually finish the reading challenge this year, because I did not finish it. I know, I did not finish it in 2020. And I think something that happens with me is maybe sort of the opposite of what you're talking about, where I find something that just sort of scratches the itch or is a really great book. And then I just try to chase other things that are like it. So I tend to go on kind of little binges where I'm reading a bunch of the same kind of stuff.
Emily Calkins:
And I'm hoping that I can stretch myself just a little bit this year, I'm going to try and read a little bit more nonfiction, which as you may know, is not exactly my jam. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I find it hard to stick with. So I'm going to experiment and see about sort of alternating nonfiction or things that are a little bit more challenging with some of the sort of more plot-driven stuff that I just like to sink my teeth into. So as we are talking about a really good book and nurturing your love of reading, do you have any that are on the horizon that you're excited about? 2021 titles?
Britta Barrett:
Well, I know it just spoke dismissively of very important literary work. But I am super excited that we're getting a new Kazuo Ishiguro book, you probably know him from Never Let Me Go, which is a personal favorite of mine or The Remains of the Day. He has a new book called Klara and the Sun, which returns to science fiction, which I'm really excited about because his is a soft, gentle, tender science fiction that I'm really intrigued by. I'm super excited that the Three-Body Problem is being adapted for Netflix and the author of that book has a new book coming out called Supernova Roman. And then we're also getting a new Becky Chambers book. And I believe we're also getting a new book from Nnedi Okorafor. So lots of cool things happening in the science fiction genre.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that's very surprising coming from you because as we often talk about, you tend to be more of a nonfiction reader. So a couple of my most anticipated picks are actually nonfiction. So we're swapping it up here. In April, we're getting The Book of Difficult Fruit from Kate Lebo, who's a Washington State author and I've had a chance to preview this one, and I think it's going to be just a wonderful book. It's sort of part cookbook, part memoir. So it's organized as an alphabetical list of difficult fruits, things that are difficult to harvest or to grow or a challenge cook with. It starts with aronia, which is also known as chokeberry. And it ends with zucchini and the zucchini chapter is very funny because it's sort of about how you always have too much zucchini. There's no way to have the right amount of zucchini.
Emily Calkins:
And then each chapter has a beautiful essay from Lebo. That's about, it sort of borrows the themes of what makes the fruit challenge and whatever way it's challenging and draws from her own life. So it has these elements of memoir. And then each chapter also has a couple of recipes. So things that you can do with the fruit. The chapter is vanilla and the recipe or one of the recipes is about creating your own vanilla body lotion and the essay is this wonderful essay about coming of age at a time when the cool girls were wearing Bath and Body Works vanilla lotion, like in middle school?
Emily Calkins:
And cucumber melon?
Emily Calkins:
Yes. And cucumber melon was the alternative, right? But it's a wonderful essay about sort of discovering, understanding femininity as you're coming of age, as you're an adolescent and what other people's femininity looks like and trying to, especially in that tender middle school age, fit yourself into that box. So that gives you an idea of what the essays are like.
Britta Barrett:
She was so much fun to talk to if you're a foodie fan, you should go all the way back to one of our earliest podcast episodes, to hear an interview with Kate and also Sam Ligon, the authors of Pie and whiskey. They were a delight.
Emily Calkins:
They were and then another nonfiction title that I'm excited about and I think this one may be up your alley too, is Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford. She's a writer and she's a podcast host and I've followed her for a really long time online, she writes these great essays about all kinds of stuff. But this is her first book. It's a memoir, it's about her childhood and it's especially about her relationship with her dad. So as she was growing up, she really idolized her dad, she felt connected to him. She thought like, "Oh, we really understand each other." But she never actually saw him. And the reason is that he was in prison and she didn't know what he was in prison for. As a teenager she finally learned what had happened that led to him being in prison. And the book sort of explores what happens next when this person that you have idolized your whole life, suddenly, you sort of start to understand that they're not as perfect or as infallible as you maybe thought you were.
Emily Calkins:
She's a wonderful writer, she's really smart, she's really vulnerable and the story is about the complexities of not only this relationship but just growing up poor and black in America is one I just can't wait to read. So that's Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford.
Emily Calkins:
I do have a couple of fiction picks too. And these are all from the first half of the year, because I didn't want to go too far out. And the first one's coming out this month, actually, it's called Outlawed. It's by Anna north, who's another person that I know is a writer from the internet, I think she originally started writing for Jezebel way back in the early 2000s. But this is of alternate history Western. It's set in the American past, right after what would have been the Civil War, and the country has been decimated by a pandemic, so timely.
Emily Calkins:
But that's led to this obsession with babies and with childbearing. So when women get married and then don't get pregnant, they are accused of witchcraft and they can be hung. So that's what happens to the heroine of this novel, Outlawed. She gets married, doesn't get pregnant and ends up running away, fleeing her hometown and joining this Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and becoming sort of a Western outlaw. And she all the while is sort of trying to understand what's really going on with her body, real information about pregnancy and fertility. And it's just such an interesting mashup of women's health and there's a lot of interesting gender and sexuality stuff. This gang that she joins is full of queer women and non-binary people. And then there's also these action sequences. So there's bank robberies and stagecoach heists and it's just a really fascinating book that circles around this wonderful character named Ada. So that one's Outlawed.
Emily Calkins:
And then in March we're getting one, this is definitely in your category of important literary fiction. But I think it's going to be heavy, but it should be really beautiful. It's called How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, it's set in a fictional African country that's dealing with the double terrors of this environmental destruction caused by an American oil company that doesn't face any consequences. So it's this little village, is at the center of this story. And there's been oil spills, the drinking water is tainted and then on top of that the country is run by this very corrupt and tyrannical dictator. And so the people of this village decide to stage a revolution. And the book is about particularly this one young woman and this one family who become a revolutionary because of this situation that they're facing.
Emily Calkins:
So Mbue is the author of the Behold the Dreamers, though it came out in a few years ago and it was one of the first novels about the 2008-2009 financial collapse. So it followed two families, a family from Cameroon living in New York City, and then the husband in that family was a driver for a really wealthy family, the father was a banker or the husband was a banker. So he was right in the middle of this whole financial prices. And I really enjoyed that one, it was really sharply observed, had great characters, especially the female characters are sort of these complex, flawed women. So I'm really excited to see how this one comes out. And that's How Beautiful We Were. And then like you said, there's just so many other great things coming, we're getting a new one from Sarah Moss, who's an author of one of my favorites. Her new book is called Summerwater. Sara Gailey, who was on the show last year has a new one called The Echo Wife that they talked about when they chatted with us.
Emily Calkins:
Viet Thanh Nguyen has a new one called The Committed, there's a new collection of Joan Didion essays coming out. And Casey McQuiston who wrote Red, White & Royal Blue has a time travel subway, queer romance called the One Last Stop, that one is coming in June. So I'm super excited for that, too. This is the time of year when I always feel so optimistic and ambitious about all the reading that I'm going to get done. I was looking back at the list of things we talked about last year. And I did not read a lot of the things that I said I was excited about, even though I was excited about them. Just like last year, this year, there's so many things coming out that I just can't wait to get my hands on. So we'll see Which ones of them I actually read.
Britta Barrett:
I don't know, I love that because it means that you discovered so many other things along the way, because I read exactly what I said I was going to read and not very much else. I got a plan and this year that Joan Didion collections totally on it.
Emily Calkins:
Yes, I really love her. And I think that collection will be interesting, because my understanding is that it's some older pieces as well as some new things. Well, should we talk about the categories for the Reading Challenges next year?
Britta Barrett:
Yeah, give them to me.
Emily Calkins:
All right. So I will say a lot of these were packed with our 2020 experiences in mind, including the first one which is read a book that makes you laugh.
Britta Barrett:
Thank goodness.
Emily Calkins:
And then we have read a book with a non-human characters. So basically, I'm thinking that anything with characters who are part of the story and are not humans counts. Obviously if you're reading fantasy, and you've got dragons or elves or trolls or whatever, wizards, mages, that would count. If you're reading science fiction and you've got aliens or AIs, the new Ishifuro book would probably count for this category, robots that interact with the story in a significant way. But I'm also thinking of things like memoirs where animals play a significant role. So there are lots of these kinds of memoirs that are like, "I adopted..." There's one about a donkey, "I adopted this donkey and here's what it was like when I was training the donkey for the donkey races." And I think that was called Running with Sherman. But there's lots of memoirs where a person's relationship with an animal is really at the heart of the story.
Emily Calkins:
And I think in those, the animal counts as a character even if they're not speaking in the same way that we often think a character needs to. After non-human characters, we have about the future. So that can be fiction, science fiction, or it could be nonfiction as well. The next one is epistolary novel, which I mostly chose because I love that there's a word for this, which is a novel that's told through letters. Epistolary, it's just a fun word. And again, this is one where I encourage people to interpret it broadly. So maybe part of the story is told through letters, it doesn't necessarily have to be the whole story. Or maybe it's not letters, but it's emails or it's text messages or some other kind of communication. Even a diary, I think a story that's told as a diary or a journal would count for this one. So interpret broadly. And we will, of course, have lists on the website for all of these categories. And you can always use BookMatch, our online recommendation service, to find books for these categories as well. Some of them are trickier than others and I think epistolary novel is one of the trickier ones.
Britta:
What are some examples of your favorite epistolary novels?
Emily Calkins:
So the one that first comes to mind for me is Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which is told in emails and other found communications, it's not a straight epistolary novel. I think the one that I'm going to read for this one is Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, who's an author that I love and haven't read in a couple of years and I haven't ever read Attachments. It's one of her first novels, but it's told entirely in emails. So I think that one will be fun. The other one that I am thinking about reading for this category this year is On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, which is a series of letters from the main character to his mother that got really great reviews when it came out. And I just haven't had a chance to get to it yet. So I might try and squeeze it in for this category.
Britta Barrett:
What are some of the other ones?
Emily Calkins:
So the next one is by a Black author. And this one is fun because there are just so many. So we will have a list on the website that's just sort of a general, here's 25 titles by Black authors that we recommend. But I'm also planning throughout the year to make some more targeted lists. So here's romance by Black authors. And here's memoirs by Black authors. And here's sci-fi and fantasy by Black authors and here are books about race by Black authors. And here are...something totally different, kids books or picture books or graphic novels. This is sort of a gimme category, in that there are lot of things to choose from. So I think readers will be able to choose something that really appeals to them. But on the other hand, we keep hearing and this is very true, when all of the Black Lives Matter protests were going on this year, a lot of my book-related social media was saying, "Hey, this is true in the publishing world too, Black writers are underrepresented, they're underpaid, there aren't very many Black people working in publishing."
Emily Calkins:
So on one hand, there's a lot to choose from in this category. And on the other hand, it's still something that you kind of have to seek out considering how large the Black population is in America, it's not really representative in publishing yet. So we'll have lots and lots of lists for this one for readers to choose from. The next category is published this year, which again, is kind of a gimme but I think it'll be a little bit more of a challenge than people might think just because the big bestsellers of the year often have long waiting lists. And so it can be a little bit trickier to hunt down something that's available, that was published this year if you're reading your books from the library. So I'll be making some lists that highlight mid-list titles or debuts by authors who are less well known, so that people can find things that are new in 2021 but don't necessarily have a waiting list of a big bestseller from a favorite author.
Emily Calkins:
So the next category I think is sort of one for you, which is read a book about pop culture. But do you have any favorites about pop culture that you'd recommend to listeners?
Britta Barrett:
Oh, so many. I feel like you might understand this because you also love Pop Culture Happy Hour. But sometimes I am just as happy listening to people talk about media as I am consuming media. Or if I don't want to watch a TV series, listening to other people sort of analyze it and interpret it and talk about it fills that void just as much. And I feel like there are some really great authors. If you critique television, specifically, I'm thinking about I Like to Watch, which is by Emily Nussbaum, who writes for The New Yorker. And what I love about her is how much she loves television. I mean, we can talk about the golden age and prestige television, but she loves all of it from Adventure Time to the Sopranos, and has some really smart things to say about critical darlings like True Detective. So her essays are really fun look at sort of TV and its place in popular culture and sort of not even elevating it but just acknowledging that it's this collective experience and this art form, that any art form can be very good, very bad and everything in between.
Britta Barrett:
And then maybe my favorite pop culture writer is Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker. She has a collection called Trick Mirror. Jia Tolentino is probably best known as being very online and writing a lot about the internet and sort of how that shapes us. She has this great essay in the New Yorker about Instagram Face, and sort of the new cultural beauty standards that have emerged and she writes quite a bit, I want to say, about self optimization in this internet age and everything she has to say about TikTok or emerging trends. I just love her take. And I think she's really clever and smart and never lets herself off the hook for the way that she's a part of the things that she's critiquing. And she doesn't offer a lot of easy answers. But she always just has this really great lens with which to view pop culture, so highly recommend.
Emily Calkins:
So the next category is re-read an old favorite. When I talked to people about what they were reading in 2020, a lot of variations on comfort reads came up and a couple of different people said, "All I'm doing is re-reading things that I already know I'm going to love." And I thought, "Gosh, I almost never re-read things anymore." So I'm excited to have this category. And there are so many choices, this one is almost a little overwhelming because I am not sure how far back I want to go, do I want to choose something from childhood or from a few years ago? There are definitely things that when I read them, I put them down and was like, "Oh, I can't wait to read that again." And then I've never read it again. So I'm not quite sure what I'm going to pick for this one. And the next one is one that I haven't quite figured out how do you make lists for yet because the category is read a book that's that where you were born.
Emily Calkins:
So it's hard to make that many lists because, of course, people who live in King County who were born all over the world, actually, so this one's going to maybe require a little detective work on the part of patrons or like I said, using BookMatch and then you can have a library and do a little detective work for you. And then the last category is one that we do every year, and that is recommended by staff. So just by listening to this very podcast, you are getting lots of staff recommendations but we also have staff picks on the website. And if you do BookMatch and so lots of ways to get staff recommendations. We do that one every year because I want to remind people that connecting with the library is not just about going and picking up your holds, although certainly we are happy to give you your books. But we're here to help you discover new titles too.
Emily Calkins:
So those are the categories for the challenge this year. And then there are a couple of ways to keep track of what you're reading. We will have bookmarks again. And probably the best way to get a bookmark if you want a physical bookmark, is to request it in myLibro, which is the app we use for curbside pickup. You can also log online, which is what I'm going to do this year. So if you go to kcls.org/10totry, you'll find a link to Beanstack, which is our online reading platform. And you can sign up for the 2021 challenge there, you earn a little badge for every category that you finish. And people have asked for this feature and we now offer it. So if you read something, and then you decide you actually want to use it for one of the other categories, you can edit your entries for the different categories this year. So people hopefully will be excited about that. I know I am because I spend all year sort of shuffling things around depending on what I discover and decide I want to read.
Emily Calkins:
This year, we are not doing finisher buttons because sort of managing those in a situation where we don't have easy access in our libraries is pretty challenging. But we are going to do the book stacks for winners again. So when you finish the challenge, you can either send a picture of your bookmark to 10totry@kcls.org or if you're logging online, you'll be automatically entered. And we'll do a grand prize drawing for a couple of winners to get a stack of books for you to keep that will be chosen for you by a librarian, which is a pretty fun thing. And all of these details as well as all of the lists that I mentioned and ongoing lists throughout the year, you can find on the 10 to Try page on our website. So it's kcls.org/10totry. And then we also will have a newsletter.
Emily Calkins:
And again, if you sign up through Beanstack, through the online reading platform, you'll be automatically subscribed to the newsletter, it comes out quarterly. it's just a little reminder like, "Hey, you signed up to do this challenge. Here's some new booklists that we've created. Don't forget to love your reading. We hope it's going well." And then if we had author events or other programs that are relevant, you can learn about those there as well.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah, and if you love listening to the Desk Set, you probably enjoy author interviews and we will have even more fun online events for you to enjoy this year. And you can go to kcls.org/authorvoices to see the calendar.
Emily Calkins:
We hope you all keep listening and we hope you'll join us for some online events as well.
Jenny Odell:
I'm Jenny Odell. I'm an artist and author. I teach studio art at Stanford. And I am the author of How To Do Nothing which is stinging the attention economy, which is about a number of things but it is mainly about divesting your attention from the attention economy and re-investing it elsewhere. And one of my big examples is in the local ecological community that you exist in.
Britta Barrett:
So after reading the book, it becomes clear that the nothing you describe is actually composed of a lot of something, could you describe what doing nothing means to you?
Jenny Odell:
Sure, I think it's pretty simple, actually, it's just sort of non-goal oriented activity. So I think the way that we tend to think about productivity is pretty narrow, it usually involves having something to show for your time, some kind of results often through a process that can be optimized. The idea of being that you want to get more for less all the time. And so the things that I put in the category of doing nothing, appear valueless from that point of view, so things like going for a walk, versus walking somewhere and trying to get there as fast as possible. Spending time with friends, simply observing something, these are meaningful experiences but they're hard to measure the quote unquote value of because the value doesn't really appear in that traditional productivity framework.
Britta Barrett:
So we're recording this during the first week of January, when lots of people are going to be encountering lots of messages about self optimization and setting goals. Can you make a case for doing more nothing in the new year?
Jenny Odell:
Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm actually really glad you asked that, because I hadn't quite thought about this in the context of New Year's resolutions and I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea behind New Year's resolutions and wanting to be a better person, totally understandable impulse but very easily spills over like so many other self improvement projects into a kind of punitive self-measurement. Like, "I'll never be the person I want to be or I'm not working enough, I'm not producing enough." And I think that there's a real risk when you get caught in these kinds of cycles that you don't give yourself the time and space to step back and ask whether that's a path worth pursuing and whether maybe what you have and what you are aren't simply enough already and are things that should just be appreciated.
Jenny Odell:
And so one of the reasons I find quote unquote doing nothing to be so important and that's the time in which I appreciate the simple fact of being alive or I appreciate the things that I have. And so I kind of instead of the idea of New Year's resolution, I like the idea of taking the new year as a moment in which to just reflect on what you already appreciate. And maybe also maybe to just kind of ask higher order questions like, "How do I value myself? How do I value my work? How do I value my time?" And kind of get way more general about it rather than like, "No, I need to do X amount of something per day." One of my worries when I published the book was related to what we're talking about, that it was just going to get picked up and reinterpreted as a life hack. And I think it comes down to the difference between and I don't think this is an easy line to draw a lot of the time.
Jenny Odell:
The difference between getting more comfortable in capitalism or genuinely trying to think outside of it while acknowledging that you live in it. And which is really difficult, I think, and that's sort of just an ongoing effort intention. So the life hack version of doing nothing, it would be not all that dissimilar from some of the more meaningless meditation apps, which is if you do X amount of nothing, you will be healthier, happier and able to work better, right? You'll be more comfortable, you'll be treading water more comfortably. But kind of what I was going for was sort of broader doing nothing as a sort of pause in which you reflect on what productivity means. So like productive of what, for whom and why. And I think that those questions are the beginning of an inquiry that can go in an anti-capitalist directions sort of in a, I hope, genuine way.
Jenny Odell:
And I think would ultimately lead you outside the bounds of the self that self-help caters to. So if you really go down that path, I think you pretty quickly end up at the reality that in order for more people to be able to do more nothing, for example, you would need things workplace organizing, you would need to question the profit structure of social media companies, like these things that are kind of beyond the level of the individual. So it's kind of like it's complicated, because it's like I'm writing the book to an individual and I'm trying to write to them about directing their individual attention. But it's sort of with this goal in mind of maybe beginning to kind of eat away at the edges of this way of thinking that otherwise has become very habitual. And then the more habitual it becomes, the more hidden it is.
Britta Barrett:
It's clear from reading the book, that you're not someone who's anti-technology as a blanket statement, but you do want to make readers aware of the mechanics of the technology and tools that we use and how they keep our attention. Could you talk a little bit about some of those persuasive design choices?
Jenny Odell:
Sure. Yeah, actually maybe as an example, I would just mention a master's thesis that I quote from in my book by Devangi Vivrekar, who was at Stanford when she wrote it. And it's amazing because it's just this sort of eagle eyed look at several different social media platforms, one of them was LinkedIn that they looked at, and it just kind of goes through and it catalogues every single aspect of what is called persuasive design. So everything from the little red bubble that pops up or these messages that you get that are sort of trying to get you to engage more various levels, things that get unlocked, the gamification of a lot of these activities. And I think it's just a really fascinating exercise and observation. And I've always been interested in observation, but I think it's especially interesting when you're trying to observe something that is set up to prevent you from observing it.
Jenny Odell:
It's trying to naturalize itself. And so just today, I was Googling and I figured out a way to hide what's trending on Twitter, which is a plague me for years. Because there is no option within Twitter to make that go away. And that's an example of something maybe you sign in, you just kind of want to see what people are talking about and you're presented with these often sort of attention grabbing headlines then you're quite quickly sucked into. Auto-playing video, I would say is another example of that. So there are all these kind of technical decisions and design decisions around trying to get a user to not only spend maximum amount of time on a platform, but to sort of engage fully to use all of the features to really get quite embroiled in it. And quite simply, there's a financial incentive for them to do that.
Britta Barrett:
For people who are interested in being informed and aware of what's going on in the world around them, often we turn to social media to get that sort of news and information. How do you personally strike a balance between setting boundaries and limits with your technology use and that desire sort of to know what's going on?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, that's a very difficult line to toe I think for anyone. I mean, assuming you do want to stay engaged. My sort of the way that I have worked that out in my head is, at some point I think I realized that the type of engagement that these platforms are optimiZed for, so things like doomscrolling but also posting and then being sort of in that world all the time, even when you're not really in the app your mind is still there. But that wasn't effective for me or for any of the causes that I'm interested in. That is not a useful version of me, that's just a freaked out kind of internet addled version of me. That may be sort of hyper-informed on one level, but it's also completely lacking perspective and the ability to reflect and respond meaningfully, not to mention just the issue of mental health. And so, I think that became clear to me that that was just sort of not as guilty as one might feel stepping away from say Twitter, and if they're very used to being there a lot and using that as their space of engagement.
Jenny Odell:
It's not like you're stepping away from that and then there's nothing else, right? There are other forms of communication, other sources of information that you can then go and seek in the absence of that state of mind. But I think intentionality is a really big piece of it for me, rather than kind of being washed over with information about different things sort of in an order that I didn't choose. And then it's keeping me in this state of kind of paralysis, which again is not useful for anyone.
Britta Barrett:
In the past year, many of us have been encouraged to use technology to stay connected with our community, but also to go outside more to do outdoor activities as a kind of safer option. I'm curious, how's your relationship to both changed at all during the pandemic?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah. Well, so I'm very fortunate to live somewhere where I have a walkable neighborhood. And I actually have been going to actual regional parks less, because they got really crowded. In the Bay Area, I think people are pretty outdoors-y here and not only increased and so it's been this sort of strange process of, I feel like I keep going through these cycles of getting bored with my neighborhood and then getting re-enchanted with it, where it's like I have only really like five or six walks, I can go on. And my whole book and my whole sort of artistic practices is about sort of teaching yourself to notice new things and so you think I would be good at that. And I think I am but it has a limit, right? I've been doing this since March but then I'm always surprised. Like yesterday, I went on a walk that had been on... I don't even want to know how many times I've been on this walk. But I went in the opposite direction. And it was completely different. I mean, and I forget that, right? When you're walking in a certain direction, you don't suddenly stop and turn around and look in the opposite direction.
Jenny Odell:
But it was just like this really humbling experience and I find that when little things like that happen, when you get surprised, it sort of renders you more open to surprise for the rest of the day in my experience. So then you start realizing that there are all these things you haven't noticed and you start noticing them.
Britta Barrett:
For someone who hasn't read the book, could you explain what bird noticing is and some memorable experiences with that?
Jenny Odell:
There's so many things you have to be aware of when you're looking at or looking for birds. So I just call it bird noticing. But that's also kind of a gesture towards the fact that for much of my life, I'm sure I was sort of generally aware of birds but certainly did not know what most of them were. There are these uncanny moments where I think about how there was a bird that I must have been looking at and just didn't know what it was. And now I know what it was. And so it's sort of like you're looking at your memory and from the present, knowing what it was now but also that you didn't know what it was then, which I think happens to anyone, right? Who learns how to kind of see or interpret any layer of reality. Probably the most memorable example which is in the book is the crows that I befriended on my street, after learning that crows recognize human faces and will favor or disfavor human different humans based on their behavior.
Jenny Odell:
So if anyone who's listening to this as ever had a dog that was mean to crows, they may know that those crows will not forget that. And there's not a lot of ways around that. So I started putting a peanut out on the balcony, here and there in 2016 and a couple of crows started coming by reliably. And that crow family still comes here every day, I saw them this morning, it's been really important for me during quarantine because they're friends that I can visit. And also there's something really kind of therapeutic about watching them arrive from somewhere else and then watching them leave to somewhere else. And I don't know where that is and I don't know what they do the rest of the day. But in the book I sort of describe these moments, especially post-election 2016, of looking at the crows looking at me knowing that at this point they recognize me and kind of trying to imagine how I appear to them, which of course is impossible.
Jenny Odell:
But knowing that being an animal that's being observed by another animal, and then looking out onto the street and trying to imagine how they see the street and how they see the hill. And I find that that's just such a reliable way of breaking outside of this very sort of myopic cycle of not just social media fueled anxiety, but even just the sort of claustrophobic sense of self and human timescales.
Britta Barrett:
During the pandemic, a lot of us have been spending more time with their own company not moving through the world in quite the same way. And for safety reasons, maybe being just more planful about how we go about things, something as simple as the act of feeding yourself, the difference between going to the farmers market and picking up seasonal produce and smelling it and talking to people and just having a leisurely time, how different that feels from like, "I've made a list, I've meal prep planned for the week, I've got a plan, I'm going to be in and out in 15 minutes." How do you nurture spontaneity and surprise at a time, when it feels like those things are more difficult?
Jenny Odell:
Oh absolutely, I am totally with you on the farmers market thing. I would go every Saturday and I would get stuff. But I would also just really like looking at just all the weird shapes. Just like a really weird long squash or something. And there's something so nice about talking to the people of the stands and feeling this connection through this food and yeah, of course, our farmers market is still going but I'm sort of too freaked out to go into it. So I'm very lucky we have a workaround, which is that the farmers market that we live near has a basically the equivalent of a CSA box that you can go pick up every week. And so it's basically like all of the interest and surprise of wandering the market is just contained in this box, because I don't know what's in the box. So every week, it's like this big deal for me to open the box and see what is inside. And I feel like it was probably around August or September, I started hearing from and talking to a lot more friends about this desperate need for novelty as just a sense that time is passing.
Jenny Odell:
And that is why that box is so important to me. It's like this past week for the button to order it was temporarily greyed out and I was like, "No, I need this box of produce, this is the only surprise in my life right now." And then it's cool you find out what's in there and then you're like, "Oh, making of these different recipes or whatever." But that's just an example of something that's pretty small and quotidian but it's a source of surprise. And I think that it's difficult but worthwhile to kind of just try to find those things where you can while acknowledging that it's very difficult.
Britta Barrett:
As a teacher, what are some of the practices you guide your students through?
Jenny Odell:
So I have given my students assignments, I don't think this is really... We've had them do things like, well, when we were on campus, I would have them go outside for 15 minutes and just observe everything going on around them and then sort of write it down in almost like a police blotter, like a guy with blue shorts is walking across the quarter or something like that, and just kind of do that for 15 minutes. And that's based on a text by George Perec, where he did that in the place in Paris, he went on several different occasions and just wrote down everything that happened. And so it's sort of like an exercise in attention. And then we talk about not only what they noticed, but why they think they noticed those things. And so it's kind of like an exercise around not just observing, but then reflecting on why do I notice the things that I noticed? And maybe like what am I not noticing?
Jenny Odell:
So that's something that we've done. I used to teach a class about cell phone photography many years ago. And one of the things that I would have them do is, for a weekend, I would have my students not take photos on their phones or try not to and draw a picture on a post-it of everything that they had wanted to take a photo of. And it was always really entertaining because they would all put them up on the wall. And they would always be these really sort of amazingly trivial things that they feel sort of embarrassed writing out. So these are just kind of exercises again and sort of noticing you're noticing or just kind of stepping back from a habitual activity. I haven't really noticed any resistance to that. If anything, it seems like it's usually welcome.
Jenny Odell:
And I mean, the biggest thing I've noticed is that my students are just far more politically aware and active than when I started teaching. And so maybe for that reason too, they're sort of welcoming and open-minded in terms of the idea of stepping outside of the hamster wheel. I think it really appeals to them because they're hyper-aware of the situation that they're in. And the productivity culture at a place like Stanford. And I think they're thinking about that even while they're kind of caught up in it. So I've been grateful for how open-minded they are and my book is dedicated to them.
Britta Barrett:
And we always like to ask, What are you reading right now?
Jenny Odell:
So I am reading two things at the same time. I'm reading Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli. And it's about quantum gravity. But it's written for someone who knows nothing about physics. And I'm almost done with it. I'm really enjoying it. And it's probably clear from my book but I really sort of crave writing and art and experiences that make the world feel strange through and through. And this is definitely a book that will do that. And then I'm also reading H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Classic bird book, really beautiful. And I think just a really amazing example of nonfiction writing, it's incredibly poetic and the way it's composed is just really inspiring.
Britta Barrett:
And where can listeners find you online, when you are online?
Jenny Odell:
I guess, Twitter. I mean, I'm also on Instagram but I don't really spend a lot of time there. And I'm not super active. But I am on Twitter. And I also have a website which is just my name, jennyodell.com, that has my art projects and things like that on it.
Britta Barrett:
Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Jenny Odell:
Likewise. Thank you.
Britta Barrett:
Thanks for listening. You can find all the books mentioned in today's episodes in our show notes.
Emily Calkins:
The Desk Set is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, produced by Britta Barrett, and brought to you by the King County Library System.
Britta Barrett:
If you liked the show, be sure to subscribe rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Happy New Year and happy reading.
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to the Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about reading in 2021. So we'll talk about our own goals, some books we're looking forward to and we'll announce the reading challenge categories for 10 to Try 2021.
Britta Barrett:
Then I'll chat with Jenny Odell, the author of How To Do Nothing.
Britta Barrett:
Happy new year!
Emily Calkins:
Yay!
Britta Barret:
Goodbye 2020.
Emily Calkins:
Goodbye, 2020. I am not sorry to see you go.
Britta Barrett:
Thank you, next.
Emily Calkins:
So thinking about the new year and reading in 2021, have you set goals for yourself? A goal?
Britta Barrett:
I think this year, I'm less focused on a number and more on following just that feeling you get when you read a really good book. And I think sometimes if you go too long without doing it, it'll surprise you when you pick up a great book again, you're like, "Oh, why have I not been reading? Why did I think this was too hard or not just the thing that I wanted." To nurture my love of reading and not assign myself homework books like, "Oh, this very important new literary title has emerged, I should read that."
Emily Calkins:
I love the idea of sort of chasing your reading bliss in 2021. I am going to set a goal, a number goal for myself because it's something that's helpful for me to kind of stay on track. But my real goal for the year is to actually finish the reading challenge this year, because I did not finish it. I know, I did not finish it in 2020. And I think something that happens with me is maybe sort of the opposite of what you're talking about, where I find something that just sort of scratches the itch or is a really great book. And then I just try to chase other things that are like it. So I tend to go on kind of little binges where I'm reading a bunch of the same kind of stuff.
Emily Calkins:
And I'm hoping that I can stretch myself just a little bit this year, I'm going to try and read a little bit more nonfiction, which as you may know, is not exactly my jam. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I find it hard to stick with. So I'm going to experiment and see about sort of alternating nonfiction or things that are a little bit more challenging with some of the sort of more plot-driven stuff that I just like to sink my teeth into. So as we are talking about a really good book and nurturing your love of reading, do you have any that are on the horizon that you're excited about? 2021 titles?
Britta Barrett:
Well, I know it just spoke dismissively of very important literary work. But I am super excited that we're getting a new Kazuo Ishiguro book, you probably know him from Never Let Me Go, which is a personal favorite of mine or The Remains of the Day. He has a new book called Klara and the Sun, which returns to science fiction, which I'm really excited about because his is a soft, gentle, tender science fiction that I'm really intrigued by. I'm super excited that the Three-Body Problem is being adapted for Netflix and the author of that book has a new book coming out called Supernova Roman. And then we're also getting a new Becky Chambers book. And I believe we're also getting a new book from Nnedi Okorafor. So lots of cool things happening in the science fiction genre.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that's very surprising coming from you because as we often talk about, you tend to be more of a nonfiction reader. So a couple of my most anticipated picks are actually nonfiction. So we're swapping it up here. In April, we're getting the book of Difficult Fruit from Kate Lebo, who's a Washington State author and I've had a chance to preview this one, and I think it's going to be just a wonderful book. It's sort of part cookbook, part memoir. So it's organized as an alphabetical list of difficult fruits, things that are difficult to harvest or to grow or a challenge cook with. It starts with aronia, which is also known as chokeberry. And it ends with zucchini and the zucchini chapter is very funny because it's sort of about how you always have too much zucchini. There's no way to have the right amount of zucchini.
Emily Calkins:
And then each chapter has a beautiful essay from Lebo. That's about, it sort of borrows the themes of what makes the fruit challenge and whatever way it's challenging and draws from her own life. So it has these elements of memoir. And then each chapter also has a couple of recipes. So things that you can do with the fruit. The chapter is vanilla and the recipe or one of the recipes is about creating your own vanilla body lotion and the essay is this wonderful essay about coming of age at a time when the cool girls were wearing Bath and Body Works vanilla lotion like in middle school?
Emily Calkins:
And cucumber melon?
Emily Calkins:
Yes. And cucumber melon was the alternative, right? But it's a wonderful essay about sort of discovering, understanding femininity as you're coming of age, as you're an adolescent and what other people's femininity looks like and trying to, especially in that tender middle school age, fit yourself into that box. So that gives you an idea of what the essays are like.
Britta Barrett:
She was so much fun to talk to if you're a foodie fan, you should go all the way back to one of our earliest podcast episodes, to hear an interview with Kate and also Sam Ligon, the authors of Pie and whiskey. They were a delight.
Emily Calkins:
They were and then another nonfiction title that I'm excited about and I think this one may be up your alley too, is Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford. She's a writer and she's a podcast host and I've followed her for a really long time online, she writes these great essays about all kinds of stuff. But this is her first book. It's a memoir, it's about her childhood and it's especially about her relationship with her dad. So as she was growing up, she really idolized her dad, she felt connected to him. She thought like, "Oh, we really understand each other." But she never actually saw him. And the reason is that he was in prison and she didn't know what he was in prison for. As a teenager she finally learned what had happened that led to him being in prison. And the book sort of explores what happens next when this person that you have idolized your whole life, suddenly, you sort of start to understand that they're not as perfect or as infallible as you maybe thought you were.
Emily Calkins:
She's a wonderful writer, she's really smart, she's really vulnerable and the story is about the complexities of not only this relationship, but just growing up poor and black in America is one I just can't wait to read. So that's Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford.
Emily Calkins:
I do have a couple of fiction picks too. And these are all from the first half of the year, because I didn't want to go too far out. And the first one's coming out this month, actually, it's called Outlawed. It's by Anna north, who's another person that I know is a writer from the internet, I think she originally started writing for Jezebel way back in the early 2000s. But this is of alternate history Western. It's set in the American past, right after what would have been the Civil War, and the country has been decimated by a pandemic, so timely.
Emily Calkins:
But that's led to this obsession with babies and with childbearing. So when women get married and then don't get pregnant, they are accused of witchcraft and they can be hung. So that's what happens to the heroine of this novel, Outlawed. She gets married, doesn't get pregnant and ends up running away, fleeing her hometown and joining this Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and becoming sort of a Western outlaw. And she all the while is sort of trying to understand what's really going on with her body, real information about pregnancy and fertility. And it's just such an interesting mashup of women's health and there's a lot of interesting gender and sexuality stuff. This gang that she joins is full of queer women and non-binary people. And then there's also these action sequences. So there's bank robberies and stagecoach heists and it's just a really fascinating book that circles around this wonderful character named Ada. So that one's Outlawed.
Emily Calkins:
And then in March we're getting one, this is definitely in your category of important literary fiction. But I think it's going to be heavy, but it should be really beautiful. It's called How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, it's set in a fictional African country that's dealing with the double terrors of this environmental destruction caused by an American oil company that doesn't face any consequences. So it's this little village, is at the center of this story. And there's been oil spills, the drinking water is tainted and then on top of that the country is run by this very corrupt and tyrannical dictator. And so the people of this village decide to stage a revolution. And the book is about particularly this one young woman and this one family who become a revolutionary because of this situation that they're facing.
Emily Calkins:
So Mbue is the author of the Behold the Dreamers, though it came out in a few years ago and it was one of the first novels about the 2008-2009 financial collapse. So it followed two families, a family from Cameroon living in New York City, and then the husband in that family was a driver for a really wealthy family, the father was a banker or the husband was a banker. So he was right in the middle of this whole financial prices. And I really enjoyed that one, it was really sharply observed, had great characters, especially the female characters are sort of these complex, flawed women. So I'm really excited to see how this one comes out. And that's How Beautiful We Were. And then like you said, there's just so many other great things coming, we're getting a new one from Sarah Moss, who's an author of one of my favorites. Her new book is called Summerwater. Sara Gailey, who was on the show last year has a new one called The Echo Wife that they talked about when they chatted with us.
Emily Calkins:
Viet Thanh Nguyen has a new one called The Committed, there's a new collection of Joan Didion essays coming out. And Casey McQuiston who wrote Red, White & Royal Blue has a time travel subway, queer romance called the One Last Stop, that one is coming in June. So I'm super excited for that, too. This is the time of year when I always feel so optimistic and ambitious about all the reading that I'm going to get done. I was looking back at the list of things we talked about last year. And I did not read a lot of the things that I said I was excited about, even though I was excited about them. Just like last year, this year, there's so many things coming out that I just can't wait to get my hands on. So we'll see Which ones of them I actually read.
Britta Barrett:
I don't know, I love that because it means that you discovered so many other things along the way, because I read exactly what I said I was going to read and not very much else. I got a plan and this year that Joan Didion collections totally on it.
Emily Calkins:
Yes, I really love her. And I think that collection will be interesting, because my understanding is that it's some older pieces as well as some new things. Well, should we talk about the categories for the Reading Challenges next year?
Britta Barrett:
Yeah, give them to me.
Emily Calkins:
All right. So I will say a lot of these were packed with our 2020 experiences in mind, including the first one which is read a book that makes you laugh.
Britta Barrett:
Thank goodness.
Emily Calkins:
And then we have read a book with a non-human characters. So basically, I'm thinking that anything with characters who are part of the story and are not humans counts. Obviously if you're reading fantasy, and you've got dragons or elves or trolls or whatever, wizards, mages, that would count. If you're reading science fiction and you've got aliens or AIs, the new Ishifuro book would probably count for this category, robots that interact with the story in a significant way. But I'm also thinking of things like memoirs where animals play a significant role. So there are lots of these kinds of memoirs that are like, "I adopted..." There's one about a donkey, "I adopted this donkey and here's what it was like when I was training the donkey for the donkey races." And I think that was called Running with Sherman. But there's lots of memoirs where a person's relationship with an animal is really at the heart of the story.
Emily Calkins:
And I think in those, the animal counts as a character even if they're not speaking in the same way that we often think a character needs to. After non-human characters, we have about the future. So that can be fiction, science fiction, or it could be nonfiction as well. The next one is epistolary novel, which I mostly chose because I love that there's a word for this, which is a novel that's told through letters. Epistolary, it's just a fun word. And again, this is one where I encourage people to interpret it broadly. So maybe part of the story is told through letters, it doesn't necessarily have to be the whole story. Or maybe it's not letters, but it's emails or it's text messages or some other kind of communication. Even a diary, I think a story that's told as a diary or a journal would count for this one. So interpret broadly. And we will, of course, have lists on the website for all of these categories. And you can always use BookMatch, our online recommendation service, to find books for these categories as well. Some of them are trickier than others and I think epistolary novel is one of the trickier ones.
Britta:
What are some examples of your favorite epistolary novels?
Emily Calkins:
So the one that first comes to mind for me is Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which is told in emails and other found communications, it's not a straight epistolary novel. I think the one that I'm going to read for this one is Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, who's an author that I love and haven't read in a couple of years and I haven't ever read Attachments. It's one of her first novels, but it's told entirely in emails. So I think that one will be fun. The other one that I am thinking about reading for this category this year is On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, which is a series of letters from the main character to his mother that got really great reviews when it came out. And I just haven't had a chance to get to it yet. So I might try and squeeze it in for this category.
Britta Barrett:
What are some of the other ones?
Emily Calkins:
So the next one is by a Black author. And this one is fun because there are just so many. So we will have a list on the website that's just sort of a general, here's 25 titles by Black authors that we recommend. But I'm also planning throughout the year to make some more targeted lists. So here's romance by Black authors. And here's memoirs by Black authors. And here's sci-fi and fantasy by Black authors and here are books about race by Black authors. And here are...something totally different, kids books or picture books or graphic novels. This is sort of a gimme category, in that there are lot of things to choose from. So I think readers will be able to choose something that really appeals to them. But on the other hand, we keep hearing and this is very true, when all of the Black Lives Matter protests were going on this year, a lot of my book-related social media was saying, "Hey, this is true in the publishing world too, Black writers are underrepresented, they're underpaid, there aren't very many Black people working in publishing."
Emily Calkins:
So on one hand, there's a lot to choose from in this category. And on the other hand, it's still something that you kind of have to seek out considering how large the Black population is in America, it's not really representative in publishing yet. So we'll have lots and lots of lists for this one for readers to choose from. The next category is published this year, which again, is kind of a gimme but I think it'll be a little bit more of a challenge than people might think just because the big bestsellers of the year often have long waiting lists. And so it can be a little bit trickier to hunt down something that's available, that was published this year if you're reading your books from the library. So I'll be making some lists that highlight mid-list titles or debuts by authors who are less well known, so that people can find things that are new in 2021 but don't necessarily have a waiting list of a big bestseller from a favorite author.
Emily Calkins:
So the next category I think is sort of one for you, which is read a book about pop culture. But do you have any favorites about pop culture that you'd recommend to listeners?
Britta Barrett:
Oh, so many. I feel like you might understand this because you also love Pop Culture Happy Hour. But sometimes I am just as happy listening to people talk about media as I am consuming media. Or if I don't want to watch a TV series, listening to other people sort of analyze it and interpret it and talk about it fills that void just as much. And I feel like there are some really great authors. If you critique television, specifically, I'm thinking about I Like to Watch, which is by Emily Nussbaum, who writes for The New Yorker. And what I love about her is how much she loves television. I mean, we can talk about the golden age and prestige television, but she loves all of it from Adventure Time to the Sopranos, and has some really smart things to say about critical darlings like True Detective. So her essays are really fun look at sort of TV and its place in popular culture and sort of not even elevating it but just acknowledging that it's this collective experience and this art form, that any art form can be very good, very bad and everything in between.
Britta Barrett:
And then maybe my favorite pop culture writer is Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker. She has a collection called Trick Mirror. Jia Tolentino is probably best known as being very online and writing a lot about the internet and sort of how that shapes us. She has this great essay in the New Yorker about Instagram Face, and sort of the new cultural beauty standards that have emerged and she writes quite a bit, I want to say, about self optimization in this internet age and everything she has to say about TikTok or emerging trends. I just love her take. And I think she's really clever and smart and never lets herself off the hook for the way that she's a part of the things that she's critiquing. And she doesn't offer a lot of easy answers. But she always just has this really great lens with which to view pop culture, so highly recommend.
Emily Calkins:
So the next category is re-read an old favorite. When I talked to people about what they were reading in 2020, a lot of variations on comfort reads came up and a couple of different people said, "All I'm doing is re-reading things that I already know I'm going to love." And I thought, "Gosh, I almost never re-read things anymore." So I'm excited to have this category. And there are so many choices, this one is almost a little overwhelming because I am not sure how far back I want to go, do I want to choose something from childhood or from a few years ago? There are definitely things that when I read them, I put them down and was like, "Oh, I can't wait to read that again." And then I've never read it again. So I'm not quite sure what I'm going to pick for this one. And the next one is one that I haven't quite figured out how do you make lists for yet because the category is read a book that's that where you were born.
Emily Calkins:
So it's hard to make that many lists because, of course, people who live in King County who were born all over the world, actually, so this one's going to maybe require a little detective work on the part of patrons or like I said, using BookMatch and then you can have a library and do a little detective work for you. And then the last category is one that we do every year, and that is recommended by staff. So just by listening to this very podcast, you are getting lots of staff recommendations but we also have staff picks on the website. And if you do BookMatch and so lots of ways to get staff recommendations. We do that one every year because I want to remind people that connecting with the library is not just about going and picking up your holds, although certainly we are happy to give you your books. But we're here to help you discover new titles too.
Emily Calkins:
So those are the categories for the challenge this year. And then there are a couple of ways to keep track of what you're reading. We will have bookmarks again. And probably the best way to get a bookmark if you want a physical bookmark, is to request it in myLibro, which is the app we use for curbside pickup. You can also log online, which is what I'm going to do this year. So if you go to kcls.org/10totry, you'll find a link to Beanstack, which is our online reading platform. And you can sign up for the 2021 challenge there, you earn a little badge for every category that you finish. And people have asked for this feature and we now offer it. So if you read something, and then you decide you actually want to use it for one of the other categories, you can edit your entries for the different categories this year. So people hopefully will be excited about that. I know I am because I spend all year sort of shuffling things around depending on what I discover and decide I want to read.
Emily Calkins:
This year, we are not doing finisher buttons because sort of managing those in a situation where we don't have easy access in our libraries is pretty challenging. But we are going to do the book stacks for winners again. So when you finish the challenge, you can either send a picture of your bookmark to 10totry@kcls.org or if you're logging online, you'll be automatically entered. And we'll do a grand prize drawing for a couple of winners to get a stack of books for you to keep that will be chosen for you by a librarian, which is a pretty fun thing. And all of these details as well as all of the lists that I mentioned and ongoing lists throughout the year, you can find on the 10 to Try page on our website. So it's kcls.org/10totry. And then we also will have a newsletter.
Emily Calkins:
And again, if you sign up through Beanstack, through the online reading platform, you'll be automatically subscribed to the newsletter, it comes out quarterly. it's just a little reminder like, "Hey, you signed up to do this challenge. Here's some new booklists that we've created. Don't forget to love your reading. We hope it's going well." And then if we had author events or other programs that are relevant, you can learn about those there as well.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah, and if you love listening to the Desk Set, you probably enjoy author interviews and we will have even more fun online events for you to enjoy this year. And you can go to kcls.org/authorvoices to see the calendar.
Emily Calkins:
We hope you all keep listening and we hope you'll join us for some online events as well.
Jenny Odell:
I'm Jenny Odell. I'm an artist and author. I teach studio art at Stanford. And I am the author of How To Do Nothing which is stinging the attention economy, which is about a number of things but it is mainly about divesting your attention from the attention economy and re-investing it elsewhere. And one of my big examples is in the local ecological community that you exist in.
Britta Barrett:
So after reading the book, it becomes clear that the nothing you describe is actually composed of a lot of something, could you describe what doing nothing means to you?
Jenny Odell:
Sure, I think it's pretty simple, actually, it's just sort of non-goal oriented activity. So I think the way that we tend to think about productivity is pretty narrow, it usually involves having something to show for your time, some kind of results often through a process that can be optimized. The idea of being that you want to get more for less all the time. And so the things that I put in the category of doing nothing, appear valueless from that point of view, so things like going for a walk, versus walking somewhere and trying to get there as fast as possible. Spending time with friends, simply observing something, these are meaningful experiences but they're hard to measure the quote unquote value of because the value doesn't really appear in that traditional productivity framework.
Britta Barrett:
So we're recording this during the first week of January, when lots of people are going to be encountering lots of messages about self optimization and setting goals. Can you make a case for doing more nothing in the new year?
Jenny Odell:
Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm actually really glad you asked that, because I hadn't quite thought about this in the context of New Year's resolutions and I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea behind New Year's resolutions and wanting to be a better person, totally understandable impulse but very easily spills over like so many other self improvement projects into a kind of punitive self-measurement. Like, "I'll never be the person I want to be or I'm not working enough, I'm not producing enough." And I think that there's a real risk when you get caught in these kinds of cycles that you don't give yourself the time and space to step back and ask whether that's a path worth pursuing and whether maybe what you have and what you are aren't simply enough already and are things that should just be appreciated.
Jenny Odell:
And so one of the reasons I find quote unquote doing nothing to be so important and that's the time in which I appreciate the simple fact of being alive or I appreciate the things that I have. And so I kind of instead of the idea of New Year's resolution, I like the idea of taking the new year as a moment in which to just reflect on what you already appreciate. And maybe also maybe to just kind of ask higher order questions like, "How do I value myself? How do I value my work? How do I value my time?" And kind of get way more general about it rather than like, "No, I need to do X amount of something per day." One of my worries when I published the book was related to what we're talking about, that it was just going to get picked up and reinterpreted as a life hack. And I think it comes down to the difference between and I don't think this is an easy line to draw a lot of the time.
Jenny Odell:
The difference between getting more comfortable in capitalism or genuinely trying to think outside of it while acknowledging that you live in it. And which is really difficult, I think, and that's sort of just an ongoing effort intention. So the life hack version of doing nothing, it would be not all that dissimilar from some of the more meaningless meditation apps, which is if you do X amount of nothing, you will be healthier, happier and able to work better, right? You'll be more comfortable, you'll be treading water more comfortably. But kind of what I was going for was sort of broader doing nothing as a sort of pause in which you reflect on what productivity means. So like productive of what, for whom and why. And I think that those questions are the beginning of an inquiry that can go in an anti-capitalist directions sort of in a, I hope, genuine way.
Jenny Odell:
And I think would ultimately lead you outside the bounds of the self that self-help caters to. So if you really go down that path, I think you pretty quickly end up at the reality that in order for more people to be able to do more nothing, for example, you would need things workplace organizing, you would need to question the profit structure of social media companies, like these things that are kind of beyond the level of the individual. So it's kind of like it's complicated, because it's like I'm writing the book to an individual and I'm trying to write to them about directing their individual attention. But it's sort of with this goal in mind of maybe beginning to kind of eat away at the edges of this way of thinking that otherwise has become very habitual. And then the more habitual it becomes, the more hidden it is.
Britta Barrett:
It's clear from reading the book, that you're not someone who's anti-technology as a blanket statement, but you do want to make readers aware of the mechanics of the technology and tools that we use and how they keep our attention. Could you talk a little bit about some of those persuasive design choices?
Jenny Odell:
Sure. Yeah, actually maybe as an example, I would just mention a master's thesis that I quote from in my book by Devangi Vivrekar, who was at Stanford when she wrote it. And it's amazing because it's just this sort of eagle eyed look at several different social media platforms, one of them was LinkedIn that they looked at, and it just kind of goes through and it catalogues every single aspect of what is called persuasive design. So everything from the little red bubble that pops up or these messages that you get that are sort of trying to get you to engage more various levels, things that get unlocked, the gamification of a lot of these activities. And I think it's just a really fascinating exercise and observation. And I've always been interested in observation, but I think it's especially interesting when you're trying to observe something that is set up to prevent you from observing it.
Jenny Odell:
It's trying to naturalize itself. And so just today, I was Googling and I figured out a way to hide what's trending on Twitter, which is a plague me for years. Because there is no option within Twitter to make that go away. And that's an example of something maybe you sign in, you just kind of want to see what people are talking about and you're presented with these often sort of attention grabbing headlines then you're quite quickly sucked into. Auto-playing video, I would say is another example of that. So there are all these kind of technical decisions and design decisions around trying to get a user to not only spend maximum amount of time on a platform, but to sort of engage fully to use all of the features to really get quite embroiled in it. And quite simply, there's a financial incentive for them to do that.
Britta Barrett:
For people who are interested in being informed and aware of what's going on in the world around them, often we turn to social media to get that sort of news and information. How do you personally strike a balance between setting boundaries and limits with your technology use and that desire sort of to know what's going on?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, that's a very difficult line to toe I think for anyone. I mean, assuming you do want to stay engaged. My sort of the way that I have worked that out in my head is, at some point I think I realized that the type of engagement that these platforms are optimiZed for, so things like doomscrolling but also posting and then being sort of in that world all the time, even when you're not really in the app your mind is still there. But that wasn't effective for me or for any of the causes that I'm interested in. That is not a useful version of me, that's just a freaked out kind of internet addled version of me. That may be sort of hyper-informed on one level, but it's also completely lacking perspective and the ability to reflect and respond meaningfully, not to mention just the issue of mental health. And so, I think that became clear to me that that was just sort of not as guilty as one might feel stepping away from say Twitter, and if they're very used to being there a lot and using that as their space of engagement.
Jenny Odell:
It's not like you're stepping away from that and then there's nothing else, right? There are other forms of communication, other sources of information that you can then go and seek in the absence of that state of mind. But I think intentionality is a really big piece of it for me, rather than kind of being washed over with information about different things sort of in an order that I didn't choose. And then it's keeping me in this state of kind of paralysis, which again is not useful for anyone.
Britta Barrett:
In the past year, many of us have been encouraged to use technology to stay connected with our community, but also to go outside more to do outdoor activities as a kind of safer option. I'm curious, how's your relationship to both changed at all during the pandemic?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah. Well, so I'm very fortunate to live somewhere where I have a walkable neighborhood. And I actually have been going to actual regional parks less, because they got really crowded. In the Bay Area, I think people are pretty outdoors-y here and not only increased and so it's been this sort of strange process of, I feel like I keep going through these cycles of getting bored with my neighborhood and then getting re-enchanted with it, where it's like I have only really like five or six walks, I can go on. And my whole book and my whole sort of artistic practices is about sort of teaching yourself to notice new things and so you think I would be good at that. And I think I am but it has a limit, right? I've been doing this since March but then I'm always surprised. Like yesterday, I went on a walk that had been on... I don't even want to know how many times I've been on this walk. But I went in the opposite direction. And it was completely different. I mean, and I forget that, right? When you're walking in a certain direction, you don't suddenly stop and turn around and look in the opposite direction.
Jenny Odell:
But it was just like this really humbling experience and I find that when little things like that happen, when you get surprised, it sort of renders you more open to surprise for the rest of the day in my experience. So then you start realizing that there are all these things you haven't noticed and you start noticing them.
Britta Barrett:
For someone who hasn't read the book, could you explain what bird noticing is and some memorable experiences with that?
Jenny Odell:
There's so many things you have to be aware of when you're looking at or looking for birds. So I just call it bird noticing. But that's also kind of a gesture towards the fact that for much of my life, I'm sure I was sort of generally aware of birds but certainly did not know what most of them were. There are these uncanny moments where I think about how there was a bird that I must have been looking at and just didn't know what it was. And now I know what it was. And so it's sort of like you're looking at your memory and from the present, knowing what it was now but also that you didn't know what it was then, which I think happens to anyone, right? Who learns how to kind of see or interpret any layer of reality. Probably the most memorable example which is in the book is the crows that I befriended on my street, after learning that crows recognize human faces and will favor or disfavor human different humans based on their behavior.
Jenny Odell:
So if anyone who's listening to this as ever had a dog that was mean to crows, they may know that those crows will not forget that. And there's not a lot of ways around that. So I started putting a peanut out on the balcony, here and there in 2016 and a couple of crows started coming by reliably. And that crow family still comes here every day, I saw them this morning, it's been really important for me during quarantine because they're friends that I can visit. And also there's something really kind of therapeutic about watching them arrive from somewhere else and then watching them leave to somewhere else. And I don't know where that is and I don't know what they do the rest of the day. But in the book I sort of describe these moments, especially post-election 2016, of looking at the crows looking at me knowing that at this point they recognize me and kind of trying to imagine how I appear to them, which of course is impossible.
Jenny Odell:
But knowing that being an animal that's being observed by another animal, and then looking out onto the street and trying to imagine how they see the street and how they see the hill. And I find that that's just such a reliable way of breaking outside of this very sort of myopic cycle of not just social media fueled anxiety, but even just the sort of claustrophobic sense of self and human timescales.
Britta Barrett:
During the pandemic, a lot of us have been spending more time with their own company not moving through the world in quite the same way. And for safety reasons, maybe being just more planful about how we go about things, something as simple as the act of feeding yourself, the difference between going to the farmers market and picking up seasonal produce and smelling it and talking to people and just having a leisurely time, how different that feels from like, "I've made a list, I've meal prep planned for the week, I've got a plan, I'm going to be in and out in 15 minutes." How do you nurture spontaneity and surprise at a time, when it feels like those things are more difficult?
Jenny Odell:
Oh absolutely, I am totally with you on the farmers market thing. I would go every Saturday and I would get stuff. But I would also just really like looking at just all the weird shapes. Just like a really weird long squash or something. And there's something so nice about talking to the people of the stands and feeling this connection through this food and yeah, of course, our farmers market is still going but I'm sort of too freaked out to go into it. So I'm very lucky we have a workaround, which is that the farmers market that we live near has a basically the equivalent of a CSA box that you can go pick up every week. And so it's basically like all of the interest and surprise of wandering the market is just contained in this box, because I don't know what's in the box. So every week, it's like this big deal for me to open the box and see what is inside. And I feel like it was probably around August or September, I started hearing from and talking to a lot more friends about this desperate need for novelty as just a sense that time is passing.
Jenny Odell:
And that is why that box is so important to me. It's like this past week for the button to order it was temporarily greyed out and I was like, "No, I need this box of produce, this is the only surprise in my life right now." And then it's cool you find out what's in there and then you're like, "Oh, making of these different recipes or whatever." But that's just an example of something that's pretty small and quotidian but it's a source of surprise. And I think that it's difficult but worthwhile to kind of just try to find those things where you can while acknowledging that it's very difficult.
Britta Barrett:
As a teacher, what are some of the practices you guide your students through?
Jenny Odell:
So I have given my students assignments, I don't think this is really... We've had them do things like, well, when we were on campus, I would have them go outside for 15 minutes and just observe everything going on around them and then sort of write it down in almost like a police blotter, like a guy with blue shorts is walking across the quarter or something like that, and just kind of do that for 15 minutes. And that's based on a text by George Perec, where he did that in the place in Paris, he went on several different occasions and just wrote down everything that happened. And so it's sort of like an exercise in attention. And then we talk about not only what they noticed, but why they think they noticed those things. And so it's kind of like an exercise around not just observing, but then reflecting on why do I notice the things that I noticed? And maybe like what am I not noticing?
Jenny Odell:
So that's something that we've done. I used to teach a class about cell phone photography many years ago. And one of the things that I would have them do is, for a weekend, I would have my students not take photos on their phones or try not to and draw a picture on a post-it of everything that they had wanted to take a photo of. And it was always really entertaining because they would all put them up on the wall. And they would always be these really sort of amazingly trivial things that they feel sort of embarrassed writing out. So these are just kind of exercises again and sort of noticing you're noticing or just kind of stepping back from a habitual activity. I haven't really noticed any resistance to that. If anything, it seems like it's usually welcome.
Jenny Odell:
And I mean, the biggest thing I've noticed is that my students are just far more politically aware and active than when I started teaching. And so maybe for that reason too, they're sort of welcoming and open-minded in terms of the idea of stepping outside of the hamster wheel. I think it really appeals to them because they're hyper-aware of the situation that they're in. And the productivity culture at a place like Stanford. And I think they're thinking about that even while they're kind of caught up in it. So I've been grateful for how open-minded they are and my book is dedicated to them.
Britta Barrett:
And we always like to ask, What are you reading right now?
Jenny Odell:
So I am reading two things at the same time. I'm reading Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli. And it's about quantum gravity. But it's written for someone who knows nothing about physics. And I'm almost done with it. I'm really enjoying it. And it's probably clear from my book but I really sort of crave writing and art and experiences that make the world feel strange through and through. And this is definitely a book that will do that. And then I'm also reading H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Classic bird book, really beautiful. And I think just a really amazing example of nonfiction writing, it's incredibly poetic and the way it's composed is just really inspiring.
Britta Barrett:
And where can listeners find you online, when you are online?
Jenny Odell:
I guess, Twitter. I mean, I'm also on Instagram but I don't really spend a lot of time there. And I'm not super active. But I am on Twitter. And I also have a website which is just my name, jennyodell.com, that has my art projects and things like that on it.
Britta Barrett:
Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Jenny Odell:
Likewise. Thank you.
Britta Barrett:
Thanks for listening. You can find all the books mentioned in today's episodes in our show notes.
Emily Calkins:
The Desk Set is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, produced by Britta Barrett, and brought to you by the King County Library System.
Britta Barrett:
If you liked the show, be sure to subscribe rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Happy New Year and happy reading.
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to the Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about reading in 2021. So we'll talk about our own goals, some books we're looking forward to and we'll announce the reading challenge categories for 10 to Try 2021.
Britta Barrett:
Then I'll chat with Jenny Odell, the author of How To Do Nothing.
Britta Barrett:
Happy new year!
Emily Calkins:
Yay!
Britta Barret:
Goodbye 2020.
Emily Calkins:
Goodbye, 2020. I am not sorry to see you go.
Britta Barrett:
Thank you, next.
Emily Calkins:
So thinking about the new year and reading in 2021, have you set goals for yourself? A goal?
Britta Barrett:
I think this year, I'm less focused on a number and more on following just that feeling you get when you read a really good book. And I think sometimes if you go too long without doing it, it'll surprise you when you pick up a great book again, you're like, "Oh, why have I not been reading? Why did I think this was too hard or not just the thing that I wanted." To nurture my love of reading and not assign myself homework books like, "Oh, this very important new literary title has emerged, I should read that."
Emily Calkins:
I love the idea of sort of chasing your reading bliss in 2021. I am going to set a goal, a number goal for myself because it's something that's helpful for me to kind of stay on track. But my real goal for the year is to actually finish the reading challenge this year, because I did not finish it. I know, I did not finish it in 2020. And I think something that happens with me is maybe sort of the opposite of what you're talking about, where I find something that just sort of scratches the itch or is a really great book. And then I just try to chase other things that are like it. So I tend to go on kind of little binges where I'm reading a bunch of the same kind of stuff.
Emily Calkins:
And I'm hoping that I can stretch myself just a little bit this year, I'm going to try and read a little bit more nonfiction, which as you may know, is not exactly my jam. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I find it hard to stick with. So I'm going to experiment and see about sort of alternating nonfiction or things that are a little bit more challenging with some of the sort of more plot-driven stuff that I just like to sink my teeth into. So as we are talking about a really good book and nurturing your love of reading, do you have any that are on the horizon that you're excited about? 2021 titles?
Britta Barrett:
Well, I know it just spoke dismissively of very important literary work. But I am super excited that we're getting a new Kazuo Ishiguro book, you probably know him from Never Let Me Go, which is a personal favorite of mine or The Remains of the Day. He has a new book called Klara and the Sun, which returns to science fiction, which I'm really excited about because his is a soft, gentle, tender science fiction that I'm really intrigued by. I'm super excited that the Three-Body Problem is being adapted for Netflix and the author of that book has a new book coming out called Supernova Roman. And then we're also getting a new Becky Chambers book. And I believe we're also getting a new book from Nnedi Okorafor. So lots of cool things happening in the science fiction genre.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that's very surprising coming from you because as we often talk about, you tend to be more of a nonfiction reader. So a couple of my most anticipated picks are actually nonfiction. So we're swapping it up here. In April, we're getting the book of Difficult Fruit from Kate Lebo, who's a Washington State author and I've had a chance to preview this one, and I think it's going to be just a wonderful book. It's sort of part cookbook, part memoir. So it's organized as an alphabetical list of difficult fruits, things that are difficult to harvest or to grow or a challenge cook with. It starts with aronia, which is also known as chokeberry. And it ends with zucchini and the zucchini chapter is very funny because it's sort of about how you always have too much zucchini. There's no way to have the right amount of zucchini.
Emily Calkins:
And then each chapter has a beautiful essay from Lebo. That's about, it sort of borrows the themes of what makes the fruit challenge and whatever way it's challenging and draws from her own life. So it has these elements of memoir. And then each chapter also has a couple of recipes. So things that you can do with the fruit. The chapter is vanilla and the recipe or one of the recipes is about creating your own vanilla body lotion and the essay is this wonderful essay about coming of age at a time when the cool girls were wearing Bath and Body Works vanilla lotion like in middle school?
Emily Calkins:
And cucumber melon?
Emily Calkins:
Yes. And cucumber melon was the alternative, right? But it's a wonderful essay about sort of discovering, understanding femininity as you're coming of age, as you're an adolescent and what other people's femininity looks like and trying to, especially in that tender middle school age, fit yourself into that box. So that gives you an idea of what the essays are like.
Britta Barrett:
She was so much fun to talk to if you're a foodie fan, you should go all the way back to one of our earliest podcast episodes, to hear an interview with Kate and also Sam Ligon, the authors of Pie and whiskey. They were a delight.
Emily Calkins:
They were and then another nonfiction title that I'm excited about and I think this one may be up your alley too, is Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford. She's a writer and she's a podcast host and I've followed her for a really long time online, she writes these great essays about all kinds of stuff. But this is her first book. It's a memoir, it's about her childhood and it's especially about her relationship with her dad. So as she was growing up, she really idolized her dad, she felt connected to him. She thought like, "Oh, we really understand each other." But she never actually saw him. And the reason is that he was in prison and she didn't know what he was in prison for. As a teenager she finally learned what had happened that led to him being in prison. And the book sort of explores what happens next when this person that you have idolized your whole life, suddenly, you sort of start to understand that they're not as perfect or as infallible as you maybe thought you were.
Emily Calkins:
She's a wonderful writer, she's really smart, she's really vulnerable and the story is about the complexities of not only this relationship, but just growing up poor and black in America is one I just can't wait to read. So that's Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford.
Emily Calkins:
I do have a couple of fiction picks too. And these are all from the first half of the year, because I didn't want to go too far out. And the first one's coming out this month, actually, it's called Outlawed. It's by Anna north, who's another person that I know is a writer from the internet, I think she originally started writing for Jezebel way back in the early 2000s. But this is of alternate history Western. It's set in the American past, right after what would have been the Civil War, and the country has been decimated by a pandemic, so timely.
Emily Calkins:
But that's led to this obsession with babies and with childbearing. So when women get married and then don't get pregnant, they are accused of witchcraft and they can be hung. So that's what happens to the heroine of this novel, Outlawed. She gets married, doesn't get pregnant and ends up running away, fleeing her hometown and joining this Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and becoming sort of a Western outlaw. And she all the while is sort of trying to understand what's really going on with her body, real information about pregnancy and fertility. And it's just such an interesting mashup of women's health and there's a lot of interesting gender and sexuality stuff. This gang that she joins is full of queer women and non-binary people. And then there's also these action sequences. So there's bank robberies and stagecoach heists and it's just a really fascinating book that circles around this wonderful character named Ada. So that one's Outlawed.
Emily Calkins:
And then in March we're getting one, this is definitely in your category of important literary fiction. But I think it's going to be heavy, but it should be really beautiful. It's called How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, it's set in a fictional African country that's dealing with the double terrors of this environmental destruction caused by an American oil company that doesn't face any consequences. So it's this little village, is at the center of this story. And there's been oil spills, the drinking water is tainted and then on top of that the country is run by this very corrupt and tyrannical dictator. And so the people of this village decide to stage a revolution. And the book is about particularly this one young woman and this one family who become a revolutionary because of this situation that they're facing.
Emily Calkins:
So Mbue is the author of the Behold the Dreamers, though it came out in a few years ago and it was one of the first novels about the 2008-2009 financial collapse. So it followed two families, a family from Cameroon living in New York City, and then the husband in that family was a driver for a really wealthy family, the father was a banker or the husband was a banker. So he was right in the middle of this whole financial prices. And I really enjoyed that one, it was really sharply observed, had great characters, especially the female characters are sort of these complex, flawed women. So I'm really excited to see how this one comes out. And that's How Beautiful We Were. And then like you said, there's just so many other great things coming, we're getting a new one from Sarah Moss, who's an author of one of my favorites. Her new book is called Summerwater. Sara Gailey, who was on the show last year has a new one called The Echo Wife that they talked about when they chatted with us.
Emily Calkins:
Viet Thanh Nguyen has a new one called The Committed, there's a new collection of Joan Didion essays coming out. And Casey McQuiston who wrote Red, White & Royal Blue has a time travel subway, queer romance called the One Last Stop, that one is coming in June. So I'm super excited for that, too. This is the time of year when I always feel so optimistic and ambitious about all the reading that I'm going to get done. I was looking back at the list of things we talked about last year. And I did not read a lot of the things that I said I was excited about, even though I was excited about them. Just like last year, this year, there's so many things coming out that I just can't wait to get my hands on. So we'll see Which ones of them I actually read.
Britta Barrett:
I don't know, I love that because it means that you discovered so many other things along the way, because I read exactly what I said I was going to read and not very much else. I got a plan and this year that Joan Didion collections totally on it.
Emily Calkins:
Yes, I really love her. And I think that collection will be interesting, because my understanding is that it's some older pieces as well as some new things. Well, should we talk about the categories for the Reading Challenges next year?
Britta Barrett:
Yeah, give them to me.
Emily Calkins:
All right. So I will say a lot of these were packed with our 2020 experiences in mind, including the first one which is read a book that makes you laugh.
Britta Barrett:
Thank goodness.
Emily Calkins:
And then we have read a book with a non-human characters. So basically, I'm thinking that anything with characters who are part of the story and are not humans counts. Obviously if you're reading fantasy, and you've got dragons or elves or trolls or whatever, wizards, mages, that would count. If you're reading science fiction and you've got aliens or AIs, the new Ishifuro book would probably count for this category, robots that interact with the story in a significant way. But I'm also thinking of things like memoirs where animals play a significant role. So there are lots of these kinds of memoirs that are like, "I adopted..." There's one about a donkey, "I adopted this donkey and here's what it was like when I was training the donkey for the donkey races." And I think that was called Running with Sherman. But there's lots of memoirs where a person's relationship with an animal is really at the heart of the story.
Emily Calkins:
And I think in those, the animal counts as a character even if they're not speaking in the same way that we often think a character needs to. After non-human characters, we have about the future. So that can be fiction, science fiction, or it could be nonfiction as well. The next one is epistolary novel, which I mostly chose because I love that there's a word for this, which is a novel that's told through letters. Epistolary, it's just a fun word. And again, this is one where I encourage people to interpret it broadly. So maybe part of the story is told through letters, it doesn't necessarily have to be the whole story. Or maybe it's not letters, but it's emails or it's text messages or some other kind of communication. Even a diary, I think a story that's told as a diary or a journal would count for this one. So interpret broadly. And we will, of course, have lists on the website for all of these categories. And you can always use BookMatch, our online recommendation service, to find books for these categories as well. Some of them are trickier than others and I think epistolary novel is one of the trickier ones.
Britta:
What are some examples of your favorite epistolary novels?
Emily Calkins:
So the one that first comes to mind for me is Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which is told in emails and other found communications, it's not a straight epistolary novel. I think the one that I'm going to read for this one is Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, who's an author that I love and haven't read in a couple of years and I haven't ever read Attachments. It's one of her first novels, but it's told entirely in emails. So I think that one will be fun. The other one that I am thinking about reading for this category this year is On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, which is a series of letters from the main character to his mother that got really great reviews when it came out. And I just haven't had a chance to get to it yet. So I might try and squeeze it in for this category.
Britta Barrett:
What are some of the other ones?
Emily Calkins:
So the next one is by a Black author. And this one is fun because there are just so many. So we will have a list on the website that's just sort of a general, here's 25 titles by Black authors that we recommend. But I'm also planning throughout the year to make some more targeted lists. So here's romance by Black authors. And here's memoirs by Black authors. And here's sci-fi and fantasy by Black authors and here are books about race by Black authors. And here are...something totally different, kids books or picture books or graphic novels. This is sort of a gimme category, in that there are lot of things to choose from. So I think readers will be able to choose something that really appeals to them. But on the other hand, we keep hearing and this is very true, when all of the Black Lives Matter protests were going on this year, a lot of my book-related social media was saying, "Hey, this is true in the publishing world too, Black writers are underrepresented, they're underpaid, there aren't very many Black people working in publishing."
Emily Calkins:
So on one hand, there's a lot to choose from in this category. And on the other hand, it's still something that you kind of have to seek out considering how large the Black population is in America, it's not really representative in publishing yet. So we'll have lots and lots of lists for this one for readers to choose from. The next category is published this year, which again, is kind of a gimme but I think it'll be a little bit more of a challenge than people might think just because the big bestsellers of the year often have long waiting lists. And so it can be a little bit trickier to hunt down something that's available, that was published this year if you're reading your books from the library. So I'll be making some lists that highlight mid-list titles or debuts by authors who are less well known, so that people can find things that are new in 2021 but don't necessarily have a waiting list of a big bestseller from a favorite author.
Emily Calkins:
So the next category I think is sort of one for you, which is read a book about pop culture. But do you have any favorites about pop culture that you'd recommend to listeners?
Britta Barrett:
Oh, so many. I feel like you might understand this because you also love Pop Culture Happy Hour. But sometimes I am just as happy listening to people talk about media as I am consuming media. Or if I don't want to watch a TV series, listening to other people sort of analyze it and interpret it and talk about it fills that void just as much. And I feel like there are some really great authors. If you critique television, specifically, I'm thinking about I Like to Watch, which is by Emily Nussbaum, who writes for The New Yorker. And what I love about her is how much she loves television. I mean, we can talk about the golden age and prestige television, but she loves all of it from Adventure Time to the Sopranos, and has some really smart things to say about critical darlings like True Detective. So her essays are really fun look at sort of TV and its place in popular culture and sort of not even elevating it but just acknowledging that it's this collective experience and this art form, that any art form can be very good, very bad and everything in between.
Britta Barrett:
And then maybe my favorite pop culture writer is Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker. She has a collection called Trick Mirror. Jia Tolentino is probably best known as being very online and writing a lot about the internet and sort of how that shapes us. She has this great essay in the New Yorker about Instagram Face, and sort of the new cultural beauty standards that have emerged and she writes quite a bit, I want to say, about self optimization in this internet age and everything she has to say about TikTok or emerging trends. I just love her take. And I think she's really clever and smart and never lets herself off the hook for the way that she's a part of the things that she's critiquing. And she doesn't offer a lot of easy answers. But she always just has this really great lens with which to view pop culture, so highly recommend.
Emily Calkins:
So the next category is re-read an old favorite. When I talked to people about what they were reading in 2020, a lot of variations on comfort reads came up and a couple of different people said, "All I'm doing is re-reading things that I already know I'm going to love." And I thought, "Gosh, I almost never re-read things anymore." So I'm excited to have this category. And there are so many choices, this one is almost a little overwhelming because I am not sure how far back I want to go, do I want to choose something from childhood or from a few years ago? There are definitely things that when I read them, I put them down and was like, "Oh, I can't wait to read that again." And then I've never read it again. So I'm not quite sure what I'm going to pick for this one. And the next one is one that I haven't quite figured out how do you make lists for yet because the category is read a book that's that where you were born.
Emily Calkins:
So it's hard to make that many lists because, of course, people who live in King County who were born all over the world, actually, so this one's going to maybe require a little detective work on the part of patrons or like I said, using BookMatch and then you can have a library and do a little detective work for you. And then the last category is one that we do every year, and that is recommended by staff. So just by listening to this very podcast, you are getting lots of staff recommendations but we also have staff picks on the website. And if you do BookMatch and so lots of ways to get staff recommendations. We do that one every year because I want to remind people that connecting with the library is not just about going and picking up your holds, although certainly we are happy to give you your books. But we're here to help you discover new titles too.
Emily Calkins:
So those are the categories for the challenge this year. And then there are a couple of ways to keep track of what you're reading. We will have bookmarks again. And probably the best way to get a bookmark if you want a physical bookmark, is to request it in myLibro, which is the app we use for curbside pickup. You can also log online, which is what I'm going to do this year. So if you go to kcls.org/10totry, you'll find a link to Beanstack, which is our online reading platform. And you can sign up for the 2021 challenge there, you earn a little badge for every category that you finish. And people have asked for this feature and we now offer it. So if you read something, and then you decide you actually want to use it for one of the other categories, you can edit your entries for the different categories this year. So people hopefully will be excited about that. I know I am because I spend all year sort of shuffling things around depending on what I discover and decide I want to read.
Emily Calkins:
This year, we are not doing finisher buttons because sort of managing those in a situation where we don't have easy access in our libraries is pretty challenging. But we are going to do the book stacks for winners again. So when you finish the challenge, you can either send a picture of your bookmark to 10totry@kcls.org or if you're logging online, you'll be automatically entered. And we'll do a grand prize drawing for a couple of winners to get a stack of books for you to keep that will be chosen for you by a librarian, which is a pretty fun thing. And all of these details as well as all of the lists that I mentioned and ongoing lists throughout the year, you can find on the 10 to Try page on our website. So it's kcls.org/10totry. And then we also will have a newsletter.
Emily Calkins:
And again, if you sign up through Beanstack, through the online reading platform, you'll be automatically subscribed to the newsletter, it comes out quarterly. it's just a little reminder like, "Hey, you signed up to do this challenge. Here's some new booklists that we've created. Don't forget to love your reading. We hope it's going well." And then if we had author events or other programs that are relevant, you can learn about those there as well.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah, and if you love listening to the Desk Set, you probably enjoy author interviews and we will have even more fun online events for you to enjoy this year. And you can go to kcls.org/authorvoices to see the calendar.
Emily Calkins:
We hope you all keep listening and we hope you'll join us for some online events as well.
Jenny Odell:
I'm Jenny Odell. I'm an artist and author. I teach studio art at Stanford. And I am the author of How To Do Nothing which is stinging the attention economy, which is about a number of things but it is mainly about divesting your attention from the attention economy and re-investing it elsewhere. And one of my big examples is in the local ecological community that you exist in.
Britta Barrett:
So after reading the book, it becomes clear that the nothing you describe is actually composed of a lot of something, could you describe what doing nothing means to you?
Jenny Odell:
Sure, I think it's pretty simple, actually, it's just sort of non-goal oriented activity. So I think the way that we tend to think about productivity is pretty narrow, it usually involves having something to show for your time, some kind of results often through a process that can be optimized. The idea of being that you want to get more for less all the time. And so the things that I put in the category of doing nothing, appear valueless from that point of view, so things like going for a walk, versus walking somewhere and trying to get there as fast as possible. Spending time with friends, simply observing something, these are meaningful experiences but they're hard to measure the quote unquote value of because the value doesn't really appear in that traditional productivity framework.
Britta Barrett:
So we're recording this during the first week of January, when lots of people are going to be encountering lots of messages about self optimization and setting goals. Can you make a case for doing more nothing in the new year?
Jenny Odell:
Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm actually really glad you asked that, because I hadn't quite thought about this in the context of New Year's resolutions and I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea behind New Year's resolutions and wanting to be a better person, totally understandable impulse but very easily spills over like so many other self improvement projects into a kind of punitive self-measurement. Like, "I'll never be the person I want to be or I'm not working enough, I'm not producing enough." And I think that there's a real risk when you get caught in these kinds of cycles that you don't give yourself the time and space to step back and ask whether that's a path worth pursuing and whether maybe what you have and what you are aren't simply enough already and are things that should just be appreciated.
Jenny Odell:
And so one of the reasons I find quote unquote doing nothing to be so important and that's the time in which I appreciate the simple fact of being alive or I appreciate the things that I have. And so I kind of instead of the idea of New Year's resolution, I like the idea of taking the new year as a moment in which to just reflect on what you already appreciate. And maybe also maybe to just kind of ask higher order questions like, "How do I value myself? How do I value my work? How do I value my time?" And kind of get way more general about it rather than like, "No, I need to do X amount of something per day." One of my worries when I published the book was related to what we're talking about, that it was just going to get picked up and reinterpreted as a life hack. And I think it comes down to the difference between and I don't think this is an easy line to draw a lot of the time.
Jenny Odell:
The difference between getting more comfortable in capitalism or genuinely trying to think outside of it while acknowledging that you live in it. And which is really difficult, I think, and that's sort of just an ongoing effort intention. So the life hack version of doing nothing, it would be not all that dissimilar from some of the more meaningless meditation apps, which is if you do X amount of nothing, you will be healthier, happier and able to work better, right? You'll be more comfortable, you'll be treading water more comfortably. But kind of what I was going for was sort of broader doing nothing as a sort of pause in which you reflect on what productivity means. So like productive of what, for whom and why. And I think that those questions are the beginning of an inquiry that can go in an anti-capitalist directions sort of in a, I hope, genuine way.
Jenny Odell:
And I think would ultimately lead you outside the bounds of the self that self-help caters to. So if you really go down that path, I think you pretty quickly end up at the reality that in order for more people to be able to do more nothing, for example, you would need things workplace organizing, you would need to question the profit structure of social media companies, like these things that are kind of beyond the level of the individual. So it's kind of like it's complicated, because it's like I'm writing the book to an individual and I'm trying to write to them about directing their individual attention. But it's sort of with this goal in mind of maybe beginning to kind of eat away at the edges of this way of thinking that otherwise has become very habitual. And then the more habitual it becomes, the more hidden it is.
Britta Barrett:
It's clear from reading the book, that you're not someone who's anti-technology as a blanket statement, but you do want to make readers aware of the mechanics of the technology and tools that we use and how they keep our attention. Could you talk a little bit about some of those persuasive design choices?
Jenny Odell:
Sure. Yeah, actually maybe as an example, I would just mention a master's thesis that I quote from in my book by Devangi Vivrekar, who was at Stanford when she wrote it. And it's amazing because it's just this sort of eagle eyed look at several different social media platforms, one of them was LinkedIn that they looked at, and it just kind of goes through and it catalogues every single aspect of what is called persuasive design. So everything from the little red bubble that pops up or these messages that you get that are sort of trying to get you to engage more various levels, things that get unlocked, the gamification of a lot of these activities. And I think it's just a really fascinating exercise and observation. And I've always been interested in observation, but I think it's especially interesting when you're trying to observe something that is set up to prevent you from observing it.
Jenny Odell:
It's trying to naturalize itself. And so just today, I was Googling and I figured out a way to hide what's trending on Twitter, which is a plague me for years. Because there is no option within Twitter to make that go away. And that's an example of something maybe you sign in, you just kind of want to see what people are talking about and you're presented with these often sort of attention grabbing headlines then you're quite quickly sucked into. Auto-playing video, I would say is another example of that. So there are all these kind of technical decisions and design decisions around trying to get a user to not only spend maximum amount of time on a platform, but to sort of engage fully to use all of the features to really get quite embroiled in it. And quite simply, there's a financial incentive for them to do that.
Britta Barrett:
For people who are interested in being informed and aware of what's going on in the world around them, often we turn to social media to get that sort of news and information. How do you personally strike a balance between setting boundaries and limits with your technology use and that desire sort of to know what's going on?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, that's a very difficult line to toe I think for anyone. I mean, assuming you do want to stay engaged. My sort of the way that I have worked that out in my head is, at some point I think I realized that the type of engagement that these platforms are optimiZed for, so things like doomscrolling but also posting and then being sort of in that world all the time, even when you're not really in the app your mind is still there. But that wasn't effective for me or for any of the causes that I'm interested in. That is not a useful version of me, that's just a freaked out kind of internet addled version of me. That may be sort of hyper-informed on one level, but it's also completely lacking perspective and the ability to reflect and respond meaningfully, not to mention just the issue of mental health. And so, I think that became clear to me that that was just sort of not as guilty as one might feel stepping away from say Twitter, and if they're very used to being there a lot and using that as their space of engagement.
Jenny Odell:
It's not like you're stepping away from that and then there's nothing else, right? There are other forms of communication, other sources of information that you can then go and seek in the absence of that state of mind. But I think intentionality is a really big piece of it for me, rather than kind of being washed over with information about different things sort of in an order that I didn't choose. And then it's keeping me in this state of kind of paralysis, which again is not useful for anyone.
Britta Barrett:
In the past year, many of us have been encouraged to use technology to stay connected with our community, but also to go outside more to do outdoor activities as a kind of safer option. I'm curious, how's your relationship to both changed at all during the pandemic?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah. Well, so I'm very fortunate to live somewhere where I have a walkable neighborhood. And I actually have been going to actual regional parks less, because they got really crowded. In the Bay Area, I think people are pretty outdoors-y here and not only increased and so it's been this sort of strange process of, I feel like I keep going through these cycles of getting bored with my neighborhood and then getting re-enchanted with it, where it's like I have only really like five or six walks, I can go on. And my whole book and my whole sort of artistic practices is about sort of teaching yourself to notice new things and so you think I would be good at that. And I think I am but it has a limit, right? I've been doing this since March but then I'm always surprised. Like yesterday, I went on a walk that had been on... I don't even want to know how many times I've been on this walk. But I went in the opposite direction. And it was completely different. I mean, and I forget that, right? When you're walking in a certain direction, you don't suddenly stop and turn around and look in the opposite direction.
Jenny Odell:
But it was just like this really humbling experience and I find that when little things like that happen, when you get surprised, it sort of renders you more open to surprise for the rest of the day in my experience. So then you start realizing that there are all these things you haven't noticed and you start noticing them.
Britta Barrett:
For someone who hasn't read the book, could you explain what bird noticing is and some memorable experiences with that?
Jenny Odell:
There's so many things you have to be aware of when you're looking at or looking for birds. So I just call it bird noticing. But that's also kind of a gesture towards the fact that for much of my life, I'm sure I was sort of generally aware of birds but certainly did not know what most of them were. There are these uncanny moments where I think about how there was a bird that I must have been looking at and just didn't know what it was. And now I know what it was. And so it's sort of like you're looking at your memory and from the present, knowing what it was now but also that you didn't know what it was then, which I think happens to anyone, right? Who learns how to kind of see or interpret any layer of reality. Probably the most memorable example which is in the book is the crows that I befriended on my street, after learning that crows recognize human faces and will favor or disfavor human different humans based on their behavior.
Jenny Odell:
So if anyone who's listening to this as ever had a dog that was mean to crows, they may know that those crows will not forget that. And there's not a lot of ways around that. So I started putting a peanut out on the balcony, here and there in 2016 and a couple of crows started coming by reliably. And that crow family still comes here every day, I saw them this morning, it's been really important for me during quarantine because they're friends that I can visit. And also there's something really kind of therapeutic about watching them arrive from somewhere else and then watching them leave to somewhere else. And I don't know where that is and I don't know what they do the rest of the day. But in the book I sort of describe these moments, especially post-election 2016, of looking at the crows looking at me knowing that at this point they recognize me and kind of trying to imagine how I appear to them, which of course is impossible.
Jenny Odell:
But knowing that being an animal that's being observed by another animal, and then looking out onto the street and trying to imagine how they see the street and how they see the hill. And I find that that's just such a reliable way of breaking outside of this very sort of myopic cycle of not just social media fueled anxiety, but even just the sort of claustrophobic sense of self and human timescales.
Britta Barrett:
During the pandemic, a lot of us have been spending more time with their own company not moving through the world in quite the same way. And for safety reasons, maybe being just more planful about how we go about things, something as simple as the act of feeding yourself, the difference between going to the farmers market and picking up seasonal produce and smelling it and talking to people and just having a leisurely time, how different that feels from like, "I've made a list, I've meal prep planned for the week, I've got a plan, I'm going to be in and out in 15 minutes." How do you nurture spontaneity and surprise at a time, when it feels like those things are more difficult?
Jenny Odell:
Oh absolutely, I am totally with you on the farmers market thing. I would go every Saturday and I would get stuff. But I would also just really like looking at just all the weird shapes. Just like a really weird long squash or something. And there's something so nice about talking to the people of the stands and feeling this connection through this food and yeah, of course, our farmers market is still going but I'm sort of too freaked out to go into it. So I'm very lucky we have a workaround, which is that the farmers market that we live near has a basically the equivalent of a CSA box that you can go pick up every week. And so it's basically like all of the interest and surprise of wandering the market is just contained in this box, because I don't know what's in the box. So every week, it's like this big deal for me to open the box and see what is inside. And I feel like it was probably around August or September, I started hearing from and talking to a lot more friends about this desperate need for novelty as just a sense that time is passing.
Jenny Odell:
And that is why that box is so important to me. It's like this past week for the button to order it was temporarily greyed out and I was like, "No, I need this box of produce, this is the only surprise in my life right now." And then it's cool you find out what's in there and then you're like, "Oh, making of these different recipes or whatever." But that's just an example of something that's pretty small and quotidian but it's a source of surprise. And I think that it's difficult but worthwhile to kind of just try to find those things where you can while acknowledging that it's very difficult.
Britta Barrett:
As a teacher, what are some of the practices you guide your students through?
Jenny Odell:
So I have given my students assignments, I don't think this is really... We've had them do things like, well, when we were on campus, I would have them go outside for 15 minutes and just observe everything going on around them and then sort of write it down in almost like a police blotter, like a guy with blue shorts is walking across the quarter or something like that, and just kind of do that for 15 minutes. And that's based on a text by George Perec, where he did that in the place in Paris, he went on several different occasions and just wrote down everything that happened. And so it's sort of like an exercise in attention. And then we talk about not only what they noticed, but why they think they noticed those things. And so it's kind of like an exercise around not just observing, but then reflecting on why do I notice the things that I noticed? And maybe like what am I not noticing?
Jenny Odell:
So that's something that we've done. I used to teach a class about cell phone photography many years ago. And one of the things that I would have them do is, for a weekend, I would have my students not take photos on their phones or try not to and draw a picture on a post-it of everything that they had wanted to take a photo of. And it was always really entertaining because they would all put them up on the wall. And they would always be these really sort of amazingly trivial things that they feel sort of embarrassed writing out. So these are just kind of exercises again and sort of noticing you're noticing or just kind of stepping back from a habitual activity. I haven't really noticed any resistance to that. If anything, it seems like it's usually welcome.
Jenny Odell:
And I mean, the biggest thing I've noticed is that my students are just far more politically aware and active than when I started teaching. And so maybe for that reason too, they're sort of welcoming and open-minded in terms of the idea of stepping outside of the hamster wheel. I think it really appeals to them because they're hyper-aware of the situation that they're in. And the productivity culture at a place like Stanford. And I think they're thinking about that even while they're kind of caught up in it. So I've been grateful for how open-minded they are and my book is dedicated to them.
Britta Barrett:
And we always like to ask, What are you reading right now?
Jenny Odell:
So I am reading two things at the same time. I'm reading Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli. And it's about quantum gravity. But it's written for someone who knows nothing about physics. And I'm almost done with it. I'm really enjoying it. And it's probably clear from my book but I really sort of crave writing and art and experiences that make the world feel strange through and through. And this is definitely a book that will do that. And then I'm also reading H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Classic bird book, really beautiful. And I think just a really amazing example of nonfiction writing, it's incredibly poetic and the way it's composed is just really inspiring.
Britta Barrett:
And where can listeners find you online, when you are online?
Jenny Odell:
I guess, Twitter. I mean, I'm also on Instagram but I don't really spend a lot of time there. And I'm not super active. But I am on Twitter. And I also have a website which is just my name, jennyodell.com, that has my art projects and things like that on it.
Britta Barrett:
Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Jenny Odell:
Likewise. Thank you.
Britta Barrett:
Thanks for listening. You can find all the books mentioned in today's episodes in our show notes.
Emily Calkins:
The Desk Set is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, produced by Britta Barrett, and brought to you by the King County Library System.
Britta Barrett:
If you liked the show, be sure to subscribe rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Happy New Year and happy reading.
