Tag Archives: reading

April 4, 2026 · 12:51 am

A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck; or, what is wrong with me

There must be something funny in my subconscious that it just keeps picking books about marriage, or divorce, or the complications of marriage or or – but it’s not that I’m seeking these books out. More that the ones that find might right now are… all of a theme. Call it the universe helping me work through it all.

Anyway, Sophie Elmhirt’s non-fiction A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck follows Maurice and Marilyn on their ill-fated sailing trip from one place to another (exact locations are used in the book, but dear reader, this writer does not care enough to look them up).

Before they set out on the journey we figure out the married couple are odd. Odd as individuals; odd as a couple. They decide to sell their house, built a boat over a few years and dedicate their lives to living at sea. Odd as it is to imagine doing such a thing yourself, odder still (to this reader anyway) that fate or fortune would bring together two people so similarly devoted.

But so goes the world, and so goes Maurice and Marilyn off to sea. ONLY TO BE SHIPWRECKED (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the title) when a whale bashes up their boat. Honestly many reviews make much of this whale (maybe for the improbability of it?) but the whale did not feature heavily in my read of it, so much as the absolute nuttiness of them having set out without a radio (for the purity!) and working flares (just…. oops).

Of course we know the whole time that things must work out mostly okay because they survive to tell the tale (or at least that was my comfortable read of it until A. suggested that perhaps it was written posthumously based on journal entires and so I spent the rest of the book in gasping suspense worried they’d be eaten by a shark, or let’s be honest, starve/die of dyhydration/exposure etc).

I’ll give you the same gift of suspense and not tell you for sure, except to say that by and large the best parts of the book were not about shipwreck or (possible) survival, but instead were about how these two managed not to eat one another alive (and I don’t mean literally) in the torment of being alone at sea.

I’ve heard – though I am an unreliable narrator on this point – that marriage can be tough and requires Some Work to make it through. One can only guess the kind of fortitude being married while dying at sea requires. Actually, you don’t need to guess. You can read this gripping and engaging book and be reminded – and don’t we all need the reminder right now – of how much hope and love alone can accomplish.

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February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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February 13, 2026 · 12:45 am

Careless People: Lessons in Narration

Sarah Wynn-Williams used to be the director of public policy at Facebook. She got fired and then wrote a book about her experience working at Facebook and with the senior executives there. She doesn’t think much of the people or the organization – offering many scenes of casual and direct cruelty, indifference and pursuit of profit above all else. Yes, Careless People is a gentle title for the memoir – could have been titled ‘Cruel People,’ or ‘These Fucking Assholes’ or something similar.

And Wynn-Williams gives lots of scenes that support this characterization. Moments where executives knew about harm decisions (or indecision) might cause to whole countries (let alone people) and did nothing. This idea of “they did nothing” is a repeated one by Wynn-Williams – she, the Cassandra calling out the disaster, only to be assiduously ignored. Convinced – or at least claiming to be convinced in the memoir – that the best way to change the company was to do so from the inside.

It’s a bit hard to believe that there wasn’t the tiniest bit of self-interest fuelling Wynn-Williams. Just the tiniest. Like whatever salary she was making played no role in staying on? Like she wasn’t willing and able to let go some of the agonized changes she was trying to make to preserve democracies or to prevent crime or whatever whatever

And I’m prepared to believe Zuckerberg and Sanders are as bad as Wynn-Williams makes them out to be, but in reading it I couldn’t help but wonder (suspect?) that no small part of this book was a desire to exact revenge. Like some of it just read as… vindictive? Even if it was accurate?

Anyway, it made the whole thing read like an exercise in trying to parse what is unreliable narrator and what is accurate. But even with that layer of skepticism, the book is engrossing in its outrage for the callousness, or “carelessness” of the Facebook folks.

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December 28, 2025 · 11:57 pm

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.

It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.

The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.

Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.

So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.

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