Quick Recs - 7/7/202

“Eureka!”

Fated to always be on the outside looking in, I nonetheless read Poetry. This one by Jessica Abughattas in the July/August 2024 volume spoke to me. That said, it’s not published to the web site yet, so I can’t link. When it becomes available in the archive, I’ll add the link and delete this delightful explanation of why I posted a rec for a poem only folks who subscribe to or but Poetry can read.

“Are We Doomed?”

In this article from the June 10. 2024 edition of The New Yorker, Rivka Galchen discusses the course of the same name taught by astrophysicist David Holz and computational scientist and socialist James Evans at my old stomping grounds, the University of Chicago. It almost made me want to go back to school . . . almost.

Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World

Gillian Gill’s 2019 book on Woolf’s mother and aunts and grandmothers and great aunts and other assorted family and near family members—and some men, both related and not—who directly or indirectly influenced the author. All biography, thanks to its inevitable remove from its subject, necessarily includes authorial inference and interpretation, but some of Gill’s conclusions wander a bit too deeply into the thicket of speculation for me to feel sanguine about them. I understand a “just the facts, ma’am” approach doesn’t make for a fun read, but sometimes the book feels more like a gossip fest (particularly “Part V - A Tale of Two Sisters”) than a text based in other texts—which, sadly, is, along with some photos and a recording or two, all that we have left of Ms. Woolf, her Bloomsbury contemporaries and any family members who actually knew her. Still, if you’re a Woolf completist, the family history alone makes it worth the read as Gill throws some light—and some serious shade—on the menagerie of family members Woolf was shaped by and, ultimately, transcended.