Journalist Vera Shengelia about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, a journalist, an activist in the field of protecting the rights of people with mental disabilities, trustee of the Foundation “Life Path” Vera Shengelia shares her stories about favorite books.
I can say that my husband Ilya Venyavkin and my girlfriend, a writer and journalist Masha Gessen taught me to read. It seems to me that before meeting them (and they appeared in my life at about the same time) I didn’t open non-fiction. Before that I read a lot, but very strange.
My parents were the first generation of Soviet technical intelligentsia, so we didn’t have any samizdat at home or any “The Road Goes into the Distance” - we didn’t even write “Foreign Literature” and “New World”, and mom and dad like Something especially did not advise me and did not slip. I just took books on the shelves - most of all there were volumes of the Gorky “World Library” - or went to the school library. So, in childhood and early adolescence, I read all the programming classics. At the same time, the memories of reading this period are always approximately as follows: here I come after school, take out a huge volume of the book “Pioneers-Heroes” - there is an apocryphal about each and a color photo under a piece of tracing paper - and I read it for the hundredth time. Thievishly, because I felt that this, as I would say now, is guilty pleasure. Or here I am going to school on the subway, go an hour, and all this hour I read "And dawns are quiet here" or "The lists do not appear" and sob.
As I recently understood, the lessons of literature replaced my lessons of ethics. Sonechka Marmeladova and Pierre Bezukhov, for example, have always been for me not characters, but some sort of neighbors, or distant relatives; I did not know how to think about the structure of the text, drama, psychology - I simply empathized with the heroes. So, I still have a very strange relationship with fiction. When at the end of the year somewhere they publish a list of the most important novels, it turns out that I read them all: the last Franzen, and some Little Life, and Shchegla, and Stoner, and the Favorite Women and Telluria. "
At the same time, according to the list of fiction, which I read during the year, I can always understand how much I have become more unhappy, and according to the non-fiction list, on the contrary, how much happier. With non-fiction it turned out like this. I am very poorly educated. In the sense that I have no higher education and for a very long time I had no idea about the coherent history of the world, science and knowledge. I started working early as a reporter - first a little at Kommersant, then at Newsweek, so instead of university and consistent knowledge I had a new text every week, a new area of interest, access to any expert in any field, the skill to ask questions .
I remember well how I became fascinated by what now constitutes a huge part of my life - human rights issues with mental disorders. I once told my husband (he is a historian of the culture of the Great Terror): "Surprisingly, after all, why did gastroenterology, for example, not become such a powerful tool in the hands of the state, and psychiatry did?" My husband asked me very carefully: "Did you read The History of Madness in the Classical Era?" Maybe I am mistaken, but it seems that from that moment our endless conversation began about a person and a state, a person and terror, a person and history. And then a tradition appeared that I did not read either Yurchak, Khlevnyuk, or Etkind: Ilya reads all this and retells me carefully. And I retell Judith Butler, books and texts about dignity, emotions, the anthropology of pain, vulnerability. This is such a conditional division: somewhere on the books of Svetlana Boim we converge, and we read something both.
We met Masha Gessen at her dacha, she very simply spoke about the operation to remove the breast, which she had recently undergone. Then I found out that Masha wrote about this book "Blood Matters: From the BRCA1 to Designer Babies,". I immediately read this book and was completely amazed how in the development space of a single topic can be linked and the questions that ask modern genetics, and questions of historical memory, and questions of identity, and reasoning about the boundaries of our body, its acceptance and perception and influence on us. As a book about, relatively speaking, new research can be at the same time and still so personal.
Since then, for many years now we have been in a continuous dialogue, where Masha wrote me about Hannah Arendt, and I told her about narrative psychotherapy, she told me about studies of the midlife crisis, and I told her about the demographic consequences of the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign; and about memory, and about Prigov, and about Yesenin-Volpin, about migrants and about dissidents; this is how we analyze concepts to the people of which they are composed and, conversely, we enter small human actions into the framework of large sociological theories.
It seems to me that Hessen and my husband taught me what a person is usually taught much earlier at the university. Understanding that everything around is not scattered shit and sticks, but one big culture, which we also took out of our heads. Spending two days reading one book, two studies, four articles and a dozen blog posts about the effects of AHA acids on acne is just as interesting as spending the same effort to figure out why the world there was an anti-psychiatric movement, but not in Russia.
Since then, I read a lot and very obsessively. I procrastinate, for example, in this way. So, for work, I need to find something about anthropologist Don Kulik, who wrote one of my favorite books "Loneliness and its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement" about the sexuality of people with disabilities and how it is different they are perceived in two social states: Sweden and Denmark. Accidentally I come across his own book "Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes", Kulik is an anthropologist, and this is his study of transgender prostitution in Brazil. I climb on Amazon, read the description and table of contents, right there I see the book "Third Gender", also an anthropological study about the culture of the Icebreakers in Thailand, again I read the description, table of contents, add it all to the basket, I dream, how someday I will read it all. So my list is not my favorite books, and not the best, and not the most important, and not the very first, but simply, let's say, very interesting (like dozens of others in my Kindle).
Elün Sacks
"The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness"
Elin Sachs is a law professor who graduated from Oxford and Yale. However, since adolescence, she lives with schizophrenia. One day, she comes to some kind of cool and important interview and realizes that she doesn’t hear anything from what she is told: simply because she hasn’t been able to take a shower for the last six months, and she has terrible traffic jams in her ears. This is one of the most important books for me - about stigmatization of people with mental diagnoses, about their struggle for themselves and their rights, about how the norm changed on two continents, in Europe and America, and how different these processes were.
JOAN DIDION
"The Year of Magical Thinking"
Here, probably, nothing even needs to be explained. For anyone who believes that there is nothing more important in the world than an equal, friendly, based on sharing and thinking marriage, this is a very important and very scary book. Joan Didion dies husband, writer John Dunn, and she describes the first year of life without him, or rather - with him, but without him.
Masha Hessen
"The Words Will Break Cement", "Two Babushkas", "Perfect Rigour" and other books
Of course, I read all the Machines of the book, I have them all, all with some touching inscription. I like to observe how the outstanding reporter skills of Hesse - to find everyone, talk to everyone, get there everywhere - flow smoothly into her outstanding writers: interesting to tell, conceptualize, find answers to great questions. A special thrill is that Hesse herself in her books is always a lot: her personal experience, her honest questions to herself, her perceptions, her directness. Last week, the last Machine book, which I haven’t read yet, "The Future of History Reclaimed Russia" hit the longlist of the National Book Awards - it will be released in October, I’m really looking forward to it.
Malcolm Gladwell
"Geniuses and outsiders. Why is everything one and all nothing to others?"
I chose this book just for example, with the same success there could have been "David and Goliath" and "Illumination". It seems to me not to mention Gladwell, if you like non-fiction, it would be strange. It is a pity that such books are not written in Russian at all and such an approach is not used. I like this very journalistic device - ask the right question. And what is all talent? What distinguishes an outstanding baseball player from the private? What is the secret of the popularity of the Beatles? Gladwell first asks good questions, and then follows the answers to very different people: to the parents of violinists, baseball players' coaches, scientists, and marketers. He sometimes finds the answer, and sometimes not, but the search path itself is always very fun to go along with it.
Charles Duhigg
"The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business"
I read this book as a book about what I can do if I want. Get up at seven, run every morning, do not eat cupcakes, read every day for three hours, and everything like that. Dahigg tells how a person’s habits are formed and how habits can naturally change the world. There is a heartbreaking moment about a woman whom no one has fallen in love with because she worked with possums. And a great story about how no one brushed his teeth, until they began to add this component to the paste, giving a feeling of freshness.
Karen Pryor
"Carriers of the wind"
In the late sixties, Pryor and her husband discovered something like an aquarium in Hawaii. They have both investors and dolphins for performances - there are not only trainers. Pryor gets abstracts of Skinner's research into her hands, and now, guided only by them, she practically begins to prepare a show with dolphins without any experience. In fact, this is a book about operant learning - about a method of training in which the animal is only encouraged and never punished. And in fact, it is about the development of science, and about Skinner, and about the Nobel laureate Conrad Lorenz, and about the training systems, and about the sixties of America. At one time I literally went crazy with this book and from the ideas of operant learning, I even went to the neighbors to train their goat.
Yong Zhang
"Wild Swans"
It seems to me that this is an ideal book for a person who asks the question "how can I understand something about the Chinese" and does not know where to start. This is the autobiography of Yun Zhang and at the same time the story of three generations of women of her family. Grandma Yun Zhang is a concubine who bandages her legs, her mother lives as the Communist Party becomes established, Yun Zhang herself goes through a cultural revolution and Mao’s personality cult, and eventually goes to the UK, marries a British historian, gets a degree and becomes a famous writer and historian. She fell into my hands at the moment when I thought a lot about the fear of the state and what the fact of being a woman with this fear does. She answers many questions about this and does it without a chin.
Rebecca Skloot
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"
This is the perfect non-fiction pattern of my favorite type. This is a book about human history at the same time — the family history of Henrietta Lax, an African-American woman who lived in the 1950s in a very poor family and died of cancer. It is about the history of medicine - because Lax tumor cells have become the material for dozens of studies. She and about the change of ethical principles - Lax cells were used without her consent and knowledge, and there were also many problems with this. It reads like a drama, a detective story, and a production novel at the same time.
Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe
"A Matter of Life. The Story of IVF - a Medical Breakthrough"
This book is absolutely irrational love. It is small, wildly simple, without any dramaturgical or stylistic frills. Just the memories of Nobel laureate Robert Edwards and his partner Patrick Steptow about how they invented IVF and how their first children conceived "in a test tube" were born. Little story of the greatest invention of the XX century.
Hisham matar
"The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between"
I read this book quite recently and now I try to advise everyone. This is the autobiography of Hisham Matar - American writer, teacher of philology, who was born in Libya. His father was all his life in opposition to Gaddafi and disappeared somewhere in one of the dictator's prisons. Hisham Matar goes home after the fall of the Gaddafi regime and tries to understand what kind of person his father was. It seems to me that I have not read such tender books for a long time.