Leah Libresco's Blog, page 2

My Favorite Books of 2024

A year very full of babies and book writing! I’m making a lot less progress through my planned reading than I hoped, but I think this might be the longest list of “favorite” reads to date. So not too bad a year. And my oldest is reading BOB books on her own, so one day soon she’ll have her own list of favorite (solo) reads.

As always, I’m listing books in chronological order to avoid picking favorites (with one exception + some thematic grouping). So, with no more ado, here are my favorite books I read (for the first time) in 2024:

THE POWER BROKER

by Robert Caro

I started reading The Power Broker at the hospital the night before my son was born. I finished just before I returned to work. Apologies to him if this means he grows up weird(er). I wrote a reflection on the book for Word on Fire.

It’s just a wonderful epic of New York, which moves easily across the years and back and forth between the scale of sprawling highways and the personal tragedies of New Yorkers (including Moses!). I took about a month of on and off reading long excerpts to my husband.

The Good Virus

by Tom Ireland

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time. I read this history of using bacteriophage viruses to defeat bacteria while… pregnant and recovering from a staph infection. “I wish I could go to Georgia [country] and just get injected full of weird viruses so I could get better,” I said feverishly to my husband.

I’m not saying you should do that, but some people with massively antibiotic resistant infection have and found healing. Phage therapy is fascinating and weird because you are setting two ambiguously alive things at war in your body. While drug development is about standardization, phage therapy is a matter of selectively breeding an antagonist to your disease.

The Country of the Blind

by Andrew Leland

A memoir of preparing to become completely blind due to degenerative illness. It wound up getting cited in my forthcoming The Dignity of Dependence (coming in the fall!) due to Leland’s fascinating discussion of ideological splits between using a guide dog or a cane. Does depending on a living being versus using a tool make someone more disabled (pejorative) in the judgement of the surrounding culture?

Motherhood on Ice

by Marcia C. Inhorn 

An ethnography of egg freezing! Well reported and more interested in truth seeking than in laying up ammunition for the culture war. One of those books you borrow from the library and order your own copy midway through chapter two. I drew on this book for my Lamp feature on infertility, IVF, and fairy tale bargains.

The Fund

by Rob Copeland

Ok, this book made my list because I’ve had a number of friends work at Bridgewater (the hedge fund profiled in this book) and I had a schadenfreudic experience reading. Here’s how I always described Bridgewater to others:

You know all those things that annoy you about office culture? The little lies everyone understands you have to tell? Bridgewater decided they weren’t going to have any of those normal problems and invented much more exotic problems.

Technically, I’d like to see more experiments with office culture, but Bridgewater devolved into lengthy, Maoist self-criticism sessions (taped and played for new recruits!) plus a side of sexual harassment.

(My other “I loved this more than you might” favorite read is Do I Know You? by Sadie Dingfelder. I just have no idea how this reads if you don’t, like me and the author, have prosopagnosia.)

Metaphysical Animals

by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

A group biography of Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley. Many wonderful historical details (like the lengths Anscombe went to to get away with teaching in trousers). But best as a portrait of philosophy as a fundamentally social activity. When we ask how to live (and how we know), we wind up asking how to live alongside others. Good to have philosophical friends who will offer comment on both your papers and your life.

How Buildings Learn

by Stewart Brand

I’m only seeing this listed used, and you’re going to want it in print, not as an e-copy. Brand offers detailed drawings of how building can be designed from the start to have room to flex and grow with the needs of their occupants. The object level details are fascinating, but floating above it is a guide on how to live with humility. Apply Brand’s guidance to your own life and you have a good middle way between a shrinking false humility that shirks the responsibility to build and a controlling pride that assumes your idea for now should stand forever. Genuinely an aid to prayer for me.

Origen’s Revenge

by Brian Patrick Mitchell

I read this on the recommendation of Mrs. Psmith, and I really enjoyed it as a mapping of Hebrew, Greek, and Christian thinking on male-female complementarity. How do you get away from the idea of women as slightly defective men? Or of maleness and femaleness just being shallow skins on generic humans? Acknowledging our differences quickly feels dangerous, because we have trouble trusting others to treat us fairly if we can’t demonstrate our sameness.

The Wrong Stuff / Reentry

by John Strausbaugh / by Eric Berger

Two stories of space programs that broke all the rules, outstripped their competitors, and launched rockets more cheaply than anyone felt possible. The Wrong Stuff is the story of the Soviets. Reentry is the story of SpaceX. You will have a real easy time telling which rocket you should be willing to board.

Both have a lot of outrageous approaches to problem solving you’ll want to read aloud to someone. Both are the story of space programs where failure was not an option, because the regime/Elon would kill you. But the Soviets, although brilliant at brute forcing solutions, are ultimately playing a game of keeping up appearances—never more so than when they tell cosmonauts in descent to deal with a warning light by covering it with tape. (They all die.)

SpaceX has remained tightly focused on scaffolding rockets that could take us to Mars and beyond. They’ve managed to continue to really care about the next step in that process, even when they’d built a successful company by other metrics. Sometimes, when I get stuck, I ask myself “What would I do if it really mattered that I solve this?” and, inevitably, new ideas present themselves (some out of proportion to the problem). SpaceX runs with that mentality all the time. If you’re going to read Reentry, read Liftoff first.

The Occasional Human Sacrifice

by Carl Elliott

A series of thoughtful profiles of people who blew the whistle on unethical medical practice (and blew up their lives in the process). The author (himself a whistleblower) is fascinated by the choiceless choice many of his subjects describe. Far from experiencing a moral dilemma, they saw only one path forward that they could go down and remain themselves. I was also interested in what forms of restitution, memorial, or simple apology followed exposure. (Not much!)

Lying for Money

by Dan Davies

A witty recounting of different forms of financial fraud. Fun enough on that front, but the deeper theme is that way fraud acts as a map of where we choose to/are forced to trust each other. Reminded me of A Burglar’s Guide to the City.

Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

Did you want to read a vividly detailed story of the collapse of reasoned quantification into paranoiac madness but you skipped over The Fund because you’ve never heard of Bridgewater? Spufford’s Red Plenty is a semi-fictional story of the failures of Soviet Central Planning. He draws deeply from the historical record and notes his departures at the back. You keep hoping things will take a turn for the truly fictional and swerve from the famine and pain coming.

Frostbite

by Nicola Twilley

Sort of a complement to the two preceding. Like Red Plenty it touches on the incredible chain of interlocking decisions that gets cheese from… (checks notes) massive underground refrigerated caves to my door. Like Lying for Money it’s the map of a war against creeping corrosion (fraud/rot). Really brings home how much everything you eat remains alive in some sense—it’s slowly dying not inertly resting.

The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

A very weird book and I liked it. A precocious boy goes looking for his father among a range of potential candidates is technically a plot description, but we’re a long way from Mamma Mia. Just jump in and remember, a real samurai will parry the blade.

Buried Deep

by Naomi Novik

The second fiction book on the list is Novik’s collection of short stories. (Particular favorites of mine were “Buried Deep,” “Seven,” Lord Dunsany’s Teapot,” and “Castle Coeurlieu.”) And of course, I love Spinning Silver which eventually grew out of the shorter telling here. Novik’s magic always has a shimmer of real magic. And she’s got a eucatastrophic bent that I deeply appreciate.

And if you’d like more, here’s my best of list from 2023.

The Power Broker’s Retreat from Reality

I spent my summer maternity leave reading The Power Broker (and taking care of the baby!). I was glad to get to write about Caro’s masterpiece for Word on Fire.

As Moses makes himself sovereign over parks, power plants, bridges, and housing, he unmakes his ability to steward what he has seized. He becomes both figuratively and literally deaf to the world. As his hearing deteriorates, he refuses to make any acknowledgement of his infirmity, and answers imagined questions rather than slow down to hear what is being said to him. As he circles the city in the back of his chauffeured car, he is unaware of how his multiplying roads have not solved New York City’s traffic snarls. There is a stark contrast between the imaginative empathy he had for the mother at the beach and his cultivated indifference to New York’s other commuters. 

What good is the power he successfully guarded for so many years when Moses loses his ability to apply it to the world as it actually is? When Moses is finally forced out, he is in agony in retirement. He draws up plans and makes calls to politicians that are never returned. He cannot abide living with his energy turned in on itself, with his days devoid of meetings and decisions. 

Read the rest at Word on Fire

Give Parents a Baby Bonus

At Deseret, I’m making the case for a baby bonus as fair and flexible help for parents and children.

A “baby bonus” is an effective way to provide support to more families with fewer complications. Every family has unique needs, and flexible assistance can help parents serve the best interests of their children in their particularity. For a worker with only guaranteed unpaid FMLA leave after the birth of a child, a baby bonus can act as paid family leave. For another family, it could help defray the costs of converting a guest room for a grandmother to stay long term to help older kids adjust to a new baby. In another family’s case, a baby bonus might cover additional childcare for an older child while the mother is hospitalized to reduce the risk of a preterm delivery. The best family support allows parents to make the decisions that are best for their specific circumstances.

Read the rest at Deseret

Don’t Ask AI to Draw God

I’m at Word on Fire making the case against AI-created devotional art.

Each of the children’s books on our “God shelf” has a human hand, heart, and intellect behind it. Each book grew out of the love the author and illustrator had for God, for beauty, and for the little readers to come. Thinking about the work of artists as subcreators and communicators of love will, I hope, offer my children an inoculation against the AI art they encounter in the future. No matter how pleasing the output looks, AI-generated art cannot be offered in love and is not the fruit of contemplation.  

Even my own art exceeds AI slop in this respect. When I tried to draw a lion for my eldest daughter, it was, without question, worse than an image she might find elsewhere. (In fact, she burst into angry tears at how bad it was.) But it was unquestionably offered out of love for her, personally. Drawing it forced me to think harder about what a lion was, and then to meditate on how very, very short I fell of God’s grandeur in making it. 

Read the rest at Word on Fire…

I’ve got a plug for my husband’s book Saintly Adventures in the piece, and I’d also like to specifically praise John Herreid, whose The Catholic Home Art Gallery celebrates living devotional artists. And the book has perforated pages so you can tear out the prints and put them right up!

Colleges Must Offer Formation, Not Amenities

Colleges donors are starting public fights with college administrators. At Deseret, I argue that’s a good thing. Colleges should be contested spaces—they need to offer values-informed formation, not a generic education.

It will be tempting for schools to keep spending on extraneous amenities to capture students, especially if they see them primarily as customers, not learners. Adding a lazy river or a climbing wall adds to the college experience without clarifying or serving the college’s mission. When the enrollment cliff comes, schools that compete on the basis of amenities will be stuck in a Red Queen race — where schools keep spending and spending, just to stay in the same place. That may lead schools feeling more beholden to donors, as they compete on what they can buy for their students. But the schools that make it through the crunch will be those with a stronger claim about what they offer.  

The schools that survive the enrollment collapse won’t be the ones with the most tricked-out theme parks, nor will they be academically excellent in a generic way. The surviving schools will have made a strong choice about their school’s identity and aims and will be prepared to cultivate or turn away donors accordingly. 

Read the rest at Deseret

Books I Hope to Read in 2024

Last year, I read all the books I put on my to-read list! (I last accomplished this feat in 2020, when I had a baby… and a pandemic).

Overall, my reading has suffered the predictable consequences of having two children (and not counting all the bedtime picture books). I read 88 books and a little over 26k words, about on par with last year… a long way from 172 books the year before my first daughter was born. Only one pre-1900 book: George Eliot’s Silas Marner.

I like this making this list because it helps me give myself permission to prioritize these books over other articles, magazines, and new releases. And, as always, my list is limited to books I already own at the beginning of the year.

Perhaps giddy with last year’s victory (and ignoring two secret projects in project), I’m adding two ambitious books to this year’s list: a series of essays by Daniel Tammet in French (it’s not available in English) and THE POWER BROKER. You tell me which is more foolhardy.

Here they are, alphabetically by author, except for Caro, balanced on top of the stack.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World  by Ran Abramitzky The Concept of Woman, Volume 3: The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015 by Sr. Prudence Allen The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female by Brian Patrick Mitchell Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective by Henri J. M. Nouwen The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa Fragments de Paradis by Daniel Tammet Encounters with Euclid: How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World by Benjamin Wardhaugh

My Favorite Books of 2023

It’s been a turbulent but mostly good year, with some pileups of new projects, two sisters old enough to play together, and a new job on the horizon for the new year. No novels on my best of the year list, which makes me a little sad, but a lot that I enjoyed on the non-fiction side!

These are my favorite books I read for the first time in 2023, listed in chronological order (with one exception).

The exception is my favorite book tout court from 2023

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America by Paul Kix

I’ve been the person to clarify that Rosa Parks didn’t make a spontaneous choice to sit in the “white only” section of the bus and that she didn’t refuse to move because she was tired. She was an activist, deliberately engaging in planned civil disobedience.

In Kix’s day-by-day chronicle, he explore the many behind the scenes choices and setbacks when King went to Birmingham and faced down Bull Connor. I appreciate books like this that show the density of history, especially history that gets quickly summarized as though the triumph of non-violent resistance was inevitable.

It’s particularly notable how much King’s pattern of non-violent resistance depended on being met with violence. His attempts to organize fizzled in some cities where the mayors and police never sent out the dogs or the water cannons—one even reverently removed his hat before arresting King, to defuse his protests with a show of respect. A great deal of the Birmingham strategy depended on finding people who were willing to be beaten bloody and the moral question of whether to allow children to put their bodies on the line for freedom.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

I put off reading this for a while because so many people had recommended it so strongly, and sometimes this puts me off—it feels like I’ll let friends down if I don’t like it. But it was splendid. The book is about senses animals possess that we don’t share, and one of my favorite running themes was the methodological puzzle of how to make sure you’re varying something that you can’t yourself perceive directly.

It’s one thing to tape and play back audible bird calls, but in a particularly vivid and low-tech example, scientists observing elephants would wait for them to pee, then move in with shovels, a wheelbarrow, a truck to move the peed-on dirt somewhere else where a new elephant would encounter it and they could see how it responded to whatever message it might convey.

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equit y by Claudia Goldin

I read this earlier in the year, before Goldin won her Nobel in economics, which left me thrilled by the news. Her book for laypeople on the economics that shape women’s involvement in the spheres of work and home was fascinating, and I drew on it for an essay at Deseret.

Greedy jobs lose their teeth when the work becomes genericized. If different workers can be treated as interchangeable by clients and employers, the pay goes down, but the pressure for the job to be totalizing also eases off. […] I closed the book with a bigger, unresolved question about balancing life at home and on the job. It seems like the easiest way to safeguard room to be a person at home is to accept being a widget at work. 

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

This was probably the weirdest book I read this year. It’s listed as a biography, but it felt like it went beyond the genre. Rundell engages deeply with history, theology, and philosophy while exploring the life of poet, minister, and sometimes scandal-causer John Donne. I knew several of his poems without knowing anything about the man, and this was an electric read.

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka / Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care by Ilana Yurkiewicz

I’m grouping these two, because both are by women who look at painfully broken systems and respond to them with compassion. Both Pahlka and Yurkiwicz are attentive to the way government and medicine can fail the most vulnerable, and the moral injury that inflicts on the people working for or administering the tottering system.

I reviewed Recoding America for Deseret and Fragmented for National Review.

How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Bark to Leaves by Tristan Gooley

I read this because of Mrs. Psmith’s review, and it’s enriched my biking and walking around my neighborhood. (It also answered “Why is the tree out front sending up all those spindly mini-tree-shoots?”) It meant when I walk, I have questions in mind and a reason to look once, twice, three times at a tree, to see what story it tells about the history of this space.

(Don’t read this mom!)

This is the book from the list that I’m wrapping to give someone else at Christmas.

And if you’re interested, this was my best-of list for 2022.

Making Repair Beautiful

When Plough announced an issue themed around repair, I knew I wanted to interview Grace Russo about her practice of visible mending.

When Russo began repairing her clothes, it changed what kinds of new clothes she wanted to buy. When she looked at something on the rack or at a thrift store, she didn’t just consider how the outfit looked then, but how it would change as it aged and weakened. What kind of mending would it need and what kind of repairs could it support?

She looked for thicker cotton fabrics that could stand up to strong stitches. She avoided clothes made of stretchier synthetic fabrics – she didn’t like the idea of wearing petroleum products, but more than that, they didn’t take repairs gracefully. She even wound up checking online reviews of clothes to see what kind of seam was hidden inside a dress before ordering it. A straight stitch in a stretchy maternity outfit was much more likely to rip than a zigzag.

As she looked at each seam, imagining how she might one day pass it back through a machine, she had a stronger sense of the hands that had already guided it, inch by inch, into its present form. Until she took up sewing herself, Russo imagined that a lot of clothes manufacturing was automated in the ways spinning thread had been. But there are almost no sewing machines that work alone. The needle is pumped up and down by a motor, but human hands guide the cloth around its turns. There is nothing woven that we put on our bodies that hasn’t passed through someone’s hands, usually half a world away.

Read the rest at Plough

The Gospel Comes with a Children’s Potty

I made my Christianity Today debut to argue that churches should welcome children by design… and that means building child sized toilets into their bathrooms.

I can see how much easier it is for her to use the child-sized, real-plumbing toilets at her school, but we don’t have the same option at church or at home. It’s made me take a speculative look at the bathroom in our house, wondering what it would cost to install one and how many children I’d need to have for it to be “worth it.” I’ve seen grab bars for stability in other families’ bathrooms, even when no one in their home is currently injured or elderly, and I think a small toilet would be a similar sign of welcome. A hospitable home is one that can accommodate a variety of guests, with a range of bodily abilities and needs.

After her preschool, church is the most child-dense place my three-year-old goes. And a church will keep hosting children for as long as it’s open, while I expect I’d have to remove a child-sized toilet from my home if we decided to sell. We’re happy to have a lively, family-filled parish that’s very welcoming of children’s joy (and their noise). So if there’s no accommodation here, why not?

Read the rest at Christianity Today

Putting a Price on “Unpaid Work”

At Deseret, I responded to Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s After Work: The Fight for Free Time, and its thought-provoking ideas about how to value “unpaid work.”

Labor-saving innovations don’t make as much sense when the work process is valuable, not just the output. When work is evaluated for the formation it gives us, it’s easier to differentiate drudgery from laborious but humane work. As Jon Askonas notes in “Why Conservatism Failed,” his essay on technology and tradition for Compact magazine, technology is the most corrosive when it breaks the chain of apprenticeship to mastery. It’s easy (and usually cheap) to outsource entry-level work to computers or off-shore workers, but, as Askonas observes, “these technologies knock out the bottom rungs of skilled practice that allow for the development of mastery in the first place.”

Parenting is one of these kinds of work. Caring for a child obviously means shepherding a child along his or her own progression toward mastery — of the body, of emotions, of conscience. But the parent often goes on a parallel journey.

Read the rest at Deseret