Alone Together: The Magic of Shared Reading—Part 2
The Ink Book Club calls itself Democracy in Action. From their web site:
Why a democracy book club? Thomas Jefferson may never actually have written that “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” but the NEA’s 2004 Reading at Risk report did come out and say that “a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy.”
We endorse that position wholeheartedly, and we’re taking that as our starting point. But while building democracy is a big part of the reason we read newsletters like this one, it’s only part of the reason we read overall. Books are paths to understanding ourselves and others, and to understanding the world, and they can also be a balm in troubled times.
Eclectic as my reading fare tends to be, I probably would not have picked up, of my own accord, the book they selected for discussion. It’s Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an argument for a politics of abundance as opposed to one of scarcity. But since Anand Giridharadas was suggesting it, I figured I’d give it a try. I’d really enjoyed his India Calling, part family memoir, part travelogue, and I like the posts on The Ink! Substack, so I picked up a copy and got to work.
I tried to read with the book rather than against it, wanting not to argue with it from the outset. I really appreciated the historical anecdotes the authors used to support their position that the United States is experiencing a crisis of scarcity—not enough housing, not enough workers, not enough clean energy, just not enough. They suggest that this is the result of decades of a scarcity mentality taking hold, so that one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations imposed on urban areas make building impossible, they argue, so it’s time to face up to what caused today’s scarcities and start building.
It’s a persuasive argument, and yes, the book was written before the present anti-administrative and recklessly anti-regulatory regime took office in Washington. So it was easy for me to agree with Bill McKibben when Klein and Thompson quote him:
“In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it's possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky – a great ball of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the Earth, driving winds whose energy can now be harnessed with great efficiency by turbines. The electricity they produce can warm and cool our homes, cook our food, and power our cars and bikes and buses. The sun burns, so we don't need to.”
I found other passages I agreed with, and much that informed me. Then I reread the book, this time in argumentative mode.
On the surface, it looks as if we can build our way out of the crisis we’re in—but arguing for deregulation at this moment felt terribly mistimed. I couldn’t read this book and ignore today’s conditions. If it weren’t for 47’s bungling tariff measures, the US might still have an economy that’s the envy of the world, yet its benefits have been felt increasingly inequitably for decades. That gap and its dangerous growth, have led in part to the installation of an aspirational dictator in the White House. Imagining an abundant future, especially with the climate crisis in mind, felt beside the point.
Oh, and things like the gun epidemic and stagnating life expectancy (which Abundance co-author Derek Thompson has actually written about elsewhere) don’t exactly fit into an abundance paradigm. And note that the book makes a villain out of regulation, while 47 is trying to unravel regulations that protect air and water and provide vaccines against childhood disease.
“I have to admit that this book really made me think. And rethink. It forced me to try and imagine the future. I’ve had trouble doing that lately, and a children’s writer must, or else, why write? ”
It struck me that it’s not enough to grow infrastructure. We have to also grow community. Writing, this solitary business, may seem completely antithetical to that objective, but it’s not. One reader at a time, we grow a community of the mind. I know this from kids and their parents who write to me, from librarians I speak to, from teachers and principals who have picked my books for shared reading in their classrooms and schools. Reading Abundance against the grain of its text, I was reminded of that.
I have to admit that this book really made me think. And rethink. It forced me to try and imagine the future. I’ve had trouble doing that lately, and a children’s writer must, or else, why write? I’ve been so angry about so much that 47 and his ilk have unleashed south of the 49th parallel. What this book helped me see is that anger gets in the way of imagination. And witnessing other people struggling as I was with some of these complicated ideas—that was really useful.
