Seeing as Labor. Or, What Exactly Do Cows Have to Do With Science?
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Image Credit: luca-bravo I started reading Maaza Mengiste’s novel, The Shadow King, almost immediately the package arrived from Amazon—the book still, (strangely), fresh with the smell of print and damp paper, and something else that whiffs to my nose but which I would never get to decipher until the book has lost its bookish-ness: the smell gone, the crisp edges now folded and blunt. All these needless details by which I mean to say that I read the book—am reading the book, will continue to visit this book—so thoroughly, if anything, so that the writer in me can inhabit its spirit of history, the weaving of its details, the impeccable structure that binds the storytelling. And, of course! The sentences, so lush and generous. Now, this: I hold the book with a sense of mild fascination, not because I am enjoying it so, but because the first time I tried to read it, having downloaded the preview on Apple books, I had found the prose spurious and dense, the page weighed down with a cluster of loud and meaningless details—the kind of book I would typically describe as…too much! And yes, it felt too much at the time. A lot of too much, actually. So, that on a Sunday evening, fresh out of a flight, it seemed ridiculous that I would have a sudden ‘knowing’ that I had to read the book.
Seeing as Labor. Or, What Exactly Do Cows Have to Do With Science?
Seeing as Labor. Or, What Exactly Do Cows…
Seeing as Labor. Or, What Exactly Do Cows Have to Do With Science?
Image Credit: luca-bravo I started reading Maaza Mengiste’s novel, The Shadow King, almost immediately the package arrived from Amazon—the book still, (strangely), fresh with the smell of print and damp paper, and something else that whiffs to my nose but which I would never get to decipher until the book has lost its bookish-ness: the smell gone, the crisp edges now folded and blunt. All these needless details by which I mean to say that I read the book—am reading the book, will continue to visit this book—so thoroughly, if anything, so that the writer in me can inhabit its spirit of history, the weaving of its details, the impeccable structure that binds the storytelling. And, of course! The sentences, so lush and generous. Now, this: I hold the book with a sense of mild fascination, not because I am enjoying it so, but because the first time I tried to read it, having downloaded the preview on Apple books, I had found the prose spurious and dense, the page weighed down with a cluster of loud and meaningless details—the kind of book I would typically describe as…too much! And yes, it felt too much at the time. A lot of too much, actually. So, that on a Sunday evening, fresh out of a flight, it seemed ridiculous that I would have a sudden ‘knowing’ that I had to read the book.