The spirit is a stomach

I can’t recall if it’s either in Zarathustra or Beyond Good And Evil where Nietzsche writes that the spirit is a stomach. It’s so true, and we really are what we eat. These days algorithms are our dieticians, telling us what to read, listen, and experience. Social media is the MacDonalds of the soul. Lately I’ve been reading mostly politics and news articles. I crave different books, so I thought this was a good opportunity for me to shut up for once, and experiment with a different kind of post.

Across the city you find these neighborhood libraries where people donate and exchange books. I often think of the stories attached to these volumes, some discarded, others gifted, some orphaned there as folks leave the city because of affordability, perhaps their households broke up, or they started families and moved to the suburbs. Maybe they simply encountered the street library on a walk, raided it, and then returned to enrich it themselves. I’ve gotten very good reads from the little orphanages. Sometimes you find penciled dates and dedications on the first pages. You find creases marking passages that the reader thought were particularly important, you find underlines, notes on the margins. (Valeria Luiselli in Papeles Falsos eloquently likens the intimacy of marking a book to "bed sheets after making love." Her novel Lost Children Archive tells the story of the formation and then disintegration of a family through the books and art that defined those years of their lives. It’s such an aching and necessary story, fit for our brokenhearted times. But I digress!)

I want to widen my readings and be exposed to topics I wouldn’t have come across on my own. Therefore I’ve decided we can build a virtual version of these neighborhood libraries.

Thistle readers are welcome to send me the titles or covers of books they think are important, they think should be read, perhaps are reading at the moment, read long ago and loved, books you may think are underappreciated–really anything you feel is worth sharing. This software has a decent image viewer, which I'll use to compile all the covers and publish them a fortnight from today. To participate subscribers may simply answer this email, or contact me through Insta, Mastodon, or Bluesky.

Happy readings, everyone.