Take Your Book Outside
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
When I went outside to read yesterday, the first thing I noticed was the sun on my face. I welcomed it, then wondered, Do I have sunscreen? Then I asked myself if I should have used the bathroom before heading to the park. I made it to a bench and opened my book just as a bold, chittering group of sparrows swooped down from a nearby perch; I watched them jostle one another. Then I set myself to my task: I wanted to make progress on an advance copy of a new memoir, but Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice was also in my bag, and I had Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept loaded on my e-reader—plus I knew I had just a couple of chapters left in Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl. When I was a few pages into the memoir, a carpenter bee started making lazy laps around me. A leaf drifted onto my head; the light forced me to squint, then dig through my bag for my sunglasses. A cowbird joined the sparrows; the chirping competed with the hum of air-conditioning units. Chapter break: I looked up and a very happy dog was playing fetch in a park specifically marked as not a dog park, and I smiled to myself. A tiny red bug crawled across my phone; boat horns from the nearby Potomac rang out; planes soared overhead. I admired the blooming wisteria, then violently sneezed.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section:
In the midst of the chattering and barking, the heat prickling my skin and the wind blowing my hair in my face, what did I gain? Certainly not an optimized reading experience. At the office, I could dispel distractions with a quick trip to the bathroom or water-bottle station; automatic curtains would block the bright sun. But I agree with Bekah Waalkes, who wrote for The Atlantic this week that some books just make 'a case for leaving your reading nook and getting out into the world.' It's important to savor pleasant days while they're here, she notes. Outdoor reading is not always idyllic; I was up against pollen, bugs, and the looming threat of bird poop. But it can be sublime.
And, in fact, the many distractions forced me to marshal my attention. I pushed myself into a unique state of focus, actively choosing each paragraph over everything that was happening around me. Every page I finished was an achievement, and the author's words floated in my head, on top of the pleasant mix of noises, smells, and breeze. When my mind slipped off the page, I barely cared. My memories of the chapters I read are now tied together with images of the world's natural rhythms: unfurling irises, creeping spiders, the flowing river—and periodically, an unexpected, uncontrollable sneeze.
Six Books You'll Want to Read Outdoors
By Bekah Waalkes
Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long.
Read the full article.
What to Read
Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones
'You're not crazy to me,' one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. 'You're daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.' That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones's sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart. — Rhian Sasseen
Out Next Week
📚 Second Life, by Amanda Hess
📚 Little Bosses Everywhere, by Bridget Read
📚 Old School Indian, by Aaron John Curtis
Your Weekend Read
Does Anyone Still Hitchhike?
By Andrew Fedorov
But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I've caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who's spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It's a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you're at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you're not alone.
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While men do hang out, it never gets too chatty. Freid explains that gossip feels 'messy' and, even something as simple as being curious about a story or a rumor could be construed as stirring the pot (men, he says, do not want to be seen as pot-stirrers). It's not that straight men are inherently bad at gossip, it's that they won't allow themselves to openly partake in or enjoy it. 'I don't think guys are really allowed to be messy and still have social credibility,' Freid says. Kelsey McKinney, the author of You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip and the founding host of the Normal Gossip podcast, sees this fear from men, too. 'Straight men seem to have the perception that gossip isn't talking about other people,' McKinney says. 'Gossip, to them, is a tone of voice that they avoid at all costs.' Gossip Girl (starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester) was a TV show about popular teens terrorized by a secret, anonymous online gossip (who turned out to be a guy named Dan Humphries). The CW This attitude grows out from a misogynistic idea that gossip is a negative thing that women do, something Robbins, the social scientist, considered during her research. 'There's a stereotype that women [negatively] gossip more than men, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence for that,' Robbins tells Vox. 'And I feel like having the stereotype that women gossip more than men, you know, serves to keep them in their place, right?' Robbins believes that social skills are valuable, and being able to discuss social topics is a necessary piece of that puzzle. Yet historically, those abilities haven't always been prized. Dismissing all social talk as gossip was a way to dismiss the women who possess those talents. Now, so many men see gossip as unbecoming as well as unmanly, they don't allow themselves to really relish the juicy morsels, nor do they tease out the savory bits. Curiously, Freid is the co-host of the Betches media-produced podcast U Up? It's a show devoted to decoding dating and relationships. His professional life revolves around piquing people's interests and recounting people's stories in hilarious ways. Does that mean the careers Freid's chosen are at odds with his manhood? 'I had to learn to be a better storyteller,' Freid tells me. To do that? He talked to women; friends, his co-host, his coworkers at Betches. A lot of women. Could gossip cure the male loneliness epidemic? Okay, so men might be less adept at gossip. Do they really need to be good at it? As Robbins indicated, continuing research shows that gossip can be a helpful social tool. Talking about other people isn't just 'not all bad,' it can be actively good. McKinney says that social scientists and psychologists have been reassessing the tropes, narratives, and stigma surrounding gossip and gossipers, and they've found that gossip brings people closer together. The idea is that the individual piece of gossip is less important than the bond that's forged when someone shares information with another person. Maybe the true measure of a friendship is the 'Can I be a bitch for a second?' texts we sent along the way. We share stories with people we think we are close to, and sharing things with other people creates intimacy. The gossip we share, arguably, is as much about our own values and beliefs and dislikes as it is about other people. At the same time, over the past half-decade or so, much has been made of what's known as the male loneliness epidemic — the idea that men are lonelier than ever and that their friendships are dwindling. If intimacy is defined, in part, by the idea of sharing stories with one another, it's not that difficult to see men who are bad at gossip hit with a lose-lose situation. They don't have the close friendships that facilitate gossip and the bond-building that comes with it, and they don't get good enough at gossip to initiate the bond-building. That's a problem, because men are disadvantaged when it comes to intimacy and communication from an early age. 'Research shows that by the time little boys are 3, we talk to them less and touch them less,' Alexandra Solomon, a relationship psychologist at Northwestern University, tells me. Solomon says that fewer conversations and less physical affection in childhood have long-lasting social effects. As boys grow up, many will tend to see communication as transactional, or directive, or a means to solving problems instead of an avenue that builds relationships. Those men see the sharing of gossip and storytelling in general as uncomfortable or a taboo, instead of intimately sharing and engaging with a story. 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself.' 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself,' Freid, the comedian and man, tells me. 'I don't hear someone telling me their story and go, Oh, good. I can tell them all my stories.' Freid says he sees male friendships and female friendships as fundamentally different, echoing Solomon's explanation of the divergent ideas about communication. Female friendships, he says, involves a give-and-go, a trading of shoulders to cry on. That 'trading' allows for deeper friendships among women — but, he suspects, also opens the door for potential rifts when someone doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. Fried takes some comfort in the idea that he never has to worry about hypothetically disappointing his buddies. 'I just have no friends where I'd be like, I can't believe they haven't called recently,' he says. It's not too hard, though, to link not expecting anyone to check in with a larger, existential problem with loneliness. Is that lack of expectation worth the lack of support? If Saturdays are proverbially for the boys, why not mix in some yapping? If straight men (statistically) gossip anyway, is there real harm in openly enjoying it, seeking it out, using it to build connections? As easy as that seems, it's asking men to share things about themselves in ways that go against how they've been conditioned. 'I would actually be out of a job if men could do that,' Solomon, the psychologist at Northwestern, tells me. 'If the trade-off is not having a career, but men talked and shared more? I would do it.'
