A Year in Reading with Seph Rodney
A 2020 awardee
Tell us what you read in 2024 that …
... was so beautifully written that you were envious.
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
... tapped into an emotion you’ve been wrestling with this year.
Healing from Pain: Taking Back Your Power by @phd_doc_troyc on TikTok
... was a balm.
You can’t have an easy life & a great character, an @icebrgmedia interview with comedian Jimmy Carr on TikTok
... you’d recommend to other arts writers.
Art in Conversation: Paul Pfeiffer with Jonathan T.D. Neil by the Brooklyn Rail
... was a guilty pleasure.
Kehinde Wiley is selling kitsch by Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post
For pleasure and personal growth, I read Jesmyn Ward’s memoir of growing up in De Lisle, Mississippi: Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury USA, 2013). It tells of the deaths of five men close to her within the span of four years. It’s told with quiet urgency. Her descriptions of these men are sometimes so beautiful they feel like acts of redemption.
On the art side, in the course of co-curating an exhibition on sports, Get in the Game at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I was prompted to read an interview in the February Brooklyn Rail between Jonathan T.D. Neil and Paul Pfeiffer. Neil elegantly and insightfully captures the essence of Modernism: “It persists in the ideas of estrangement, of defamiliarization, of creating these gaps in habitual perceptions to open up the horizon of something new.” I also thoroughly appreciated Sebastian Smee’s incisive criticism of Kehinde Wiley’s work, which is almost but not quite contained in the The Washington Post headline: Kehinde Wiley is Selling Kitsch.
And this year I fell in love with TikTok and Instagram reels. I didn’t precisely read them, but they conveyed the most important ideas I absorbed this year. “Imagine getting bitten by a snake and instead of helping yourself recover from the poison, you chase the snake and try to find out why,” is a quote from “Healing from Pain: Taking Back Your Power” by TikTok’s @phd_doc_troyc. This immensely helped me put my relationship with my father in perspective. And lastly was the comedian Jimmy Carr saying that “You can’t have an easy life and a great character,” also on a TikTok video. This helps me get through some of the tough days.
