Most of my long-time readers probably don’t often visit the site itself, but in my menu bar there’s a link to an index of all the books I’ve ever written about (at least between 2008 and 2016). Just now whilst procrastinating I followed some of those links and revisited my thoughts on a few randomly-selected favorites. Part of me was appalled by the careless language (I really overuse ‘basically’) and part of me was appalled by the careless thinking, but I’m glad those posts exist.

This blog, in its second incarnation (it’s gone through at least three or four reboots), was primarily a book blog. I’ve maintained it through my entire time as a reader of the literary canon, and you can see, if you care to, my initial posts on Anna Karenina and War and Peace and Bleak House and other literary classics that for some reason seemed to demand comment from me.

Lately my reading hasn’t slowed, but I’ve felt less need to write about it. I long ago accepted that I don’t really want to be a ‘thinker’ in the way of a Samuel Delany or Lionel Trilling or Dwight McDonald. Nor do I want to be a smart cultural critic like Pauline Kael or Jo Walton. And I don’t even want to be an essayist of any stripe. Although I appreciate all these forms of writing, they don’t inspire me. There’s a certain density to all the popular nonfiction forms that I find myself uninterested in matching. I also have zero desire to look up quotations or research facts. I think what I enjoy most in the blogs I read is actually the opposite of this denseness; it’s the feeling of looseness and playfulness that comes from watching a mind at work (it’s what I value most about John Scalzi’s or Nick Mamatas’s writing, for instance), and it’s what I hope to give my own readers.

Sometimes I’ve thought of collecting all my posts about writing and putting out a little book. It’s a saturated market, but I probably have something original to say, both about the structure of the novel and about finding your inspiration. The most difficult lesson, at least for me, has been the process of learning to listen to the whisper-soft voice of my own longing (“This is what you really need to be writing…), and I know that other writers could use a little guidance along this own journey.

But that’s all a long aside. In this post we’re talking about book-blogging. That’s the topic, and I’m sticking to it.

It feels wrong to read so many books and to let them pass without comment. Particularly since I’ve lately been trying to read more obscure books–novels and essays and short stories that are less fully assimilated into our culture. And I see that in the past two months I’ve read a few books that’ve had a profound impact on my thinking.

Probably the most exciting of these was David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, which is about the very broad phenomenon of people feeling as if their own jobs are, not just meaningless, but actually almost like some sort of scam. For my entire working life, people have paid me to do things whose utility has eluded me. I don’t just mean in the broad sense, that I didn’t understand why this project was necessary, I mean that in the micro sense: I didn’t understand how my work even contributed in any meaningful way to the completion of the project. If, as I learned as an undergrad economics major, I was being paid in some sense for my productivity–my added value to some completed economic project–then why couldn’t I perceive that value?

Instead of going with the standard economist’s answer (“You can’t necessarily perceive the larger picture under which your labor is necessary”), Graeber starts by assuming that people like me are, broadly, correct in our assumption that our labor is without productive value. Instead he develops some theories for how society could’ve developed in such a way that a large number of people are paid for valueless labor.

The theory is that the apocalypse foretold by mechanization has already occurred: most workers are already superannuated. Our economy simply doesn’t have a need for nearly as many workers as there are people. But obviously some immense surplus still exists, and for political reasons the owners of capital are unable to simply take all of it for themselves–they need to distribute the surplus in some way in order to create allies and maintain the political order. This isn’t some big conspiracy; it’s something that occurs organically. In large organizations, having employees means having power. You fight for a bigger budget so you can employ more people, and then the fact that you employ so many people means you get paid more and are more important. Repeat this many industries, and you have our current economy.

I don’t entirely buy the theory, for many reasons (a bit of the economics major lingers inside me still), but I highly recommend the book. It’s very worth reading, and it’ll explain these ideas far better than I ever could.