A few things worth reading

I rather liked this piece by Bradley Babendir at The Baffler on two essay collections, one by Vivian Gornick and one by Lydia Davis, that are different from a lot of what passes for book criticism these days:

At their best, Davis’s insightful essays also demonstrate how fruitful writing with time and care outside the publishing industry’s relevance cycle can be. Though not quite the traditional criticism that’s increasingly being displaced in newspapers and online today, Essays One and Unfinished Business nevertheless show the value of literary writing that places curiosity and questioning over definitive claims and myopia.

B.D. McClay writes at the Hedgehog Review about lessons we can learn from Typhoid Mary:

Another lesson from Mallon’s experience might simply be that while we want to cast stones at others for “thoughtlessness”—witness the very popular social media activity of denouncing people in pictures who appear to be crowded together—we may want to consider that those people make their decisions for many of the same reasons we do. People have livelihoods they fear for. People are lonely. They have friends and family they worry about and want to see as safely as possible. Maybe they’re doing the wrong thing. But they work from the same limited information we all work from. Energies might be better directed toward pressuring authorities to make it as easy as possible for people to stay at home through rent and mortgage freezes and other forms of social aid—or, just as important, to make sure that those who can’t or won’t stay at home have reasonably safe working conditions and guarantees of job security if they need time off for health reasons.

And at Vanity Fair, Abigail Santamaria writes about how a pandemic shaped Madeleine L’Engle’s writing and worldview:

“This is my psalm of praise to life,” she declared in her journal after completing [A Wrinkle in Time], “my stand for life against death.” Readers are drawn to her fictional dark worlds because, like the dark places of her own universe, the light wins in the end. Bound up in L’Engle’s biography are promises of what transcends the wastelands of our pandemic. Decades from now, an intrepid biographer writing about those who walk among us today will be handed a key to a storage unit—or an attic, a basement, a closet—and will peer into the past in the context of the future; she will see that which endures.