I'm making up new categories for Books of the Year this year, and it feels like cheating. Having already touted memoir and history, I'm now deploying the broader label of non-fiction. Then again, in a record-breaking year for volume, I want to cheat so I can tell you, dear reader, about more books.
This category features two books that felt in dialog with each other about the topic of attention and its deterioration. Gloria Mark and Sherry Turkle come to different conclusions, but I found each point of view valuable. I wonder if the passage of eight years between their books explains the differences or if Turkle would say the same thing now that she said in 2015. Is Turkle the stern, 1900s disciplinarian while Mark embodies the gentle parent? If so, I kind of like the combination more than abiding by one alone.
Then, how does one categorize a large collection of essays when one is going to (foreshadowing alert) crown a collection of essays as The Book of 2024 later this week? Well, I put it here. It's that Sedaris brand of non-fiction where I can't always discern the line between truth and his imagination.
Books of the Year: Non-fiction
Attention Span; A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, Gloria Mark, 2023
Who in the 2020s does not worry that our devices and media steadily make us less focused,dumber, and unhappy? My concern for those things made Gloria Marks's research on attention appealing. In the field of human computer interaction, she has focused her career on experiments - many of them in workplaces - to understand how attention functions day to day for ordinary people. Not to spoil the book, but she principally concludes that we should not beat ourselves up about our lack of focus or the small distractions we might engage in on our phones. While not denying the idea of too much of a good thing (TikTok), Marks reinterprets small digital breaks as serving a similar function to a walk or a conversation with a friend of colleague. She sees a hierarchy, placing those off-screen breaks higher in value and effectiveness than the screen ones, but she doesn't dismiss a little digital rote activity out of hand. After we've focused for a period of time - and our digital tools allow that focus as much as they enable distraction - we may do well to virtually step away in order to recharge that focus battery. She also points out that a "flow state" happens far less often than we think it should and encourages releasing that expectation. None of this is to say that there's not a crisis: average sustained attention on any one thing has fallen to 47 seconds in the iPhone era. But Marks would have us be aware of our attention rhythm almost like a sleep cycle and work with it rather than try to white-knuckle our way to a different rhythm.
Reclaiming Conversation; the Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle, 2015
Turkle takes on the sociology of what all of these screens, devices, and "social networks" have done to that basic form of human connection, conversation. In 2015, when she did her most recent research featured in this volume, college students still used Facebook. Media has moved on in the intervening years, but her general finding that people converse less and worse now than they did even pre-iPhone remains relevant. Turkle structures her book with the metaphor of chairs like the two featured on the cover. Her "One Chair" section covers self-awareness and solitude. Two Chairs covers family, friendship, and romantic relationships. Three Chairs examines education, and work, and then she rounds out the book with ideas for a way forward. This text stands in contrast - actually, outright opposition - to Gloria Mark's Attention Span. Where Mark would have us forgive ourselves for our market-degraded attention span, Turkle would have us put down our screens and look each other in the eye or at least take a walk outside. I found value in both approaches. For what it's worth, I "read" this book in my new hybrid hard copy/audio habit, and I found it easier to consume this one as an audio book.
The Best of Me, David Sedaris, 2020
Having seen David Sedaris read from new and old work in Pasadena in November 2023, I found myself wandering the stacks at the main library. Sedaris so consistently entertains by mixing poignant family memories with laugh-out-loud surprise jokes. This collection of old and new work meets that standard. I partially read it and partly listened to the author read it on audio book. The latter format, interestingly, included recordings of live readings. In the middle of a long chapter of studio reading, the listener would then hear one of these recordings in front of an audience. Sedaris curates his stories and essays masterfully, putting them in dialog with each other. This long book provided everything I want from Sedaris.
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