As I write this, the stock markets are tanking. The bluster and bluffing of one world leader is categorically destroying the financial value of markets around the world. Which made this an interesting week to read Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. It’s also an important time to reflect on Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan which has sat beside me on my desk for over a month after I finished reading it, because I know it still has things to teach me.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

I can’t remember if I bought Getting to Yes because I wanted to be better at salary negotiations or if I happened into it at a Little Free Library, but it called to me from the to-read shelf this week. It’s a simple book and effective in it’s framing. The writers even say at the end that the reader probably knows a lot of the things in the book instinctively, even if they haven’t put organized thought into it. I did learn a lot about my own tendencies with positional bargaining and how empathy may have saved me from the holes I dug with that over the years. What was most fascinating, though, was the “What If They Use Dirty Tricks?” chapter, which basically lays out all the ways someone could be negotiating with you in bad faith (and what to do about it).

“Good negotiators rarely resort to threats.” – Getting to Yes

That’s where the tariffs come in. I don’t think any of us think our “dear leader” is a master negotiator (except he himself). But it’s illustrative to see how he ticks all the boxes in this chapter, from phony facts to threats to extreme and escalating demands. It also helped me understand why some of the approach from the U.K. to the man has seemed so artful. They are using soft but firm negotiating tactics of their own, tactics that depersonalize the problems and work toward ameliorating core concerns. I also found hope for the Ukraine situation in the “Negotiate with someone like Hitler?” as I thought about this article in Harper’s about some of Putin’s core concerns that we never talk about.

It’s a great book to read for your interpersonal relationships, business relationships, and seeing how things could be done better. They can be done better, right? Because I’m ready for a lot less bluster and a lot more Booker.

Small Things Like These

Speaking of Booker and his 25-hour speech (of which I watched both too much and not enough), there has never been a better time to speak up than now. I think that’s why I’ve kept Small Things Like These beside me all these weeks. It’s a quiet story about one man’s simple life in an Irish town and how he discovers something horribly wrong that everyone seems to know about but no one is questioning. And no one wants him to question, either.

“He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?” – Small Things Like These

Bill Furlong will surely pay for his actions in all the ways his wife predicts he will. But isn’t it better that he tried?

Fisher and Ury write that “principled negotiation can help make the world a better place.” I’ve kept this blog post on thirty actions you can take right now open on my phone to remind myself that even small actions matter. What are you doing today to make the world as you want it to be?

I was going to make this a New Year’s post, but really there have been so many markers of “new” in the past few months, from the election to me leaving my job of eight years, that January 1 didn’t really feel like a changeover date. Tomorrow does, and I realize in writing this that I’ve been preparing for a long time for whatever comes next. I often find myself drifting toward books that will help me cope with something my subconscious senses is on the horizon, and the pile I’ve accumulated recently is an interesting mish-mash of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with a kids’ book thrown in for the real future. While I probably won’t start walking backwards as Tomás does in response to personal tragedy in Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal (a book I’m still reading), I am very interested in disrupting my norm to see what positive changes I can cause. Read on to find out what lessons about change (both self-imposed and not) that I’m taking away from the books that have jumped into my lap recently.

Saying the Important Part Out Loud with R.F. Kuang

There are many, many reasons to love Babel by R.F. Kuang, from the rich characters to the well-drawn action, but what hit me most about this book as I was reading it this fall was the way she turns history inside out by simply naming the things that were happening from an angle we are unused to. While to my knowledge there was not really a group of translators changing the world in the 19th century by inscribing spells into bars of silver (though it made for a great way to explore the power of language), she has a beautiful way of calling out the everyday assaults of empire:

“‘But I do know this. The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’” – Griffin in Babel by R.F. Kuang

Not only does this series of sentences spell out exactly the dark side of the British empire in a way I’ve never read before, it also speaks to the present and future of the U.S. in ways we would do well to consider deeply how to change. This is part of Kuang’s art, the weaving of a warning into a damned good story.

“‘You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawady, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’” – Babel by R.F. Kuang

How long have we been pitched against each other by our political parties? I was relieved when the Democrats picked Kamala Harris to run, finally. The last time she ran, she became the first candidate I’d ever given money to, and I was excited about her governing to the middle. But she was hardly an outsider candidate, and in my view the Democrats have a lot to answer for to their constituents—specifically, I would have liked a choice. Which is to say that the people in power are more interested in maintaining power, however they can, than in genuinely meeting our actual needs. I would have been deeply disappointed to vote for Biden who took no meaningful stands on the women’s issues that are so close to my heart (and body as well as the bodies of 49.8% of our population). I won’t even start on the Republican Party, but I do believe strongly that there is a middle we are being steered away from seeing. And that in the middle lies a lot of answers that allow for social progress and for a wide feeling of safety at the same time.

“There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse…Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.

And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over…Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.” Babel by R.F. Kuang

Collective action anyone? It is definitely time to assess what power we have and how we can effectively use it.

I have read online criticisms of this book that it is too packed with linguistic explorations, but to me that level of thought and involvement with language is only a bonus. You should read this book right now. And as you bristle against some of the things she writes, I want you to think about why and what your role has been in building our own empire. Then think about the world you want to build and how you can change your actions to bring that about instead.

Unbreaking the System with The Primary Solution

Nick Troiano is also of the opinion that the system is broken. In The Primary Solution he lays out a strong argument for how our current system of primaries disenfranchises voters and contributes to dysfunction at the party level and at the governing level because of the polarizing list of candidates it allows to move forward.

“A democracy that is controlled by its fringes at the expense of the majority, offering division over solutions, simply cannot endure over the long haul.” – The Primary Solution by Nick Troiano

Troiano argues that there is a vast, moderate section of the electorate who is not being served by the current candidates and that none of us are being served by the gridlock of the current landscape. Though my own politics are on the left edge and I am one of the 18% of voters votes in primary elections (which, according to Troiano, determines the outcome of 93% of all offices), I can’t disagree that the current state cannot continue.

My first experience of disgust for party politics was when I brought my then small child to caucus for Bernie back when we had caucuses in Washington. Our precinct captain explained the math of how the delegates were assigned and it was immediately clear that Hillary Clinton had been ordained the candidate of preference by party leadership. I was discouraged, but it was important for me to finally see that the party had the power and the privilege to make that selection, regardless of what their constituents want. I have to agree with Charles Munger, Jr., as quoted by Troiano saying, “We saw primary reform as the right tool to bring the parties back to their duty.” Imagine that—duty! The reforms Troiano explores, including ranked-choice voting and synchronized primaries, are hardly revolutionary, but if they lead to a more representative slate of candidates who can actually legislate and govern for the majority, I’m in.

The book was long for me, I think I would have preferred a white paper, but I did enjoy reading about the reasons why the ways Washington primaries have changed so much in the nearly thirty years I’ve lived and voted here. The Primary Solution is a must read for policy wonks and a good skim for anyone who thinks our government is broken and wonders what steps we can take to make it better.

Considering the After with Czesław Miłosz

I think we can all agree that World War II was some of the worst of what the world experienced during the last century. In my typical, “let’s read about the darkest thing we can find to see how people survive it” way, I was glad to read the forthcoming collection Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953 by Czesław Miłosz and translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick. While I’ve enjoyed Miłosz in translation before (and structured Polska, 1994 around lines from “Rivers”), I was surprised to see that I’ve never really written about him. I’ve also read almost nothing of his from the period covered by this book, which is, I suppose, the point.

All the poems in this collection were new to me, which made it delicious to explore. I was excited by the twinning of irony and lament in “Child of Europe” with lines like “We, who taste of exotic dishes, / And enjoy fully the delights of love, / are better than those who were buried.” This poem felt so Polish to me in that feeling with the pairing of outward barb and the inward nod of complicity topped with regret.

I think a lot about audiences and who understands what when there are multiple layers of meaning, which made me wonder who would mistake lines like “Let the sweetness of day fill your lungs” for celebrations of autocracy, though Miłosz writes into that awareness when he gets to “A new, humorless generation is now arising, / It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.” A stanza that made me think of the MAGA youth. He also writes of the doublespeak to come, something I learned to deepen myself while in Poland, with “Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words. Consign clear words to lexical limbo.” By the time he reaches, “Gone is the age of satire” my heart dropped for the poet that Hass describes as “recovering from a war of extraordinary violence, taking his bearings in a new world, and trying to locate and understand his task as a poet.”

”The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth—
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.”
— “Song on Porcelain” by Czesław Miłosz

My heart was equally broken by the lines “My life broke into islands, / Through no choice of my own.” In “To Jonathan Swift” as he writes of exile. As we know, Miłosz survived the after and went on to write greater poems, but it’s clear that there was great cost to all the before and the in-between. I was reading “Reflections” about “A city ruined, and above it clouds / A ruined city and above it a column of azure sky” during the worst of the L.A. fires and thinking about the myriad challenges (expected and otherwise) we face now and in the future.

”And as someone else used to say,
You have the power. Influence the course
Of the avalanche. Moderate its wildness
And cruelty. This too requires courage,”
— “Treatise on Morals” by Czesław Miłosz

What I liked most about this book for myself was seeing the “after.” As Hass writes in the introduction, in 1944 Miłosz had walked away from a city in ruins. Something like 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw had been destroyed by the German army…” He’s fighting with himself, though, to go forward with poems like “My Mother’s Grave” where he writes, “Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man / what you knew as the child’s ardors. / Let me not put down my burdens.” And he did continue to fight in his work, though from afar, which made me want to put “Notebook: Pennsylvania” with its family shunning their heritage in a new land beside Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning” which is about cleaning up after war.

I was really hoping to be able to comment intelligently on the translations of these poems, but only the English text is included (which makes sense) and I haven’t tracked down the originals. My Polish is rusty enough that I probably would have made a hash of it anyway, but I might track down a few soon just to feel the words on my tongue again.

This book is out in February, and I’ll be excited to see what you find in it, where I’ve misread intentions in the layers of meaning, how you think about the ways life continues.

Adam Gidwitz Models Getting Frank with our Children

I wish I could give A Tale Dark and Grimm ten stars instead of five in Goodreads. This book is deliciously dark in a way that left my nine-year-old begging for more. He felt in control and in on the action and like he was tormenting me, but together we were exploring the edges of the dark and how we could navigate it together. Are coping mechanisms hereditary? It reminded me a lot of the day in March 2020 that my then four-year-old came home and told us about the virus. His teacher (herself a survivor of war in Afghanistan) had shown the children a video explaining what we knew then. And my son, having finally been let in on what the whispers of the last month were about, exuded so much confidence. That’s not to say that the months and years to come were always easy (ha!) or that we told him everything, but that we were all better prepared because we were prepared to treat him like a person with fears and ideas of his own.

While Remy and I were reading the first book in this series of Grimm fairytale retellings, he picked up the second to read with his dad (who has read the original Grimm). And the moment he and I finished the first, we picked up the third. They are gruesome, yes. They are also hilarious and the authorial intrusions remind me of the way I often interrupt our readings to gently (or not so gently) ask my son if that’s how he thinks things should be. Highly recommend these books, just plan ahead so you can finish a section before bedtime, that bit of resolution helps avoid nightmares.

It feels sacrilegious to hold the particular inauguration on MLK Day and I’ll probably spend the day with a book rather than the TV or the headlines. The day after I’ll be sharing some Lucille Clifton with my son’s class to teach the kids about how much can be said with a little and to get them thinking about their roles in the world to come. What are you reading and how are you preparing for what’s next beyond books? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments.