Be a Cactus Podcast

Hello Friends,

I’m writing this on Halloween, hoping that the kids come by for candy before the rain sets in. I thought of writing about Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and a particularly creepy story in there about the Epstein files and Trump assaulting a girl. To remind us of what we are dealing with as the election comes up. But then—we already know what we’re dealing with.

I’m nervous about Tuesday not only for Trump’s reaction to the election (Oh for the days of ‘We got shellacked!’ and that’s the end of it!), but because my husband is having major surgery. The surgeon told me I’d be in the waiting room for eight hours. At least I won’t be following the political news. All positive thoughts and prayers welcome!

After a few brief announcements, let’s look at a book that made me happy recently and at an author I love—The Anthropocene Reviewed and John Green. For uplift. And then let’s have a brief look at a Partita by Barbara Kingsolver.

Announcements

* Next week is our library and banned books news, but that will be too late for this announcement. I thought you might like to attend this Author’s Guild webinar because both Malinda Lo (Last Night at the Telegraph Club, winner of the National Book Award) and Patricia McCormick (Sold) will be featured. Banned Books: How Authors & Readers Can Respond

Thursday, November 5, 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PTFree to attend

* I’ve discussed why I think Sold belongs in the high school library more than once (it’s last year’s most banned book). I also wrote here on Be a Cactus about why Last Night at the Telegraph Club is the perfect YA novel and belongs as well.

* SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. posted a round up of what they learned at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Lots of news about AI in publishing.

* A while back, I discussed Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification here. Here’s an article he recently wrote and published on Medium about how Google is taking enshittification to a new level with its AI results, which extract value from websites and offer nothing in return.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

I’ve been a fan of John Green since reading Looking for Alaska, his first novel for YA readers. (Widely banned, of course! See here why I think it belongs in the high school library.)

I’m not magic the way Green is, but I feel like a fellow traveler. In Anthropocene—I believe it’s his first nonfiction book—I related to the blues and difficulties during the pandemic and the fact that Green has battles with depression throughout his life.

I haven’t listened to Green’s podcast, which is the source for the material in the book. I decided to listen to the book instead, which Green narrates, to have all of it in a nice bundle at once. To hear Green musing about any number of subjects. I enjoyed it immensely. Not because the subjects are so odd—some are, but some are what we all think about from time to time—but because of the inventive connections Green makes between events or ideas. I enjoy his creative mind.

In The Anthropocene Reviewed, Green ranks a wide variety of experiences on a 5-star scale after noting that a 5-star scale is a lousy way to review something, a device created for algorithms. Of course, he also discusses each experience at length. He tells us that he worked at Booklist as a reviewer before he made his way as a novelist. That job gave him the chance to reflect on the various elements and nuances of each title. Repeating that experience is one of his goals here, each set of stars preceded by inventive connections.

Some of the wackier essays include:

* Thoughts on real velociraptors. They were so small (yes, very much related to today’s birds). Why do we prefer the Jurassic Park version?

* Scratch and sniff stickers don’t smell like the real thing. Why do kids enjoy them so much? Perhaps their purpose is to give people the same feeling as the real thing does?

One of the most heartbreaking essays is about the photograph “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.” Green, who seems to have more than one obsession, dived into the background of the photo, as well as into the subjects of the photo. He tells us these young German men they are not farmers at all—they are two miners and a desk worker, all in their early twenties and months away from being conscripted into the German Army in World War I. Their stories end in tragedy in a world far from that of the young men heading off to a dance. And yet, that future was nearly fully formed as the photo was snapped. In essays like this one, Green’s power comes to light.

I enjoyed listening to the audiobook because it helped immerse me in Green’s personality and quirks, the things that make the book unique. I give it 5 stars. 😉

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The Good in the World

If you are very anxious this week about the election and the future, and are starting to wonder if good people still make a difference in the world, John Green and his brother Hank are go-to guys. They founded The Good Store. From Wikipedia: “Originally a sock subscription service, the company sells everyday products such as coffee, tea, soap, and eco-friendly cleaning supplies. All profits generated by the company are donated to charity partners, primarily Partners in Health.

Good Store has donated over $13 million to critical charitable initiatives around the world. They donate to Partners In Health to fund the Maternal Center of Excellence (MCOE) in Sierra Leone, to treat and prevent tuberculosis in Lesotho, and to increase access to cancer treatment. They also donate to the Coral Reef Alliance. (Their loose tea is very yummy!)

A goal of John Green’s is to see the end tuberculosis in his lifetime. His second nonfiction title is Everything is Tuberculosis. I reviewed it here. It’s a must read.

Although he said he’d retired from writing fiction, Green is back at it with this year’s publication of his first novel for adults, Hollywood, Ending. I have it but haven’t had the chance to read it yet. I want to see if his talent in the YA genre is carried over.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

I know this is not Kingsolver’s best. In fact, I agree with all the points Jan Harayda makes in this unflattering (ahem) review. And yet I enjoyed the book. How is that possible? It doesn’t have the big societal themes of some of her other work, particularly Demon Copperhead. But it tackles the things in life that just about everyone has had to come to terms with (failed dreams, hard work followed by a lack of success through no fault of one’s own) and something that most of the women I know have experienced—longterm shame concerning the giving oneself over to an undeserving man, a man self-centered and self-important. I liked the longform airing of these problems, the ruminations on how one shakes these men off. Why is it so hard to find peace in a life that turned out good enough?

I think I was able to find something useful in the novel because I was listening to it rather than reading it. If I had used my reading time for such a long work with only a specific (narrow-themed) payout, I might not have been very happy about it. And here is something I’m wondering about that I haven’t seen in reviews. Maybe you have the answer: I thought there was a sort of ‘Chekhov’s gun’ in the fact that the former boyfriend is visiting Tennessee for medical help. He says he’s not dying, but why go so far out of his way for a meet up? Does he ever say what is wrong with him? Did I miss it because I wasn’t listening carefully enough? The meet up is kind of a flop and a missed opportunity for the author.

Of course, the structure of the novel is based in a classical music form, something I have no right to comment on. For those interested in the musical aspect, Kevin Ng discusses it in The Baffler. Though Ng finds the novel deeply uneven, he say…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

The Future of Nonfiction?

Over the next few months, I’d like to discuss some ‘of the moment’ nonfiction I’ve been reading. I say discuss rather than review because I find them all to be good, worthwhile books. Yet, I’ve borrowed these books from the library rather than bought them because I know about their subjects from reading legacy media stories and some paid-subscription to political Substacks. But I want a peek behind the curtain at the players (politicians and billionaires), which these books offer.

I still buy other kinds of nonfiction frequently, usually books that look at a historical moment (think Erik Larson’s work as a type— a few of my reviews are here, here, and here) or something newsworthy that I’m not seeing in legacy media (think John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis as a type).

Recently, I’ve realized that another reason I put all these current issues books on hold—and then stop reading whatever else I am making my way through (right now The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai)—is because I’m looking for the part where they discuss the possibility that things will be all right. Of course, action—letters, phone calls, canvassing, donations—is what moves the needle, but reading is, I suppose, a way of holding the constant state of anxiety in check. Of taking a measure.

I know nonfiction sales are trending downward. Last week, author Leigh Stein discussed in her post “losers v. victims: on declining nonfiction book sales” how authors and publishers should market work by asking what is the book going to give the reader that they can’t already get on the internet for free? I pay for lots of legacy media and several political Substacks, so I’m not getting the info for free on the internet. But I’m not buying the books I borrow from the library. I wonder if my behavior is common. (Do you do this? Leave a comment, please!)

Last week in her newsletter The Bottom Line (analysis of the publishing business, partly free, partly paywalled), Jane Friedman included the premium article “Where Nonfiction Is Struggling Right Now and Where It Can Grow.” She summarizes thoughts from Circana’s Kristen McLean at the Association of American Literary Agents’ People of Publishing conference. McLean notes that some of the decline in nonfiction is just cyclical, but that some of the interest has gone elsewhere. “‘[T]he sustained decline in print adult nonfiction reflects volume that has gone to audio, podcasts, short-form news, and other types of reference.’” This is in line with my serious increase of consuming short-form news over the last ten years.

Kathleen Schmidt also took up the topic in her Publishing Confidential newsletter this past week with Nonfiction isn’t the Problem: Publishers must understand how and why audiences consume information. The goalposts are constantly shifting. (I’m not sure whether this is paywalled.)

If the industry wants the nonfiction market to recover, they must change the way they publish it. This requires analyzing how nonfiction audiences consume entertainment. It also requires an open mind: Maybe it’s not about fully rejecting a nonfiction proposal/memoir, but about molding the content so it aligns with how consumers will discover it. Microdramas have done this with short video episodes, and podcasts have found they’re more likely to be seen and heard through social media clips. The publishing industry’s response to weak nonfiction sales can’t be, “We’ll publish less of it.” or “We’ll only publish celebrity memoirs or people with huge platforms.” If other entertainment sectors can figure this out, so can publishing.

I encourage you to read the entire article. Schmidt has some interesting and useful thoughts on memoir, which is the nonfiction most writers I know are working on.

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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

As most readers know, the title of Wynn-Williams’s book comes from a famous line of The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

At our current moment, most everyone I know relates to the idea that the ultra rich are smashing up the world and the people in it. They deplore Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) among others. So Careless People was destined to sell well; however, Meta itself seems to have catapulted it to the bestseller list by leaning on a nondisclosure agreement and not allowing Wynn-Williams to speak about the book at any of her promotional events. This created a lot of buzz and interest. (See Brooke Warner’s post A Field Guide to Increasing Book Sales by 300%: Facebook’s Massive Backfire Maneuver in Its Efforts to Silence Author Sarah Wynn-Williams.) We want to get the book to find out what it is that Meta folks don’t want Wynn-Williams saying.

Not Just Careless: Weird, Ethically Empty, and Morally Vacuous

Wynn-Williams’s bosses at Facebook are so weird, ethically empty, and morally vacuous that I found myself absorbed in the details of their personalities when the truly significant element of the book is how Facebook has harmed people globally, including those in the United States:

* Facebook employees were embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016. They targeted potential voters and sent ads that were, quite simply, full of lies. There were no Facebook employees embedded in the Clinton campaign because they didn’t allow it.

* In 2017, lies on Facebook helped to incite a genocide against the minority ethnic group of Rohingya.

* Facebook worked to get unblocked in China, according to Wynn-Williams, by proposing China-based partnerships, data collection of the Chinese people that would be handed over to the government, and censorship tools. There’s an entire chapter about this, and it’s worth borrowing the book just to read that.

The details about Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan (an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who becomes Wynn-Williams’s boss) are, unfortunately, riveting.

Zuckerberg is so completely conscienceless and free of all consequences that he can blame his assistants even when he forgets his own passport while traveling. He transforms from someone who doesn’t want attention to someone who craves it. The success of helping Trump campaign in 2016 leads him to consider his own run for president, but he can’t actually be bothered with ‘the people.’ He basically shrugs when an employee in another country ends up in jail due to company policy. He feels like a person who has no human feeling for others.

Sheryl Sandberg comes off as bizarre and infantile. She has an assistant buy lingerie for the two of them. She demands that other people take care of her as if she were some sort of baby. She requires employees to sleep with her (by which I mean sleep, not have sex). In one sitting, she fires two makeup artists in China, leaving both in tears. She appears to exist in a perpetual tantrum. Wynn-Williams, who had previously known Sandberg by her ‘Lean In’ persona, soon sees that everyone else needs to lean in to Sandberg with obedience and “closeness.” Sandberg owes nothing in return.

In the sexual harassment category of creepy coworkers/bosses, Wynn-Williams gives us the vice president of global policy and her manager, Joel Kaplan. (Kaplan is well-connected politically to Justice Antonin Scalia and George W. Bush.) He pushes up against Wynn-Williams at a work party and makes weird sexual comments. When she is recovering from a particularly traumatic childbirth experience that included a near-death-dealing amniotic fluid embolism, Kaplan emails her and demands weekly videoconferences, asking her where she’s bleeding from. In an internal Facebook investigation he is cleared of any wrongdoing. When Wynn-Williams ends up with a negative performance review, she comments that in her defense, she was in a coma for some of the period when …

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

It’s our week for ‘Library and Banned Books News,’ to which I don’t usually add an audio record. However, I’d like to make an exception this week because I want to include a book review in the discussion.

We just finished up Banned Books Week yesterday with “Let Freedom Read Day.” During the week, PEN America published Banned in the USA: National Findings for the 2025-2026 School Year. I encourage you to have a look at it. Meanwhile, I’d like to highlight some of the findings—including the fact that some school districts are using AI to select books to ban. We’ll discuss one of those books after looking at an AI prompt used in the McAllen Independent School District in Texas.

Okay, let’s go.

A Spotlight on School Book Bans from PEN America

Banned in the USA: National Findings for the 2025-2026 School Year Show Continued Assault on Books in Public Schools

Some of the key findings

* Nearly 12,000 (11,982) books were banned in public schools during the 2025-2026 school year, according to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans.

* The majority are YA books

* 87% are fiction

* The vast majority of recorded book bans this school year came from just two states: Texas and Florida. These states also have by far the most complete record of book bans, owing to public records requests from grassroots organizations, the Florida Freedom to Read Project and the Texas Freedom to Read Project.

* This year saw a record number of unique titles banned — 7,370 titles — impacting the creative works of over 4,000 authors, illustrators and translators.

* Over 4,500 of these were titles not previously recorded in PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, the most new titles added to the index in a single year, illustrating the continued expansion of the book banning crisis.

* This school year also saw the highest number of school districts (114) banning books in a single school year.

Please read the report to see the additional political trends, the data and methodology used in the study, and the list of books banned for the first time (which, oddly, includes Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë).

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The Use of AI in Banning Books

The report includes mention of the trend of using AI to ban books. Let’s look at that and at one specific book mentioned in the report: Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.

Here is an AI prompt provided by McAllen Independent School District in Texas in response to a public records request:

Note that the novel passes the three-prongs of the Miller Test: it doesn’t appeal to prurient interests, does not depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner, and it has literary value. But it appears the AI is scraping any old opinion out there and then deeming it a necessary ban.

Eleanor and Park was published in 2012. It was popular in my school library and we had tens of copies. I wrote the following in January 2014, partly because of the feedback some student ‘romance readers’ gave us. Although I called it a romance, I have found since that a closer genre is ‘love story,’ which doesn’t demand the couple be together at the end.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Eleanor and Park is already popular with some of our readers of realistic teen fiction, but before Valentine’s Day rolls around, I’d like to introduce it to the rest of you who are looking for a good romance.

It’s 1986 and the new school year has begun. When Eleanor tries to find a seat on the school bus, she is shut out. People seem to hate her for her appearance—she’s heavy, has long, wild, curly red hair, and dresses weird. People will go on to call her “Big Red” and mercilessly bully her in PE class. But on that first day, Park, who also thinks of himself as different-looking because he is half white and half Korean, finally lets Eleanor sit next to him, although he is very rude to her as he does, using the f-word.

And so begins a lovely romance. No, you wouldn’t think so, but both Eleanor and Park are smart kids and can see past the exterior shells. Park realizes that Eleanor likes the comics he reads on the bus in the morning, so he sets copies on her seat each day. He knows that she would like the same punk music he does, if she could afford to buy it. So he makes tapes for her. And they talk about everything they have in common, growing close.

What it takes Park much longer to realize is that Eleanor’s home life is a nightmare.

Eleanor’s dad is out of the picture. He just doesn’t have any interest in his many children. Eleanor’s beautiful but egoless and beaten-down mom has married Richie—an abusive, perverted, foul-mouthed jerk who won’t allow a door on the bathroom (for starters). They are poor, and Eleanor’s strange taste in clothes is partly due to the fact that there is no money to buy anything except ill-fitting thrift-shop attire. She, her brothers and sister all walk on thin ice daily, hiding from Richie and waiting for him to explode. Which he does with some frequency.

The thing about this novel that is so sweet—and so tough—is that Park and Eleanor know that their love has come very early in life. It’s not likely to last ‘forever.’ But what they share is worth having, even if they seem destined for unavoidable heartache.

High school housekeeping: One of my coworkers made the astute observation that there are two camps of teen readers when it comes to Eleanor and Park. Although this is a bestseller and super-popular book, we have had several teens bring it back and tell us they couldn’t get into it, didn’t like it. These are mostly girls who are looking for romance books. In talking to them, we generally find that they like formula romance—they liked Simone Elkeles’ and Susane Colasanti’s books. They want the forever part and sometimes more—teens who stay together forever while becoming brilliant artists or scientists. Oh, and rich, of course. If you are a romance reader, I want to encourage you to try Eleanor and Park (and The Fault in Our Stars, of course). Seeing examples of teens who treat one another well in difficult circumstances is a way of becoming that kind of person—of finding an example of love that respects the individual with all his or her quirks. It’s also a way of facing reality and learning that, painful though it is, to have loved and have lost is often worth it. In fact, it may well enrich your life.

***

Notice the try ‘something a bit uncomfortable’ suggestion at the end of the review. Having these kinds of books in the school library matters! Teens are becoming adults; they will arrive at that milestone very soon. (Girls will be going to colleges and universities with their own versions of the Cornell 7, for god’s sake.) They have to deal with difficult issues and need to have an awareness of danger in the world. They need to look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers (and his mom) remind us.

Books and Navigating Tough Topics

This is a theme I come back to a lot. Here’s a link to an easy-to-read article that hits the main point and has a nice analogy comparing YA novels to being inoculated against a disease.

Books Can Help Teens Navigate Tough Topics in Ways Their Parents Can’t (Exclusive Essay) from People Magazine

Like many adults, I’d assumed teenagers must be protected from the world’s cruelties as long as possible. But teenagers are already living with hard things, and it’s this reality that makes young adult literature so necessary — and why it’s under siege. The same topics that would earn an adult novel praise as serious and important can be viewed as gratuitous or even irresponsible in Young Adult.

I’m not the only pearl-clutching parent, as countless book-banning campaigns can attest. But this response is a fundamental misreading of the genre and of its audience. YA books that depict death, mental illness, sexual violence and predatory relationships aren’t lurid pulp, and they aren’t tainting childhoods. It’s the opposite. They are protective.

When we are inocula…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

This is not our scheduled week for ‘Library and Banned Books News’. It is, however, Banned Books Week, an annual event highlighting the freedom to read. In the U.S., it’s promoted by the American Library Association. (Is there a Banned Books Read-in near you this week? Check the map.) I know that Amnesty International also promotes it elsewhere. If you are outside the U.S., is it a thing where you are?

I’m not going to give the run down of state library news and book challenges now since that’s scheduled for next week, but I want us to take a fun quiz, look at some good news concerning libraries and bans, and then discuss the most banned book of 2025, Sold by Patricia McCormack. (Careless People by Sarah Wynn- Williams has to wait until next time.) And then I’d like to follow up on how my own novel, Keep Sweet is connected to Sold’s theme as well as to the rise of patriarchy in the U.S.

While it’s Not Good News, it’s a Fun Quiz

PEN America posted an Instagram carousel on Jeopardy’s recent “Restricted Reading in America” category, and we’ll see here how many we can name. If you are an Instagram user, you can use the link and then follow PEN there. Since I’ve read many YA books and follow book bans, this quiz was pretty low-hanging fruit for me. I’ll add the answers in a footnote.

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The U.S. Legislative Bills to Ban Books Nationwide are Probably Going to Fizzle Out

Could Congress Create a National Book Ban? From School Library Journal

Misleading titles H.R. 7661: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R. 2616: Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, and H.R. 8705: CHARLIE Act.

The good news is noted at the end of the article:

While all three measures represent a concerted effort by House Republicans to codify conservative federal restrictions on K–12 education, none has an easy path to becoming law.

With the 2026 midterm elections approaching and most Senate legislation requiring 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, the proposals face significant hurdles before they could become national policy.

Librarians are Getting the Opportunity to Tell Their Own Stories in Print and on Film

LIBRARIANS on LIBRARIES from the New York Times (gift article)

We asked dozens of librarians about America’s libraries — what they provide, what they need to survive.

These librarians want you to know that they don’t sit around reading all day. They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and crafting groups and pop-up medical clinics.

They want you to worry, the way they worry, about artificial intelligence, looming legislation and harassment of their staff. But most of all, they want you to know what the library really is: a safe place for people to gather around books, ideas and one another.

Librarians Hit the Road from I Love Libraries

Roadtrip Nation, the PBS documentary series that sends three people across the United States in an RV to explore what it means to build a career—and more importantly, a life—around the things you love, has dropped its new season, and libraries are at the forefront for a portion.

In the two-episode arc, “Beyond Books,” three aspiring librarians take a road trip to explore all the surprising, powerful, and essential roles libraries play in our communities today—online, in rural areas, and more. Along the way, they learn from community leaders and caretakers of knowledge just how vibrant and dynamic a career in libraries can be and discover the unique impact they each can bring when it comes to creating a space that’s truly for everyone. …

“There’s a public misconception that librarians are gatekeepers of information because, historically, stacks had been closed and that’s how it was,“ Sam said. “But libraries haven’t been that way for many years now. In reality, we’re thought partners, we’re friends, and we’re in this together. Librarians are here to help the public wayfind, not to hold information back. That’s the message we’re still working to establish culturally.”

And: I enjoyed this post on Banned Books Week by Julie Snider.

Sold by patricia mccormick

As I was a high school librarian for many years, I read a lot of young adult (YA) fiction so that I could ‘book talk’ it to students and classes who were coming in to check out books. It’s strange that Patricia McCormack’s Sold was the top banned book in 2025 because it was published in 2006. Nearly twenty years of helping and not hurting. (Huh. What could this really be about?) In a previous post, I discussed the novel in detail: what it’s about, how I came to read it, and why it belongs in the school library:

* Trafficking of girls (and boys) is a topic that seems to interest conservatives, a thing they claim to want to put an end to. (Remember the Pizzagate conspiracy theory?)

* Information is power. The author interviewed trafficked girls and activists fighting for them to present this realistic portrayal.

* Knowledge of these terrible but very real circumstances engenders empathy.

* Empathy may engender action. Many high school students form clubs, get a teacher to be their advisor, bring guest speakers, and raise funds to fight for good in the world.

* High school activism is a foundation for a life of concern and goodwill for humankind. Even if a student doesn’t get to this step, they’ve done the first step: read the book.

This week book critic Ron Charles posted “What’s So Scary about This Book?” In which he includes a bit of chat with McCormick.

Even while reading scores decline and teenagers drift away from books, activists have whipped up a moral panic about pornography in schools.

As McCormick suggests, it’s a movement based on a particularly destructive kind of misreading.

“Books aren’t being banned because of their content or their quality or their message,” she says. “People are taking a single page — and in the case of this book, it’s the page where the main character is sexually assaulted — and reading that out of context in a way that triggers or troubles people.”

“I always say, ‘It’s supposed to be upsetting!’ You can’t write a book about child trafficking without having a scene like that in there. But it’s written from the point of view of a 13-year-old, so her language is not graphic. … and it isn’t pornographic.”

“I can’t tell you how many schools have launched fundraising efforts after having read the book. It activates kids. It turns them into activists. And so we’re shutting off that opportunity.”

Even more important, McCormick says that when she visits high schools to talk about Sold, a student will frequently take her aside or stand up in front of the group and say, “Something like this has happened to me.”

“There’s a way in which reading about a girl in Nepal — like six degrees of separation — allows kids to see their own situation with empathy. And those kids can get help. … And when you think about what’s happening at Cornell right now, this is a book everybody needs to read.”

Yes, I Did My Own Take— Keep Sweet

I had a brief interview with Marla Miller about how I came to write Keep Sweet, the title of which I’d picked before the Netflix series on the FLDS cult and Warren Jeffs. I decided to stick with the title because, at that point, it was a good indicator of what the novel was about. (Please check it out!)

I was told by agents that I needed to make the book less ‘adult’ (the protagonist being sexual abuse victim might be too much) and that I should give her a boyfriend. Ugh. That wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. Luckily, I found a small press publisher. This makes it hard to promote, but it’s an honest book, which matters to me.

Everyone is probably thinking of the Cornell 7 just about now. The similarities are in the privileged men dominating women and girls. But there is also the concern about our government becoming enmeshed with Christian Nationalism. And we can see how mixing up the church and the …

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

This is our week to talk about books. (Audio included.) I feel I have so many books I’d like to discuss after reading people’s comments on Theo of Golden. For now, I’ll mention a few ‘feel good’ books that I enjoyed and then focus on Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID by Nicholas Enrich.

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On a personal note, I participated in a Walk to End Alzheimer’s this weekend. When I was a bit younger, I did marathons for causes. This walk was a lot shorter, but there were so many participants and folks cheering us on. Very good vibes. The sponsors were handing out flower-shaped wind spinners. There were different colors, and we were to choose the one that represented our relationship to dementia. There was blue for caretakers. When the volunteer explained that, I was going to pick one, but then she went on to say that purple was for those who’d lost a loved one to dementia. I picked that, as I started to explain myself: with my sisters, I cared for my mom as she declined and lost her memory, but she’s gone now, so I’ll take the purple. A sudden wave of grief smashed into me and I started to tear up, losing it. I didn’t want to distress the volunteer and was trying to pull it together. Just then, a young woman began to sing the national anthem to kick off the day’s program. I turned to face her, to stand in respectful silence. Isn’t it wild the way grief arrives without warning?

Good Books for Uplifting Reading

In the past few weeks, in response to numerous comments about the need for books that make us feel good, I’ve mentioned that Ann Patchett’s Whistler fits the bill. I also want to mention two books that I found very heartening: Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton and Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven. Both are nonfiction about women who find themselves in unusually close connection with a wild animal. These creatures are neither pets nor people and the authors are careful not to interfere with their wild natures nor to anthropomorphize them: there is no sentimentality in the narratives. And yet by coming into close contact with the animals, the authors come to have a deeper understanding of their own humanity and a greater connection to the natural world. These intimate tales of very different natural settings are quietly gorgeous. A true balm, and perhaps what you need now.

My sister-in-law is something of an animal whisperer and English as well, so I sent her my copy of Raising Hare, which takes place in the English countryside. Hare read like an alternative version of her life. I still have my copy of Fox and I. I hope to reread it, but I can’t keep up with new books, much less go back to those I love. Does anyone else have this problem?

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Thanks for the recommendation

I also want to thank jen parker for recommending The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring. Richard Russo blurbed it and it definitely has a Russo vibe—small town folks dealing with big issues, so I enjoyed reading it. A tragic event leads everyone in town to question whether they had unknowingly contributed to the outcome. But they also have to find their way forward. Here’s the publisher’s back copy:

In most small towns, the private is also public. In the town of Dalton, one local makes an unthinkable decision that leaves the community reeling. In the aftermath, their problems, both small and large, reveal a deeper understanding of the lives of their neighbors, and remind us all that no one is exactly who we think they are.

It’s 1990. In Dalton, Maine, life goes on. Rose goes to work at the diner every day, her bruises hidden from both the customers and her two young boys. At a table she waits, Dr. Richard Haskell looks back on the one choice that’s charted his entire life, before his thoughts wander back to his wife, Trudy, and her best friend.

Trudy and Bev have been friends for longer than they can count, and something more than lovers to each other for some time now—a fact both accepted and ignored by their husbands. Across town, new mother Bridget lives with her high school sweetheart Nate, and is struggling with postpartum after a traumatic birth. And nearer still is teenager Greg, trying to define the complicated feelings he has about himself and his two close friends.

The Road to Dalton offers valuable understandings of what it means to be alive in the world—of pain and joy, conflict and love, and the endurance that comes from living.

Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID by Nicholas Enrich

“Elon Musk tweeted on Monday, February 3 at 1:54 AM. ‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.’”

Author Nicholas Enrich worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under four administrations. He was the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025 when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health.

“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Into the Wood Chipper’s epigraph, quoting Timothy Snyder

In Into the Wood Chipper he details the history of USAID, its value to both Americans and communities around the world, and its demise at the hands of Elon Musk and the Trump administration. The title brings to mind the infamous image of a gleeful Musk holding up a live chain saw as if he were the star of a horror flick.

“My distress had intensified as I watched Musk flagrantly lie. Standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, he assured the gathered journalists and their live TV audiences that USAID’s programs to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola and HIV were still operating. They weren’t. DOGE was dismantling them piece by piece. At the same time, Secretary Rubio and his team were blaming me and my colleagues for the undeniable and deadly mess, accusing us of intentionally creating bureaucratic hurdles to block delivery of food and medicine. Rubio called USAID’s career staff ‘completely uncooperative’ and ‘insubordinate,’ even as his own political team stonewalled our desperate efforts to restart life-saving aid. Trump then piled on, claiming that USAID was run by ‘radical lunatics’ and pushing absurd lies about our work.”

Enrich’s goal is to bear witness to the thing he could not prevent. He is perfectly situated to do so. And while the book is well written, it is content rather than style that concerns him. If you have been following the Trump II cycle, doubtless you know that USAID was dismantled. But if you want to see how this affected both employees of the organization as well as healthcare around the world, I recommend Into the Wood Chipper. If you feel that you can’t spare the thirty dollars for a book on a topic you’re already familiar with through the news cycle, I encourage you to do as I did—borrow it from your local public library.

USAID was established because President Kennedy understood that the Soviet Union was pouring billions into support for newly independent nations across the globe. The United States needed to provide a counterweight. (Perhaps we’ve forgotten that we still do.)

President George W. Bush also understood the value of USAID. In 2003 he signed legislation to combat AIDS, saying that every day of delay meant 8000 more AIDS deaths in Africa and 14,000 more infections.

President Obama reminded us: “To many people around the world, USAID is the United States.”

According to peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, in the two decades previous to its shutdown, USAID…

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Hello Friends,

I’d like to discuss some books at length. Don’t forget you can choose to listen to the audio (located above).

I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize , Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, The Irish Times Best Book of the 21st Century) and wanted to learn more about the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland.

Small Things Like These

If you’re unfamiliar with Small Things Like These, you are in for a beautiful reading experience! Oh to be able to write like Keegan. What a voice. The novella takes place in a small Irish town in the 1980s during the Christmas season. When a coal merchant delivers an order to a Catholic convent that runs a Magdalene Laundry, he discovers a freezing girl who has been locked in the coal shed overnight. In returning her to the convent, he finds a world of abuse and imprisonment for the girls and young women who are pregnant and new mothers. As he questions what his response should be, the frightening political and social power of the nuns and the Church are made clear. This is a tale of a test of moral courage.

The Fallen

So powerful was this little novella that it inspired me to find The Fallen by Louise Brangan, a research-based book on the twentieth-century history of the Laundries told through the stories of six young women and girls who were inmates there. I purchased the audiobook version. Again, the story was powerful and shocking. I decided to get the print version from interlibrary loan to have a closer look. Just as my copy was available, it was announced that The Fallen had made the The 2026 Cundill History Prize Shortlist.

The two epigraphs at the beginning of The Fallen indicate that Brangan plans to bring the truth to light and force a reckoning:

In some instances, one may not talk of forgetfulness, for one cannot forget what one has never attempted to know. —Gordon Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us. —Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

The Women and Girls of the Laundries

The prologue discusses a fifteen-year-old girl named Eileen who disappeared from her job as a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin in February 1954. She enjoyed the job. However, one night when her friends were out and she was on her own, two women appeared in the townhouse and decided that Eileen was destined to become a fallen woman. They told her she had to go with them. Like all Irish children, she was raised to unquestioningly obey adults, and so she did. The women dropped her into a Magdalene Laundry, stealing her freedom and ruining her life. She’s given as an example of the kind of girl who ended up in the laundry. She was born in a Mother and Daughter Home, which means that she was considered illegitimate. She lived with relatives who weren’t very kind to her until she finally got away and found her job in the bed and breakfast. She was not pregnant, nor was she an unwed mother. This is one of the important things Brangan clarifies about the Magdalene Laundries. They were not really for ‘fallen women,’ even though people assume that they were and Small Things Like These indicates as much.

In fact, Brangan must also correct the record about information that rolls at the end of the Small Things film, which is based on the novella. It states that there were 56,000 young women who were sent to the Laundries and the children born there were taken from them. The government‘s official calculation of women and girls in the Laundries is 10,012; informed historians consider this an underestimation. However 56,000 seems high. It is, in fact, a figure from an official state investigation into something different—the inmates held in Mother and Baby Homes during the 20th century.

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The Magdalene Laundries

What actually happened in the Laundries belied the serenity of the Irish countryside of the twentieth century, where the general population was considered to be quite moral. From the period of Irish independence in the 1920s, there weren’t very many people in prison. Brangan argues that this doesn’t mean many people, particularly women and girls, weren’t imprisoned. They lived in various “psychiatric hospitals (known then as mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphan children, county homes (formally work houses that were rebranded after Irish independence) and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls who were pregnant outside marriage were sequestered. Then there were the Magdalene Laundries.”

Brangan points out that these institutions housed over 1% of the total Irish population, an incredible rate, and that people there became “ensnared rather than supported.”

The Magdalene Laundries were Ireland’s main carceral institution. While they had initially been run by ordinary people both Catholic and Protestant, they eventually became regimented and religious places of punishment. However, the state colluded with the church in running them. There were ten Magdalene Laundries, which circled the island, run by four religious orders of nuns. The inmates there did everyone’s laundry: priestly vestments, prisoners’ uniforms, hotel and restaurant linens, family laundry, everything. They were not allowed to speak to one another—complete silence at all times was the rule—much less form friendships.

Outside of cleaning laundry, what happened there was a dark secret before activists demanded a reckoning in the mid 2000s. Former inmates were interviewed, particularly between 2009-2015. While the Laundries were active, some women managed to escape, but the tales they told at the time were generally not believed. People couldn’t imagine the nuns running the Laundries because they had not had the same kind of experiences with women religious, who might have been very kind to their families, helping them with alms and with their family troubles.

Punishment for Uncommitted Sins

Brangan tracks six women and girls were confined to the Laundries. One was imprisoned for truancy from school; another because strangers considered her pre-delinquent; yet another to save a family’s reputation. While each of their stories is different, all of them were unwanted, homeless, abused, or rejected. Their stories are unique and utterly compelling, deserving the full treatment they receive in the book. After reading about them, I had nightmares about inescapable places.

In 2009, when there had been a period of pronounced hand ringing about the horrors of the past, the author John Banville wrote what remains one of the most eloquent and uncompromising statements on the topic of Irish silence. ‘Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watch word. Everyone knew, but no one said.’”

Immediately upon entrance into the Laundries, inmates’ names were taken away, and they were given pseudonyms. They were not allowed to speak to each other; they were not allowed to form friendships. This meant that girls who were new didn’t know where they were. They started rumors that the women around them were prostitutes or women who had illegitimate babies. Yet they learned this didn’t make sense because there were also much older women there. The others were like them: abandoned, abused, neglected, rejected by their families.

They had to work long hours in very hot and horrible environments. For example, girls who worked in the sorting rooms found it absolutely disgusting. One woman described it as “‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ None of them could adjust to the fetid air. It was ‘wreaking, stinking, bleach, smell of piss, urine, always had that smell, always.’”

The food was also described as a nasty watery swamp of stew…

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Background

I knew nothing about the novel Theo of Golden, but I wanted to read it because I was heartened by the story of an older writer going viral with a debut after self-publication and then being picked up by Simon & Schuster. I asked for it for my birthday, and I received it (along with several other birthday books; I have a lovely family and friends).

As a general rule, I only discuss books I think are worth reading. If I read something I don’t like, well, I’m a librarian who believes in books for everyone. Though I’m the wrong reader, the book will find the right one. An author, especially one who is published by a small press, can be hurt by criticism, so why engage in it? Better to lift each other up. However, a novel like Theo of Golden and its author, Allen Levi, can’t be harmed by a small voice like mine--and probably not by a booming voice, either. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been scheduled for a film starring Tom Hanks. So, I want to discuss it because it leaves me wondering about the future of fiction.

Warning: I’m likely to include spoilers because I don’t think you should read the book.

Theo of Golden

Though the prefix ‘Theo’ means god, as a name it means a gift of God, and that is clearly what our protagonist is meant to be. Though he is 86 years old, this mystery man is healthy, wealthy, and wise, ready to solve others’ life problems.

Theo is a curious stranger, making his list and checking it twice. He arrives in Golden just before Easter and departs a year later in my least favorite author ‘Get Me Out of This Book’ trick—defenestration. By which I do not mean that another character tosses Theo off the balcony, but that Levi does it.

One of the first things we learn in this novel is the hours of operation of the local coffee shop, the Chalice. (Get it? Get it? Because we have to have very clear religious metaphors in case the name Theo and the fact that he arrives just before Easter escape us.). So I thought the book would be a murder mystery and the hours would have something to do with solving it. But no, it’s just a beginning writer’s story with all the hallmarks of a self-published book. The excess of useless info dumps continues throughout the book, which would benefit from a good editor.

At the Chalice, Theo finds that the coffee competes with the best of Europe. And he would know because he’s been everywhere, beginning with his native Portugal. The walls of the shop are covered with original pencil portraits of the town’s inhabitants. Masterpieces. This, too, Theo knows. In fact, he’s quite the expert on lots of things. Wine, liquor, art, music--you name it, Theo can birdwalk about it, as the novel roams over diverse topics that don’t drive the plot forward. The one thing that’s not discussed until after Theo’s death is who he really is and what he is doing in Golden. But this city of Golden, Georgia is one of the best he’s ever been to, a quaint, loving community in the God-Blessed American South.

Theo decides to buy the pencil portraits from the Chalice, a few at a time, and then give them to the models. He sends each person a mysterious letter asking them to meet him in the park, tell him their stories, and receive the portraits. And while the town knows little about this man, including his last name, they do know that he has beautiful penmanship and a set of expensive stationery, so they trust him. Well, except one very bad man, who will also be easily dispensed with.

The episodic structure of these meetings affords Levi the opportunity to include stories that are completely disconnected. Instead of incorporating necessary character development into the narrative, Levi often relies on info dumps by making a character read, say, a magazine article. The entirety of its contents is then included in the narrative. By page seventeen (of a grueling 384 pages), I was sorry to see Theo’s first letter to a portrait recipient, fearing that the book would be filled with the letters to all 92 of his beneficiaries. At least I was saved from that fate.

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Eventually Theo will play (unlicensed) psychologist to a number of the town’s inhabitants merely by listening and always knowing the right questions to ask and the right things to say. These inhabitants are as onion skin thin as he is. Levi tries to round out one of them—a Vietnam War veteran—by eventually detailing his trauma and PTSD. The problem is that the episode and its dialogue feel very unnatural and it doesn’t come off. It’s just another info dump. The man, a bookseller, is supposed to be seen as a kindly curmudgeon, but Levi is unable to manage it. The character is mostly irritating, his better nature never surfacing.

Other briefly-appearing characters are cringeworthy. A Black man—other than a Nigerian doctor, he appears to be the single Black person in the novel (in Georgia, remember)—speaks in dialect. Another “little man” who is an “illegal,” causes a car accident that kills a woman. (No worries--everything is forgiven in the end.) Where, oh where, is the editor?

The single three-dimensional character in the novel is Ellen, the self-described homeless woman. We learn about her worries over her bicycle and the chance that it might be stolen, her creative talents and how she employs them, and her grammar policing.

As the novel mercifully ends, there are explicit comparisons between Theo and Jesus, including Theo’s springtime (Easter) death. And this is the deeper reason why I’m repelled by this novel. Here we have a savior who does not embody radical notions of love and sacrifice, never mind one who flips a bird to the religious and political authorities of his day. What Levi gives the reader is a man he finds as a better iteration of a savior: Santa Claus, with limitless resources to bestow just the right gifts to all the childish adults in his sphere.

Ultimately, the publishing industry is not a meritocracy. It’s a business and the purpose is to make money. While I can’t be sure, I suspect Simon & Schuster knew Theo would be a cash cow ‘as is’ and didn’t bother with an editor. Still, I admire any author who is able to make a living from writing. As my mother used to say, when Levi is criticized, I’m sure he’s crying all the way to the bank. I imagine we will hear more from him. I saw this reported in Deadline:

Warner Bros Locking Down Film Rights To Allen Levi Bestseller ‘Theo Of Golden’ With Tom Hanks To Star

“The book was published wide by Simon & Schuster last October and has sold over 3.5 million copies stateside. It has been published in 43 languages and was a No. 1 bestseller in places like the Netherlands, Italy and the UK. Now it will be headed for the big screen, following the trajectory of books like Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County and a few others. Like that novel, Theo of Golden is particularly popular with a mature crowd of readers.”

Hanks is the perfect vehicle for the character of Theo, especially if he can bring off a Portuguese accent. But one thing this article made me consider is that the novel is a worldwide hit. It’s not just Americans, then, who read like children.

I couldn’t find professional reviews of Theo except a commentary published on Slate. Most of the things I had thought about were echoed there. I, too, thought that the vast response to this moralizing and saccharine Christianity could be compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I read Stowe’s novel as an adult already knowing that it wasn’t a great piece of literature. However, Uncle Tom has historical value as a force in the abolitionist movement, having had a profound effect on readers of its time. Theo won’t be driving a political movement for human rights and will not be remembered in the future.

When I thought about Theo being the worst book I’ve read in twenty years, the previous worst was Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, published in …

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Hello Friends,

I’m putting on my librarian hat today and, rather than writing an essay, I’m providing some sources that discuss what’s next for the publishing industry concerning AI. I hope my organization of the articles means that one leads into another. Before I get into today’s topic, I figured we could all use some good news, so I’m linking to a recent article on Reasons to Be Cheerful. (Is there any better creature than a dog?) Lastly, I have some reading recommendations. Please click the title to view the whole article or listen to the audio.

Good News

Meet India’s Four-Legged Wildlife Detectives from Reasons to be Cheerful

“Sniffer dogs are emerging as the secret weapon of Indian wildlife authorities,” says Nitin Desai, director (Central India) at WPSI. “When there are no eyewitnesses, dogs find evidence that no human eye can detect.”

Since 2008, WWF-India … has trained more than 120 wildlife sniffer dog squads … . Deployed across 22 states, they assist forest departments in detecting poaching and wildlife trafficking, helping seize tiger skins, pangolin scales, ivory and live animals while also deterring poachers in vulnerable landscapes.

The Drama and Trauma Caused by AI-generated Writing

I’m going to make some assumptions here, primarily that you have heard of book deals being canceled over suspicions that the author used generative AI to write. Readers and writers have been worried that the bookish culture we love will be replaced with AI texts. Now I’m wondering what we are all going to do about it. So, here are some recent articles that (sort of, kind of) seek answers. As to the articles’ mention that people enjoy crappy writing: I want to explore that soon by diving into a book whose author I can’t harm by commenting (a blockbuster bestseller that will probably get a film deal). I asked for Theo of Golden for my birthday because it’s so wildly popular, and someone I know loved it. And, man, is it a pile of stink.

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Writers Combat AI with Style

More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’ From Wired

Ellena Savage, an Australian novelist and academic … says … “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying.”

Across magazines and digital publications, this anti-AI counterstyle is reshaping in-house style and editorial practice too. Richard Fisher, an honorary professor at University College London and editor at online culture magazine Aeon, says AI has prompted him to encourage writers “to be more human” and write more conversationally. “We don’t want to sand out the rough edges, because AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans.” …

[R]enewed appreciation for good writing might be one of the unexpected benefits of the AI writing era. Last April, John Warner, a veteran writing teacher, published More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, in which he argued that rather than replacing writers, AI might actually come to reinstate the value of good writing and the style and process therein.

LLMs have introduced a new paranoia about style, and lack thereof, that might, at least in the short term, be a good thing. … it could provide a new incentive to improve in order to avoid being made redundant by LLMs.

But as AI keeps pace with human writing, potentially being trained on a corpus of anti-AI writing styles as they develop, it could soon necessitate the invention of an anti-anti-anti-AI style. “Whatever cosmetic counterstyle is created in response to AI, AI could mimic,” says McGarry. “The only true counterstyle is good writing.”

And Yet…Do People Prefer AI Writing?

AI stories preferred to human-written ones - study from the BBC

The study, published by Cambridge University Press, tested to see whether people aged 18 to 81 could tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated short stories.

Led by researchers at Villanova University (VU), USA, it found that participants could not tell which was which. …

In their first experiment, 1,682 participants read a story and were either correctly or incorrectly told it had been written by AI or a human. They then rated how engaging it was and its quality.

In a second and third experiment, 424 and 481 people received one human-written story and one by AI, and were not told the author. After reading, they were asked to identify them.

Weisberg said: “In our study, participants gave the highest ratings to stories that they had been told were written by humans but which were actually written by AI. … I’d argue that this reveals a bias towards narratives written by real people.” …

“AI writing tends to be clearer, more direct and easier to process,” said Weisberg. “By contrast, human-written stories are often more subtle and complex. … Perhaps people generally prefer predictability, because difficult or subtle material requires more brain power.”

How A.I. Books Sneak Their Way Into Stores from the New York Times (gift link)

A few years into the A.I. era, there is sobering evidence that a significant and growing portion of the novels being sold are written with or by chatbots, and that readers are buying them.

If True, is This the End of Creativity?

If the average person can’t tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated art, then people and companies and corporations will use AI-generated art because it incurs no human costs, for example health or retirement benefits. …

Why bother to write anything truly creative if you can make money just asking AI to churn out a couple hundred pages of garbage and design a cover to match? … [I]t only takes a few greedy abusers to change the system… . Remember, the average reader usually can’t tell the difference. If they could, books like Fifty Shades of Grey and Theo of Golden would never have become popular. And AI has no trouble replicating bad books like that. …

Young people will no longer aspire to be artists, because they’ll know it will not be them producing the art, but the AI assistant that they are forced to work with. Forced? Yes, because corporations will find a way to acquire the AI technology that produces almost all the art in our country, and they will provide most of the jobs in that field. With AI as the standard, more creative artists will be forced to abandon their more adventurous impulses [in order to] to survive.

Preserving the ‘Wholly-Human’ Author

Why is Anthropic destroying books? From The Guardian

The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data

Should we destroy all the books in the world?

An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Destructive scanning was Anthropic’s solution to a problem: in order to “train” Claude, Anthropic had to procure a large, high-quality language dataset, preferably one created before 2022 and the corrupting influence of generative AI on contemporary text. … As the court’s decision relates, Anthropic hoped that books’ “well-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives” would help “Claude write as accurately and as compellingly as Authors”.

Anthropic had a choice: it could have secured copyright permission to use existing e-books. This would have required the “legal/practice/business slog”, as Anthropi…

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Hello Friends,

Today, I’d like to discuss a few banned and often challenged books: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, a YA multiple award winner and Lucky by Alice Sebold, which should be withdrawn from libraries, but not for the reasons it is being banned.

Before we dive into these books, I want to note that this week Utah banned another book in all of its public schools: Stephen King’s Different Seasons which contains four novellas, two of which were adapted for the films The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me.

Anyone who has read “The Body” or seen Stand By Me will understand why schools were using the collection in the classroom. It’s quite possible that this was the only story in the collection that was assigned. And now the students have lost access to studying it.

When such works are removed, it’s unclear that the goal is to protect the teens or tweens. What is clear is that relatable stories are disappearing from the curriculum.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Over the past few years, I have been discussing banned books most of which were published a decade or more ago. I thought it would be fun to read a more recent one and see what the issues are. I recently picked up Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo because it is so highly regarded and so often vilified. I wanted to know why.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (2021), the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Michael L. Printz Honor, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Wow. And so deserving.

Lily Hu is a Chinese American teen living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s. While she deals with prejudice because of her race, her family is also afraid of the McCarthy-era milieu in which all people of Chinese heritage are suspected of having Communist sympathies. In fact, Lily’s father, a doctor, has been targeted by the FBI for not naming one of his patients as a Communist and his citizenship papers have been confiscated.

As a rising high school senior, Lily is awakening to her sexuality and thrills to an ad for a performance by Tommy Andrews, a male impersonator, at the Telegraph Club. She later learns that a classmate—smart and kind Kath Miller—has been to the lesbian night club. The two strike up a friendship over their common academic interests and later become romantically involved. They sneak out of their houses a few times to go to the Telegraph Club late at night. Eventually, the club is raided and Lily must decide whether to tell her parents the truth and support Kath, or live a lie.

I’m sure the reason Telegraph Club is so often censored is that, at one point, the two girls have a sexual encounter that is briefly described. It’s a natural development of their relationship and only a few paragraphs of the entire novel, which is full of: great character development; a keen perception of the racial prejudice and Communist hysteria of the 1950s; and a very moving first-love story.

After reading Telegraph Club, it’s hard to say how sorry I am that this novel is so often banned. It’s not only a great book, but its emotional pull will benefit all readers. I want to say that it’s very dear, but I’m not sure that conveys my sense of the book. The main characters are sweet, kind to one another, and fumbling through adolescence in the most real way. We love them and root for their happiness. All of which is to say that the novel has an uncommon tenderness. It’s just nuts to keep this excellent work of YA fiction away from teens.

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Utah Banning of Alice Sebold’s Lucky.

Apparently, Utah’s school districts are working backward in time to ban books. The recently banned Lucky by Alice Sebold was published way back in 1999. It’s the author’s story about an extremely violent rape and what followed—the arrest and conviction of a Black man for the assault. While the rape in fact did happen, the man convicted was innocent. This was only proven long after the memoir was published, long after Sebold became a bestselling author with her novel The Lovely Bones. When the alleged rapist was exonerated, the publisher, Scribner, pulled the memoir from distribution.

Back in the day, I used to ‘booktalk’ Lucky to high school classes who came in looking for memoirs. I also posted a review on School Library Lady, discussing why I thought the book was a good choice for high school students. Once the convicted man was exonerated, I removed the review from public view. So the banning of the book in all public schools in Utah (along with 36 other titles) has me thinking about how book curation and weeding in school libraries actually works.

Librarians remove books all the time. Otherwise, there would be no room for new ones. Common reasons for removal are the physical condition of the book (falling apart), lack of interest as shown by checkout stats, and outdated information. The outdated information usually pertains to the sciences (Someday, man will go to the moon!), but it can also be that the information in the book proves to be incorrect.

The easiest example I can give of books with bad info, one that everyone will understand, is memoirs and biographies by or about Lance Armstrong. Think of it—in my high school library, we had LOTS of Lance. Since our population included ESL students, we had biographies beginning at the third grade reading level and going through adult level. Lots of companies that published books specifically for schools sold Lance. He was included in all sorts of series—American heroes, top athletes, role models for our time, etc. And again, these were written at various reading and lexile levels. We talked these books up; they circulated well. And then we had to weed them all. Our role model into the recycle bin.

Lucky is a book with the same fate. Not because Sebold was a liar as was Armstrong—her story of being raped at knifepoint and beaten and the aftermath is true and horrifying. But the book is inaccurate because it tells us that the rapist was caught and imprisoned. So it belongs in the recycle bin. Even though Utah schools had the book in the last 25 years, if it was still in the collection, I’d be surprised. Maybe the schools don’t have a level of staffing that allows time for weeding. (This is a very common problem and was true of my job as a teacher librarian.)

The story surrounding Sebold’s rape and the conviction and later exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, is tragic. Broadwater was wrongfully imprisoned for 16 years and spent 22 years as a registered sexual offender. There are so many missteps and genuinely bad police work.

If read together, two articles give us a solid overview of the situation. One was published in the New Yorker in May 2023 “The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her Rape” by Rachel Aviv. A second came out a few weeks ago (June 30, 2026), That Guy is Still Out There by Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica.

The New Yorker article may be password protected (no gift link available to me, sorry.) The ProPublica article is free to all readers. They are pretty long, but I highly recommend reading them. Meanwhile, below I paraphrase and quote from each. These are only a few of the points the articles make, but they will give you a sense of what happened.

From the New Yorker

* During a police lineup, Sebold identified a different man—not Broadwater. After signing a form that confirmed her decision, she felt a wave of nausea. She sensed that she’d made the wrong choice.

* The assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, was a thirty-one-year-old pregnant woman whom Sebold saw as a …

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Hello Friends,

While this is not our “Library and Banned Books News” week, (that’s next week), I do want to mention that the Knox County, TN schools reversed the banning of Alex Haley’s Roots. And that was because of community and national blow back. Fighting back matters! Good job, book ‘freadom’ fighters!

I had another cataract surgery last week, and wasn’t seeing clearly again, so I had the chance to listen to several audiobooks. One of them was Daniel Kraus’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Angel Down. I read some remarks about the book questioning whether the Pulitzer committee was biased toward experimental work. Apparently, some critics found all the finalists to be similar in their approach. I don’t know—I haven’t read most of the books up for the award. However, Angel Down is unusual (I wouldn’t go so far as to say experimental) in that it is a single sentence. But, at least in audiobook form, it flows well. Pauses can be felt; there are chapter breaks (each starts with the word “and”).

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Angel Down

Angel is easy to follow and reminded me—in form, not in content— of the Academy Award winning film 1917 (Directed by Sam Mendes) which feels like it was filmed in one continuous shot. I haven’t read any interviews with Kraus, so I don’t know whether he was influenced by the film.

Angel is the story of a group of five American soldiers trying to stay alive during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I. A weird lamentation is coming from the No Man’s Land between them and the Germans. The pitch and endlessness of the cry is driving the men mad. Their commanding officer—Major General Reis, a very bad guy—commands them to take care of the man, who is probably caught in barbed wire. He means they are to kill the sufferer.

No one wants to risk their life in No Man’s Land. Private Cyril Bagger, a con man and draft dodger who only landed in the war because he was caught in an illegal scheme, knows he can con his way out of being chosen for the risky mission. However, when the task falls to a teenage soldier named Arno, a mere boy who lied about his age in order to join the army, Bagger decides to accompany him. He has a soft spot for the poor kid after reading “The Son of Tarzan” to him. For a while, he believes he can make sure that Arno makes it home alive.

When the two venture out to find the suffering soldier, they are surprised to find instead what they think is an angel, a woman who is unable to walk but who emanates a beam of heavenly light. It seems she protects them as they rescue her. But once they arrive back with the others, the angel brings out both the worst impulses of each of them as well as their illusory dreams. Bagger and Arno make it their mission to protect the angel and deliver her to safety.

The story is full of vivid descriptions of the gore and horror of war—severed limbs, erupting guts, rotting teeth, pus and infections, burnt flesh—one atop the other, giving the reader a sense of the futility and darkness of the enterprise.

As a high school teacher librarian, I read many YA books that I would later ‘book talk’ to students. The way the horror and gore were described in Angel were familiar to me. Is this the Daniel Kraus who wrote YA novels that I used to book talk? I checked—and yes, he is the same man.

This Pulitzer winning novel has much in common with two novels I read for book talks—Rotters and Scowler. Perhaps this will lead some readers to think ‘how did Angel win the Pulitzer, then?’ But maybe another way to look at it is that some YA books are very good, and Kraus’s are among them. Maybe he was building the skills that landed that Pulitzer.

If you enjoy horror, you might enjoy those novels. You could recommend them to teens you know. Teens could impress their teachers with the fact that they’ve read books by Kraus. Here are some thoughts I had when I read the YA books.

Scowler

My thoughts in October 2013:

Scowler is a great October read, one in a YA branch of the true horror family. So—this is NOT your love triangle with some supernatural creatures thrown in ala Twilight and its progeny.

Scowler is Dark.

Scowler is Disturbing.

After nine years in prison, a psychopath returns to the family farm with one thing on his mind—revenge against his son, now nineteen years old, for having him locked up all those years ago. That father, Marvin Burke, has escaped when meteorites fall throughout the county. One hits the prison and chaos ensues. Though Burke is supposed to be in a more distant lock-up, another escaped prisoner comes to the farm and warns Ry that his father is out for his blood.

Ry had bested his father nine years earlier after climbing through a window and discovering his mother locked in her room, unable to flee. Her immobility is due to the twisted torture that her husband had devised for her in response to the fact that she has secretly done work to support the failing farm. (I can’t tell you—don’t want to kill the creep factor when you read it.)

Though the family—Ry, his mom and his little sister Sarah—nearly escape, Marvin Burke catches them. It is up to ten-year-old Ry to be a decoy, to risk himself through a freezing night. He has no jacket, none of the right clothing, in fact. No light. No nothing, except three toys that fall from his pockets. As his mental state breaks under pressure of his father stalking him in order to murder him, these toys come to life and direct him through his living hell.

One of Ry’s toys—Scowler—is an old cast-off, homemade from pipes, husks and shells. Hideously ugly.

It may prove his salvation more than once.

High school housekeeping: I think any teen might enjoy Scowler for a Halloween fright. Though there are several flashbacks, it takes place over a few days, just before the meteorite hits and then just after. Here, the reader finds himself in the mind of a sadistic psychopath as well as in the mind of his son, who, having suffered beyond ordinary human endurance, may well become a psychopath himself. The language is colorful, so if cursing offends you, you might take a pass. But this gives a sense of reality both to the brother-sister relationship and to the dire situation of the family. It’s a book of average length and average difficulty that will give you a taste of what adult horror fans read in the lengthier works of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and their ilk.

Rotters

My thoughts in June 2013:

Such a weird story! The combination of bullying and horror story compelled me to finish the book, and I think it will appeal to anyone who likes really quirky stuff.

Joey Crouch has lived with his mother all of his life in Chicago. They don’t go out much and he’s never been over the Illinois state line. But when his mother is hit by a bus and killed, Joey is removed to a small town in Iowa to live with a father he’s never known.

Things are very bad from the start. Ken Harnett, Joey’s dad, doesn’t bother to pick him up at the depot. He immediately leaves the house upon Joey’s arrival and doesn’t return for three days. Meanwhile, Joey sleeps on the floor, has nothing to eat and notices a strange, nasty odor in the shack that he can’t identify.

Dressed poorly, hungry and stinking, Joey immediately becomes a target of bullying in his new high school—not only by jocks but by a sadistic biology teacher as well, one who daily makes Joey stand in front of the class and then uses him to point out body parts and their functions. (Just a note here from the teacher in me: I had a hard time believing that any teacher anywhere could get away with treating a student the way Joey was treated—but if one tried, I would hope that someone in the class would speak up and tell outsiders.)

The situation only gets worse when we discover what that terrific stink is: Ken is a modern-day grave robber. With nothing to lose at school, Joey decides to learn the trade, and we enter the bizarre brotherhood of this underworld. They are criminals with a …

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com