Hello Smarty, It's Your BookWag!

There’s an icy plunge, and then there’s bloody murder. The cast of Bad Sisters at the Forty Foot, Sandycove, Dublin (Christopher Barr/Apple TV+).

Dear Wags,

On my way to serving up my first 2024 BookWag, I took a polar plunge in the Atlantic.

I love a bracing swim. I’ve done laps in a Baltic Sea pool (just four of them, but when the water is 54 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s plenty), logged hours in an Adirondack lake in September, and jumped into frigid pools around the world. I’m not the only nut who believes in the restorative properties of an icy dunk. Wag Katja Pantzar, author of Everyday Sisu: Tapping into Finnish Fortitude for a More Resilient Life, swims in the frosty sea near Helsinki every day. An Irishwoman I know revives herself at the Forty Foot in Dun Loaghaire, the swimming spot featured on the Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters. My crew of polar bears braves rivers, ponds, and estuaries up and down the East Coast.

Starting the year with an icy shock may be great for the body, but creative entrepreneurs shouldn’t be left in the cold. When I came across this article about the Spotify model for audiobook compensation, my blood boiled. Here’s another godawful idea from the tech world: paying authors on how many pages a reader gets through. While we’re at it, why don’t we pay musicians by the number of measures heard before a concertgoer falls asleep? Hate a lyric? Demand your money back! Authors publish books, not sentences.

For as long as anybody can remember, readers have bought entire books, with some appreciation for all the labor that goes into them. If they dislike a plot twist, they can’t march back to the store for a refund. When you buy a dictionary, you pay the full cover price, whether you look up 10 words or 2,000.

The rest of humanity is getting pretty fed up with Silicon Valley’s attempts to reduce the best parts of existence to crummy ROI calculations. I’ve fallen asleep reading books widely held to be riveting and raced through others many folks found a slog. If I purchase a book and then forget about it for a year or two, why should the author suffer? I’m pretty sure Daniel Ek, Spotify’s billionaire CEO, won’t.

When it comes to ripping off writers, media tycoons don’t lack for ingenuity. The last thing we need is another diabolical way to tie an artist’s income to the attention span of a fickle audience. Or are we thrilled with what new forms of media have already done to cheapen culture?

One of great things about a polar plunge is that it reminds the swimmer she can withstand a little discomfort. Great literature should get people to stretch outside their comfort zones. If a reader hits the pause button on audiobook, its writer shouldn’t be forced to idle by her side. Spotify execs probably fancy themselves disrupters of the creative economy. What they are really doing is sinking into the ancient trap of pandering to make a quick buck. But here’s the thing: Great writing is found in the cold depths of risk, never in the shallows.

Yours Ever,

The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Donkey is an 11-year-old girl, left with her grandmother Hermine Zook after her mother runs off. The old woman nurtures the infant with donkey’s milk, hence the child’s nickname. The pair live in isolation in Michigan’s Great Massasauga Swamp, where Hermine is shunned as a witch. As the child grows up, she burns with curiosity about the wider world and her family’s story. Set in a hardscrabble community, this moving tale is populated by flinty women and tender men. Aided by her keen eye for rural life, Campbell has crafted an evocative coming-of-age yarn.

My Friends by Hisham Matar

Khalid, Mustafa, and Hosam are three men united in resistance to Libya’s Qaddafi regime. They share a troubled a history that stretches from 1983 London to 2011’s Arab Spring. Matar’s memoir The Return related his difficult reckoning with his country; now he explores themes of exile in fiction. Khaled seeks political asylum in England while his friends confront a repressive government at home. In middle age, the trio wrestle with the choices they’ve made. Looking back at their restless youth, we come to understand that what binds them together may also tear them apart.

You Only Call When You’re in Trouble by Stephen McCauley