\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.<\/em><\/p>\n One of the more common clich\u00e9s of modern travel is calling any trip\u2014even a subway ride to an Instagram-famous coffee shop\u2014a pilgrimage. The word originally applied to journeys made to holy places by people so devout that they were willing to endanger their lives to get there. Today, both the risks and rewards of travel tend to be lower, but the activity retains its spiritual character for some, including the novelist Lauren Groff. For the latest installment of The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s series \u201cThe Writer\u2019s Way,\u201d she traveled to Kyoto in search of the mysterious author of The Tale of Genji<\/em>, frequently credited as the world\u2019s first novel. She made her way through the crowds swarming Japan\u2019s former imperial capital to find out more about that writer, known to us as Lady Murasaki. But Groff also came across the kinds of spiritual experiences that fire up much of her own fiction.<\/p>\n First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s books section:<\/p>\n Groff was in Kyoto in April; the journalist Reeves Wiedeman was there around the same time. In a feature published in June in New York <\/em>magazine, Wiedeman wrote that the city has become the epicenter of the \u201cage of overtourism\u201d: a once-tranquil historical landmark blighted by travelers racing to take selfies at a handful of clogged sites. Reading it, I wondered how Groff\u2019s essay could wrest meaning from this location\u2014what weaving among the frequent-flying box-checkers could reveal about the Heian era of Japan, a time and place that Groff says is \u201cthrillingly distant to my imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n In Kyoto, Groff did what many tourists do: She made a list and checked off destinations\u2014temples, palaces, and museums associated with Murasaki\u2019s life and work. Yet her most meaningful encounters had as much to do with sensation as place. She describes a feeling of \u201cliving outside time\u201d while eating a 7-Eleven egg sandwich and sitting on a clean-swept sidewalk curb; she has an epiphany not while beholding a 10th-century relic but while taking a hot bath downstairs from her hotel room. Her deepest connections to medieval Japan are experiential, rather than physical or intellectual. \u201cI had an inkling that, though my love of Lady Murasaki could be explained only through beautiful abstraction\u2014by meeting her mind in her work,\u201d Groff writes, \u201cI might begin to understand something tangible about her through the wordless animal body.\u201d<\/p>\n This kind of sensory awareness can be found in Groff\u2019s fiction. Her most explicitly religious novel, Matrix<\/em>, published in 2021, imagined the 12th-century mystic Marie de France as a towering figure who made a British abbey into a power center for medieval women. A heterodox interpretation of Christianity infuses much of her work, as Judith Shulevitz noted in a recent Atlantic <\/em>essay about her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds<\/em>. Shulevitz considered the journey in the book, a young woman\u2019s flight from Jamestown in the 17th century, to be a spiritual one\u2014an update, in fact, of The<\/em> Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em>\u2014in which communion with nature is achieved through perilous struggle. She called the book \u201cChristian allegory in a post-Christian spirit.\u201d Groff\u2019s recent novels, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a profile when Matrix <\/em>was released, sprang from \u201cthe idea that so much of our present suffering comes from a misreading of Genesis. God instructed man to have dominion over Earth and its creatures, and yet dominion<\/em>, Groff thinks, has been interpreted as domination<\/em> instead of care: \u2018the right to kill, the right to take, and not the right to nurture.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to connect this dichotomy\u2014dominion versus care\u2014with the approach Groff takes in Kyoto, diverging from the flocking tourists that Wiedeman depicts. Groff, a fan (as Shulevitz notes) of the animist-leaning Quaker John Bartram, observes the nature-worship of Japan\u2019s Shinto traditions. She closes her essay with a tea-and-meditation ceremony at the Shunk\u014d-in Temple, a place with no ostensible connection to Murasaki, and yet she gleans something valuable about the often-puzzling structure of The Tale of Genji<\/em>. She learns from one of the temple\u2019s Buddhist reverends that \u201cthe self is a shifting, inconstant phenomenon\u201d; he advises her to \u201cembrace\u201d ambiguity, which is \u201cpart of nature.\u201d This instruction helps Groff understand the orderly disorder of Murasaki\u2019s writing; it also teaches her about herself. Perhaps this is\u2014or should be\u2014the goal of every pilgrimage.<\/p>\n Takako Kido for The Atlantic<\/p>\n A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto<\/strong><\/p>\n By Lauren Groff<\/p>\n A thousand years ago, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji<\/em>, the world\u2019s first novel. Who was she?<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed<\/em><\/strong>, by John McPhee<\/strong><\/p>\n Pilots get most of the public credit for a flight\u2019s successes\u2014but they couldn\u2019t go anywhere without the behind-the-scenes heroes: engineers. McPhee has a rare gift for stepping into the astonishing obsessions of seemingly ordinary working people; here, he uses it to immerse the reader in a decades-long quest to build an entirely new type of aircraft. That potential vehicle, shaped like the titular pumpkin seed, was imagined as a combination of dirigible and airplane. Its siren call, as McPhee shows, was sometimes all-consuming, even life-destroying. In a saga that reaches from the Civil War to the 1970s, one acolyte after another grew convinced that he (this affliction appears to target men exclusively) would be the one who conquered the engineering challenge that had theretofore led only to ruin. Did anyone finally succeed? The fact that you aren\u2019t reading these words in the passenger compartment of a dirigible-airplane hybrid gives you a clue, but McPhee\u2019s storytelling makes readers hope that the mission will somehow pan out.\u00a0 \u2014 Jeff Wise<\/em><\/p>\n From our list: Six books to read before you get to the airport<\/p>\n \ud83d\udcda <\/em>A New New Me<\/em>, by Helen Oyeyemi<\/p>\n \ud83d\udcda <\/em>The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide<\/em>, by Howard W. French<\/p>\n \ud83d\udcda <\/em>Breakneck: China\u2019s Quest to Engineer the Future<\/em>, by Dan Wang<\/p>\n Illustration by Jonelle Afurong \/ The Atlantic. Sources: Mike Hansen \/ Getty; mikroman6 \/ Getty.<\/p>\n Why Is Everything Spicy Now?<\/strong><\/p>\n By Ellen Cushing<\/p>\n To put it generally and reductively, American food has not always been known for embracing spice. But now a large and apparently growing number of people in this country are willingly chomping down on fruits that have been expressly cultivated to bind to their body\u2019s pain receptors and unleash fury with every bite. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the great puzzles of culinary history,\u201d Paul Rozin, a retired psychologist who spent much of his career studying spice, told me. \u201cIt is remarkable that something that tastes so bad is so popular.\u201d<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.<\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. One of the more common clich\u00e9s of modern travel is calling any trip\u2014even a subway ride to an Instagram-famous coffee shop\u2014a pilgrimage. The word originally applied to journeys made to holy places by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[10371,1001,1043,10373,10372,2018],"class_list":{"0":"post-17241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-11thcentury","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-briefing","11":"tag-kyoto","12":"tag-novelist","13":"tag-search"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What to Read<\/h4>\n
Out Next Week<\/h4>\n
Your Weekend Read<\/strong><\/h4>\n