The Sunday Supplement: #46
Good new (and newish) books about acquiring things, a website to help shop for fun cars, favorite Italo Disco
Currently reading and really enjoying two books about consumption: Frank Trentmann’s 2017 magnum opus Empire of Things and Kaitlyn Tiffany’s 2022 book Everything I Need I Get From You.
The Trentmann is a very broad, very big, also highly detailed look at shopping and acquisition, from Renaissance Italy and late Ming China to today. Basically, he sets out to explain why anyone has ever wanted anything, anywhere. Small task!
From Jason Heller’s review on NPR:
It's an enormous undertaking, and the size of the book reflects that. It's huge. Thankfully it's also hugely readable. Combining a dizzying array of disciplines — economics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, religion, geopolitics, and even etymology — Empire deftly juggles a colossal load. The roots of the word "consume" are unearthed — including its transition from negative to positive somewhere around the Industrial Revolution — even as every conceivable angle of the idea of consumption is taken, turned, and reexamined. But Trentmann's savvy enough to dig up characters and tell stories.
I don’t remember how I discovered it, but for a possibly dry topic done in a possibly textbook-y title, it’s a page-turner, readable and often startling.
I’m only about a third into the Kaitlyn Tiffany book, but I’m really enjoying it: a smart, personal study of the online world of fans, particularly fangirls (and particularly One Direction fangirls, which Tiffany identifies as), asserting that fangirls basically created the social internet the rest of us have learned how to use.
From Amanda Hess’s review in the New York Times:
She contextualizes fandom as a culturewide coping mechanism and creative outlet; it can be a lifeline for a lonely and powerless teenager, a site of reflection for a middle-aged mom or a wonderful excuse for anyone to scream into the void. Ten years after she discovered the band, Tiffany’s favorite 1D inside joke — “We took a chonce”; if you know you know — still “smacks me with a lingering hit of dopamine,” she writes, “like a gumball-machine-sticky-hand landing on a windowpane.”
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