"Books rise to the level of enduring art, I believe, when their writers take something ordinary and reintroduce it in a way that radically transforms it. The right work can make a subject that's never crossed my mind, or that strikes me as aggressively boring, into something incantatory, pulsing with meaning."
"Shapton trained for the Olympic trials twice, almost making the Olympic team, her time long by mere seconds. But this isn't the story of a loss or a win. Instead, the book is a collage of outtakes, nonsequential essays, and lists. Most interesting are several series of paintings and photographs that feel as repetitive as lane swimming across pages and pages of half-forgotten teammates' blurry faces, swimming pools' rectangular shapes, and almost-creepy old bathing suits on a dressmaker's dummy."
Enduring art emerges when writers take commonplace subjects and present them in ways that fundamentally shift perception and understanding. The most powerful works place readers inside unfamiliar perspectives, cultivate empathy for strangers, and reveal unexpected dimensions of everyday experience. This transformative approach inspired the author's novel Earth 7, which explores beach sand as a transcendent substance. Nine carefully selected books exemplify this principle by reshaping the author's understanding of seemingly dull topics. Shapton's memoir about competitive swimming demonstrates this technique through a collage of essays, lists, paintings, and photographs that reveal the subtle complexity and emotional depth within repetitive athletic training, transforming a potentially tedious subject into something rich with meaning and variation.
Read at The Atlantic
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