reading when you are crumbling

I’m not sure what to say about this year’s life as a reader. Looking back at my list, the books from the first half of the year seem so long ago—I could’ve sworn I read Mohsin Hamed’s Exit West a couple of years ago (was it even out then?) and haven’t I always been worrying about Julie Buntin’s Marlena? It’s partly that those books stuck into me and wound themselves around me in ways that feel like I’ve been carrying them forever. But it’s also this year. This year is too long. There’s too much in it. We all joke about this—the Tuesday afternoon tweets saying “I can’t believe it’s Friday already!” But it’s not really a joke. There’s the Friday afternoon news dumps, the revelations day after day about some shocking, previously unthinkable thing happening, the radical cracking of what so many people (wrongly) thought were the safe foundations…

reading when the world crumbles

This was not a good year for reading for me. I read a lot, but it was almost every time hard to settle on a book to read, to find something that fit my mood even though I didn’t know what my mood was, to choose a book that wasn’t too heavy to get through but wasn’t too frivolous. What a luxury it is to be able to set aside time to read, when other people are facing the horrors of not being able to get into this country to be reunited with their families or to be safe from persecution and poverty and illness, when others are here but cannot leave and are scared to open their doors for fear of being dragged away from their homes, when others are reliving sexual assault and harassment and humiliation from yesterday or decades ago. But what a necessity it is to…

books won’t save you

In the wake of what has been for many in my circles a devastating election repudiating all sorts of values we hold dear—diversity, inclusion, equity, feminism, respect, coherent sentences—there have been a lot of statements along the lines of “if people read more books, this wouldn’t happen!” This is obviously such bunk I can hardly be bothered to deal with it. There’s nothing inherently good about reading; the act of reading books doesn’t make you a better person. Shouldn’t that be obvious? It’s not reading that saves you, but the doors that reading can open and your willingness to walk through them. If you only read books that reinforce what you already believe, you won’t learn anything new. If you only read books to pass the time between being awake and being asleep, you won’t engage with new ideas. If you only read because you think you’re supposed to, if…

books with friends

In the last few years I’ve started to keep track of what I’ve read. I don’t do anything fancy: I have a google doc and I write down the author and title of each book I’m reading and some quick notes on it, keeping track of the months as they go by. I do it partly because I was jealous of other friends’ lists and curious to know what I really read—not what I remembered reading, the low and high points, but what I’d really spent my time reading. I also do it so that when someone asks me for a recommendation, I have notes on what I liked and disliked and said meh to. (My 2015 book list is here, cryptic notes and all.) What I had not appreciated until recently, however, is that my list helps me remember my friends as well. When I look back at the…

being a reader, again and still

There’s a story my parents used to tell of me as a child and how much I loved to read. Reading was what my family did in the evenings; we sat in the room we referred to as the study and read. One evening I was so deeply engrossed in my book that I had no idea they were talking to me; this was entertaining enough that they were both watching me to see how long it would be before I responded. It was long enough that it became a tale they told, part of how they understood who I was. I have always identified as a reader—a bookworm who understood the world by reading novels. It’s because I loved reading so much that I wanted to be an English professor (yes, if someone hadn’t intervened, I would’ve written one of those applications for grad school that gushed about how I…