March was my best reading month in ages. I read 8 books and loved all of them. Also, one of the books I read touched my soul so deeply, it has been assigned a permanent spot in my personal canon. If you are a reader, you know what a thrill that is.
Here’s a list of everything I read in much. And, if you are curious, I have included brief reviews of each book at the bottom of this (long) newsletter.
I am a fan by Sheena Patel
Good Material by Dolly Alderton (audiobook)
Stoner by John Williams
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (audiobook)
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Katalin Street by Magda Szabo
People are always asking me how I read as much as I do (as someone who does not read for work) and here are some thoughts (again). Most importantly, I believe that our battle these days is not to read more but to scroll less. When we scroll less, we do more of the other things we enjoy doing. In my case that happens to be reading.
So, basically, I tell myself to reach for a book when I would normally reach for my phone… and here’s what that means in practical terms:
I try to always have a physical book on me - Sometimes, all I end up doing is making my bag heavier but other times, I am stuck somewhere and end up having a great time because instead of scrolling, I can read. This past weekend, we went to the park because the weather was nice. We got popsicles, played frisbee and … guess what… sat around on the grass and read our books! It was divine.
When I am home and working, I always have a book nearby. If I am waiting for a co-worker to join me for Zoom, I get on the call 5 minutes early and read a few pages. If a meeting gets cut short, I read a few pages. If I am waiting on my coffee, I lean against the kitchen counter and I read. I am finding that reading in little spurts like this keeps me IN the book so it ends up taking me less time to get BACK IN it later.
Give audiobooks a real try. It took me a while but I now love having an audiobook going in parallel to whatever main book I am reading on paper. I pick books that are plot driven so that they are easier to follow and then listen in the car while driving, while out for a walk or while doing house chores such as dishes or laundry. It is different to read this way, it is true, but if you are listening to your book when you can still be somewhat solitary and focused, you will be able to get drawn into the narrative, I promise you.
To replace “the infinite scroll”, I have perfected The Infinite TBR Pile. All over the house, I have piles of books that I try to group by themes that are ready To Be Read. That way, I ride the momentum of finishing a book… and that force is especially powerful if I actually enjoyed what I read.
Last but not least, you may probably remember me lamenting the fact that I haven’t really been feeling contemporary fiction recently. So, I decided to give myself a break and after I finished the Dolly Alderton and the Sheena Patel books, I opted for modern classics and backlisted novels (novels that were published more than two years ago. Even though I read some recent titles, I chose those because I was interested in the author or the themes of the books, not because I was trying to “stay current”. This one small change in my reading choices ended up feeling especially liberating and I believe is the main reason why I became a human reading machine this past month. Choosing backlisted titles was essentially the reader equivalent of stepping away from the urgency to be up-to-date by the minute and only consuming “content” that is current and new.
Below are the brief reviews of what I read in March! Let me know if you have any questions about any of these titles, happy to provide more detail!
📚 I am a fan by Sheera Patel - not my immediate favorite but I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s told from the perspective of a young woman who is having an affair with a married artist and becomes obsessed with his other illicit love interest. The book gave me massive anxiety but really made me think about Instagram/influencer culture and how we are affected by the parasocial relationships we are in, how much the people we get to know online impact how we feel about ourselves or evaluate our real-life relationships.
📚 Good Material by Dolly Alderton (audiobook) - this is the story of a breakup told from the perspective of the guy in the relationship. Andy is a struggling comedian and his ex-girlfriend is a hyper-functioning, type A, professionally successful woman with a corporate job and a steadfast forward trajectory. I honestly hated most of the book because I found Andy to be just so whiney and annoying but I stuck it out and ended up loving the final chapters, told from the perspective of Jen.
📚 Stoner by John Williams is the book that is now maybe my second most favorite book of all times (second only to Nicole Krauss’s Great House). It is the story of William Stoner who grows up on a farm in rural Missouri and becomes the first person in his family to go to college. Stoner stumbles into an English Literature class, falls in love with books and eventually ends up becoming a professor at his Alma Mater. He gets married and has a child but is unlucky in love and focuses his energy on teaching, becoming a beloved professor despite his lack of professional ambition. This is a quiet book about books, reading, self-awareness and self-acceptance. It felt so tender and happy reading it. I wish I could read it for the first time again.
📚 Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is about an unmarried woman in her 30s, living in Tokyo and finding complete fulfillment working in a convenience store despite the pressures of her friends and family to look for something better. The book is deceptively simple, yet profound, and it not only provides an interesting counterpoint to late stage capitalism but also serves as such a beautiful reminder to why we read. I loved getting to know this neurodivergent character and feel deep empathy for a lived experience so different from my own.
📚 The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt is a tiny little book that I read while waiting in line to get a passport and kept me so entertained that I forgot to feel cranky that they kept me waiting for over an hour. The main protagonist is a young woman who was raised by a wealthy couple in Marrakesh, who may or may not have been con-artists. Delightful.
📚 The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (audiobook) - Set in Dublin, the story is told from the point of view of Rachel - a college student who works in a bookstore to afford school where she meets her initially closeted new best friend, James. The two move in together, building deep love and trust, the way we only do in our 20s. They lean on each other as they both throw themselves in heart wrenching love affairs - James with Rachel’s married lit professor and Rachel with another James - that change them profoundly.
📚 I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman - This book is a dystopian novel set in the near future where we meet 40 women who have been imprisoned by an unknown force for unknown reasons. The story reminded me of The Handmaid’s Tale but felt kinder and more hopeful, instead of focusing on the atrocities that had created the scenario to, instead, choosing to explore the resulting love and friendship between the imprisoned women. A beautiful take on female friendship, aging, and desire and what it means to retain your humanity under inhumane circumstances.
📚 Katalin Street by Magda Szabo was my first Szabo book. Szabo is a well known Hungarian writer across many genres but her work has recently become buzzy in the States after the New York Review of Books published The Door in 2015. Katalin is the story of three families who live nextdoor to each other on Katalin Street. Their lives become forever changed after one of the families is deported when Germany occupies Hungary during WW2 and the remaining families unsuccessfully try to hide their daughter. The book is an incredibly moving Holocaust story without focusing on the atrocities committed by Germany and instead exploring the infinite ways in which in our efforts to protect, humans end up hurting each other. The book is so cool and collected and yet upon finishing, all I could do was sob.
Now tell me:
How’s scrolling for you? Do you feel you have things under control?
What are you reading and loving these days?
Do you have favorite classics that you would like to recommend?
Do you wish you could read more? What gets in your way?
Who are your favorite #BookStackers? I want to meet them!
Most of the scrolling I do is Substack now - oops! But I've been meaning to take the book I'm reading now (The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice) to the kitchen for when I'm making coffee / food.
I had an urge to dive into a book authored by someone with a completely different perspective from mine, and "Be Useful" by Arnold Schwarzenegger proved to be just that. Adapting to his style took some effort (Schwarzenegger isn't known for his intellectualism), but his candidness, openness, and directness won me over. Experiencing the world through the lens of someone who, unlike me, doesn't overanalyze was quite refreshing.