is a writer, artist, and designer who has spent his career mapping what it actually looks like to live and work as a creative person. His books — Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep going — have been a lifeline for me at multiple points in my life, and his newsletter is one of the few I read the moment it arrives. What I love most about Austin’s work is his particular mix of wisdom, humor, and generosity. He shares not just his outputs but his process, which is, I think, the reason his work has such broad and enduring appeal. He is beloved by artists and us mortals alike.

Austin’s writing has been personally meaningful to me at more than one inflection point, and increasingly so as A Reading Life has evolved. What started as a desperate attempt to claw my way back to some intellectual life after being physically and creatively depleted postpartum has grown far beyond what I originally imagined. And throughout that process, I have constantly questioned my right to be doing any of it. The critical voices in my head are NOT quiet and Austin’s work has helped me (keep going) in very concrete ways. He’s the reason I write about books even though I’m not a critic (you don’t have to be a genius), and write about them the way I do (write good stories) — in my own voice and in my imperfect way that if it has any appeal it is because it is mine. And, when I do get in my head, which happens much more frequently than you guys could possibly imagine, I think of a specific reader of this newsletter and (make gifts) write a post specifically to them, clicks and open rates be damned, just writing in a way that I hope will connect for that one person and mean something to them specifically.

Austin is also, for the record, the reason I own a datestamp and begin every day by stamping my notebooks — my work notebook, my personal journal, my junk journal, my commonplace. I genuinely cannot explain why this gives me such distinct joy, but it does. It is one of the main characters of my bliss station.

I love Austin’s work so much… I have been bugging him to do The Reading Life interview since July of 2024!!! And for the longest time he couldn’t (he was deep in a book and needed to stay focused, which I completely understood) but told me to stay in touch. So I kept asking. Austin kept writing. And - guys - as of this week, the book is out.

Don’t Call It Art is the fourth book in his artist handbook series, and Austin describes it as:

In his characteristically light-handed way, he has written something that feels, to me, quietly radical and profound. This book is a warning against spending too much time self-mythologizing and performing a creative identity — for the algorithms, for an audience, for ourselves. Doing so unintentionally can put up walls between ourselves and the actual work we need to be doing. The antidote Austin proposes is not discipline or ambition but play: unserious, unlabeled, imperfect making. The idea is that when we stop trying to produce something worthy of our self-image, we create the conditions where real work — surprising, alive, authentic — becomes possible again.

Today, with very little further ado, I am beyond excited to share Austin Kleon’s responses to The Reading Life questionnaire. P.S. All images in the post are used with Austin’s explicit permission.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for the second time. I first read it over the 2010-2011 holiday break, so it’s been, oh 15 years? I believe that every time you pick up a book you’re a different person than you were the last time, so it becomes a new book. This time around, I’m struck by how many of McMurtry’s influences I’ve read since then — specifically Don Quixote and Tolstoy’s gigantic novels — and how much more I understand the Stoic/Epicurean tensions that McMurtry highlights in his introduction to the anniversary edition. It’s got stuff that’s as bloody and horrific as McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (which came out the same year!!) but it’s also funny and fun to read. It’s a great book, a classic, a genuine page-turner. I might read it again in 15 years.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

I couldn’t really say, as it varies greatly depending on the season. I like to read non-fiction in print with a pencil in the morning or afternoon and fiction every night on my e=reader before bed. (Non-fiction wakes me up, fiction puts me into the dream state.)

I read a lot in the summer when the kids are off school. Around 3PM I get into our pool and with a book and just float around and read until dinnertime. Summer is when I tend to tackle big books — I’ve read Don Quixote, Dune, Middlemarch, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, Iain McGilchrist’s massive books, etc.

You can tell which books on my shelf got read in the pool because they’re warped from being waterlogged.

How do intense personal or professional periods affect your ability to read?

When I’m writing, I need something really escapist and different from the material I’m working on. I often find that my depression is usually correlated with my inability to find something good to read. (For example, it’s hard for me to be too depressed when I’m reading Lonesome Dove.)

I find that as the world loses its mind, I want to spend time with people in the past who kept their heads. For most of the past winter I read a dozen pages of Montaigne’s Essays in the morning, and a Sherlock Holmes story every night. It was wonderful. Mark Slutsky has this idea of “good-handedness” in a book, the feeling you’re in good hands. (Although, I would guess that the good-handedness of a book depends on the hands that are holding it.)

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

Hell, I don’t know. [Laughing.] I’m like Alice in Wonderland, in that I am biased towards books with pictures, and often think, “What is the use of a book without pictures?” Graphic novels and comics, sure, but what I really love are big ol’ collections of newspaper strips, like Schulz’s Peanuts, Bushmiller’s Nancy, or Jannson’s Moomin. (In another life I would’ve liked to be a cartoonist.) I love the Quentin Fiore paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, the heavily-designed stuff like Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. I love books where the illustrations act as punctuation and help tell the story, like Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, or more recently, Sally Mann’s Hold Still or Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal. I think Lynda Barry’s What It Is is probably my favorite book of the 21st century.

PKG: Our household is also totally and completely obsessed with the Moomins and Tove Jannson. I just recently acquired her biography — Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin and can’t wait to dig in. She is incredible.

But if a book doesn’t have pictures in it, I’d prefer its author to write great sentences and have a sense of humor. I have a hard time with humorless stuff. I’ve read all of Charles Portis’s novels 2-3 times. I love Tim Kreider’s essays.

Oh, and I love books about music and musicians, especially oral histories, like Please Kill Me and Meet Me in the Bathroom. I’ve read, like, ten books about the Beatles, but I’ll read about anybody, too: I’m not a gigantic fan of Van Halen, but I’ve read 3 books about them.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

I actually read myself a lot? Not my books, but I have a little sidebar on my blog that has a list of posts that were published “on this date,” and I’ll try to read those every day, just to refresh my mind about the kind of material I have. I often re-read my diaries “on this date,” as well — 2026 feels a lot like 2018 to me, so I’ve been checking in with myself, reminding myself what it is to go crazy, and trying not to go there again.

When you re-read yourself this way, you detect a lot of patterns and find that you have your own seasons. (I learned to do this by reading Thoreau’s abridged journal every day with little sticky notes on the days in each year that were closest to the current month and day. I went through the book twice doing that and learned a ton, about Thoreau, and about what it’s like to keep track of yourself.)

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I always read paper books with a pencil — the usual marginalia: I underline, I scribble notes to myself, sometimes I get bored and doodle. I dog-ear, too, when a passage is particularly great and I know I want to go back to it. I highlight a lot on my e-reader. I try to go back through the books and copy the highlights into a big quote file, but I’m lazy, so not that often.

PKG: We have to take a moment and take in Austin’s notebook shelf. How beautiful is this? For the notebook fiends in our midst, be sure to take a look at Austin’s break down of his notebook ecosystem on ’ newsletter - Noted.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

In my noodle. [Taps forehead.] Usually by buying the book — you can expense books on your taxes when you’re a writer, which is as good a case for being a writer as any, I think.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

I aspire to reading like a DJ builds a setlist, letting the last book lead smoothly into the next. Sometimes that’s easy and direct: I picked up Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper because C. Thi Nguyen brings it up so much in his books like The Score. Sometimes when I’m reading I’ll note down books the author mentions that sound good on the back flap and pick one of those when I’m finished.

But usually it’s haphazard and random. I believe in my friend Alan Jacob’s dictum: “Read at whim!”

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

If you keep your phone out of arm’s reach, you get done what you want to get done. I leave my phone in the kitchen when I go to bed and I leave it in my studio when I go out to get in the pool. Those are about the only reliable times I get reading done.

I’m not a particularly fast reader and I don’t actually think I read all that much. I just do it every day. Same with writing: I don’t think I write all that much, but I show up week after week and the days pile up.

What is one book that you find yourself recommending to people over and over and over again?

This may sound shocking, but I don’t really like recommending books to people! I also don’t like foisting books on people (except for my own) and I don’t really love it when people foist books on me. What I love is when people just talk about books they love. That’s what I do in the newsletter, and that’s what I’ve done in this interview, I hope.

Austin’s answers are, characteristically, full of warmth, specificity, and the kind of practical wisdom that makes you want to go read / write / make something something immediately. I’ll hope you do just that but before you go…

🤓 Tell me what you think in the comments:

• Austin describes reading himself — revisiting his old blog posts and diaries “on this date” — as a way of tracking his own patterns and seasons. Do you have any version of this practice? What would it mean to read yourself as a reader?

• Austin says he doesn’t like recommending books — he’d rather just talk about books he loves. What’s the difference, for you, between a recommendation and simply sharing enthusiasm? Do you agree with his distinction?

• Austin reads non-fiction in the morning to wake up and fiction at night to ease into dream-state. Do you match what you read to the time of day or your mental state — and has that ever changed how a book landed for you?

A quick note for our friends who are new here: every month I write a post about everything I read. Sometimes the books cohere thematically and I am able to talk to them as a group, other times the only thing connecting them is that they all happened to land in the same thirty days. But I love the discipline of it. Knowing I’ll have to share this update keeps me reading and, more importantly, keeps me paying attention

📚 Books mentioned:

• What’s So Great About the Great Books — Naomi Kanakia

• Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

• Permanence — Sophie Mackintosh

• The Water Cure — Sophie Mackintosh

• First Love — Gwendoline Riley

• My Phantoms — Gwendoline Riley

• Red Doc> — Anne Carson

When I pick up a novel, I typically don’t move on to the next one until I am finished. With nonfiction — I take more notes, I need more time. I had a very interesting experience of spending a lot of the month with ’s new book — What’s so great about the great books? — and I thought it was the perfect backdrop to all the contemporary reading I was doing.

📚 What’s so great about the great books? — Naomi Kanakia

In her 20s, Naomi Kanakia started reading the Western canon because she wanted to be a better writer. She picked a list and went after it, reading as a lay person — the way she would approach any contemporary work of fiction — trusting that eventually it would all make sense. Spoiler alert: it did. In reading the great books, Naomi discovered a shortcut into the history of ideas and a record of how seriously humans have always taken the questions we think belong to us. The political despair, the moral confusion, the exhaustion with institutions — it's all there, and it's handled with style, rigor and integrity, even if the reading experience itself sometimes comes with "a bit of a health-food quality" to it.

I loved reading What’s So Great About the Great Books? partly because over the last couple of years I have been following the ADHD-brained version of this plan — intuitively picking up classic titles here and there, talking myself through the shame of getting to these titles so late in life (so late is not the same as too late1). Reading Naomi’s book had me revisit ’s Lifetime Reading Plan which I have referenced many times before. As much as it saddens me to admit it, I am not sure that I can ever commit to such a rigorous reading project, but perhaps the most disarming argument in Naomi’s book is the argument in favor of owning your curiosity, of being open to the potential of your own intellect and being unafraid of reading work that will challenge you stylistically, morally, philosophically. In fact that’s probably the best reason to be doing that reading in the first place.

📚 Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

Reading Naomi’s book was truly good for my soul as a reader as it created the mental space I needed in order to allow myself to learn and read in a direction that I have felt curious about for ages but kept self-centering. When I read Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt earlier this spring, I went looking for the NYRB cover art and discovered it was a Chantal Joffe painting, a painter I had a vague familiarity with but whose work I had not explored in earnest. I spent a great deal of time in May learning about Joffe’s work, which in turn led down the corridor of her friendship with writer and art critic Olivia Laing. Apparently, Chantal read The Lonely City, wrote Olivia a fan letter and invited them to sit for a portrait. Olivia accepted and thus began their friendship. Last year they made this incredible book — Painting Writing Texting — part paintings, part essay collection.

The book explores the idea of artistic practice and the specific relief of having someone in your life who understands what you make. There’s a section on their various trips to Venice and how they each respond to the same experience through completely different work. What the book is actually about, I think, is the question of whether friendship can be a form of creative metabolism, whether being known by the right person changes what you’re able to make… And, for me at least, that is an absolute fact.

I then read four novels in a row that were all, in different registers, asking what women actually want… as in… Who are we, actually? And what the fuck is the point of all this when those who are supposed to love and protect you are probably the ones who harm you the most? Why bother be a partner? Why bother be a daughter?

📚 Permanence — Sophie Mackintosh

I read ’s Permanence after devouring this conversation with . The story follows Clara and Francis who begin a relationship after meeting in the most romantic way at an art museum, being hypnotized by the same painting. Too bad that Francis is also married and the father of a young child. We travel through the highs and lows of their affair when one day the two find each other able to be open and public about their relationship because they are now residents of a city in which everyone else around them is similarly removed from the real world and allowed to exist with no risk of punishment or shame with their lover. I was worried that I would find the premise of the novel gimmicky but found the dream-like quality of Mackintosh’s writing bewildering and fitting for the liminal world of love and betrayal she has built in Permanence. The book moves back and forth between the two worlds as we learn more about the nature of the relationship, about the level of love, commitment and sacrifice it demands from both of them and the mechanisms at work that make them move back and forth. Permanence brought me flashbacks of On the Calculation of Volume v.1 — which is not a book that I enjoyed — and I thought it handled similar questions around marriage and relationships with much less construction and artificiality while hitting similar disorienting notes.

📚 The Water Cure — Sophie Mackintosh

Mackintosh put me in a dream-like state that I wanted to stay in for a little while longer, so I picked up her debut novel — The Water Cure. In this book three sisters live on a remote island, raised by their parents to believe men are the source of all harm. Father disappears. Three men wash ashore. Mother disappears next. In the absence of clear explanations of who and why, they are left with no other choice but to explore the hydraulics of familial loyalty, sexual desire and self-preservation, which in Mackintosh's hands are almost indistinguishable from one another. I loved the eerie atmosphere and strongly sexual undercurrents of this novel. I am starting to realize that I truly love reading psychologically driven dystopian novels, so if you have recommendations, do share!

📚 First Love — Gwendoline Riley

I then picked up Gwendolyn Riley's First Love: Neve, trying to be a writer, saddled with a husband she probably shouldn't have, parents who divorced badly, a former situationship she can't metabolize. Minimal and anxiety-inducing and — this is the part that got me — genuinely funny. Riley earns her comedy by keeping Neve's self-awareness just sharp enough that she's in on the joke about her own life, without sufficient awareness or chutzpah to do anything to change it. That gap between knowing and changing is where I find myself a lot recently and Riley has given me a lot of material to push against as I ponder my own patterns.

📚 My Phantoms — Gwendoline Riley

Because apparently one Riley wasn't enough, I read My Phantoms immediately after. If First Love is about the damage you absorb from the people you choose, My Phantoms is about the damage you absorb from the people you didn't. We meet another tyrannical, deeply problematic father but also, specifically, a mother, Hen, whom the main narrator Bridget has managed down to one dinner a year and considers “the problem” contained. It isn't contained. What Riley does here that's so unsettling is refuse to make Bridget simply right about her mother. The cruelties run in both directions, the resentments are never fully named, and what accumulates under the surface is something that resists the word "love" but also resists every alternative. By Naomi's definition, a book is great precisely because you cannot separate what you love about it from what most disturbs you, and this one definitely qualifies. I don’t know if you can tell but I am an immediate Riley fan.

And before I move on — can we have a moment for the NYRB Editions cover art?! For First Love (L), we have Jean Cooke’s Cinema Paradiso (c. 1980s) and for My Phantoms (R), we have Up the Road in Pigeon Pie (also by Cooke).

📚 Red Doc> — Anne Carson

I finished the month with Red Doc> — Anne Carson's follow-up to Autobiography of Red, which I read and reviewed in January. In this one, Geryon is G., older and keeping a herd of musk ox somewhere in a frozen north (at a reading, Carson said that it’s somewhere Upstate NY). His best friend / lover Herakles is back too, renamed Sad. Sad is a war veteran with PTSD, showing up with his damage intact. To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing, Carson writes as G. and Sad, together with a female artist friend roadtrip across an icy plain, end up in a psychiatric facility, encounter ice bats, etc. The book looks like poetry, moves like a novel, and somehow yet feels like neither poetry nor novel. Carson does not bother to fill in the gap between the two books — the decades of fictional time, the complete change of form, etc — and this novel felt more disorienting to me that Autobiography of Red… It felt to me that Carson maybe was thinking about Geryon and Herakles… and then wrote this book to herself, just to see what if… I found it a little denser and more challenging and hope that commonplacing it will help me see it more clearly.

More than usual, at the end of this month my brain is on an upward spiral of associative reading. I always say that I love to leave a book with at least one other title to push me forward. I ordered Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House the moment I finished My Phantoms and a triptych of Laings → The Lonely City, The Garden Against Time, and Funny Weather. I already have Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma at home and feel super inspired to continue my journey through the oeuvre. I also picked up Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers for another example of a novel in verse.

❤️ Favorite books of 2026 so far:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

• April — Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

• May — Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

It’s wild that we are almost halfway through the year. I have been so lucky in reading but I am also incredibly tired. I have a super fun reader interview to share with you guys next week and then I plan to take a couple of weeks off while we travel to unplug, check in against my reading / writing / human goals and come back to tell you all about it. We are traveling to Madeira for a week and then Bulgaria to visit my family. I am so excited, I can cry.

But before I go today… you know that I always have…

🤓 Some questions for you:

• Where are you on the shame to self-acceptance continuum with your reading of the great books?

• Do you have a lifetime reading plan?

• What are you current reading hyper-fixations? Any overlap with mine?

I have wanted to talk to for a long time. We first met, as so many wonderful literary friendships now begin, through Substack — bonding over our shared love of classic literature1 and the pleasures terror of building a reading life in public. Over time, I have come to admire not just Naomi’s taste, but the quality of her attention. She reads with rigor and reverence, but also with a kind of self-awareness and self-possession that I find deeply inspiring.

What I love about Naomi as both a reader and a writer is that she has created a perspective that feels entirely her own. Again and again, she gives herself a job and goes after it — whether that means immersing herself in the classics, Middle English literature, Thomas Bernhard, or the history of magazine culture. There is something deeply motivating about watching someone pursue intellectual life with that much vigor, sincerity and curiosity.

The timing for this conversation is no coincidence. Naomi has a new book coming out next week: What’s So Great About the Great Books? — a thoughtful and generous defense of reading classic literature.2

In the book Naomi writes that she is drawn to great books because they possess integrity — they take their own ideas seriously and pursue them with nuance and complexity.

The Great Books are, more than anything, marked by their tremendous rigor, their drive to hold their own ideas up to scrutiny. And in that rigor, that paring away of what’s easy and facile, they bring us closer to the world-in-itself — the true, objective world that we can never know through reason alone. And it’s my contention that this rigor and honesty and care is synonumous with taste.

The passage perfectly describes Naomi’s own work as well.

What follows is a generous tour of Naomi’s reading brain: why she reads, how she reads, how writing shapes her reading life, and how she sustains attention in an age designed to fracture it. I have been anxiously anticipating this conversation and I’m so excited to finally be able to share it with you.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

As a kid, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy, and I grew up wanting to be a sci-fi writer. Within the SF community, the advice to aspiring writers is that you should read everything—so, after college, I decided that if I was going to be a serious writer I needed to read all the classics. You know, stuff like Proust and Tolstoy and Herodotus—all the books I’d heard about, but never read.

I got very into reading these books, and to this day I have a similar pattern, where I’ll pick up some book I’ve vaguely heard about, and then I’ll get extremely engrossed by that time/author/period/style and read a dozen related books. And then I’ll move on.

About four years ago, I started writing about books, first for literary periodicals like The Los Angeles Review of Books, and then for my own blog, . As a result, my reading had to change—now I read not just to educate myself, but with an eye to whether I can write about this book.

As an outgrowth of all this writing about books, I ended up with a contract from Princeton University Press to write a defense of reading the Great Books (i.e. all those old great books we’ve all heard about). And that book, What’s So Great About The Great Books?, will be coming out next week, on May 26th.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

For years and years, I would track my reading time, and I always struggled to read more than fifteen hours a week. Eventually, all this tracking started to feel very odious and compulsory, so I stopped. Now my perception is that I mostly read in the evenings and at night, after my daughter has gone to bed. But I also read sometimes in the afternoon after I’ve finished writing. I highly doubt that I’m reading more than fifteen hours a week.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

I like all kinds of things! The main change is that about five years ago, during the pandemic, I realized that I’d read most of the classic books that I was truly excited about reading, so I’d need to stretch and go further afield, reading things that sounded less appealing. This was a great decision—it led me to pick up Chaucer, and I got very into Middle English literature. I also went through a phase where I read a lot of Kant and Hegel—very difficult, but quite rewarding.

PKG: My husband’s dissertation is on Kant’s aesthetics … and I have been scared to read it since he defended it 20 years ago. Reading Naomi’s book and now the interview is giving me the perhaps delusional confidence that maybe I am ready for it.

I also started to read this strain of very Romantic maximalist literature (think Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Wright) that’s out of fashion, but which I ended up enjoying a lot.

So nowadays I really look for whatever I’m resistant to. For instance, for years I was very allergic to the classic 20th-century domestic realist story (I was like, this is just stories about sad middle-class people), but when I finally picked up John Cheever I loved him, and that sent me on a tear, where I read lots of these New Yorker stories.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

Like all people nowadays, I struggle with fragmented attention. Whenever I feel like I’m getting too distracted, I’ll use a little stopwatch and set a timer for twenty minutes during which I’m not allowed to look at my phone. During that time, if any thoughts occur to me, I’ll just jot them down using a pen and paper (or, lately, the stylus for my Kindle Scribe). Once I’ve done this a few times in a week, my mind will settle down, and I’m able to concentrate better.

But I’ve gone through ENDLESS rituals to maintain the integrity of my attention. It’s such an ongoing struggle. I had years when I would lock my phone in a timed safe, but after I had a child, it started feeling irresponsible to be out of touch for hours at a time.

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils?

Yes, nowadays I read mostly on my Kindle Scribe, which is a large Kindle that has a stylus that allows you to take notes on the page. I use this to jot down stray thoughts—I almost never look at these notes, but it keeps my hands occupied and keeps me from looking at my phone.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I have notions. Sadly, my reach exceeds my grasp—when I get into a topic I end up buying around three times as many books as I end up reading. But these recent purchases end up in a pile somewhere (or on the most recent page of my Kindle library), and the pile structures what I read next. I also keep a lot of random books around the house and sometimes I’ll browse through them, and they’ll send me in a totally new direction. For instance about fifteen years ago I bought a Kindle version of Njal’s Saga, the greatest of the Icelandic family sagas.

Three years ago I randomly opened the file and got absorbed, which set me onto a three-month journey where I read a lot of Old Norse literature.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

Writing a newsletter has really changed my reading life, because now I’m in conversation with my audience and with other newsletter writers. A lot of the time, I read things because they’re bubbling up on the internet. For instance, I just read Yesteryear because there’s been so much Substack discourse about it. I’d also been hearing about Walter Ong a lot, so I read his big book, Orality and Literacy.

Then I’ll have some longer-term projects—I’ve gotten into reading Thomas Bernhard for what I hope will be a big piece, and I’ve been reading a lot of literary journals too—I have a huge stack of issues of The Yale Review, The Believer, The Baffler, etc in my living room.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

For big writing projects, I have developed a sense for what kinds of books I’ll need to read in order to start making an argument—I’ll move both forward and backwards from an author. I’ll read both their influences and the people they influenced. Then I’ll read some of the secondary literature about them. There’s definitely a process to this kind of reading. In the beginning I have to read a lot, in an exploratory way, but towards the end, my reading needs to get narrower and more focused on what I need to make my argument. The trick is to read enough that you feel confident in what you’re trying to say, but not so much that you get bogged down by the complexity and feel unable to say anything at all.

PKG: Finding the balance between “enough to feel confident” and “not so much that you get bogged down” is so hard! I was incredibly impressed by how readable Naomi’s book is, given its lofty subject, and my overwhelming feeling of it was one of embodied knowledge. #goals

The same is true for smaller projects. I’m always looking out for topics where it’s possible to just read one book and then write a post about it. Then there’s a rhythm to these bite-sized projects too.

What’s really hard is for me to read a one-off book that’s disconnected from my overall writing life. In February, I reread Les Miserables. It’s extremely long—took a month to read—and blew a hole in my writing schedule because it only resulted in one (not particularly popular) post. I can do that once in a while, but not often.

Oftentimes my blog gets sorted into seasons. Last year, for the first half of the year, I was writing mostly about 19th-century American literature, and for the second half I wrote mostly about 20th-century magazine culture. This happens pretty naturally, as a result of my changing interest, but it’s always scary when I’m between seasons, looking for something new that’ll hold my interest long-term.

It’s really exciting when that happens though, because it gives me the chance to sell my readers on something new.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

I love playing video games. But about fifteen years ago, I essentially stopped. For a while I convinced myself that I was too mature for games, but then maybe ten years ago I bought an XBox and spent a hundred and fifty hours playing Fallout: New Vegas, one of the best games of all time. It was such an immersive, awe-inspiring experience. I played Disco Elysium five years ago—same thing, one of the best games I’ve ever played. Such an intricate, well-told story. Since then I don’t think I’ve really completed another game—just don’t have the time to drop a hundred hours into a game anymore.

It’s very sad. Do you know how many incredible games have come out in the last fifteen years?

PKG: LOL.

I am 100 percent positive, I would love Baldur’s Gate 3, but I’ve never played it. If I told this to myself at age fifteen, she would be appalled! Do you mean Baldur’s Gate 3 finally came out and you’ve NEVER played it? But there’s just no time.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

Go easy on yourself. This is true not just in my reading life, but for the pursuit of any goal—perfectionism is the true enemy. People spend months beating themselves up because they’re not reading every second, all the time, but really the best thing is to start small, just set a timer and read for ten minutes. I think you’ll find that if you set out to read for ten minutes, you’ll often end up reading for an hour or two. But if you tell yourself you must read for two hours, then frequently you won’t start at all, and the day’ll be lost.

My years of tracking my reading made me very realistic about how much I read—I almost never did more than fifteen hours a week, but that was enough to read Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, Tale of Genji, Story of the Stone, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and hundreds of other difficult and intimidating books.

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

Recently I’ve become convinced that Robert Caro’s The Lives of Lyndon Johnson (his four-volume biography of the former president) is the closest thing contemporary America has produced to a Great Book. This series is a titanic achievement, a study of power and governance in 20th-century America. The depth of research is incredible, and it’s full of hundred-page mini-essays and asides, like Caro’s long study of rural electrification, or of the way that power works in the Senate. I read the first three books in high school, and I’ve since read them several more times, and each time I’ve come away inspired.

What I found so inspiring about this conversation is that Naomi speaks about reading from the other side of sustained effort. You can feel, in her answers, the accumulated weight of years spent following curiosities all the way down — through difficult books, changing interests, moments of resistance and breakthrough. How cool that she is sharing her experience so openly with us and showing us that we, too, can do this if we try.

🤓 So let’s chat about this:

• Which of Naomi’s tips or reading habits felt most relatable to you — and is there one you’re curious to try in your own reading life?

• What has your relationship to the “Great Books”?

• What’s a “war story” from your own reading life — a difficult book, obsessive phase, abandoned project, or unexpected literary rabbit hole that changed you as a reader?

In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote about aura in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. For Benjamin, aura describes the quality that makes an original work of art irreducible. Not simply beautiful or well-made, but… singular, present in a way that resists reproduction. He was writing about paintings and photographs, but I’ve been thinking about his idea in relation to books, and specifically in relation to the experience of reading a book that feels like it could only have been written by one person, at one particular cost, out of one particular life.

The book that got me thinking about aura was Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg which I reviewed in my April round-up.

In the book — a collection of connected short stories — writes about fat bodies, queer bodies, bodies in pools and bars and bedrooms in a way that doesn’t aestheticize or explain. She doesn’t make fatness a metaphor for something else. She makes it exactly what it is: a condition of being in the world, with all the negotiation and visibility and longing that entails. The book exists in its own atmosphere.

You feel it as soon as you’re inside it and you feel its absence when you leave. A lot of the book is set in and around Philadelphia and the whole time I was reading, I could feel that distinct Philly thing that anyone who has spent any meaningful time in the City will be able to pick up, even though it is almost impossible to describe. The book feels approachable in this way… but it’s entirely an object of its own. That I believe, is the feeling of being within the book’s aura: nearness and distance simultaneously. Something that holds itself slightly apart even as it pulls you in.

I’ve wanted to understand the conditions that made this book possible — the years, the faith, the landscapes that unlocked the whole thing. I am not trying to demystify it but I really think the world a book comes from is itself worth attending to… and I am the kind of reader who after much hemming and hawing decided to go straight to the source and fucking ask.

This conversation with Emma is the first installment of Source Material — a new occasional series in which I talk to authors whose work has that quality and try to understand where it came from. If my Reading Life series is about how readers read, Source Material is about what writers draw from. I already have the next one lined up for July — it’s going to be a good one!

Emma, please tell us about your new book! What was the idea / character / image that set you on your path to write it?

I have been working on FAT SWIM for twelve years and in many ways it is the record of how I lost belief in writing fiction and wrote my way back to it. There are several stories in the collection that reflect this ambivalence, that are almost essayistic. The earliest story, Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, began at the very end of my MFA program and I just fell into the voice of Tracy, a kind of brassy armored woman wrestling with having given a kid up for adoption. Tracy’s voice helped me break the assumptions I’d been working with in grad school that serious literary fiction couldn’t be funny and it couldn’t be about the body.

But the book FAT SWIM really came together as a united project when I wrote the title story, which is about a little girl who falls in love with a group of fat women at her local public pool. That story started with an image — I’d become part of a fat liberation group and someone suggested we go to the pool together. As I was swimming with my friends, I looked up and saw a plump little girl watching us. What is she seeing? went my writer brain, and the story was born.

Please share some books that make sense alongside FAT SWIM: inspiration, theoretical references, works you are fighting with?

1. Bryan Washington’s Lot for the way it does with Houston what I was trying to do with Philadelphia — use the geography of a city to show characters living in spatial proximity and grappling with physical, embodied concerns.

   

2. ’s No One Belongs Here More Than You for how weird it is and for its respect for the surreal experience that is being a person with a body — particularly in her story The Swim Team.

3. ’s Her Body and Other Parties for its literary treatment of fatness and capacious approach to form and genre.

4. Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage for its obsession with objects and describing the physical world.

5. Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At the Last Minute (aspirational).

   ---

Now that the book is done - what are you doing / reading / listening to in order to take a breath from the intensity of the writing process?

• Swimming! I’m trying to swim in a public or affordable pool in every city I go to on book tour.

  

• Reading poetry — Megan Fernandes and Diana Khoi Nguyen and Chet’a Sebree are on current rotation — and then printing out poems and putting them up on the side of my little free library so people can see them.

• Making collages — I want to print out reviews of FAT SWIM and cut them up and make art out of them to say thank you for all the time people spent with my book.

• Walking around my neighborhood to get a cookie.

• Petting every dog.

I love it so much when a book refuses to let you move on from it and I am truly happy to have such a deep list of references to help me hold on to Fat Swim a little while longer. I read that Miranda July short story collection when it came out and even though I don’t remember individual stories, I do remember being delighted by how weird it was. Also, I just started reading Grace Paley last month with as part of her Short Story Salon… today’s mention of her work makes me doubly excited to keep going. But, honestly, everything mentioned on Emma’s list is now on mine.

⚡️ So, let’s chat about it all:

• Have you ever read a book that felt auratic — like it existed in its own atmosphere, slightly apart from everything else? What was it?

• I loved the way Emma described the books and authors she is in conversation with. Have you read any of these works?

• Emma's Philadelphia is so specific you can feel it even if you've never been. Is there a city that lives in your body and have you ever encountered it in fiction?

• Emma spent twelve years writing her way back to belief in fiction. Have you ever lost faith in something you loved and found your way back to it?

Note: 50% off paid subscriptions + Community Zoom details for this coming Saturday, 1PM Central. See you soon!

About a month ago, I realized I had lost my commonplace notebook. It’s probably somewhere in the house, but in a home organized around artfully arranged piles of books, it has effectively disappeared. I’ve checked the obvious places and then the less obvious ones. My best theory involves my nine-year-old daughter, who is fascinated by my notebooks and knows how much they matter to me — which, of course, makes them irresistible. So far, however, she insists she doesn’t have it.

After a few days of searching, the frustration I felt got replaced with an almost despondence. I felt absolutely devastated by the loss.

I started commonplacing a little over a year ago for reasons that were almost entirely sentimental:

I have been thinking a lot lately about how my 7-year-old daughter will remember me when I’m not around anymore, really wanting to leave her with a lasting impression of her mother living an inspired life. I know it’s difficult and probably unadvisable to engineer memories, but she already has an awareness that I am a reader. What I want to be able to leave behind is an embodiment of my reading spirit. Our family book collection will be hers, of course, but I also love the idea of leaving her a stack of notebooks that contain quotes that challenged, moved, or entertained me. I want her to have a record of what made me feel alive. No shade, but my stack of Morning Pages journals is not it.

After researching the practice quite a bit, I joined in her Commonplace Book Club that January and was immediately hooked. After I finish a book that particularly spoke to me, I sit with my notebook and copy out the passages that stopped me — not everything I underlined, only what feels essential to preserve. Before I started, I used to keep this kind of thing in my phone, a note called “quotes” that I added to sporadically but didn’t really return to. Practical, because I could search it… but in reality, inert.

After doing this for a while, I began to feel that handwriting makes you inhabit a sentence differently than copy/paste. By the time you’ve written a passage out, it has moved from the page into something that is almost, if not quite, yours.

When I started, I expected to copy the passages and watch the collection grow but I thought of this as a gift I was making for my kid. Almost immediately, however, I noticed that I wasn’t just writing in the notebook. I was READING it, too. I just kept it on my desk and would often pick it up, flip through, stop somewhere. And the passages I had captured just sort of … stayed with me. I wouldn’t say that I was deliberately pursuing any kind of self-study or personal curriculum. I was just allowing myself to spend time with whatever was tugging at my heart at the time.

Before commonplacing, I mostly thought about books in terms of plot, ideas, or overall emotional impact… but copying passages by hand slowed my reading down enough for me to begin noticing something else entirely: voice, rhythm, cadence. The strange and deeply intimate texture of someone else’s mind moving through language. has several posts that guide through close reading exercises and, unsurprisingly, they all involve starting by copying your passage by hand.

I read and commonplaced Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett that January. By December, I had read everything she’d published and compiled a list of every book mentioned in Checkout 19 — around 130 titles. As you can imagine, I have spent a lot of time trying to diagnose this obsession and I don’t think any of that would have happened without commonplacing first. Copying Pond just made the book so alive for me. I know it will sound kind of kooky, but I kept feeling that whoever I was copying was whispering in my ear…

Looking back, I think the copying and rereading was training my attention. I was beginning to hear her. And once I started hearing style at that level — the humor, the perception, the peculiar sentence logic — it became almost impossible to go back to reading quickly or passively. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that an author who writes so uniquely about thinking and interiority would be the one who unlocked this practice for me. Her work feels like a portal into the consciousness of a book.

When I first wrote about commonplace journaling back in February 2025, I mentioned the fact that I had added an index — a practical solution to a discoverability problem. What’s the point of a notebook full of quotes if you have to read through the whole thing to find what you need? So I reserved five pages at the back, organized by letter, and added themes as I went: misanthropy, friendship, solitude, disappointment, lost youth.

What I didn’t anticipate was that the index would become its own source of insight — one that operated on a thematic level rather than a stylistic one. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

As my index grows, it reveals patterns in what catches my attention across authors and genres — themes of belonging, feeling seen, disappointment, solitude and isolation, lost youth. It’s becoming a map of my reading mind. Far from being pointless and backwards looking, it is showing me what I actually care about before I’ve had a chance to put my finger on it myself. It honestly feels like magic.

I still feel that INDEX-ing produces so much magic but those early observations didn’t quite capture the compounding effect of it over time. It is SO different from what annotation gives you. Annotation is intimate with a single book — it captures your relationship to that text, that argument, that sentence. The commonplace index cuts across everything you read (or, commonplace). It shows you not what you thought about a book, but what you think, full stop.

Over time, certain themes began gathering weight. Such an odd thing to describe… but in all these books I was reading, certain emotional and philosophical preoccupations kept surfacing. I realized that even though I wasn’t intentionally choosing books by theme, I was probably subconsciously working through certain concerns — in life, in reading — and letting those themes jump out at me.

Reading stopped feeling random. My obsessions stopped feeling arbitrary. Over time, it became difficult not to notice the continuity in what moved me across books, genres, and (I expect) even years of reading. Solitude, for example, or disappointment, or the strange relief of no longer needing to be exceptional. They appear and reappear across my notes on writers who have nothing else in common.

Once I noticed those patterns, I began trusting my instincts as a reader much more deeply. I stopped worrying so much about whether I “should” be reading something and became more interested in following attraction, intensity, fixation, appetite — whatever made me feel more awake. My reading life already had an internal logic. I just hadn’t known how to see it yet.

I have always wondered and have felt deeply envious of how some people are able to quote entire poems or book passages from memory. I assumed it required a special kind of intellect or brain capacity that I did not believe I possessed.

It turns out that memorization has less to do with intellect than with attention and repetition. Copy a passage you really love. Return to it. Return to it again, simply to enjoy. The memorization then happens almost without you. By the time I lost my notebook, I could reproduce several passages close to perfectly. Not many, mind you, but some.

The first passage I could reliably reproduce was Bennett’s famous banana paragraph from Pond:

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe — in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn’t, forget about it. Though admittedly that is easier said than done. Apples can be forgotten about, but not bananas, not really. They don’t in fact take at all well to being forgotten about. They wizen and stink of putrid and go almost black.

I think this passage stayed with me because Bennett notices ordinary life with almost unbearable specificity.1 After months of copying her work, I began catching myself paying closer attention too — to mundane objects, passing thoughts, the emotional atmosphere surrounding small things.

This morning I went into the bathroom after my husband and daughter had left for school and noticed he had left the door of his medicine cabinet open. He never does that. I suddenly felt this strange wave of sadness wash over me, imagining him moving through his morning distracted or anxious or lost in thought. As I closed the cabinet door, I could feel this oddly loaded emotional atmosphere around such a prosaic object. It felt tender and dark at the same time.

The following passage has also become a favorite:

Quite often I’m terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but that’s usually my own fault for the simple reason that I’m too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely.

A sentence that initially feels merely interesting can, through repetition and rereading, slowly become something closer to wisdom. I found myself returning to this passage whenever I felt impatient with my own life — too quick to declare something over before it had fully unfolded.

And Ada Limón, from Foaling Season — which I copied early in my poetry reading life and still return to constantly:

Increasingly, I suspect the practice is less about preserving quotes and more about preserving ways of feeling and noticing that I do not want to lose.

Trying to understand why I got so sad about my lost notebook, I realized that the grief I was feeling was not about the missing object which — with some effort — I can reproduce. I kept reaching for it without thinking — in between tasks, at the end of the day — only to remember it wasn’t there. What I missed was the ability to drop back into that accumulated space of attention, a shortcut to the part of me that reads and thinks and is patient enough to give it all time to become what all of THAT is trying to be.

So, yeah, the grief was out of proportion to a missing object. But it was proportionate to losing a self.

Last week I decided I was done moping and started a new commonplace book. is running her spring Commonplace Book Club — copy a quote a day into a notebook, for a month — and there was something right about the symmetry of joining again at the beginning. I waffled about how to begin and then, of course, picked up Pond and thought… I must have a record of this book that has given me so much.

I am again enjoying the intensity of the challenge. Doing a little bit of this every day requires commitment. (Outside of the challenge, I typically commonplace once a week max). But agreed to be my accountability partner and now each day we text each other a picture of our quotes. I love the time I spend in my notebook and I look forward to her texts even more.

Through the gate, the noses touch.

May 9th - Saturday - 1PM Central Time

We will close out the “formal” program at 2PM, but I am going to stay on until 3PM and just hang out. Last time we didn’t want to leave.

This weekend we’re talking about off-season reading — what happens to your reading life when life itself gets harder, slower, or more chaotic. The seasons when you’re depleted, distracted, or just not quite yourself.

In those moments, most of us either stop reading — or we reach for something completely different than what we’d normally choose. Both of those responses are interesting.

For those of you who like to prepare, here are some questions I hope we get to work through:

• When you hit a hard or low-energy season, what happens to your reading — do you reach for different books, or do you stop reading altogether?

• Is there a book or genre you’ve never let yourself take seriously — something you’ve always treated as “lesser”? What is it?

• Has a book ever genuinely helped you through a hard season — not in a self-help way, but just by giving your mind somewhere safe to go?

• Do you trust your off-season reading instincts, or do you feel guilty when you’re not reading “well”?

• What are your tried and true off-season reads — the books, genres, or series you return to when you need them most?

After the paywall:

• Zoom Details

• Recording of our last Community Zoom

I really look forward to seeing you, I have really missed you guys!

Read more

After months of reading beautiful, devastating literary fiction… I went into April thinking a lot about the idea of off-season reading — something to reach for when I need to take my foot off the pedal or to recover from an especially affecting book:

After getting so much amazing input from you guys re: romance, I thought. Ok… maybe this is it. I will give it an earnest try and maybe! romance can become my go to off-season genre. There were several reasons why I thought this could work. The genre has genuine range, romance readers are exceptionally willing to help you find what you’d like within it, and the subject matter — love, connection, second chances — seemed like the right antidote to the type of reading I’ve been doing. I had reasons to be optimistic.

I ended up trying 5 romance novels, all recommended by readers of this newsletter. I started and abandoned August Lane by Regina Black. I couldn’t get into it but because I wasn’t pre-invested in the genre, I found it easy to DNF. That’s typically very hard for me and I found it liberating. I finished Seven Days in June by Tia Williams, Book Lovers by Emily Henry and two novels from 831 Stories — Found Time by Caroline Goldstein and Exit Lane by Erika Veurink.

I read all four switching between print and audio and found the plot lines easy enough to follow, which was great for my commute to and from work; also, hilarious when listening to steamier sex scenes while grocery shopping or waving to neighbors while walking my dog. As Rachel mentioned in the comments to my original post, the fact that these books can be a significant libido boost is a good enough reason to read them. I liked that the books centered female characters. In the four books I finished, they were strong self-made women with brains, hearts, and ideas about what they wanted for themselves. If they were my friends (and they all felt like real, beating hearts), I would have been happy for them. However, as a reader, I could not lose myself in their stories.

Let me see if I can explain.

Last year I took my daughter Rumi to the mall to get her ears pierced at Claire’s. The woman who worked there made such a big production of filling out the paperwork, choosing the earrings, prepping her ears… that by the time it was time to actually do the deed, my kid was so panicked and traumatized that…. I ended up getting a second piercing.

Reading these romance novels felt similar. I am not sure how else to describe it … but I felt like I could hear the authors shuffling their papers and clearing their throat and setting their coffee down a little too loud as they read their lines with feeling at an invisible camera… The stories felt so thoroughly arranged that nothing truly alive could happen inside them.

This hearing of the mechanics that I believe mostly stems from the formulaic nature of genre-writing, I think, was the hardest thing for me to process. We talked about this a lot a few weeks ago and intellectually I was prepared to accept that the moves were the moves and I would instead focus on the execution. But I found myself over and over being UN-surprised… so much so that I would audibly groan. For example, early on in Book Lovers… there’s a scene in a small town bar where the female protagonist and her former work nemesis (now love interest) play a competitive game of pool. He is feeling pretty smug about it but it turns out she is secretly better than him… until he comes back with the revelation (?!) that he’s actually left-handed and up until that point has been playing with his right hand. In both Seven Days in June and Found Time, the protagonists find themselves reconnecting with men they had passionate short-lived love affairs with in their youth. In Exit Lane, the elusive Marin is working through the trauma of losing her dad to cancer and rejects Teddy despite having super strong chemistry with him when he also receives a cancer diagnosis.

I realize I may sound like a total heartless bitch for rolling my eyes at all this but the sentimentality was so overworked and heavy-handed that I felt like the authors were watching me from across the room to be sure I was sufficiently verklempt. That feeling killed the writing for me. And it’s not like I don’t like drama. I am wide open to reading and thinking about some run of the mill, earnest, eternal human heartache: how do we build lives full of love and connection on top of the rubble and bullshit we are dealt. Death, illness, the body, our children, the people we love — it’s hard to be ironic about those things and it’s dishonest to try. But you can be earnest about these things without being too neat. You can be moved as a reader without feeling micro-managed.

At some point in the month I started to realize that maybe I was reaching a saturation point with romance and started to wonder where I would need to go next. I was half-way expecting that I would want to reach for a business manuscript… something that would feel unemotional and unfamiliar. But what I realized was that reading so much romance actually made me crave something very emotional and sensitive but less sentimental. I ended up reading three works of fiction that did that for me … and neither of them hinged on kissing the guy.

📚 Books mentioned:

• Seven Days in June — Tia Williams

• Book Lovers — Emily Henry

• Found Time — Caroline Goldstein

• Exit Lane — Erika Veurink

• Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

• Fat Swim — Emma Copley Eisenberg

• Kudos — Rachel Cusk

• On Eating — Alicia Kennedy

📚 Seven Days in June — Tia Williams

Eva and Shane are two Black writers who shared one devastating week as teenagers. Mutual attraction, mutual damage, mutual obsession. Now as adults, they run into each other at a Brooklyn literary panel and, of course, the pull is still there. Tia Williams builds a genuinely affecting backstory — self-harm, addiction, the loneliness of children who had to grow up too fast. There is real emotional material here, and I could feel it. But I could also feel the architecture of it. Every revelation arrived with such precision, every wound introduced at exactly the right moment. I just could never quite relax into the story… some of it probably because of the diaglogue, which… to paraphrase my nine year old… just… did TOO MUCH.

📚 Book Lovers — Emily Henry

Emily Henry has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration for her work is Nora Ephron’s movies and you can definitely tell. The female lead in this book is a NYC literary agent — sharp, self-aware, high strung — who has been in a series of relationships that left her behind for the small town belle. In a turn of events, she finds herself in a small town where she runs into her professional rival: an editor who rejected the latest book by her favorite client. I didn’t dislike these characters but I found them more interesting than the situations they were placed in and caught myself flipping through some of the pages quickly, literally saying, yeah yeah yeah whatever, next.

Also… there was a lot of dialogue which, to me, read like a transcript of two people who have decided to flirt. Oh, are you flirting? I might be. Are you? Perhaps. Back and forth, back and forth… I don’t think I am a “banter” person.

📚 Found Time — Caroline Goldstein (831 Stories)

This was my first 831 Stories book… you can’t be an online book person and not have seen publicity around the project. I need to be honest with you and share that I have felt a lot of personal resistance to the perfect marketing that has surrounded the whole endeavor: the uniform covers, the merch, the just-so media pieces. I don’t know… I live in Memphis, TN… and there is something so Nashville about this by comparison… entrepreneurial and new, for sure, but also so squeaky clean and so manufactured that contemplating it really makes me want to burp really loud. At the same time, I respect the hustle and if selling branded trinkets means that the authors are getting better pay for their work… then, let me be wrong on this.

Found Time is a second-chance romance. In the 90s, they meet at a Jeff Buckley concert in NYC just days before the guy moves to California for a dream job. They reunite 20 years later, both of them single-parents of teenaged daughters. The protagonist has built an impressive career despite the disappointment of her marriage. Her male-counterpart has only gotten smarter, more emotionally aware and hotter with age because life has thrown him for a loop and he’s learned things.

Their reconnection is handled with more restraint than I expected,1 which I appreciated. But from very early on, I could feel the book arranging itself toward its ending… And once I caught a whiff of that, it became hard to stay inside the experience instead of observing the construction of it.

SIDEBAR: Guys, I realize that I am raising the same objection here over and over again… those of you who have experience with the genre — please share what reading the formula feels like for you. I can’t imagine that you are not noticing the cogs turning. So, what do you do when you start noticing? Do you tell your brain to ignore that? Or do you feel pleasure in knowing the thing that the characters themselves don’t know yet? Do you groan sometimes when the tropes hit you in the face like I did?

📚 Exit Lane — Erika Veurink

This is a rework of When Harry Met Sally. After graduation, Marin and Teddy drive from Iowa City to New York. She is ready to start a new life and no longer be “the girl with the dead dad” and he’s about to start Law School but actually dreams of a white picket fence life back home. They make out in Chicago but Marin is adamant that they shouldn’t stay in touch or make anything of it because she is determined to fully leave Iowa behind. They come together and they split apart several times… each time feels kind of confusing.

While Veurink captures the surface pleasures of the Ephron mode — the banter, the timing, the will-they-won’t-they choreography — it feels like it stops just short of the emotional risk that makes that mode actually land. Everyone is a little too composed, a little too self-aware, a little too protected from their own mess. Even when they fall apart, they get off stage too easily…

Also, a weird thing that bothered me (irrationally): too many mentions of loafers.

📚 Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

And now, for some drama with strong emotional payoff.

Ruth’s only daughter Lily is a heroin addict. When Lily gets pregnant, Ruth decides to raise Lily’s daughter Eleanor herself — steadily, with a kind of love that feels both enormous and, eventually, calm. Boyt writes about this without melodrama and without sentimentality, which is precisely what makes it devastating. The prose is so controlled but Boyt’s touch is so light, it almost disappears. You feel the voice of Ruth, you can smell her cooking, you can feel the peaceful calm of that household… you feel enveloped in this world — raw and vulnerable — you forget you are reading a book. Then, out of nowhere, a moment arrives… a small gesture of intimacy or understanding between Ruth and Eleanor, a joke that explains the title of the book — that completely takes your breath away.

This is a book about what it is like to love someone you cannot save; about the long, unglamorous labor of care; about the wisdom of children and the power of friendships to help us smooth over the sharpest of edges. The book will also make you sob in indignation that so often in life the best people have the hardest go at it and it is so fucking unfair. But you will also feel the catharsis of knowing that suffering does not have to deprive us of dignity or meaning.

I am virtually pressing this book into your chest. It is timeless and contemporary, exacting and earnest, hopeful and sad.

📚 Fat Swim — Emma Copley Eisenberg

I have been cheating on my life in order to read this book!!! Dropping balls left and right so that I could get through a story at a time.

This is a collection of stories that more or less explicitly connect to a narrative united by recurring characters, themes, settings. The writing is so sensitive, so specific, so attuned to the experience of being a human in a body — that constant negotiation between who you are, how you’re seen, and how those two things never quite line up… especially when you are queer and / or fat and trying your damnest to figure out how to feel less disconnected from yourself. I really liked the polyvocal nature of the book — not a novel but not a straight-up short story collection either. Revisiting the same character multiple times, their emotional state sitting higher or lower on the emotional register, felt very gratifying to read. Oh, ok. So maybe I didn’t need to worry about you after all. You are doing fine. My favorite stories were Fat Swim, Beauty and Mama, which I read in bed next to my kid… and made me repeat to myself to remember to ask questions when I don’t understand.

We are living in such a cruel moment in culture and are inflicting so much harm on each other and it felt so heartwarming to read work that raises big questions without falling into victimhood and offers solace without being Polyannaish. This is my first Emma Copley Eisenberg work and I am officially a fan.

📚 Kudos — Rachel Cusk

I also finished Kudos by Rachael Cusk which completed my re-read of the Outline Trilogy. The narrator, Faye, travels to a literary festival in an unnamed European city. As in the previous books, the novel is almost entirely composed of conversations: on the plane, at dinners, in hotel lobbies, at panels and readings. People tell Faye things. She listens. Even more than in the previous two novels, her own interiority is almost entirely withheld, present only in the precision of what she notices, what she triggers in others and what she chooses to record.

I don’t know if those of you who have read Cusk feel the same way but when I read the Trilogy, especially Kudos, I think… my own consciousness kept drifting in and out, certain lines of monologue felt like my own inner voice only to remind myself to snap out of it and assume the role of the observer again… which is how Cusk writes Faye… she listens to her interlocutors but then drifts away into her own thoughts only to come back with a one line response… which then reanimates her conversation partners. I just kept weaving in and out of it the whole way through.

The title - KUDOS - is perfect for this book that circles questions of recognition, reward, and what it means to be seen in literature, in marriage, in public life. A journalist interviews Faye about success and failure, male writers hold forth. The narrator accumulates other people’s stories, there’s something about her that just makes people spill it. The story is so minor yet I found myself again feeling quite angry reading it… as it tells a story about how men and women get to experience the world quite differently and the self-effacement that women find themselves performing in order to self-protect.

It’s the shortest and most austere of the three novels. Some days I think it’s my least favorite of the three. Other days I think it’s the most perfect. Either way, this month in particular I felt a profound appreciation for an author who so masterfully erases the walls between the author, the reader, and the writing itself.

📚 On Eating — Alicia Kennedy

Last but not least — I read Alicia Kennedy’s new memoir On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites earlier this month and wrote about it at length.

The short version: it is a book organized around the foods and ingredients that have shaped Kennedy’s life — apples, lamb, oysters, coffee — and it uses them to think about appetite as a serious intellectual and political category. How we learn to want. How female hunger gets domesticated or pathologized. How following your appetite outward, honestly, builds into something that looks very much like taste except that it was generated from inside rather than aspired to from without.

As I mentioned in my original post about this, the book is fantastic because it can be read in so many different ways. It is, for sure, an excellent food memoir for anybody who appreciates food writing. But in the context of this community, the book is also for anyone who has ever felt caught between the reader you are and the reader you think you should be. It is, truly, so great.

❤️ Favorite books of 2026 so far:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

• April — Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

A quick note before we go! Our next community Zoom will be on Saturday, May 9 Central, and given everything we’ve been talking about this month, I thought it would be the perfect time to discuss our favorite off-season reading. What do you reach for when you need to step off the pedal? I’d love to hear from you in person.

A post with all the details is going up for paid subscribers shortly. And if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading — now is a great time. I’m offering 50% off between now and May 30.

🤓 And now some questions for you:

• Have you ever had this experience of “hearing the machinery” of a book while you’re reading it?

• For those of you who love romance (or any genre with strong conventions): what does the formula feel like from the inside? Is it comforting, pleasurable, invisible…?

• What do you reach for when you need “off-season reading”?

Last weekend I finished Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed and when I surfaced long enough to post about it on Instagram, all I could manage was: holy shit. Within the hour I had a pile of responses from people I consider serious, thoughtful readers — people who read at volume and have strong opinions — and every single one of them was a variation on I KNOW!!!!

This is what two years of writing about books on the internet has given me, and honestly it might be the thing I am most grateful for: a group of people who will meet me exactly where I am, at whatever level of eloquence I can manage, and just… know.

Two years ago this month, I started writing A Reading Life. In that time, I’ve read with an intensity that has no precedent in my life. I’ve thought harder about reading than I ever expected to. At times, I’ve gotten so far into my own head about it — most recently about taste and erudition — that , with the calm of someone who has already worked through these questions, felt compelled to tell me, in her supportive, gentle, wise way… to calm down.

I’m not there yet, but I’m taking notes.

Looking back, the past two years have been an exercise in two things that sound like opposites but aren’t: nerding in AND peacing out. The deeper I’ve gone into reading — the more seriously I’ve taken knowledge, attention, and what it means to have a real embodied intellectual life — the more I’ve also had to learn to let go of exactly that seriousness. Reading is such an immersive endeavor that… unless you lighten up a little… it will begin to crowd out the sense of openness that makes reading feel like discovery rather than effort. It will make what excites you feel boring.

What follows is my attempt to distill that insight into something useful but also do so in a lighter way. I know that “listicles” get a bad rep these days but as someone who is extremely strapped for time at the moment, I do appreciate it when a favorite writer decides to loosen their collar (this is a Rachel Cusk reference which is not funny if I have to explain it, I know, but it’s on my mind… so there). Most of the experiences described below are mine but I had to include some ideas that came from you and for that I am forever grateful.

📚 It’s easier to be reading a lot than to be reading a little.

This sounds counterintuitive until you experience it. Reading consistently creates its own momentum — you finish one book and you’re already halfway into the next.

📚 Think of reading not as a habit to maintain but as a practice to return to.

Think of it the way you think of yoga. There’s no endpoint, no graduation, no streak to protect. Every time you return to it you start from exactly where you are that day. Having a great session today doesn’t mean anything because you may tweak your neck tomorrow and need to sit yoga practice out. But missing a class, a week, a month… doesn’t mean you’ve failed at yoga. There is no yoga police. And it doesn’t mean you have to begin again from scratch next time you roll out your mat. The practice is yours and it will be there when you come back, and it will give you what you need at that new moment in time. Reading is similar.

📚 The only battle worth fighting is the battle for your attention.

Why you seek it, what you offer it to or how you are affected by it matters. Everything else follows from this. I keep asking myself: what am I attending to right now? And how is my phone in the way?

📚 Never leave the house without a book.

When I found myself in a fashion rut (or was it depression?) while working from home for ~5 years, I told myself that I had to get dressed in real clothes and leave the house at least once a week. To keep the promise to myself, I started going on coffee and a book date once a week on Fridays and taking photos on my way out the door for accountability.

Those me-dates became my favorite time of the week and eventually led to so much more (including this newsletter) but also… the habit of taking my book with me as I was leaving the house stuck. Now I take my book with me every time, non-negotiable. The world will give you time if you’re ready for it.

📚 Find sneaky, playful pockets in your day to read a little bit.

The nine minutes before the pasta water boils. The four minutes someone “gives you back” at the end of a Zoom call. The carpool line. Reading doesn’t only have to happen in long, uninterrupted sits — and once you stop waiting for those, you’ll be surprised how quickly this type of interstitial reading adds up. This is a tip on how to read more by writer .

📚 A longer book is sometimes a better cure for a distracted mind than a shorter one.

Learned this from of . The cost of immersing yourself in a new world is higher than staying longer in a world you already know. When everything around is going crazy, picking a long book gives you one space to just stay put. This is also counterintuitive but excellent advice on how to think about “vacation” reading.

📚 Have a day book and an evening book.

Another tip from a book nerd friend, this one courtesy of . The day book lives in your bag, sits on your desk, tolerates interruption. Essays and short fiction are great for this, as are journals and diaries. The “evening” book gets your full attention. This is my first month testing out this advice and here’s Helen Garner with a prominent spot on my work desk.

When I need a REAL break from whatever I am working on, I read a couple of pages and most of it has been so clever, funny and/or odd that it’s been just delightful to dip in and out.

📚 When you’re in a reading slump, the book is rarely the problem. Rest.

📚 The classics are weirder, hornier, funnier than you think.

📚 Challenge yourself.

There is no better ego boost than tackling a book you’ve been intimidated by for years. And, not unrelated to that…

📚 As you get older, you get better at reading.

It’s one of the greatest surprises in life. Who cares if your bottom is saggy if Dostoyevski is finally fun?! (I do realize that not everybody shares this particular opinion but, let’s be honest, they are not reading this newsletter.) 🤓 📚 🍑

📚 100 - YOUR AGE = the number of pages you owe a book before you DNF it.

I am not sure where I heard this, but I believe it’s a Nancy Pearl rule. At 45, I give a book 55 pages. It’s a good way to practice trusting your own judgment.

📚 Identify your off-season genre.

After two years of talking with serious readers, I have noticed that the best ones have a go-to genre that they read when needing to step away from the main stream of things. Amor Towles loves to read suspense series during the summer. started a trend during one of our early community zooms by getting everyone excited about reading horror. who is one of the best known book nerds on Substack shared in her Reading Life interview that embarrassingly-not-embarassingly she loves to read self-help.

As you know, I now identify as romance-curious even though the jury is still out on that one. What can I say, we contain multitudes and sometimes need a break from our own high-minded bullshit.

📚 Nothing compares to a deep book cry.

This year The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt and Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt. Clear your schedule.

📚 Poetry is an acquired taste.

Put in the effort. You get back exactly what you put in. Not immediately, and not always comfortably, but the returns are unlike anything else.

📚 Taking time to reflect on your reading is just as important as the reading itself.

The book isn’t finished when you close it. Write a sentence, copy a passage, tell someone what you thought. The reflection forces you to metabolize what you’ve read and integrate any consequent learning.

📚 An easy way into book journaling is to copy the first and last sentence of every book you love. via Kim Ourada

📚 Keep a record of what you read.

A handwritten list of titles and dates, watched accumulate over years, is one of the most intimate objects you will ever own.

Also, if you’ve been curious about journaling but don’t know where to start or how to stay consistent — this is it. Just the book and the date.

📚 Do not apologize for your taste.

It will change soon enough anyway. The reader you are at 45 is not the reader you were at 35 and will not be the reader you are at 55. Chase what calls to you now.

📚 Writers are people too.

Don’t assume they know how much their work has meant to you. After a Greek summer vacation, I emailed Katie Kitamura (!!!) to tell her that A Separation made me feel like I had actually visited Naxos in a previous life. She wrote back.

📚 Nobody cares about your reading life as much as you do.

Make it matter to you. It does not need to make perfect sense to anyone else. The reading life you build is yours — specific, strange, entirely your own. That’s the whole point.

Two years ago, I talked to writer and teacher while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do here on Substack. She pushed me to think about what I genuinely wanted out of my newsletter. My answer was simple: connection. I wanted book nerd friends. People who love reading, books, and journaling the way I do — and who, like me, don’t always have the time, space, or people in their “real” lives to have these conversations out loud. I wrote through my imposter syndrome, and I have to say — my wish came true!

I love that we have such a chatty comments section, I genuinely look forward to hearing everybody’s reading update on our Friday Book Chat and I’m obsessed with our Community Zoom we do every other month to just get to know each other by talking about books. Our next Community Zoom is Saturday, May 9th at 1PM Central. It is so great, I know I am biased but it’s one of my favorite hours of the month. If you’ve been thinking about joining, now’s a good time. Half off through the end of May.

Thank you for being here. Truly.

🤓 And now, some questions for you! Be honest!

• Have you ever spiraled about your taste, your “level,” or whether you’re reading the right books? What sent you there?

• What helps you get out of your own head as a reader… or are you perfectly happy living in there?

• What parts of your reading life feel most like you right now—and which parts feel inherited or imposed?

There is something terrifying about becoming a woman who writes on the internet, especially when your personal path has not followed the standard trajectory and your object of study does not coincide with the canon. As much as you own your journey and do the work of backfilling your intellectual lineage, you are eventually faced with the possibility that you may in fact be a philistine.

I have been convinced that taste is not the same as having a clear articulation of your personal preferences. Taste is a very specific kind of knowledge that I aspire to acquire. As writes in his now famous essay on the subject, having good taste in wine means being able to identify what you are drinking, being able to distinguish various grapes and regions. Having good taste in literature means knowing what you are reading, where it sits, what it is doing. It took me a while to realize that despite having missed it early on in life, that knowledge is still attainable for me. But even as I continue to surprise myself with how much I genuinely enjoy and appreciate classic works of literature, I still feel a certain discomfort with the idea that to truly claim taste, I need to aspire to a belonging that has historically not cared about me and my people.

Especially because whenever I allow myself to explore and trust my own preferences, I find myself rewarded — drawn into an intellectual lineage that is literary and erudite, but also emotional, corporeal, and, importantly, inclusive. When I let myself feel a sense of belonging alongside writers like Deborah Levy, Annie Ernaux, Kate Zambreno, Lauren Elkin, or Rachel Cusk, a familiar doubt creeps in. Is this comfort real? Is it earned? Who the fuck do you think you are, aligning yourself with writers so far out of your league?

But I didn’t arrive here by accident. It took real work to find my way into this space — work that was not always pleasant or easy. So when I catch myself wondering whether I’m just self-soothing through these books, I have to push back. Was reading A Woman’s Story supposed to be comforting? Was it fun?

I talked to several of my favorite readers about taste last year:

And continue to work through what it’s like to read in a way that is almost universally dismissed by serious critics:

I don’t mind working for taste. I just refuse to apologize for my preferences. And it is from inside that tension that I want to talk about ’s new memoir.

On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites just came out this week. It is AK’s second book in English and an extension of her work as a food journalist, academic, and essayist. Many of you will already know her from her incredible newsletter, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy and here’s a peek into her reading life as told to yours truly:

The new book is organized around the foods and ingredients that have shaped her life: apples, lamb, mushrooms, oysters, coffee. Through stories of coming of age on Long Island and building a career in New York City and later San Juan, she weaves personal narrative with well-researched food histories and sharp observations on a food industry that presents as creative and desirable but has been built on exclusion and exploitation. It is a book about becoming: about learning how to want, how to discern, and how to make a life around those instincts. As someone raised to associate food preparation with the subjugation of women and anything remotely domestic with servitude, the fact that I am deeply invested in this writing continues to astonish me. It is a massive testament to Alicia’s writing and, specifically, her ability to work on multiple registers at once: memoir and cultural history braided together, behind-the-scenes honesty about food writing as both craft and profession, and a refusal to romanticize a life that is often aestheticized from the outside.

Alicia’s professional journey is almost accidental. While working as a copyeditor at New York Magazine, she takes up vegan baking as a form of stress relief, soon finds herself running a small business selling birthday cakes to Long Island vegans, and little by little builds a writing portfolio by pitching online publications. She becomes a restaurant writer for The Village Voice (RIP), and when the publication folds, takes the push to go freelance. Vice Magazine sends her to San Juan to write about piña coladas, where she adopts, in her words, “a Bourdainian posture” for the first time. It is cocktail writing that opens up the world for her: Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and beyond. She discovers she does not care for wine but loves learning about the history and politics of what people drink and why, finding along the way that she is not just competent at this but genuinely, voraciously interested.

The chapter on martinis made me nervous to read, and not because I am especially anxious about alcohol. I felt nervous for her as she described walking into a male-dominated space, a world of bars and tastings and industry events and professional drinking, and simply not being afraid. She is curious, she is hungry, she is willing to go. She does not manage herself into smallness. She simply follows her appetite into the room and finds out she belongs.

My reaction made me wonder how much of my formation as a woman has been about staying small, staying gentle, staying legible, staying safe. The fear I felt reading Kennedy in that bar was not fear for her. It was recognition of something in myself that has spent a long time keeping many doors closed. A woman who follows her appetite into a room that wasn’t built for her, who drinks what she wants and writes about it and gets paid and comes back for more: that is supposed to be dangerous. Except it isn’t. It’s just a woman becoming alive to her own life. This is what appetite looks like when it hasn’t been fully domesticated.

Appetite is Kennedy’s driving force and, I think, the most useful concept this book offers to anyone trying to think about how we know what we know and why it matters. Alicia describes it as the hunger that’s not hunger but a greedy voraciousness, and I love how active and momentous that feels. It is restless. It starts in the gut but does not stay there. It is specific to your body and your history and your grief and the particular moment you are living through. And crucially, it is NOT the opposite of knowledge. When vegan baking takes Alicia down the artisanal chocolate aisle of a specialty grocery store, she intuitively embarks on a journey that will not only influence her baking but will teach her about “how food comes into our hands, especially in the affluent global north,” and will ultimately shape what she wants to write about. Appetite, followed honestly outward, does the same work that accumulated knowledge does. It expands you. It builds, over time, into something that looks very much like taste, except that it was generated from inside rather than aspired to from without.

This feels especially significant given that women have historically been denied appetite as a serious category. Female hunger, whether for food, sex, power, knowledge, or recognition, gets pathologized, moralized, or domesticated. While male chefs, Alicia argues, have been allowed to cook from intellect or self-expression, women do so in service of others. We cook for our families, to feed our children, to nourish our community, to be useful. The acceptable version of female hunger is hunger that disappears into care.

This shows up in reading too. The idea that a woman might read to satisfy her own hunger, not to improve herself or become a better citizen but simply because she wants to, has always carried a faint whiff of defiance. I feel it every time I choose a book because it calls to me rather than because it appears on a list I am “supposed” to be working through. I feel it every time I defend emotional, embodied reading as a serious mode of engagement rather than a warm-up for the real critical work.

“This is something I have been slow to admit — Alicia writes — that I have a unique relationship to food that has never been punishing.” I find that attitude endlessly inspiring. I read her not with other food writers but with the authors who compose my own personal canon: Deborah Levy, Lauren Elkin, Kate Zambreno, Annie Ernaux1. What connects all of them, and what connects them to Kennedy, is that they write the self as a serious critical and political act. The interior life, the body, desire, appetite, grief, place: these are not warm-up material for the real argument. They are the argument. And none of these women are writing in service of anything or anyone else. The world may be interested in forcing them into a defensive position, but they refuse to submit. They insist that their hunger is serious.

If you have ever felt caught between the reader you are and the reader you think you should be, between the hunger you already have and the taste you are still working toward, I hope you find your way to this book. Kennedy will not tell you to work harder or want differently. She will give you a word for what you are already doing and show you how seriously that doing can be taken. How far it can take you. How much it already knows.

🤓 Now tell me:

• How do you distinguish between preference, appetite, and taste in your own reading life? Do those feel like different things to you?

• Have you ever felt undeserving of the books you love—like you somehow hadn’t “earned” your place among them?

• What would it look like to follow your intellectual or creative appetite more fully—and what, if anything, is stopping you?

This past weekend I was in Austin for the Austin Texas Book Trail. While navigating the crowded aisles of First Light Books, I struck up a conversation with a fellow reader clutching her Book Trail map. I asked how many bookstores she had visited and she said just one — a small romance bookstore I wasn’t familiar with (it was my first time in Austin.) I think she took my comment to mean I don’t read romance, which emboldened her to share that she had only gone because her friends were huge romance fans and she went along to be agreeable. IN FACT, she had JUST spoken to her therapist about how irrationally angry she felt about romance and how she couldn’t stand how predictable it was.

Me: What did your therapist say?
Her: She told me to put the book down. Not everything is for everyone.

We chuckled and she apologized profusely for oversharing, which I assured her was TOTALLY fine because I live for an intense exchange with a stranger, especially in a bookstore. What I didn’t tell her was that I was already working on this post because — girl, same. I too feel an active, irrational resistance to reading romance.

Romance as a genre has obviously been popular forever but has grown immensely since ~2021. It is currently the leading growth category for the entire print book market, and the volume has more than doubled in four years. Romance bookstores are popping up everywhere, BookTok loves it, it’s becoming more and more diverse. It is, by any measure, having a serious moment OR, more accurately… it is gaining momentum.

I, personally, keep avoiding it — actively, defensively, aggressively — and here’s why:

1. I find it predictable and formulaic.
   I know how it ends before I begin, the arc is fixed. Boy meets girl, or girl meets girl, or enemies circle each other for 300 pages and arrive at the same destination. As someone who reads for surprise, for rupture, for the moment a book does something I didn’t see coming… the guaranteed happy ending feels like depriving myself of the best part.
   

2. It find it too sentimental.
   I have spent years cultivating a taste for authors who don’t flinch. Deborah Levy. Constance Debré. Catherine Lacey. Neige Sinno. I love books that look at relationships in a cool, precise and unsparing way. The authors I love write deeply emotional books, but they never veer into sentimentality. In her diaries, Helen Garner says that “sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.” Romance, in my estimation, is the opposite of all that. It wants you to feel good. And it’s not the feeling good that I have a problem with but the wanting.
   

3. In my mind romance writing is not especially interested in language.
   I came to serious reading late and I fought hard to get here. My assumption about romance has always been that it’s essentially a plot-delivery infrastructure and within that format, language is a vehicle, not the point. And, increasingly, I am here for the point.

I want to sit with these objections for a moment because if I am being honest, I think they reveal something embarrassing about me rather than anything true about the genre.

The predictability argument, for instance, doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. Cailey Hall, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, compares romance novels to sonnets:

I like to think of romance novels as not dissimilar from sonnets. Both are constrained by certain expectations: 14 lines of iambic pentameter and a handful of possible rhyme schemes, on the one hand, and necessary plot points — the protagonists meet, their relationship develops, problems arise and are mostly resolved — on the other. Yet despite — or perhaps because of — these constraints, it is still possible to produce new, exciting, and even brilliant work within them. At the same time, as many romance readers have noted, the generic conventions of romance also offer what I see as a kind of consolation. In contrast to most things in life, romance guarantees ‘an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending,’ although the journey there can take many directions.

Reframing the happy ending as formal commitment is interesting to me. In this way, the constraint and formulaic nature of the genre does not have to be limiting, it is in fact the point. And more than that, Hall argues that romance novels consistently achieve something that sounds almost banal but is, in fact, quite radical:

While there is no way to systematically account for the thousands of novels published every year — or for the ways readers respond to them — I have found that almost all of the romance novels I have read achieve something that sounds mundane, but remains quite radical: they model a form of female happiness and fulfillment still lacking in most canonical works of literature… these novels not only depict relationships that involve negotiation and growth, but also allow female protagonists to experience a kind of personal, sexual, and professional fulfillment that does not feel like an unattainable fantasy.

Or, as the romance novelist Jenny Cruisey puts it, “[m]odernism has convinced us that suffering and losing is more valuable than suffering and winning. Romance fiction says that this isn’t necessarily so and constructs positive, uplifting narratives to demonstrate that.” LOL. I mean. Fair.

So maybe what I’m resisting isn’t predictability. Maybe it’s the idea that happiness could be… allowed?!

The sentimentality objection is where it gets even more uncomfortable. Because if I am honest, what I’m really saying is: I have internalized a literary hierarchy that ranks emotional withholding above emotional exuberance. I have read enough to know that this hierarchy has a long and specifically gendered history. I’ve spent the past year publicly dismantling my belief that analytical reading was serious and emotional reading was indulgent and yet here I am, applying the exact same logic to an entire genre. As I judge an entire genre for being too much of a provocation, I remind myself that I actually love to be moved by a piece of writing and feel it’s nails down my skin. I don’t need everything I read to MEAN something profound, I just need it to mean something to me.

The prose objection might be the most defensible, and also the one I’m least qualified to make, since I haven’t actually read enough romance to know whether it’s true. For this one, I just apologize.

My friend , who shares a lot of my taste in literary fiction and also reads romance, told me this:

Outside of the Twilight novels from my youth, I spent most of my life with this very tunnel-visioned view of what the romance genre was. I assumed it was strictly “bodice rippers” or the high-intensity smut ala Fifty Shades of Grey. But I swiftly realized that the genre isn’t a monolith.

At the height of the pandemic, I remember speaking to a friend who told me that “every story is a love story if you manage to look at it from the right angle.” And that changed my perspective on reading romance, completely. Whether or not a novel ends with a “happily ever after,” there is relatability and romance to be found in yearning, fleeting moments of clandestine love, and more so as of late…the intersection of romance and mental health. I am very much a mood reader, and the romance genre, I’ve discovered has many flavors, spices, and a bit of something for everyone…PERFECT FOR ME!

There are the tropes: enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, sports romance, etc. There are queer romance and hetero romance. Some romance books are saccharine, like Hearstopper by Alice Oseman or See You At The Finish Line by Zac Hammet. Some are perfect as vacation reads, like Beach Read by Emily Henry or Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez. Some are very spicy palate cleansers best suited for in between heavy reads, like Winging It With You by Chip Pons or Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid. Others centered on yearning and tender clandestine moments of budding love, like Swimming the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski or Lie With Me by Philippe Besson.

The diversity within the genre, is why I love reading romance. I like to mix it up. Sometimes I want something simple and sweet, and other times I want something to devastate my soul.

My friend , who also reads across both literary fiction and romance, offered a useful distinction: there are romantic books that aren’t technically romance — more literary, less centered on plot mechanics — and then there are the ones that will, in her words, rot your teeth and keep you reading until midnight. Both are valid. Both serve a different need.

And some of the titles she mentioned — queer autofiction translated from French, historical fiction about slow-burn longing — honestly align almost perfectly with my previously well documented reading kinks

When I was working on my interview with Justin from Fly by Midnight, I ended up listening to a lot of their music — light, poppy, unapologetically romantic. I especially loved listening to it on my way to and from work as a way to just get into a happier mood for my co-workers and for my family at the end of the day. And I could feel it working.

Me (whistling)…
Husband: Since when have you become a person who whistles?!
Me: I have been listening to Fly by Midnight, and it’s making me… I don’t know… happy?!
Husband: Aha.
Me: I keep reading all these super intense books that just wreck me. I’ve been wondering if I should maybe try to read romance novels or something lighter like that so that I can feel more…
Husband: You mean… like a normal person?

I carry a chip on my shoulder about not being well-read. I have been in catch-up mode since I started taking reading seriously, and I have made every book count in the heaviest possible way. Month after month of gorgeous, devastating literature. And somewhere in that project I seem to have decided that lighter meant lesser. That pleasure for its own sake was a distraction from the real work. That reading should always do something profound to me.

But… wait a minute. Maybe there is something to the idea of introducing a little bit of lightness and romance into an otherwise grown-up and serious (reading) life. I desperate need help to lighten up a bit. Also, I think that bringing in something easier might actually open up some mental space to allow me to recover from the heavier books and let me rebuild some mental stamina for the next book that will destroy me?

I reached out to Book of the Month and they immediately agreed to partner with me and let me pick a book from their April line-up that fit the bill. Beyond romance, I think BOTM is particularly great for this kind of genre-seeking and experimentation. Each month has a diverse but contained set of books to choose from… I was specifically interested in romance but their April line-up included upmarket, fantasy and literary fiction.

This month, BOTM are also celebrating their 100th anniversary. If you join in April, you can get your first book for just 100 cents with the code HUNDRED. I chose Annie Knows Everything by Rachel Wood: a novel that seems to sit right on that edge I’m curious about: contemporary, but with relationships at its center. It’s a workplace romance set in a tech company so I thought, given my professional background, I could be a fair a judge of how well the author has depicted this world I am familiar with.

I will also work off Marco’s and Jenna’s lists to see if maybe I can find a sub-genre of romance that works for me. But in the meantime, please:

🤓 Help me think through all of this!

And please, if you are able, do share your personal experience with romance!

• What is this?! Why the resistance? Where am I wrong?

• If you have been similarly prejudiced against romance (or any genre for that matter) but changed your mind, what happened?

• And if you manage to read outside of your core genre, please talk to me about the logistics of it! How do you fit it all in and how do you maintain focus?

Thank you, Book of the Month, for generously sponsoring this post!

I just discovered the work of Veronica Ryan, a British artist known for her intricate biomorphic sculptures and installations. Ryan draws on a wide range of organic materials—pods, fruit, husks, seeds, and feathers—alongside found, discarded, and traditional materials. She combines classical sculptural techniques with textile practices such as quilting and crochet to create works that are rich in texture and meaning: at once personal and political, historical and acutely modern.

In 2022, she won the Turner Prize for Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moaceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae) (2021), depicting tropical fruit made of marble and bronze. The work was inspired by memories of visiting Hackney’s Ridley Road Market as a child and is dedicated to the Caribbean immigrants who moved to London after 1948. Ryan was the oldest person to receive the Turner Prize, and the piece itself was the UK’s first permanent public sculpture by a Black woman.

Ryan spent time in New York in the 1990s, raising children while trying to continue making work—often using scraps and found objects because she couldn’t afford “real” materials. In an interview Ryan explains how early in her career she got criticized by her teachers for using both materials and techniques that did not belong in the hierarchy of high art making but, partly out of necessity, she stuck to guns and it’s that particular mix of high-low materials and high-low technique what eventually became what she was known for.

Living through the “simultaneous exhaustion and essential resourcefulness of motherhood,” one day Ryan was emptying the vacuum cleaner and decided to keep its contents. She found a discarded industrial bread bin on the street and began collecting vacuum dust in it. She was drawn to the contrast between the soft dust and the ruggedness of the metal container. She was fascinated with the idea that the dust itself contained traces of everything that had passed through her life.

That’s one of the paradoxes [with waste],” she says: “We are emptying out, but nothing is completely empty.” Under a microscope, the dust would reveal an entire universe—mites, fragments, living processes. The dust itself becomes a container: of artefacts, of time, of life. The questions she was asking were both quotidian and existential. When do things end? Where do they go? Can we ever really get rid of anything.

In 1993, that accumulation became Empty Container Full of Dust.

I’ve been thinking about this piece — not because it directly relates to the books I read last month (although in some strange way, it does) — but because I can’t shake this idea of accumulation. Of gathering fragments, letting them settle, compress, integrate. Of creating something soft and new while still preserving the integrity of what came before, even if you need a microscope to see it.

March was an incredible reading month for me but even though I took copious notes on the books I read throughout, I have felt very unsettled by it and have been dreading the idea of writing this post which I typically really look forward to. Initially I thought that maybe I was dealing with writer’s block or burnout… but that’s not it. I think, to the contrary, I have too much swirling in me… and, to borrow from Ryan, I believe I sucked too much in with my reading vacuum and it’s going to take a while for all that dust to settle in the bread bin.

You can probably tell just from looking at the reading list that I spent time with true masters of craft (including a newly announced International Booker shortlisted title and not one but two Nobel Prize for Literature laureates)... There is legitimately too much language, theme and form to process. So yeah… too much dust in the vacuum… BUT… also… my container is all wrong. The idea of writing a post of reviews the way I typically do feels borderline disrespectful — to these amazing authors and to their incredible books.

So, after almost two years of writing these monthly wrap-ups, I’m realizing two things at once:

1. I absolutely love sharing what I read each month. It gives me motivation, momentum and focus. I love the conversations we have about what we’re reading and I don’t want to stop doing that.

2. But I am increasingly dissatisfied with my ability to produce anything that feels meaningful when what I’ve read is this serious, this personal, this good.

To compress She Who Remains (so poetic), and Repetition (philosophical, hilarious, and brave), and Kitten (sensitive and aching), and Rachel Cusk’s precise, controlled work… and then casually move on to two Nobel Prize-worthy novels…It just feels wrong.

Not wrong in an absolute sense. If I’ve learned anything from writing about books on the internet is that there are a million ways to have an interesting, insightful conversation about reading. But it feels wrong for where I am right now as a reader. I sat with that feeling for a while, longer than I wanted to… but eventually I landed somewhere that felt true: that this discomfort is probably a reflection of some kind of growth.

When I first started writing about books on Substack, I was really preoccupied with how to read more, how to rebuild the habit and make it feel like a natural part of my life again. And once I did that, I became equally preoccupied with figuring out my taste, which has been its own incredibly satisfying journey. I’m so grateful I didn’t skip that part because I easily could have continued reading the way I always had → off lists, off new release tables, guided by a vague sense of what I thought I should be reading rather than what actually moved me.

I don’t know how else to describe it other than compare it to the effect of having a yoga practice… like when your yoga teacher tells you that all you have to do to get better at yoga is to get on your mat and do yoga. I also have heard people who share their personal style on the internet — and I think have both talked about it — credit their aesthetic evolution as in big part to simply making an effort to get dressed and posting pictures of themselves on Instagram. gives the example of a ballet dancer dancing in front of a studio mirror. Just by resolving to do the thing with intention somehow makes you better at the thing.

What I’m feeling now is that I want a bit more — from myself, from the time I spend with these books, from the way I move through them. Not more books, not more output, but more time. More space to process and assimilate what I’ve read, to journal about it, to talk to you guys about specific aspects of it, to read around it, to return to it, to let it do whatever it’s going to do in my head before I rush to articulate it in a monthly wrap-up.

While I was journaling about my experience of reading The Bluest Eye this past month — my first Morrison — I shocked and horrified myself by writing that my favorite section of the book was Soaphead Church’s rambling, narcissistic letter to God, where he attempts to justify his actions as a child molester. Soaphead ultimately blames God for the existence of evil while claiming a kind of moral superiority for “helping” Pecola by making her believe she would get the blue eyes she covets.

Even writing that above paragraph now makes me uncomfortable. But I also think it’s in scenes like this one that Morrison’s genius is revealed. She doesn’t tell you that good people can do terrible things while believing themselves righteous. She puts you inside the mechanism of that self-deception and makes you feel it working. You briefly, terrifyingly, inhabit it and what emerges in that moment is not contempt for the character, but a kind of recognition that is much harder to sit with. You end up feeling kind of scared of yourself.

I need and WANT more time with that feeling before I can say anything that feels remotely adequate about a book that has ruined many a reader.

During our last Community Zoom, we spent two full hours talking about bookstores and the ways we move through them, and several people mentioned how much they love reading the shelf-talkers — the little handwritten notes by bookstore staff that has them gushing about their most favorite books all within a square inch of paper. There is something so charming about this way of distilling a book… something about the particular format of the container makes the recommender really choose their words.

And I realized that what I’ve been struggling with this month is that books but the container I’ve been trying to put them in. My current format — the super long, structured, everything-I-read post — suddenly feels too rigid for what these books are doing in me…. What bothers me about the format is that it is forcing me to write about very different works in a very similar way. Also the timing of it feels wrong too… A monthly post of the sort I have been doing makes sense from a logistical perspective…. but from a more substantive angle, it asks for clarity too soon… It asks for conclusions I may not have yet. It forces me to define things that are still and, possibly forever in motion.

Part of me feels like I am talking myself out of the job of writing my own newsletter. But what I am actually wanting to do is keep the monthly wrap-ups but play with the container.

I feel so inspired by Veronica Ryan’s casting nuts and seeds in bronze or “caging” fruit in little fishing net baskets… to draw attention to the impermanence of an object by crafting a little structure around it. I am excited to experiment with this idea of how to capture the brief, breathless feeling of having just finished a good book — the way you text a friend about it or the way you speak over your shoulder as a you pass a stranger in a bookstore. I want to figure out how to transmute to you just enough so that you guys could feel what moved me in the moment but also save some space and energy for deeper processing and assimilation and, ultimately, returning to a book or an idea later on… with a bit more clarity.

📚 She Who Remains — Rene Karabash

In a remote Albanian village governed by the Kanun, Bekija faces an unwanted marriage and makes a radical choice: to become a “sworn virgin,” renouncing womanhood to live socially as a man. The transformation buys her freedom and safety but cuts her off from desire, intimacy, and a fully inhabited self. I think that readers are loving this book for two main reasons. Karabash does an incredible job setting up that internal conflict of needing to trade one kind of self for the freedom to discover another. The protagonist endures the consequences of that choice under extreme circumstances but, ultimately, the choice itself is profoundly relatable. And, secondly, she writes about that calculus in a very atmospherically rich, poetic language that is bery understandable and affecting. The combination of that psychological insight with the accessible beauty of the language just knocks you out on page one. A hard yes from me.

📚 Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

If you loved Will and Testament, this is essential reading. In Repetition, Hjorth returns to the protagonist’s teenage years and her first (almost humorously bad) sexual encounter. As the now adult narrator reflects on her family’s bizarre reactions to the incident — the mother’s controlling anxiety, the father’s detachment — the humor becomes something really dark. Hjorth’s ability to circle truth without naming it outright is absolutely unmatched. (I really want you guys to read this but not before you’ve read Will and Testament so that you can get the most out of it).1

📚 Outline and Transit — Rachel Cusk

I am re-reading Rachel Cusk’s groundbreaking Outline Trilogy — a set of books that completely changed my reading trajectory.

In Outline, we meet Faye, a writer who travels to Athens to teach a creative writing seminar, and in Transit, she is back in London, renovating a dilapidated flat while moving through the wreckage of her divorce. The narrative unfolds through a series of conversations Faye has with the people around her — fellow travelers, students, friends, construction workers, other writers. She says very little and reveals almost nothing about herself, at least not directly, and yet, through that absence, a portrait of a woman and a writer slowly takes shape. It’s the writer as observer, the self defined in negative space. The effect is both stunning and slightly disorienting, and I am having such an incredible time revisiting it. Also … I really don’t mean this in any kind of mean way … but the whole time I was reading Outline, especially, I kept thinking of Merve Emre’s conversation with Christine Smallwood on the Critics and her Publics podcast.

Emre’s vivacious and bubbly…. and Smallwood is … not that. Both incredibly smart and erudite women, obviously, but Smallwood just gives such strong Faye vibes. 🤭

📚 😻 Kitten — Stacey Yu

My most anticipated debut of 2026! The of all Galley Brags! Katie is drifting, financially dependent on her boyfriend and estranged from her mother. On vacation, she becomes fixated on his cat, Silver, who, unlike her, gets to be helpless and still be cared for. The book captures the ache of early adulthood so perfectly: the discomfort of going home but not quite belonging there anymore, while not having anywhere else that feels better just yet; the confusion and volatility of romantic life2; the inability to tell what is you and what might be class, racial, or other difference between you and your partner. There’s also that constant feeling of being out of place in every aspect of your life… so much so that you start behaving in ways that feel almost bizarre, simply because you don’t know what to do with yourself. I really loved this book! I want to give it to all my college friends and inscribe it — we made it.

📚 The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison

My first Morrison ever. I felt so incredibly intimidated but also fully primed to receive the work. If, like me, you have been meaning to read Morrison but feeling paralyzed by the magnitude of the decision of where to start, this episode of The Critics at Large was what pushed me personally into action.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s debut, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl in 1940s Ohio, prays for blue eyes, believing beauty will save her from a life of poverty, violence, and contempt. Morrison dismantles the myth of whiteness as salvation and shows how a culture’s cruelty can be absorbed so completely it turns inward and destroys. It is heartbreaking, loving, and furious all at once. I need to sit with this one much longer, I feel terribly unequipped to do it justice.

📚 Morning and Evening — Jon Fosse

My first Fosse, and my second Nobel laureate of the month! A tiny, simply magnificent book. It opens with a birth and closes with a death, tracing the arc of a life in between. We follow Johannes, now an old man, as he moves through what appears to be an ordinary day, though something about it feels slightly suspended. He drifts in and out of clarity — calm, confused, accompanied by a friend who is no longer alive — and it slowly becomes clear that we are witnessing his final hours. I read this thinking about my grandfather who passed away earlier this year, wondering what those last days feel like from the inside… There is something almost unbearably gentle about this book.

📚 SS Proleterka — Fleur Jaeggy

A daughter remembers a cruise she took with her distant father, a man who is both emotionally vacant and financially ruined. They barely speak, and yet there is something beautiful, almost charming, in the bond that exists between them. This is my second Jaeggy of the year. I read Sweet Days of Discipline back in January — my first encounter with her — and remember being struck by how controlled and emotionally restrained her writing felt, how much intensity she was able to generate in such a tightly sealed environment. Reading SS Proleterka now, a couple of months later, that feeling has only deepened, Jaeggy’s style is so distinct. It feels as though she has taken a red pen to her own work, stripping away anything that could possibly be considered fluff, leaving behind only what is essential. The result is a style that is sharp, slightly rough, and incredibly precise… almost unsettling in how much psychological charge it carries in so few pages. What has stayed with me since I finished the book is the warm, caring yet strange aura of the father-daughter relationship portrayed in the book: two people who never quite meet each other, and yet remain bound together in a way that feels both meaningful and accidental.

As I move into April and I try to take in everything I read in March… here’s the homework I am assigning to myself:

• Read more novels by poets.

• Read Kierkegaard’s Repetition to gain further insight into the philosophical foundations of Hjorth’s work. She cites him as a deep influence.

• Complete the Outline Trilogy reread. Kudos next and then more of Cusk’s standalone novels in preparation for the new one that’s coming out later this year

• Research Cusk / autofiction

• Can’t wait to share more from Yu with you guys later in the year. Her book comes out in the UK in July and then in the States in early August. I am going to need everyone to support it, ok!

• More Fosse, more Jaeggy because I can’t get enough of a good thing.

Collecting, accumulating, processing, assimilating. I trust that as I give myself time, I will figure out what I want to do with all this (over-) thinking.

🤓📚🥰 Favorite books of 2026

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

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⚡️ And now some questions for you!

• Which book have you read recently that you feel like you’re still processing?

• Do you have a preferred “container” for your reading life right now — notes, conversations, rereading, writing?

• What do you lose (and what do you gain) when you try to immediately “explain” a book after finishing it?

I have to be honest with you, working on this interview has left me with a kind of tender feeling that I did not see coming.

A little while back Justin Bryte - half of the indie-pop band Fly by Midnight - reached out to me after coming across my newsletter.

Middle-aged as I am, I had to google them. Don’t judge, I am still stuck on The Garden State soundtrack and don’t even mind. But I started listening to their music while chatting with Justin about how we could do something together and now I am a proud, t-shirt wearing fan of the band.

Fly By Midnight — Justin & Slavo — are an LA-based duo who have spent the last decade building something genuinely singular: multiple albums, touring internationally, a global audience, and crucially, all of it entirely on their own terms. Their music is emotional, melodic, and beautifully nostlalgic… think 80s popsynth, made super modern. I’ve been playing it a lot in the car with the windows down, soaking up this Memphis spring, feeling grateful for the rare urge to sing out loud and experience a kind of lightness that does not come naturally to me.

Fly by Midnight write the songs, produce the albums, direct the videos, design the artwork. I know that many of us seek autonomy and creative independence, but their ability to follow their creative instinct is truly inspiring.

Justin agreed to answer The Reading Life questions and as I was working on this post for you, I was struck by how unusually personal it felt to be so immersed in someone’s creative mind. (In fact, I highly recommend you put on the music as you read through the interview.) So much of contemporary internet culture flattens people into output — into an aesthetic or an image, something easily understood and repeated. And yet, somewhere between his music and his reading life, I found myself encountering not a brand or a persona but a… person. It’s almost embarrassing to admit how shocking that felt.

I know that I don’t speak only for myself when I say that life has felt a bit MUCH recently… but chatting with Justin I am yet again reminded that genuine human connection through art, literature and music can not only temper the hardship but also serve as a reminder to open up one’s own aperture more widely.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

Thanks for having me to chat Petya! On a personal note, reading has become part of my daily routine. Every morning I drink a cup of coffee and set a timer for 15 minutes to crack open a book before kicking off a workout. I’m really grateful my lifestyle allows me that luxury because it gives me the space to wake up before diving into, what’s normally, a pretty busy day, with typically a very late night ahead.

On the professional side, I’ve really enjoyed using books as a source of inspiration for the last couple of Fly By albums we’ve written. Sometimes simply taking the overall emotion a book has left me with can be a really cool diving board, when walking into a writing session. As we’ve been touring a lot more this year than previous, reading has also become one of my favorite ways to disconnect for a bit. Everywhere I go I carry a kindle in my shoulder bag haha

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

When I’m home I try to make the space to read 30 min to an hour a day. That bit in the morning and then before bed I’ll put in some time to cool down my brain. Occasionally if I’m really engrossed in a book I’ll derail my whole week and read a lot more.

PKG: As someone who has NEVER been a morning person and has zero aspiration of becoming one, I will have to agree that reading a little bit in the morning definitely sets up the day as a reading day… and I find it much easier to return to reading before bed if I have read some pages in the morning.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

These days I’m a bit all over the place with my favorite genre. The last few years I’ve jumped from historical fiction to classics to sci fi and more. I’ve really enjoyed the randomness of it all. I’ve also always been a fan of community so when someone recommends I read a book I often will just so we can have a bookclub-esque chat after.

PKG: Justin has really shamed me because I am so much more selfish by comparison. I have such a long TBR and guard it with my life. But I am making an attempt to soften my cold heart and be a better friend through reading with friends. This month I am reading SS Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy with Mike from .

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

I’d say setting timers for my reading feels like a habit that’s unique to me. I think for some people they’d find that structure frustrating, but it allows me the balance to enjoy a book without losing track of time and avoiding distractions.

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I often underline sections in a book, but lately I’ve moved away from physical books and am loving the highlight feature on my kindle.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

On my goodreads account I have a ton of books I’ve added to the want to read list.

PKG: Because I was nosey and wanted to snoop on Justin, I reactivated my own goodreads account. Nothing to see there right now but I may re-start my TBR list.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

A bit of everywhere lately. Reddit has been a really cool platform to connect with other readers and find recommendations. Also sometimes my wife and I will go into our local bookstore and I’ll grab a couple of books that stand out to me. Fun date day for us.

Also random story, but our song Infinitely Falling was used as the trailer song for the Netflix movie Love At First Sight which was based off of the book The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. The author Jennifer Smith sent us a couple of copies and it was the coolest thing to have our song be the backdrop for so many fans of the movie and book. Such a full circle moment for me loving music and reading.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

Definitely a mood reader. After reading a melancholy sort of book I often find myself being like “yeah I need something more uplifting next”. On the same token if I’ve done a long read (looking at you War & Peace) I’ll follow it up with some short stories or novellas.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

This is a really interesting perspective. So far I feel like I’ve been able to create space for everything I want to do in my day. Having a kid soon I’m sure will shift some of those priorities so I may need to check back in with you there haha Reading has shifted my focus away from social media all the time too, which despite being terribly difficult, I think is super important.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

I’m a big advocate for creating habits. Even starting 10 minutes a day may have you catch the bug. I also tell my friends who aren’t readers to genre search more, as I’ve noticed most guys in my circle associate reading with self help or non fiction. I’m like nah dude read about a romance in 1970s Tokyo or intergalactic political conflict! Haha

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

Some favorites that I can’t stop recommending:

• Speaker for the Dead

• The Pillars Of The Earth

• The Five People You Meet In Heaven

• Left Hand Of Darkness

• Norwegian Wood

• Hyperion

• Rules For A Knight

• Stoner

• Working Stiff

I hope you loved this conversation as much as I did. Justin gave us many fun nuggets to pull from, but the thing that’s really sitting on my heart right now is how to carry this soft, happy, slightly lovey feeling into my own reading life. I have a suspicion that some strategic genre searching may be involved… and I may, in fact, be—gasp!!!—romance curious.

🤓 So let’s talk:

This chat is competing with a new Fly by Midnight single release today BUT in addition to my questions below, please note that Justin will try to pop in and say hi at some point today! Feel free to speak to him directly in the comments!!!

• Which of Justin’s tips or reading habits felt most relatable to you — and is there one you’re curious to try in your own reading life?

• What are you reaching for when you want to feel something lighter, softer, or more hopeful in your reading?

• Have you ever surprised yourself by getting into a genre you didn’t think was “for you”?

We all have our own preferences for how we love to read — outside, in a coffeeshop, long uninterrupted stretch in bed — but let’s be honest. Life happens and if we wait for our ideal time and place, we may never read again.

So. Today I am doing something I have wanted to do for a long time. I want to give you the gift of 15 unexpected minutes of reading time. Please take the time you would have normally taken to read one of my longer posts and spend that time reading your book. At the end of the 15 minutes, come and tell us what you read and how much you were able to read. I will do the same!

Time confetti! 🎉

For my birthday last month, my husband and my daughter surprised me with a trip to New Orleans. It’s one of my most favorite cities in the world and a place we visit whenever we can. At this point we know our way around it well enough that it’s a low-effort, high-return kind of destination. We walk around to soak in the atmosphere, we eat extremely well because the food scene is incredible (my vegan husband fully agrees), and we visit bookstores.

This last time we only had time for two bookstore runs, but they were so good… which made me realize something slightly ridiculous. After nearly two years of writing about books here, I have never actually written about bookstores. That feels like a pretty glaring omission. Bookstores are one of my happiest places on earth, and I have a feeling many of you feel the same.

So let’s talk about them.

I have always loved bookstores, but for a long time they overwhelmed me in the same way department stores still do. There is so much within reach that the experience becomes strangely paralyzing. Everything is there, yet it is hard to know where to begin.

For many years I relied on lists to solve that problem. Best Of lists, Book Award lists, anything orbiting The New York Times book coverage. Those lists carried me through my reading life and structured my bookstore visits as well. I would walk in, head straight for the New Releases table, and look for titles that I could recognize. Deep in my heart I think I imagined that there was an invisible curriculum that I was trying to complete. These days I operate differently.

Writing this newsletter — and simply getting older — has forced me to pay closer attention to my own taste. Over time my reading instincts have sharpened and I trust them far more than I used to.

What that has meant for my reading life is fairly simple:

• I read fewer buzzy new releases, especially from the big publishing houses. When something starts getting aggressively hyped, my interest often fades.

• I read more classics that once intimidated me. I used to assume they would be difficult; what I eventually discovered is that when they are difficult, I often enjoy them more.

• I read far more backlist titles — books that have had time to find their readers. Good stories do not expire after two seasons in the market.

I still keep an eye on the lists, but I now treat them more like a weather report than a command. Something to observe and occasionally useful, but not something I feel compelled to follow. And this shift in taste has changed the way I literally move through bookstores.

These days I enter a bookstore like a cold assassin. Focused. Calm. Collected. I have a METHOD.

• I am frequently going in with a list in hand. I don’t keep track of what I want to read in Goodreads or such; I have a list in my Notes App but that’s largely neglected. What feeds my list is typically a loosely defined Reading Project or an author I am working through. Working off projects and favorite authors means that you have a constant list at your fingertips.

• Since last year, I have aimed to read at least one poetry collection a month, so now I always make sure I look at the Poetry section in any bookstore I visit. My hot take is that you can judge the quality of a bookstore on the prominence of its poetry collection.

• To expand my taste, I track down all the random Staff Recommendation shelves and corners. I look for the dedicated endcaps and also make sure to read the little tags that booksellers place on the shelves. Being a bookseller is a labor of love and I love getting oddball recommendations based on impassioned staff picks.

• This one won’t work for all of you but as an extraverted introvert, I make it a point to talk to staff and ask them about what they are reading, recommending or noticing. It’s never a dull conversation and I often leave buying more based on that.

• If I am not in a rush (and I try very hard not to rush a bookstore visit), I finish up by doing what I think of as the A–to–Z stroll. I slowly walk through the fiction section and let my eyes follow the shelves. I pick up books I have loved and miss, books I have been meaning to read, and sometimes books I have never heard of.

I am a big believer in trusting intuition when it comes to books. If I pick something up and feel a jolt — my heart skipping a beat, a sudden curiosity, a sense that the book is somehow calling to me — I usually just buy it.

Bookstores are also an anchor destination whenever I travel. Experiencing the literary spaces of a city tells you so much about its intellectual life, its personality, its readers.

I have visited hundreds of bookstores around the world but if someone forced me to pick a favorite, it would probably be Faulkner House Books in New Orleans.

The store sits on Pirates Alley in a historic townhouse built in 1837. In the 1920s William Faulkner lived there while working on his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. The bookstore itself is tiny — just two rooms — but absolutely beautiful. Soft light spills through the alley windows, the floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves are packed with a meticulously curated mix of classics and contemporary titles, and the entire place feels like a kind of literary shrine.

The bookseller who makes it all happen is an extraordinary woman named Joanne Sealy. Joanne has worked at Faulkner House for years but is not an owner, which actually makes me love her even more.

She sits at a work table in the middle of the store like a tiny priestess of literature, calmly directing traffic (only six people allowed inside at a time) and answering questions with impressive efficiency. She apparently reads every single book that makes its way onto the shelves.

A conversation with her feels like you have briefly been touched by… something.

On this last visit I was flipping through Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle and said to her, Tell me honestly. What do you think of him?

She paused for a moment and said, It is very odd. I sold two of his books today already, but I can’t stand him. I really didn’t think I needed to know that much about any one person in the world.

I laughed.

When I asked her what she was reading and loving right now, she simply said: Proust.

Bookstores are such rich cultural habitats, sustained by the peculiar devotion of people who care deeply about literature. Amazon could never.

On another bookstore-related note, I will be in Austin from April 3–5 for the Austin Texas Book Trail: an annual bookstore crawl dedicated to celebrating independent bookstores across the city.

The event is actually the brainchild of one of our own community members, Jacqui Rangel who runs and her friend Michelle Zhang (Michelle is a bookseller and does PR for Alienated Majesty Books).

If you live in Austin — or anywhere nearby and willing to travel — please send me a DM. I would absolutely love to meet some of you and possibly do a little bookstore wandering together.

And if all this bookstore talk made your heart flutter a little, be sure to join us for our March Community Zoom this Saturday at 1 PM Central.

I have a very special guest joining us (I am keeping it a surprise for now), and I suspect anyone who loves bookstores will especially enjoy the conversation.

Paid subscribers should already have received the Zoom details. If you didn’t see that message, feel free to reach out and I will resend it. And if you are not currently a paid subscriber but would like to attend, let me know — I am always happy to upgrade people who want to join the conversation.

🤓 And now, some questions for you:

• What is your personal approach to bookstores — do you go in with a list, or wander and see what finds you?

• Have you ever had a memorable encounter with a bookseller that shaped your reading life?

• Do you seek out bookstores when you travel? Which ones have stayed with you?

• And finally: if you’re in Austin — which bookstores should I absolutely not miss?

March 14th - Saturday - 1PM Central Time

We will close out the “formal” program at 2PM, but I am going to stay on until 3PM and just hang out. Last time we didn’t want to leave.

For those of you who like to come prepared, I really hope we can chat about BOOKSTORES (among other things)!

• What is your approach to navigating them?

• Do you go in with a list?

• Do you seek out staff recommendations?

• How do handle messy used bookstores?

• What are your most memorable bookstore experiences?

After the paywall:

• Zoom Details

• Recording of our last Community Zoom

I really look forward to seeing you, I have really missed you guys!

Read more

Vigdis Hjorth describes Tove Ditlevsen’s writing as brave, cheeky, unpredictable, brash — a merciless look at herself and others. Something more demanding than honesty. More disciplined than confession. To look mercilessly is to refuse the comforting version of events. To resist calling something fate when it may in fact be pattern. To stop narrating your life as though you were only ever being carried along by it.

I began February feeling scattered. Too many tabs open, too many half-formed ideas. I kept telling myself: don’t panic, don’t reinvent the wheel — fall back on what you know, read towards what you’ve already chosen. So I did. I read into two of my reading projects: Working Class Writers and what I think of as Monographic Reading — staying with authors I already trust rather than chasing something new. Tove Ditlevsen, Annie Ernaux, Vigdis Hjorth (whose new book Repetition is out NOW, and I wanted to have read everything I own by her), Constance Debré (whose fourth book also comes out in early April, and I am, at this point, a completionist). The choices felt less like selections and, honestly, more like logistics.

Without any deep planning on my part1, February became an extended meditation on the desire to build a life on your own terms — to want more, to become someone, to escape the version of yourself that was handed to you. Again and again, the same tensions surfaced: ambition and shame, desire and self-deception, the dream of freedom and the weight of where you came from. There is a Kierkegaardian thread running through all of it: the difference between a life that happens to you and a life you choose. These four books pull at that thread from every direction. Debré complicates the picture — her new book Offenses is less about the dream of self-invention than about those for whom no such dream was ever available.

That merciless quality runs through every one of them. Each book is, in its own way, about the dream of choosing yourself — and what stands in the way.

📚 Books mentioned:

• The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• A Woman’s Story — Annie Ernaux

• If Only — Vigdis Hjorth

• Offenses — Constance Debré

📚 The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

The Copenhagen Trilogy is Tove Ditlevsen’s three-volume memoir — Childhood, Youth, and Dependency — tracing her life from a working-class upbringing in 1930s Copenhagen to literary success shadowed by addiction. First published between 1967 and 1971, the books feel startlingly contemporary in tone: restrained, lucid, psychologically unsentimental. Across the trilogy, Ditlevsen examines how class, love, ambition, and dependency shape a woman who knows from a very young age that she is different.

She begins in a cramped apartment in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district. Her mother is stern and socially anxious, preoccupied with respectability and advancement. Her father, once politically idealistic, has been worn down by labor and disappointment. The atmosphere is not dramatic, but it is tight. There is very little space for interior excess.

In Childhood, Ditlevsen writes about being very young and already believing she is strange. Her classmates find her unceasingly, overwhelmingly comical, and she adopts the clown role because it protects her from their cruelty. But internally she is observant, inward, and perpetually longing for recognition. She dreams of meeting some mysterious person who will listen to me and understand me. I know from books that such people exist, but you can’t find any of them on my childhood street. The loneliness is palpable, but so is the formation of a mind that cannot help but narrate its own experience.

What is especially moving in Childhood is how clearly we can see what she cannot yet name. She believes she is odd, overly sensitive, perhaps defective. From our vantage point, we recognize the early awakening of a creative spirit. She writes heartbreak before she has been kissed. She rehearses abandonment before anyone has left her. She writes candidly about this compulsion: Even though no one else cares for my poems, I have to write them because it dulls the sorrow and longing in my heart. Writing, at this stage, is her way of self-regulating. In a childhood she memorably describes as long and narrow like a coffin, language becomes the only space that feels expansive.

In Youth, that early sensitivity collides with the compromises of adulthood. She leaves school early, takes clerical jobs she does not care for, marries impulsively. The desire to be taken seriously as a writer becomes entangled with the desire to be chosen by a man. Attention feels like proof of worth. Love feels like rescue.

If Childhood traces sensitivity and Youth traces ambition, Dependency is where it all breaks apart — the self she built and the writer she became, couldn’t protect her from the need for relief. The hunger that made her a writer also made her vulnerable to addiction.

After an abortion arranged by a lover, she is given Demerol for pain. She describes the first injection with unsettling calm: A warm wave washes through my body and removes all resistance. Everything becomes easy and without weight. What she registers is not ecstasy but relief. From there, the descent into a full-blown addiction is almost immediate and unfussy, which is precisely what makes it frightening. She becomes reliant on the man who controls her access to the drug. The marriage grows coercive and humiliating. Shame accumulates, but it does not explode. At one point she observes, The craving for the drug is stronger than love. The need for relief becomes entangled with the need for love, and by the end the two are indistinguishable.

That little girl on a Copenhagen street, filling a poetry album with emotions she’d only read about — she was rehearsing, as it turned out, for everything. She was sensitive in a world that did not know how to hold that sensitivity safely, and writing, the thing that saved her, was also the thing that couldn’t.

📚 A Woman’s Story — Annie Ernaux

A Woman’s Story begins with the death of Annie Ernaux’s mother after a long decline from Alzheimer’s in a nursing home outside Paris. The opening pages are factual and restrained: the body, the room, the administrative details. From there, the book moves backward, reconstructing the life of a working-class woman born in rural Normandy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ernaux states her aim clearly: I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world. This is not a conventional grief memoir but an attempt to restore complexity to a woman reduced first to “mother” and then to “patient.”

Ernaux’s mother grew up in poverty, worked in factories, later ran a café-grocery store with her husband, and lived in constant negotiation with France’s rigid class hierarchy. She was proud, energetic, devout, ambitious for her daughter. Everything she did was directed toward financial stability and social advancement. Ernaux achieved that advancement. She became educated, entered intellectual life, and moved into a bourgeois world structured around books rather than manual labor. The distance this created is central to the book. Social mobility fulfilled the mother’s hopes while simultaneously marking separation between mother and daughter.

That separation becomes concrete after Ernaux’s father dies and her mother eventually moves in with Ernaux and her family. The tension between them is ostensibly domestic and constant. The mother insists on cleaning, cooking, contributing — usefulness is the only identity she recognizes. Ernaux, now living in a middle-class intellectual household, tells her she does not need to do these things, that she should rest, that she is doing them differently.

We had gone back to addressing each other in that particular tone of speech — a cross between exasperation and perpetual resentment — which led people to believe, wrongly, that we were always arguing. I would recognize that tone of conversation between a mother and her daughter anywhere in the world.

Beneath the arguments about housework lie two incompatible class codes. Care becomes correction; gratitude shades into irritation.

Alzheimer’s then erodes what little remains of their relationship. Ernaux records the confusion, repetition, suspicion, and gradual loss of language without dramatization — her signature. There is a moment when her mother attempts to write letters as she once did and cannot continue; one unfinished note reads, Dear Paulette, I remain in darkness. The sentence is literal and unbearable. After the death, she writes,

I shall never hear the sound of her voice again. It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing, which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.

A Woman’s Story is a book about becoming — about what it costs to choose a different life than the one you were handed, and what you sever in the process. The mother made the escape possible. The escape made the distance inevitable. This book felt incredibly personal for me and gave me one of the biggest, deepest book-cries of my life. It was incredible.

📚 If Only — Vigdis Hjorth

Ida Heier is a successful playwright in her thirties when she begins an affair with Arnold Busk, a married professor she meets at a seminar. What begins as an encounter charged with intellectual and erotic energy stretches into a relationship that lasts for years, volatile and consuming. At first neither of them leaves their spouse. They sustain the affair through secrecy, argument, and reconciliation. When Ida eventually divorces, it is not because she has achieved clarity but because the internal strain she goes through becomes unbearable. Arnold divorces years later, yet even then the relationship refuses stability; it continues to be shaped by his ambivalence and Ida’s hunger for more. She believes in love, she has to believe in it, there is nothing else to believe in. Love here is less an emotion than a worldview. Ida experiences it as destiny, as something that gives her life coherence. To question it would mean dismantling the structure she has built around herself. The relationship is held together by volatility — a tightening cycle of withdrawal and return. Each time Arnold distances himself, Ida’s longing intensifies. Each reconciliation feels like proof and her intelligence does not protect her from self-deception.

Beneath the affair runs something more destabilizing: Ida’s injury. The novel never specifies its origin — it remains oblique, a history of shame and early trespass that shapes her responses without being neatly explained. If you are familiar with Hjorth’s work, you will recognize the territory; she returns again and again to questions of sexual violation and family silence. In If Only the wound is left deliberately unlabelled but it’s impact on Ida is profound: distance feels like abandonment, criticism feels annihilating, instability becomes familiar terrain.

Midway through the novel, Arnold leaves a message invoking Tove Ditlevsen:

Tove Ditlevsen could cope with much more than you. You’re a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen. What I have done is nothing compared to what Victor Andreasen did to Tove Ditlevsen.

Tove Ditlevsen and her fourth husband Victor Andreasen — we only meet him briefly at the end of Dependency — stayed together their whole lives, almost, no matter what one did to the other. Because they loved each other. We love each other, Ida! You know that, pleads Arnold.

In her imagination, Ida answers:

Tove Ditlevsen, ended up killing herself Tove Ditlevsen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and Victor Andreasen couldn’t take any more and left her. Perhaps Tove Ditlevsen should have left Victor Andreasen much sooner. Then she might not have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, she might not have killed herself, who knows.

Tove Ditlevsen planned to write a book about her life with Victor Andreasen, the title of which would be The Woman Who Put Up With Everything.

It would take a novel to explain to him what it was like for her, a completely different story to the one he would have written.

The reference reframes the novel from within. Arnold invokes endurance as evidence of love, measuring Ida against a literary model of suffering. Ida counters internally with another interpretation: perhaps endurance is precisely the tragedy. Perhaps staying too long is not devotion but simply a repetition of a familiar pattern.

Kierkegaard runs alongside this as a persistent undercurrent. Ida speaks of love as inevitability, as something that happens to her rather than something she chooses. The affair exposes not only her attachment to Arnold but her reluctance to assume responsibility for her own freedom. As long as love is destiny, she is spared the burden of choice. What finally becomes clear to Ida — and to us — is that she has been living inside a story that absolves her of agency, and that leaving Arnold means more than ending a relationship. It means accepting that she authored her own captivity, and that she alone can end it.

📚 Offenses — Constance Debré

Constance Debré’s earlier trilogy — Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name — chronicles her radical break from bourgeois life. She leaves her husband, relinquishes wealth, dismantles the privileges of her lineage, and writes toward a stripped-down version of freedom. Those books are fierce and ascetic, animated by the belief that one can shed identity like clothing and begin again. Offenses turns outward.

The novel is based on a real crime: a 26-year-old man murders an elderly woman, stabbing her ten times over a €450 debt. Debré removes their names and pares the story down to structure — debt, anger, fear, escalation. The title gestures both to legal infractions and to the everyday violations people commit against themselves and others.

Unlike her earlier work, this book resists psychological excavation. The young man is not rendered as a monster, nor as a romantic antihero, but as someone shaped by circumstance: precarious employment, family instability, the grinding limitations of class. Where Debré once wrote about choosing to leave — family, status, inheritance — she now writes about someone who cannot leave anything. The conditions that made him, the debt that cornered him, the rage that had nowhere else to go. By the time the crime occurs, it feels like the only possible outcome, the final pressure point in a system that was already crushing him.

Debré refuses melodrama, and the stabbing is not sensationalized. Instead, she attends to the continuum of violence. Her argument is not that poverty excuses brutality, but that violence exists on a spectrum shaped by power and insulation. Some people are buffered from acting on rage by education, money, or cultural capital. Others are not. Where her earlier narrator dismantled her own privilege in pursuit of personal freedom, Offenses interrogates the asymmetry of that freedom. Reinvention, the trilogy suggested, is an ethical act. Offenses seems to suggests that reinvention is a luxury.

Taken alongside her earlier books, Offenses feels like a continuation of Debré’s preoccupation with class and privilege — but deepened. In Name, she confronts the weight of her distinguished lineage and attempts to strip herself of its protections. In Offenses, she examines what it means to live without those protections in the first place. The question is no longer how to leave, but what happens when leaving is impossible.

Four books in, Debré has yet to disappoint me.

How was your February for you? What stopped you in your tracks? What was the most beautiful? Did you read anything brave, cheeky, unpredictable, brash, merciless?

❤️ Favorite books of 2026:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

It may sound obvious, but not everyone who writes on the internet is actually a reader. That realization continues to surprise me.

, who writes the culture newsletter , is unmistakably one. I found her on Substack which seems mathematically surprising, given that under the name ColorMeLoverly on TikTok, Instagram and Substack, she has a combined audience of ~400K followers. 🤯 I may have been late arriving to the Clara party, but I was quick to realize that she occupies a category I deeply value: the chronically online writer whose mind is shaped by books. She follows the discourse — the Beckhams, Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr., the endless churn of contemporary algo-driven culture — but she runs it through a reader’s mind first. The moment doesn’t just pass through her; it gets examined, contextualized, placed in conversation with other texts.

In her Nuzzi piece, for example, she writes: We love to read about beautiful women coming undone, provided they remain beautiful. I loved that observation so much, I wrote it down in my journal. The line provokes a laugh, but it isn’t a joke. It names the aesthetic condition built into so much cultural coverage of women in crisis. Unraveling is acceptable, even desirable, as long as it remains legible and attractive. Clara does the lord’s work of recapping the spectacle for those of us who have not had the time or energy to follow AND identifies the structure underneath it. Her work moves between literary reference and tabloid energy without flattening either.

Because reading Clara always pushes multiple of my reading pleasure buttons, I really wanted to know what her reading life looks like. Thankfully, she very generously agreed to share!

Enjoy!

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

Reading has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Not to be dramatic, but it grounds my life, making it fuller and more creative. I very much buy into the knowledge is/as virtue of it all, and there are few ways that more directly feed into that virtuous cycle than a habitual dedication to literature. The more I read, the more I want to read.

When I first moved to the States as a child, speaking not a lick of English, it was through reading that I gained the vocabulary and the fluency in this foreign language. I will forever harbor a soft spot for L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott and Madeleine L’Engle, not to mention the librarians and booksellers who recommended them, for holding my hand and teaching me what I needed to know, for setting such a lovely scene for and in my new home. In all likelihood, my completionist tendencies are thanks to them.

PKG: I feel so tenderhearted when I read about moments in childhood when an attentive adult connected with a child over literature. So many of the people I’ve interviewed in this series have mentioned relationships like that. It’s just so beautiful.

I moved on to the classics as a teenager, making my way through Jane Austen’s and the Brontës’ oeuvres like it was my job. I read a lot, mostly because I enjoyed it but partly because I felt like I had to catch up and patch up the blind spots I still had from spending the first nine years of my life in a different country. Now, of course, I’m taking care of different blind spots, reading the authors I likely would’ve been reading had I remained in Latin America. At least part of my life will always possess a hamster wheel quality—I’ve made my peace with that!

My reading ebbed and flowed during college and then grad school as I slowly learned to maintain a semblance of balance between my social, professional, and interior lives. I still haven’t fully figured out A System to make all sides of the triangle stand stable and firm, but … a semblance!

Now, I feel so lucky that part of my job as a writer is literally to read. Not only because I write about books in the newsletter, but also because there is no writing without a steady and solid foundation of reading. I read an average of 50 books a year; the bulk of this volume is made up of literary fiction, although there’s a good bit of poetry, drama, and non-fiction strewn about as well. I relied on a lot of English, American, and Irish literature in my younger years, so nowadays I do try to read quite a bit in translation. If you want a more or less representative sample of my reads, here’s where I listed every book I read in 2025.

Like anyone who keeps more or less abreast of literary discourse—a cursed subject matter, btw—I’m keenly aware of all the books I haven’t read, from classics (Moby-Dick and Middlemarch keep escaping me) to more contemporary hits (sometimes it feels like I’m the only girl in the world who hasn’t yet read anything by Rachel Cusk), but I also know rushing from novel to novel, without giving myself at least a bit of time to digest a tale, has never once made a book better.

PKG: Clara, I am with you on Moby-Dick and Middlemarch; if you want to start with Cusk, go with the Outline Trilogy.

The older I get, the more conscientiously I read, I think—to gain the most understanding from a book, I’ve realized that I am required to take my time with it. And that’s okay! I won’t get to every great book ever written, and it’s an inevitability I’ve chosen to accept.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

Someone asked me last week how many books I read in an average month and when I did the math—it was about five? So I guess I read around a book a week, give or take depending on book length and how busy/homicidal/anxious I happen to be. I used to only read before bed, but since quitting my corporate life, I’ve enjoyed more flexibility with how I spend my time. I’m usually reading a couple of books simultaneously: a run of the mill novel and either a nonfiction book or a collection of short stories or essays.

In the morning, after journaling, I usually read whatever nonfiction I’ve got going on for about thirty minutes. I find this practice gets me in a good headspace to work for a few hours. I find nonfiction or short stories to be more inherently self-contained than novels, so even if the subject and the writing is riveting, once I put it away I’m not distracted by it and can focus on my work. With novels, if they’re good I’m prone to lose long stretches of time to them—not a bad thing on weekends or days off, but when I’m trying to be disciplined (a notoriously tricky thing when working for myself, to be quite honest!), it helps to keep creative distractions to a minimum.

Sometimes I take a little reading break after lunch, especially if I’ve been productive—it’s like a reward. Again, I have to be careful, because I settle into the couch for this particular reading sesh, and it does occasionally happen that I get too comfortable and before I know it, I can barely see the words in front of me and I realize the day has fully gotten away from me. Which, like, is fine, but sometimes a girl has places to go, people to see, deadlines to meet, you know?

Tl;dr, though: I bring a book with me pretty much everywhere. I read in bars, cafes, trains, waiting rooms, airplanes, friends’ couches while I’m waiting for them to get ready … no dead time is safe from a little page-flipping. I’m never bored.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

Let’s be clear: I’m a novel girlie first and foremost. Fiction is a necessary element of any reading stack I schlep around with me from day to day. I have a soft spot for literary fiction—out of everything I read, it’s what I find the most rewarding. When a novel is great, it has the capacity to entirely rewire my brain, to make me see my past in a different light, examine my relationships, reconsider my future choices … I mean!

That being said, I used to read a lot more romance, an oft-maligned genre that I still very much love. There are so many romance tropes and clichés that are difficult to weave originally into a novel, so I really appreciate when a writer does it in a way that feels fresh—I wrote a little bit about this a couple years ago when I did a deep dive on Emily Henry. I’ve read so much romance over the years that I’m able to clock pretty quickly whether a new one will be good or bad (for me), which is not always the case with other genres. Mind you, unless something is Very Wrong™ I still finish them, because I like being an informed hater. But it makes things more efficient. Nowadays, I read maybe one romance novel every couple of months, maybe more if an author I’m loyal to releases a new book (looking at you, Ali Hazelwood!) or if I need something cozy that won’t run the risk of rewiring my neural pathways. Sometimes I need my brain to chill. Existing in a constant state of fiction-induced crisis is simply not sustainable.

PKG: As someone who is in a more or less constant state of heartbreak due to my reading choices, I am taking this advice to heart.

Recently, I’ve been leaning into collections. Essay and short story collections, especially. Not to belabor this point, but they’re self-contained, so I can sit at my desk for half an hour, read one or two essays, one or two short stories, and move on with my day. Collections are digestible. You can take your time with them. They’re also a great way to introduce a new author into my literary lexicon. Earlier this year, I finally read Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, and within days I’d purchased Lahiri’s sophomore effort, her novel The Namesake. Back in November, I read Roberto Bolaño’s A La Interperie, a hefty essay collection, and in December, Borges’s Ficciones, a short story collection that blew my mind. I haven’t read more of Bolaño or Borges yet, but I will.

There are also subjects I occasionally hyperfixate on. I get in this mood where all of a sudden I’m like oh my god I do not know enough about [niche subject that does not play into my personal or professional life not even a little bit not even a lot], how embarrassing for me! Currently, that subject is architecture. One of my goals this year is becoming more fluent in that and philosophy. No particular reason for it at all, I just have this thing where if I’m not learning I feel like I’m dying. Which is a very normal feeling and no therapists have suggested otherwise, I’ll have you know.

Right now, for instance, I’m slow-reading The Brothers Karamazov (for ’s eadalong!); Bauhaus Goes West, about Bauhaus-trained architects and artists who emigrated from Germany to America and Britain in the twentieth century and how their influence impacted the trajectory of Western design and architecture; and (I’m so sorry) Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Very chill, very non-obnoxious, very casual stack. I’m incredibly fun at parties.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

I don’t know if this is unique to me, and in fact I’m pretty sure I stole the practice from someone (unless it came to me in a dream, which is not not a possibility!), but in recent months I’ve started copying my underlined quotes from a novel into a little notebook about a week after I’ve finished reading it.

This serves a couple of purposes:

First, the exercise nearly always reveals an emerging theme around my takeaways from the novel, whether the takeaways be stylistic or substantial. Sometimes I don’t realize what my attention is consistently drawn to while I’m reading, and it takes a bit of distance from the experience of having read a novel to understand why or how it spoke to me. Was it the use of language itself? Was it the dialogue, the unique sentence structure, the realistic portrayal of tired love, the depiction of a gradual unraveling? My underlining is occasionally a bit mindless, which is fine for me as I don’t feel the need to be extra deliberate while reading, but being more intentional in the aftermath helps me unpack my feelings and thoughts about a book, see if there are any overarching themes, any associations to be drawn between otherwise disconnected novels.

Second, it’s frankly nice to have a little collection of quotes to pull from when I’m writing about either the actual book or another subject altogether. I was working on an essay about AI a few weeks ago when I vaguely remembered a Clarice Lispector quote from Near to the Wild Heart that I was fairly confident I’d jotted down late last year, and indeed, when I cracked open my little quotes notebook, there it was. It made it into a footnote, which is where my most fun thoughts take up residence.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I’ve fully finished a book until I give myself the hour or two it takes to carry out this particular ritual.

PKG: Clara’s process mirrors my two-step approach to processing a book, especially one that I want to remember. Here are my posts on how I annotate and why I keep a commonplace journal. If you don’t believe ME that your notes can speak back to you, listen to Clara!

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I annotate directly on the book, unless I’ve borrowed it from someone. I use either a 0.38 ballpoint pen (usually from my beloved Muji) or a well-sharpened pencil. Perhaps shockingly, I’m not very fussy about this; I often switch between pencil/pen from day to day, even within the same book, depending on what I have nearby. I just enjoy a lived-in book. The more a book leaves a mark on me, the more I want to leave my own trace on the pages. Clara was here, if you will. I love a bit of marginalia, underlining, exclamation points when a passage speaks to me.

Always a bit embarrassing, though, when I lend a book to someone and I have to be like, “right, well, you can go ahead and ignore the annotations that make me seem unwell.” But to be loved is to be known and to be known is to be loved, I guess!!!

(One book I did not lend out was Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which I wrote about last year and which, as you may be able to tell from the below photo, consumed me for a few weeks. I love falling into a fiction-induced fugue state.)

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I wish I had a better answer for this, but tracking what I want to read exists in a combination of my head, my planner, my journal, slips of paper slid in between book pages, screenshots, text histories … there is no system. Alas. It mostly works for me.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

Usually, the ideas will come from the books I’m currently reading and recommendations. A couple of years ago, for instance, I was reading Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins, a lecture/essay collection of sorts about how to become a better reader and a better writer, and she went on and on (complimentary) about Dante’s Vita Nuova and Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery. She also spoke in extremely laudatory terms about Natalia Ginzburg, by whom I’d already read Family Lexicon, but that, per Ferrante, was not enough. So over the next few months, I read Vita Nuova, Lies and Sorcery, and a slim short story collection by Ginzburg. An Italian lit crash course, if you will.

I also love a Booker longlist moment, although when a novel grows too popular, I have a tendency to postpone my reading until the hype has died down. I just can’t seem to locate my own thoughts about a work of art if I need to drown out the noise that comes from the rest of the world consuming and opining on that same work of art. It’s a personal flaw, I’m sure.

Friends’ recommendations are also big for me, especially when they’re friends whose literary taste I trust. It was through Petya that I read (surprise surprise) Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, through that I read Annika Norlin’s The Colony, through my friend Melanie that I read Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, through that I finally read Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, and through my best friend Appy that I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. I’m leaning into recommendations more than I have in the past, and I’m finding it a delightfully successful system thus far.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

Planning is not huge for me, although every once in a while the completionist bug strikes and I’m like, oh, how shameful that I’ve only read three of Percival Everett’s 79 novels. (To be clear, I’ve read eight of his 24, and So Much Blue remains my favorite.) I have this rule that if I really like an author and they’re relatively prolific (meaning, I guess, they’ve written at least three books), I’ll make a serious attempt to read more of their work. Much like starting a fresh book in public, I find the alternative embarrassing. The idea of someone bringing up someone’s second-most famous novel and my being incapable of contributing any clever commentary because I’ve only read their most famous novel sends a chill down my spine.

I feel like people do this less and less, but perusing the shelves of a bookshop remains one of my favorite ways of seeing what’s out and about, what booksellers are pushing, what themes are emerging in different genres. Sometimes, if I have the time and I’m feeling adventurous, I do this really obnoxious thing wherein I go through shelves until I arrive at one where I haven’t read anything from the authors residing on that particular shelf (for the purposes of this exercise, I skip the James Pattersons of the world), and I pick one of their novels. It’s my chaotic way of finding new-to-me writers.

Relatedly, it needs to be said: I’m a total slut for a staff recommendation. Whatever the opposite of a grain of salt is what I take a bookseller’s suggestion with. I trust these people with my life. The more obscure, the better.

I’m also trying really hard to re-read my favorites more. I used to do this so often as a teenager, to the point where my paperbacks were held together by a wing and a prayer. There are so many new and new-to-me books I want to read, but frankly the art of re-reading is one I’m keen to pursue more seriously. With that goal in mind, I’ve been appreciating becoming even more familiar with books I already love, especially when they would benefit from a second, third, fourth look. Anything written by Clarice Lispector, for instance, whose words fascinate and escape me in equal measure.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

Oh, well, I don’t exercise, so that’s definitely one of them. It’s nice to tell myself that I would exercise if I didn’t love reading so much … a little fiction, from me to me.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

Veer from your usual genre! Don’t hold yourself to self-imposed standards! Join a book club! For me, when I’m in a reading slump, romance novels work wonders. They’re read quickly, they’re sometimes silly, and if they’re good, they’ll lift your spirits.

I’ve mentioned this already today, and probably too often, but it bears repeating: short story and essay collections are great if you’re trying to read more, or better yet, to get into the habit of reading. It helps if you make it part of your routine. I did this a couple of years ago when reading Joan Didion’s The White Album, which was somehow my first work by her; after my first morning coffee and journaling, I’d spend half an hour reading Didion’s essays while nursing my second cup of coffee (famously the superior cup, if we’re ranking them). I already love a slow morning, so adding this little step, waking up with the knowledge that I’d get some good, sometimes kooky pages in … it was a dream.

Experiment with your reading. Ask your friends about the last unputdownable book they read. Re-read an old favorite, even if it’s just a few chapters. Pretend it’s brushing your teeth or washing your hair or wiping down your kitchen counter: make it a habit!

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

I’m a millennial and an immigrant with a somewhat untraditional job, and I find that many folks in my social circle boast similar characteristics, so recently I’ve been recommending a lot of millennial-coded novels like the aforementioned Dept. of Speculation and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (which I wrote about last year).

I’ve also recommended Han Kang’s Greek Lessons with a missionary’s zeal, along with everything Claire Keegan has ever written. Clarice Lispector’s work for friends who don’t mind going on a bit of a journey. And, well, to close the loop on Millennial Fiction™, everyone knows I’m Sally Rooney’s pro bono publicist—I may or may not keep Intermezzo on my bedside table, ready at a moment’s notice to be cracked open and provoke an existential crisis.

Clara’s reading life is disciplined but playful, structured but slightly chaotic. There’s intention there, but also appetite. There’s seriousness about literature, but not solemnity. I suspect parts of it felt familiar to many of you.

🤓 So let’s talk:

• Which of Clara’s tips or reading habits felt most relatable to you—and is there one you’re curious to try in your own reading life?

• Do you have a subject or author you feel perpetually “behind” on, the way Clara mentioned Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, or Cusk?

• And are you actively trying to read more right now—or more slowly?

Pre-script: Through the end of February, I am offering 45% off annual subscriptions. Thank you for reading and always making me feel so seen and understood. ❤️

I delayed this post by a day so I could tell you — I am 45 today and I am thinking a lot about getting older. There is a lot to say about that, especially five days into starting HRT, which feels both boring and dramatic. But beyond all of that, what stands out to me is how much freer I feel. Getting older has made me realize that most of what we fear is far less catastrophic than we make it out to be. When you realize that yes, there may be a cat there — but at least the cat is not a tiger — suddenly there is peace.

I bring up aging in the context of this newsletter because writing here and talking books with you guys has become one of the areas in my life that allows me most vividly not only to explore what it means to be an aging, changing human, but to practice what I learn. And that’s different from why I started. I’ve written before about what pushed me into this space — burnout, early motherhood, post-partum depletion, the feeling that my interior life had somehow thinned out. But lately I’ve been thinking less about what made me begin and more about what keeps me here.

The reading, the writing, and the conversations have filled an important social gap I didn’t quite know was there. I am fully aware that I could still be reading on my own without running my mouth about it publicly. And yet I don’t.

I’ve been reading ’s The Social Photo: On photography and social media, which challenges the assumption that social media photography is simply a degraded or amateur form of traditional photographic art. His argument is not that the images we post are secretly masterpieces, but that we misunderstand them when we evaluate them primarily as aesthetic objects. Social photography / Networked Images / Vernacular photography operates according to a different logic. Its primary function is communicative rather than compositional. It exists less to endure as art and more to circulate as exchange — to mark presence, to situate the self within a network, to register “I was here” in relation to others. The social image is embedded in ongoing interaction; its meaning is inseparable from the social field in which it moves. Understood this way, vernacular photography is not a lesser category of art but a distinct cultural practice, shaped by relationality, temporality, and participation.

The more I think about this reframe — from object to practice, from artifact to exchange — the more I recognize something similar in the way many of us read and write about books online. Just as most people sharing photos they took with their iPhones don’t necessarily think of themselves as photographers (even though some absolutely do), many of us who share our thoughts about books do not necessarily think of ourselves as critics. That doesn’t mean we are unserious. It means we are engaging in a different practice.

For me, reading is first and foremost an aesthetic experience. I love being immersed in a text for its own sake. I love sentences that break skin. I love the pleasure of appreciating something on its own terms without asking it to be useful beyond the hours I spend inside it. But that is only part of the experience I’m actually living. A big part of the pleasure of reading for me — especially now, in this stage of my life — comes from the sharing. From writing about what I read. From watching how our conversation unfolds in the comments. From the DMs. From the Friday chats. From the small shocks of recognition when someone says, Yes. That. I felt that too.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think one of the reasons this community — and I don’t just mean HERE-here, but more broadly book-Substack — has become important to many of us is not simply because we share similar tastes (although in many cases we do). It’s because reading functions as a vehicle of self-articulation. The books we gravitate toward reveal our affinities and our longings; they help us assemble a self that often feels more precise than the roles we inhabit at work or at home. Reading becomes a declaration: this is the intellectual lineage I want to stand in; this is the kind of mind I want to call mine.

I’ve lived through enough iterations of internet culture to know how quickly online communities can turn brittle or performative or exhausting. And yet — I don’t know how else to say this, I know it’s corny — I have never felt more happy or proud to be part of an online community than I do right now.

Our people here are so fucking great. The tone here feels different. It is slower. Less interested in annihilation. We disagree sometimes, but we rarely try to destroy, and it feels to me like there is room for thinking out loud. I don’t take any of that lightly.

In The Social Photo, Jurgenson writes that snowstorms produce a blizzard of images — an extra inch of snow as evidence of time passing. Or, as Svetlana Boym explains, the experience generates anticipatory nostalgia for the present moment that flees with the speed of a click. Documenting a reading life works in a similar way. A well-groomed Goodreads account is the literary equivalent of a blizzard photograph — a small, repeatable gesture that marks time as it accumulates.

Because the thing people say about getting older and time flying is absolutely true. You think of something that feels like it happened centuries ago, but when you remember what you were reading at that time, the memory sharpens. You can almost always connect a book to the life that was happening around it: who you were arguing with, what you were afraid of, what you were longing for. In that sense, the living becomes one with the reading, and the reading becomes the memory of the life.

Maybe that sounds depressing to some of you, the idea that books can become our timelines… but to me it feels beautiful. It means I wasn’t just drifting. I was thinking. I was paying attention. That is what vernacular reading really is for me now: reading practiced as aesthetic encounter AND shared attention.

🤓 Some questions for you:

• Have your reading goals changed this year?

• What’s one thing you’re proud of in your reading life right now?

• Want to share a Concept Project you’re thinking about for the rest of 2025?

This post is generously sponsored by , which arrived in my life at exactly the right moment.

February has been a lot.

I opened entirely too many browser tabs — literally AND figuratively. At one point, screechy music started playing and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I feel like the mom in the DayQuil commercial. All I want to do is crawl into bed, but mommies don’t get sick days. We have got to keep things moving.

I had a good cry. Then I switched into consultant mode and asked myself, what can we do to untangle some this?

After running the most rigorous Hobonichi Planner pilot program throughout January, I declared Hobonichi Bankruptcy on January 31st. It requires more attention than I can currently give. And as my friend Nikki says, I don’t want to PLAN. I want to DO.

So I grabbed a slim Stalogy monthly for appointments, big deadlines, and family logistics. Then I turned my work notebook into my Everything Notebook using a very light Bullet Journal flow1.

I made a February brain dump list with everything I needed to do for everybody (that’s THE LIST I mentioned in my organization post) . I’ve been pulling from that list to create focused weekly work and personal to-do lists. This weekly spread is followed by work notes, reading notes, Substack planning notes, and whatever else needs to live there. I number pages as I go. Anything I might need to reference again gets indexed in the back.

I am worried about many things right now. Losing tasks is not one of them.

I’m working on a couple of writing projects and doing a lot of internet searching. Because work is INSANE right now, I do not have enough time to actually read what I find. I kept leaving browser tabs open. So many tabs, in fact, that my Zoom audio quality started to deteriorate. I called our IT guy for help. When he saw my screen, he said he needed to step out of my office to compose himself.

Around the same time, Substack introduced me to , the founder of Sublime.app. She generously gave me premium access and I immediately started organizing my research projects.

If you’re not familiar with it, Sublime is a digital knowledge library. You save your highlights from articles, essays and other online sources into themed collections. There is a browser extension, so you can highlight text directly on a webpage and send it to the right collection without opening another tab. The source link is saved automatically. You can also see related highlights and notes from other people using the platform.

I created a Collection for each of my writing projects and now when I come across something I want to save, I highlight it and send it directly to the appropriate collection. No extra tab, no copy-paste into Notes, no lost links. It feels like a digital commonplace notebook. It’s structured and searchable but also… CALM.

Because of the extension, I don’t even have to open another tab to use it. I feel so taken care of by this tool that I honestly want to cry.

(Yes. Second reference to crying in one post. We are fine.)

Sari has generously offered 20% off using if you use the code AREADINGLIFE if you’d like to try it. If you want to follow me there, I’m here.

And here’s the third cry.

I finished Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood, Youth, Dependency, aka The Copenhagen Trilogy. I’ll talk about it more at the end of the month, but if you’re in my Neapolitan Quartet fam and craving something similar but not derivative, this is it. I read it as part of my Working Class Writers project inspired by Claire-Louise Bennett, featuring Ditlevsen, Annie Ernaux, and Ann Quin.

When I finished the trilogy, I felt that familiar post–great-book malaise — the same floundering I experienced after finishing Ferrante last summer. But then I remembered why I plan my reading the way I do. I went straight to my Annie Ernaux pile and picked up A Woman’s Story — Ernaux writing about her mother after her death (beautiful and sad). I feel deeply grateful to Past Me for building this reading safety net. Even though I am still a mess, I am a reading mess.

I know that when I share systems and thoughts about reading and organizing one’s life in service to reading, that can create the impression that I have it all figured out. That my life is a blissful collection of moments spent with a book.

The truth is that some weeks are just hard. And even though I work very hard to create small structures that protect my focus and keep me from spiraling completely… sometimes I feel like a collection of coping mechanisms in a trenchcoat.

If you’re in a similar season, I hope something here helps you reclaim a little calm. And as always, please share what’s working for you.

We are all learning.

🥳 Birthday Month Special

February is my birthday month and I’m turning 45. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, I’m offering a choose-your-gift birthday option — pick whatever feels right:

• 45% off an annual subscription ($27.50/year)

• $4.50 for 4.5 months (Feb 20–July 20)

Thank you for your support!

Pre-Script: For reasons I do not fully understand, my mouth is especially potty today. I considered toning it down and then decided to leave it as it came out. You’ve been warned and thank you for accepting me as I am.

If you fall within the lineage of brainy young women who lost themselves in the hallways of humanities departments — and maybe even attempted some graduate work — you have most definitely encountered the work, the myth, and the legend of Anne Patricia Carson: classicist, translator, poet of extraordinary vim1 and erudition.

Such is the aura of said author — bolstered by her wit and unmistakable personal style — that the only thing rivaling the reverence her work holds in your little heart is the fear that you are not smart enough to get it. And so you spend years (and now, decades) lusting after and fearing her work in equal measure, to the point of embarrassment and complete and utter humiliation. Because who on Earth has not read Anne Fucking Carson?! Meanwhile, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we are not going down without having read Anne Fucking Carson. Friends, this past month, I did it.

The moment I opened Autobiography of Red, I knew I would fucking love it. It is so specific, so whimsical, so tender without ever tipping into saccharine or melodrama. Erudite without pushing you out. The opening section gives you just enough grounding in the mythology it builds upon that, as the story unfolds, you feel a little bit like you’re shitting your pants — but step by step, you realize you are, in fact, prepared for the adventure.

By the end, you’ve wiped away a few tears and feel somehow softer and smarter than you did at the beginning. Plus, you’re left with a follow-up reading list to carry you forward. A truly memorable, climactic reading experience. I would say it’s been a while since I felt this way… but actually, it reminded me of finishing Anna Karenina. Or The Last Samurai, for that matter (more on that in a bit).

Somehow, at almost 45, I still surprise myself when I read a hard book and feel like I got it. How odd. Yes, certain texts require more preparation than others. As Annahid Nersessian points out, some authors operate with a certain amount of erudition and insiderness that doesn’t exactly make you feel invited to the party.

And yet, I’m still learning that one of the best surprises of getting older is that literature begins to feel more accessible — not because you are smarter than you used to be, but because life has pushed you through enough tight spaces that you no longer read with your intellect alone. You read with your whole entire scratched-up being. You metabolize the words — yes, with your mind, but also with your body and your soul. Even the parts that remain intellectually challenging can now be held, processed, lived with.

For those of you who are worried about getting older — honey, you don’t even know how wonderful it is.

📚 Books mentioned:

• The Last Samurai — Helen DeWitt

• Long Live the Post Horn! — Vigdis Hjorth

• Helen of Nowhere — Makenna Goodman

• Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• My Education — Susan Choi

• Sweet Days of Discipline — Fleur Jaeggy

• We Were Forbidden — Jacqueline Harpman

🥳 Birthday Month Special

Before I get into book stuff — February is my birthday month and I’m turning 45. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, I’m offering a choose-your-gift birthday option — pick whatever feels right:

• 45% off an annual subscription ($27.50/year)

• $4.50 for 4.5 months (Feb 20–July 20)

A paid subscription supports this nerdy corner of the internet by funding my book-buying habit.

📚 The Last Samurai — Helen DeWitt

My reading year started with a bang. Following Sara Hildred’s now-famous advice for managing holiday reading anxiety by picking just one big book to carry you through, I started The Last Samurai on Christmas Day. It was the only book I brought with me on vacation to the Dominican Republic.

Travel included two three-hour flights each way, both of which I spent reading. I read most of the book on various beaches and finished it as we were literally taxiing to the gate back in Memphis, bawling my eyes out. I mention this not to bore you with travel logistics or to brag, but because for this book, the circumstances of reading really matter. The storytelling is herky-jerky at first, and if I hadn’t been reading it while on vacation—with a kind of enforced sensory deprivation to begin with—I’m not sure I would have had the patience to stick with it, let alone enjoy it.

Even though I loved many sections as I was reading, there was also a lot that challenged my interest and focus. This is very much a book that comes together in the end—but it makes you work for it.

By way of synopsis: a strange, curious American woman named Sybilla grows up in towns where “they were excited to be getting their first motel,” fakes a degree and letters of recommendation, and gets herself accepted into Oxford. She is deeply committed to getting away—and staying away. To make ends meet, she takes a job at a publishing house and, after a work party, has a one-night stand with a famous travel writer.

I feel ridiculous that of all the extraordinary writing in this book, this is what I’m about to share—but DeWitt’s description of Sybilla and her one night stand Liberace’s encounter is the funniest depiction of a one-night stand I have ever read:

No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley…

Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.

The Drunken Medley results in a child, whom Sybilla chooses to raise on her own. She never liked the father all that much, and given the circumstances of the child’s conception, she sees no point in bringing him into the picture.

The little boy, Ludo, may be a prodigy. By age three, Sybilla begins teaching him foreign languages, science, and mathematics to occupy his restless mind. She also starts showing him Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as a way of compensating for the absence of any positive male role models in his life.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to Sybilla’s devotion to raising a child of extraordinary intelligence, and much has been written online about the novel’s contribution to discussions of “genius culture,” pedagogy, and what it means to educate a child outside traditional institutional structures. But what struck me most about Sybilla’s parenting was how much it felt — at its core — like regular, ordinary parenting, regardless of IQ.

Because any parent will tell you: children stun you with how much they arrive already knowing, how clearly they see through your schemas and machinations, and how — even when you are raising them with another parent — they still ask questions you feel utterly unequipped to answer. Add to that the need to provide for them, and the book becomes a devastating portrait of how impossible it is to feel good about parenting when you also have to work. Needing to work, alongside needing to rest, alongside needing to burrow into a hole and be alone — it all puts you in a pressure cooker of guilt, love, devotion, and the vital necessity to forgive yourself when you snap at them for asking yet another question.

I want to be careful not to spoil the book for those of you who still plan to read it, but the ending made me think that the boy’s desperate quest to find his father is also a desperate attempt to keep his mother from unaliving herself. That his panicked dedication to study mirrors her own — her desperation to stay tethered to life in the only way she knows how: through ideas, learning, and knowledge. Through staying connected to humanity and creation when human relationships themselves feel unbearable. As someone who’s been in that deep dark space, Ludo’s love for Sybilla was my favorite part of the book. 😭😭😭

Note: the piece above is for everybody who’s already book.

For a wildly different take on this book, please check Martha’s review of it. We read it together and it felt helpful to both of us to be able to chat about it as we were reading… if for no other reason, to remind each other that we’re smart enough for it. 🫣

📚 Long Live the Post Horn! — Vigdis Hjorth

I was genuinely worried that after The Last Samurai I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything else. I needed something less demanding, but my brain was still completely lit up, and I couldn’t bear the idea of reading something vapid. Enter Vigdis Hjorth.

Last year I read and loved Will and Testament and Is Mother Dead, so I knew this one would work for me too. It’s my least favorite of the three — but only because I’m comparing her to herself, which feels like an unfairly high bar.

Long Live! follows Ellinor, a media consultant who finds herself adrift in life and disconnected from any real sense of purpose. When her business partner disappears — and then takes his own life — Ellinor is left to pick up his work, including managing a campaign for the Norwegian postal workers’ union opposing a directive that would privatize parts of the postal service.

At first, she approaches the assignment with distance and skepticism. But over the course of the book, the campaign’s mundane details, including a story about a postal worker’s attempt to deliver an undelivered letter, begin to work on her. What emerges is a renewed attentiveness to language, communication, and the often invisible connections that give value to everyday life.

The novel depicts both a political and a personal awakening, exploring loneliness, existential malaise, and small political struggles as the unlikely sites of meaning and self-discovery. It was originally published in Norway in 2020, so the context is obviously different — but I found it unexpectedly poignant and deeply soothing when read in our current American moment, as so many of us wonder whether our small acts of political resistance connect to anything larger, or amount to anything at all.

I say it every time when I write about Hjorth but I mean it — I am a fan.

📚 Helen of Nowhere — Makenna Goodman

I went into this book with very high expectations after remembering how much I loved Goodman’s first novel, The Shame. Helen of Nowhere centers on an unnamed former English professor — dismissed from his career, estranged from his wife, and searching for some kind of fresh start.

He travels to the countryside to consider buying a house once owned by a woman named Helen. As he tours the property with a charismatic (weird? charlatan?) realtor, he learns about Helen’s life and her vision for living closely with nature. The novel alternates between the increasingly bizarre interactions with the realtor and the professor’s reflections on his past.

The book examines his ego, personal and professional failures, and longing for reinvention, while circling larger questions about identity, rural retreat, male obsolescence, and the possibility — and cost — of happiness. I’ve seen the novel described as surreal or philosophical, and as someone who loves a weird book, I expected to be fully on board. Instead, I mostly found myself confused. I have yet to read a novel about gender dynamics in academia that I didn’t like — this one included — and Goodman is such a fun, different writer. But I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the trippy parts. I wondered if I was supposed to find them funny, but I just… didn’t.

In moments like this, I tend to rewatch that little clip of explaining that if you’re expecting something funny or profound and instead feel flat, baffled, and vaguely annoyed, you’re probably reading satire. But even with that framing in mind, the critique of white male fragility felt too heavy-handed to me, and the return to sanity at the end felt a little undeserved.

If you read this and loved it, please tell me how I’m wrong. I genuinely wanted to love this one.

📚 Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

Okay. So. This is a verse novel that reimagines the ancient Greek myth of Geryon. In Greek mythology, Geryon is best known as the formidable opponent Heracles defeats in his tenth labor, when he steals Geryon’s prized herd of red cattle from the mythical island of Erytheia. He is often depicted as having three bodies or three heads, a fearsome warrior related to Medusa, and the owner of a two-headed dog named Orthrus.

In Carson’s contemporary retelling, Geryon is a sensitive boy growing up in the modern world — beautiful, but harsh. Carson blends poetry, essay, and mythological scholarship to tell a coming-of-age story shaped by desire, abuse, photography, and loss. At the center is Geryon’s intense, formative relationship with Herakles, rendered as a first love that is both erotic and devastating.

If, like me, you’re drawn to stories of queer love and sexual awakening told in imaginative, formally daring ways, you will love this book. I felt my whole body tingle while reading it, and I think I even relived some of the humiliation of the aborted sexual encounters of my adolescence. Good riddance to all of that. And yet, there was something deeply fortifying here. The abuse and humiliation Geryon experiences never eclipse the way those experiences come to inform and energize his life and work as an artist.

Now that I have faced my fears and survived my first Anne Carson, I feel… unstoppable.

For anyone else on a similar reading journey, I asked the good people of the internet where to go next. told me there is a sequel, Red Doc, and that he also loves Kinds of Water as a next step. Others strongly recommended Glass, Irony and God, Wrong Norma, and Eros the Bittersweet. I was also encouraged to widen the aperture to Louise Glück (The Wild Iris), Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Charles Wright (Black Zodiac is a good place to start), Bernadette Mayer, Lauren Levin, Mary Ruefle, Jack Gilbert, Lorraine Niedecker, and Elise Partridge.

You know I love a good reading list. Please tell me your thoughts on this one. And also… can we agree that the internet, at its best, is incredibly generous and affirming?

📚 My Education — Susan Choi

This was my “romp” of the month. A novel about Regina Gottlieb, a graduate student in the early 1990s who becomes entangled in a complex sexual and intellectual relationship with her married professor and his wife.

The book is a psychologically dense exploration of agency, feminism, and the stories people tell themselves in order to justify formative experiences (i.e. bad life choices we make when we are in our 20s). When I shared in our Friday Book Chat that I was reading it a few weeks ago, someone said they were disgusted by the novel and couldn’t believe it had been nominated for several prestigious literary awards. I understand the reaction — to an extent — as we’ve learned so much as a culture about power dynamics and exploitation in the aftermath of #MeToo.

That said, as someone roughly of the generation depicted in the book, I felt Choi told a trivial story very truthfully. (I spent many years in and around a continental philosophy department, I should know.) And there’s still a part of me that believes screwing up — and, yes, screwing — is a vital part of self-discovery, one that allows us to arrive at a sense of dignity that feels earned rather than assigned.

Could some of the drama have been avoided? Of course. But as someone who is wildly attracted to intellect, I have a high tolerance for grey space. Thank you, , for recommending this one!

📚 Sweet Days of Discipline — Fleur Jaeggy

This was my first Jaeggy, discovered via the Checkout 19 intertexts, and I have since learned she has quite the following. Feeling lazy and unwilling to research where to begin, I did what felt most honest: I went on a shopping spree and ordered a stack of her books. Only afterward did I realize they are tiny and blurbed by Sheila Heti, Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, among others. WHAT?!

Originally published in 1989, Sweet Days of Discipline is set in a Swiss boarding school for girls and narrated by a former student reflecting on her intense friendship with a classmate named Frédérique. The prose is controlled and emotionally restrained, mirroring the strict institutional environment meant to prepare these girls for lives of extreme privilege. Beneath the surface of discipline and order runs an undercurrent of obsession, cruelty, and erotic fixation.

The book is slim on plot but overcompensates in emotional density. I love stories that place you in the charged space between characters who are incapable of negotiating their intimacy. Think less Cruel Intentions and more The Piano Teacher. My only gripe is that it felt a little too hurried but then again, I have a stack of Jaeggy waiting for me, so I’m not exactly suffering. First new favorite discovery of the year. I am pumped.

📚 We Were Forbidden — Jacqueline Harpman

Finally, I read We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman — a newly translated collection of novellas from Transit Books. I’m reviewing it for a print publication 😬 so I’ll keep my thoughts here brief for now but reading it only deepened my admiration for Harpman and my gratitude that more of her work is becoming available in English. The book will be out in July.

How was your January for you? What stopped you in your tracks? What was the most beautiful? Did you read anything scary?

❤️ Favorite books of 2026:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson