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

  ---

⚡️ 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

I’m so happy to return to this interview series with one of my favorite readers — . Based in Houston, Texas, Katie writes , a newsletter where books, writing, and the body cohabitate in all their complexity.

Katie is also the host of the book club Reading the Body — a space dedicated to reading through the lens of the body: disability, chronic illness, mental illness, disability justice, and all the ways embodiment resists containment. The club moves freely across genres — memoir, poetry, fiction — because the body itself is not a single story, and neither is reading.

Katie lives with OCD and OCPD, as well as hEDS and fibromyalgia. Chronic illness and mental illness have shaped her life from a young age, and her work is deeply informed by a commitment to disability justice — not as abstraction, but as lived reality.

There are many reasons to admire Katie, but what I love most about following her reading life is how clearly it reminds me that reading is never neutral. It is deeply personal — and precisely because of that, it is also political. Our histories, our bodies, our capacities and limits determine what language does for us and to us. What we are drawn to, what repels us, what cracks us open — these choices signal allegiance. In choosing what moves us, we are not only advocating for ourselves, but often for others like us — including those who don’t yet have the words, or the safety, to speak.

Every time I hear a call to “read more diversely,” I think… yes… and also… what if we spent a little more time in self-study and self-awareness? Facing ourselves honestly and generously is what allows us to meet others without fear or flattening. It’s what makes curiosity possible. And it’s what gives reading its power to change not just our minds, but our orientation toward the world.

I’m so excited for you to get to know Katie.

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

I’m an introvert, but I love to chat and tell long-winded stories, which means we have to back things up a bit.

I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, in the early 90s. My parents and older sister moved to Houston before I was born, leaving behind a tiny town in South Texas with maybe one stoplight. My mom made sure to get me out of the suburbs as much as possible, taking me into the city, visiting the museum and theater districts of Houston. I was always into something creative and started taking ballet when I was four. I continued until I was eighteen (chronic illness/pain made it impossible for me to continue dancing). I’m thankful my parents encouraged a curiosity and passion for the arts. Books fit into all of this, trust me!

Summers in elementary school were full of dance classes and daily visits to what I now realize was my first independent bookstore encounter, Copperfield Books, which I still visit when I’m on my parents’ side of town. I’d buy American Girl Doll books nearly every day (my favorites were from the Josefina series). My mom drove me down the street from our house for a new book and across the same street for dance before going home to read and repeat everything the next day.

PKG: As an immigrant parent of an American daughter, I have grown up in an entirely different canon and always love getting book ideas from my smart girl friends for my kid.

As I got into my teens and could borrow a car, I would drive myself to the local Barnes & Noble on Mondays after school for coffee and to do homework before heading to dance class. On Fridays, my mom would pick me up from dance, I’d add a few layers of clothing over my tights and leotard, and we would go eat pasta together before going to Barnes & Noble until they closed, me with a stack of books to explore and her with a stack of cookbooks.

Like most teens, I stopped reading for relaxation or pleasure, instead only what I was required to for school, mostly classics, mostly (all) by white men, except Frankenstein (which I loved). I was still dancing about twenty hours a week, was in the orchestra, and was taking as many art electives as possible. By my junior year, I knew art was my calling and set my sights on becoming an art teacher or professor. I somehow got into college (I wasn’t the best student, more like a B and C student with A’s in the arts and English). I was the first in my family to go to college, and both parents thankfully supported my desire to study fine arts. I graduated, eventually went to graduate school, worked a few terrible retail jobs during those years, and finally became a high school art teacher. I thought teaching art was it for me, that I had found my forever career, but I quickly burned out. It’s not easy to be in your 20s and teach with few resources, no budget or support, 40+ students in each class, and, on top of that, no sink in an art classroom! Something had to change.

In 2014, on one of my early dates with my now husband, he took me to an independent bookstore he often shopped at near his apartment. I fell back in love with books, and eventually, after teaching, I got a job at the same bookstore. This job was meant to be a summer job while I figured out a new school situation. However, I was promoted less than two months later and stayed for three more years.

Unfortunately, in 2021, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I decided to move on from the book world and return to a more stable career. After a year and a half back at a school, I put in my notice before the end of the school year, without a career plan (if you know me, you know this is very, very unlike me). Eventually, I got a remote job with a children’s literary subscription service and was laid off along with many others three months later. This was a difficult time — I had no direction and no idea what to do next. I gave myself two months to mope, cry, and feel sorry for myself. I then reached out to another newer independent bookstore in Houston, Basket Books & Art, where I was a regular, and I’ve been working there for over 2 and a half years! I’m never leaving the book world again!! I like to say, I don’t work in books, I work with books. Books are the one constant in my life, it’s the career I return to over and over again, and it’s the space I feel most myself in.

PKG: What a relief to find a career that feels like a soft spot to land.

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

I aim for a book a week, but the number matters less to me than consistently making time for reading. Reading is built into my day — I rarely have a day without it. I prefer to read for an hour or two in the mornings with my coffee and a small breakfast under a blanket on the couch. If I don’t have a late evening working at the bookstore, a must in our house is that my husband stops working at 5pm, we make coffee, grab a few Trader Joe’s coffee cookies, and sit to read until it’s time to make dinner. I would say I read about 2-4 hours a day, 14-30 hours a week, which seems wild! The higher end of that is much rarer.

Because I’ve worked in bookstores for a long time, people always say to me, Oh, you must get to read all the time working in a bookstore. Meaning I read while at work, and in the five-plus years I’ve worked in a bookstore, I have maybe read during my shift, not counting breaks, a total of eight or ten times. Indie bookstores have quiet moments, but you’re rarely still. (I’d watch a reality TV show about independent bookstores, their employees, and customers any day!)

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

Here’s a rough timeline of my reading tastes from my 20s through mid-30s.

In 2017, I finished my last semester of graduate school. I just got married, and had my final portfolio review and installed my thesis exhibition. I was looking for jobs and getting back into reading to unwind. Mostly picking up recommendations at my local bookstore, lots of works in translation that, at the time, went over my head. I tried reading The Master and Margarita (I was not ready for that!).

In 2018, I was teaching and trying to survive, picking up more popular buzzy contemporary fiction for quick reads and plots to keep my attention when late-night grading was complete. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler.

From 2018 to 2020, during my first year and a half working in a bookstore, I read five books total. It was wild how little I read, even though I was surrounded by books for 40 hours a week. Once 2020 hit, like many others, I got back into reading. During the first two months of lockdown, when I couldn’t go to work, I read Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (a favorite book of all time) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. My reading quickly snowballed from that point on, and I dabbled in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and discovered the DWM (Depressed Woman Moving).

In 2021, I began to understand my reading tastes more and to develop my specific interests and subjects that attracted me. I read a lot more nonfiction, discovering writers with chronic pain and illness like myself writing about the body, art, and disability. The memoir A Matter of Appearance by Emily Wells, and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black are two books about bodies and art that live on my favorites shelf.

Now I’m reading more fiction. Writers like Iris Murdoch, Kathryn Davis, and Marilynne Robinson. I’m buying classics by George Eliot and Jane Austen as if my life depended on it. In 2025, I embraced poetry and hope to explore more writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, and JJJJJerome Ellis. I keep telling my husband I want to read about the meat of life—what it means to be human. I want lush, delicious writing that stops me—I want jaw-dropping and spine-tingling writing. I’m not necessarily reading for pure blockbuster entertainment, and I don’t always know what I’m looking for, but when I find it, I know.

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

I know this is going to make some people reading this crazy, but I have to crack a book’s spine. I prefer paperbacks because of chronic hand and arm pain, and will absolutely crush that sucker and fold a cover back on itself without hesitation. I like a lived-in, floppy book.

PKG: I love manhandling a book myself. 🫣

I can read in complete silence most of the time, unless Houston traffic and other city sounds become too much, which they often are. I’ll put on some rain or thunderstorm sounds. I also enjoy listening to classical music. My Spanish is abysmal, so I can listen to artists like Bad Bunny or Natalia Lafourcade without getting distracted by the lyrics. I also listen to some metal music like Deafheaven, which is primarily a cacophony of sound that works for me.

PKG: Katie belongsto a lineage of distinguished metalheads, including and .

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

Yes! I keep my journal with me while reading. I can’t juggle multiple notebooks and have one for everything. However, I do keep one slim notebook at the back of my journal, separate for my book club notes. While I’m reading, I jot down thoughts, key moments, or questions for myself to reflect on as I continue, along with the names of other books mentioned or pieces of art.

For annotations, I match my pen to my book. I place large sections of important text in brackets, sometimes underlining a few key sentences or phrases. I am not opposed to underlining a chunk of sentences if the mood strikes. If I write a thought or a few sentences in the margins, I will mark it with a colorful sticky tab so it’s easier for me to find later. I think you recommended them, Petya. Thank you!

PKG: I feel super proud of this shout-out and must use this opportunity to share that my favorite sticky tabs are the skinny ones from Stalogy and that you can find identical, much cheaper dupes at Daiso.

I dog-ear every page I mark, too. This helps when I feel like flipping through a book and rereading sections. I also like to place symbols next to areas I underline or bracket. Here are my three symbols! An exclamation mark indicates something that stood out, or the author wrote something profound or gasp-worthy! A star indicates a distinguishing quote worth pulling from that embodies the book—I am more sparing with those. Last, a heart indicates I just loved something, it was touching or personal to me. For annotating, I prefer the Zebra Sarasa Clip 0.5 and the Stabilo felt-tip pens in various colors. For journaling, I use the Kaweco Sport Fountain Pen.

My annotation style works for me, but it might seem a little too much for some people. Find what works best for you!

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

I add books to Goodreads. It is easier to track my “to read” list there instead of StoryGraph. I also take screenshots of books I need to remember or look for immediately, and place stacks around my house as reminders, too.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

One of my constant fears is that I will not know what to read next and therefore will never read again — it’s ridiculous! Thankfully, I almost always feel in the mood for something — it’s one of the reasons I keep little piles of books everywhere. If I think of a book I’m curious about or remember I own, I’ll put it in a stack and return to those when I’m unsure. I can always count on book club books. If I’m really stuck, I see what people whose tastes I like have read recently or dig around on their Instagram for some inspiration.

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

I fall somewhere in the middle. The random piles I mentioned earlier are typically created over the course of a month. I’ve been adding books to a hopeful February TBR throughout January. The rough TBR will usually contain about 8-10 titles (I know I won’t get to all of them), leaving me plenty of room for mood reading. The stack will mainly contain the books I’ve been most eager about or deal with a subject I want more of. I’m involved in two book clubs, one for work and my own book club, so I am guaranteed to have two books I must read each month.

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?

When I choose to do anything that isn’t reading, I feel guilty, which is something I’m working on. Thinking about books, writing about them, and reading takes up a large chunk of my time, but it’s still never enough.

I don’t exercise — I occasionally walk our senior dog around the block, but he is so slow, and I don’t count that as exercise, just a moment for fresh air.

My family makes fun of me because they know to never ask me to hang out on Sundays and say, Oh, Katie doesn’t leave the house on Sundays. It’s true: I wake up, put away groceries, have coffee, watch SNL or booktube, shower, read, make an early, cozy meal, read, make coffee, read some more until I decide to do something else or watch a few TV shows.

I have stopped waiting to read only during “ideal times” and will squeeze a page or two in the parking lot before work or in a doctor’s waiting room, instead of scrolling on my phone or anxiously staring into space.

We don’t have children, which gives us a lot more free time for reading.

I don’t go out often and prefer to stay home in my pajamas, reading or working on a writing project. I enjoy my quiet life.

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

Read in pockets of time. Don’t wait for the perfect setup or the ideal scenario. You’ll find that those short spurts of reading will get longer and longer, naturally fitting into your schedule. Find what works best for you. The way to enjoy reading is to make it personally accessible.

When you get home from work, tidy up for five or ten minutes max, set a timer, don’t get sucked into deep cleaning, just tidy up, put laundry away, take out the trash, etc. After those few minutes, make a nice coffee or tea, put on some comfortable clothes, and dedicate thirty minutes to an hour of uninterrupted reading. Take small steps to build a routine and unwind, make your home comfortable, set yourself up for success, and dedicate time to reading.

PKG: I am obsessed with this reading ritual to mark the transition between work and home life.

Attend an author reading at your local indie bookstore, buy the book, and take some notes during the talk. While you’re there, see what book clubs they offer. Talk to the staff, I promise we want to meet you and chat with you about books!

If you like a book, find out who the publisher is and seek out more books from them. If I enjoy a book, I look up who blurbed it and check out their work.

Watch a booktuber. Honestly, this always gets me excited to pick up a book! Listening to other people chat about books is motivating!

PKG: Shameless plug — I also post videos on my YouTube channel. Nothing you haven’t heard me say before but sometimes it’s fun to switch formats.

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

I love this question! It’s a massive part of my job. Here are just a few!

Anything by Olivia Laing! They rewired my brain and how I think about personal narrative, biography, and art history. Laing writes sincerely and passionately about art and artists in a style I never read in art history classes or academic articles. The Lonely City and Funny Weather are two favorites. If you want something a bit more nature-focused, try The Garden Against Time.

Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin is another excellent exploration of feminist artists and unruly bodies!

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza was my favorite memoir/book from 2025!

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer hits a sweet spot for anyone not that into science fiction but loves intricate prose, an unreliable narrator, and a setting as its own character. It’s a perfect standalone novel I’ve read multiple times.

On The Calculation of Volume Series by Solvej Balle…perfection, love!!

Landscapes by Christine Lai and Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal are two novels I think about often!

For poetry, I recommend With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang and Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I loved reading Katie’s answers and I am absolutely obsessed with her list of recommendations in the last question. I am already fantasizing about visiting her at Basket Books & Art. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did and thank you, Katie, for taking the time to give us all the juicy details on your reading life.

🤓 And…. now some questions for you guys:

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

• How do your body, schedule, or current season of life shape the way you read (or don’t)?

• Have you ever had to grieve an old reading self in order to make room for a more sustainable one?

This post is for Stephanie.

The most straightforward answer to why I read as much as I do is because I like it. For someone who has an endless capacity to get excited about people, ideas, pieces of art, professions, personalities — and who has done her fair share of career, hobby, and place-of-residence switching — reading offers the most efficient way to live a thousand lives, to be a thousand souls. And especially since I started reading poetry, I’ve come to appreciate that there are truly a million ways to put life into words — and that some people are simply better at it than the rest of us.

But apart from all that — and probably even more importantly — there’s another reason I read as much as I do, one that some of you may find more relatable: I often prefer reading to the alternative.

For me, not reading doesn’t open up space for other adventures of the heart and mind. Not reading opens the door for old habits to kick in and for my brain to default to a familiar script — one organized around effort, discipline, and delay — that goes something like this:

The most important thing in life is to work hard — at work and at home. To work hard at work means accounting for every moment of your day and making sure everything you touch bears the marks of effort and diligence. If something feels easy, you must not be working hard enough. When you’re home, you should work hard on making that home as clean and orderly as possible so you can enjoy being in it. You can’t enjoy it unless you’ve done all the things. Do the things so that you can finally sit down and relax with, let’s say, a book. But you can’t enjoy the book unless everything is done — at work and at home.

I used to think this logic was primarily the result of my Eastern European upbringing — that after years of living under various degrees of state surveillance and oppression, people coped by building facades of impeccability. As I get older, I also recognize that there’s nothing especially Eastern European about this kind of dogged perfectionism. People under all sorts of circumstances respond to their particular lack of control by becoming especially controlling.

So, to bring things back to reading: I don’t read as much as I do because it fills my free time with something pleasant (which, of course, it does). I read because it redirects my attention away from a way of being that I am actively trying to avoid — a way of being defined by tightness, self-surveillance, and the constant sense that life must be endured before it can be enjoyed.

Reading allows me to enter a state of suspension — one where I can be with people, settings, and circumstances that are messy, confusing, liberating, oppressive, out of control. I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that when I make time to read, my capacity to deal with my own life — and my own bullshit — expands. My natural tendency to be tightly wound loosens its grip.

This might sound like another way of describing escapism, but to me it feels closer to practice. Not in a literal sense, but abstractly — the way the point of yoga isn’t to twist yourself into a pretzel. Reading, similarly, feels like a way to practice settling, focusing, expanding, and staying with whatever the moment has to offer. Even when the reading itself isn’t especially fun.

Accessing that space came more easily in my twenties and early thirties (pre-kid). But it was becoming a parent — stopping reading, focusing on getting ahead professionally, and keeping house — that made me realize how much I needed reading to stay grounded and to avoid feeling stuck. Ironically, it was going through what I now call my sad girl years that clarified this even further: reading isn’t optional for me. It’s central to my mental health and my sense of self-worth. I know some people feel that way about exercise. I wish I were one of those people

I’ve shared this analogy before, but picking up a book throughout the day feels a bit like a Roomba returning to its docking station. I float around doing the things I need to do — important things, necessary things — but whenever I can, I plug back in. That’s how I maintain my default state. The dustier the house, the more reading time I require to get myself ready to go again. And I mean that both literally and metaphorically.

• I try to read a little every morning, even if it’s just a couple of pages. I always want to be reading, but some days are completely nuts, and I hate spending the whole day in anticipation — will I or won’t I? If I get even a few pages in early, I feel steadier and more like myself.

• When I’m driving, especially my standard twenty-minute commute, I listen to audiobooks. Staying focused on audio was an acquired skill for me, but I’m so glad I practiced it because some days this is the only way I can return to that state. If a narrator feels too slow or too animated, try 1.2 or 1.5 speed. Someone who understands brains better than I do can explain why this helps — especially if you’re a little neuro-spicy.

• Always, always bring a book. I usually bring a physical one and read a few pages during my lunch break. I cannot overstate how much better a sad desk lunch feels once you add a book. Also: a visible book is an excellent conversation starter.

• Audiobooks have made household chores borderline enjoyable, with one caveat: I don’t recommend multitasking unless the task is genuinely brainless. Emptying the dishwasher, folding laundry, weeding the yard — great. Actual cooking, for me at least, not so much.

• In our family, we’re all readers — but it took a while to get there. Now we end each day with what we call Family Reading Club. When my kid was little, we read to her every night. These days, we pile into her room and read our own books for twenty to thirty minutes before bedtime. It’s the sweetest ritual.

We also love a good library run followed by enjoying our loot at a coffee shop, and cozy weekend reading piles with tea and blankets. I finished Anna Karenina in one of those piles, reading the last pages while my kid read across from me on the couch — one of my happiest hours of 2025.

• On weekends, when I don’t have to rush into the day, I make myself stay in bed reading with a cup of coffee. It’s my favorite time to read — not just because it’s relaxing, but because it’s my way of choosing expansion over obligation first thing on my day off. That choice still feels like a major victory.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be done negotiating the pull between discipline and aliveness — between doing what’s required and choosing what keeps me open. But I do know that when I treat reading as my default state — something that steadies me, expands me, and brings me back to myself — everything else in my life tends to soften around the edges. I become more patient, more curious, less constricted. And that, for me, feels like a good place to organize from.

🤓 Some questions for you:

• Do you organize your life around discipline — or around what brings you back to yourself?

• What does your default state look like when you feel most like you?

• Are there small, everyday ways you interrupt the idea that pleasure has to be earned?

I wasn’t going to write this post because of how banal the topic of goal setting has become and how much resistance many of us now feel toward the pressure to optimize every single moment of our days. That resistance is justified. But every time I find myself circling a reading-related question, I try to write it through here, because if I’ve learned anything from nearly two years of this Substack, it’s that our struggles are rarely as singular as we imagine them to be.

Note: the YouTube video above is a chatty version of this post. Read this post or watch the video, seeing both will feel repetitive.

For a long stretch of my adult life, I didn’t have an approach to goal setting in my reading life. I read by mood. I followed my interests. I got ideas from the New York Times and didn’t write anything down, trusting that if something mattered, I would find my way back to it. Reading felt elastic enough to stretch around the rest of my life without much resistance.

That began to change when I became a mom, started advancing professionally, and the demands on my time grew sharper. My happy-go-lucky approach wasn’t cutting it anymore.

Even though I never stopped thinking of myself as a reader, there were about five years—between 2017 and 2022—when I barely read at all. When I did, it was almost entirely work-related nonfiction, grabbed in short, utilitarian bursts. Those years were also my sad years. It took me a long time to connect those two facts, and once I did, I realized how badly I needed air.

A brief sidebar:

Especially for anyone who has ever felt the surge of creativity move through them: if you are a reader, if you are an artist, you have to take that part of yourself seriously. If you don’t tend to it, the absence doesn’t stay neutral. It turns into an ulcer. Wanting to read and not reading feels worse, in the long run, than being tired because you stayed up late with a book. Thinking about the novel you want to write without writing it will always feel worse than feeling discouraged about messy, imperfect pages. I know this because I’ve lived both versions.

Eventually, I got tired of thinking about wanting to get back into reading without actually reading. My way back was, somewhat unexpectedly, through social media. I started following book nerds on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and eventually found my way to Substack. Social media became my gateway back into reading, and I say that with real gratitude. Sharing reading online is a labor of love, and it changes lives. It changed mine.

As I paid closer attention to how people talked about their reading online, I encountered the idea of the TBR in a more serious way and found myself fascinated. What a clean way to organize attention. What a way to signal seriousness. What a way to be a serious reader, a serious person.

In her Reading Life interview last year, talked about how she keeps a note on her phone listing every book she owns, chooses a set each month, and commits fully. There is something undeniably appealing about that kind of decisiveness. You wake up knowing what you’re reading and why. At the far end of that impulse sits ’s Lifetime Reading Plan. Ted made a list of the books he believed one must read to feel “well read” and then—wait for it—read them. His confidence in his ability to stick to a plan is simply stunning to me. It rests on the belief that intellectual life can be ordered, even mastered.

I wanted to believe that.

When I tried to adopt similar approaches — several times, and with genuine effort — the experience was consistently unhappy. The list didn’t steady me; it tightened around me. Reading began to feel contractual. I carried a low-level awareness (anxiety?!) of what I was behind on, even while holding books I had chosen for myself. Something essential drained out of the experience.

At the same time, reading purely by impulse had begun to feel unsatisfying in a different way. Left entirely to mood, my reading scattered. I moved quickly, rarely staying with an idea long enough for it to deepen or change shape. I missed the feeling of sustained attention.

What eventually became clear was that I needed a form of structure that didn’t depend on enforcement. What finally worked for me was reading in projects.

A reading project is a container — sometimes thematic, sometimes centered on a single author — that gives my reading a center of gravity. The project holds my attention over time while allowing for drift, pause, and revision.

I’m starting 2026 with five projects: three carried over from last year and two new ones. I’ve grown attached to the idea of carrying projects forward and maintaining continuity year-to-year. Meaningful reading unfolds over longer arcs, and I’m no longer interested in compressing it into a calendar year.

The Three Projects I’m Carrying Over

📚 19th Century Wives Under Pressure

So far, this project has included:

• Madame Bovary — Gustav Flaubert

• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy

This year, I’ll continue with:

• Middlemarch — George Eliot

• The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James

I originally thought of this project as a playful way to catch up on classic titles. Halfway through, it has revealed itself as something more foundational—reading that has sharpened my interest in feminist literature by lingering on women navigating rigid social structures, structures that reward compliance even as they hollow out interior freedom.

📚 Monographic Reading (or, following my favorite authors down the Rabbit Hole)
Last year, this meant staying with writers who had already deeply gotten under my skin:

• Ayşegül Savaş

• Claire-Louise Bennett

• Constance Debré

I came close, and made serious dents in the oeuvres of:

• Elena Ferrante

• Deborah Levy

• Jenny Erpenbeck

• Vigdis Hjorth

This year, I’ll continue. Debré has a new book coming out in March (from Semiotext(e)), and I plan to keep following the trails these writers leave behind — their references, affinities, their neurosis and intellectual preoccupations. Reading this way has felt better than any yearly list ever did.

📚 Poetry

Last year I aimed to read one poetry collection a month and ended up reading six. That number no longer feels diagnostic. Poetry changed how I read, full stop.

This year I’m keeping the same loose rule and starting with Anne Carson, who has intimidated me for years. I’m drawn to her work and feel unworthy of it in equal measure. I still worry I’m not smart enough to get it. I’m reading anyway. These days, when fear shows up, I pause and ask what it’s trying to clarify. Increasingly, it feels less like a stop sign and more like a signal to steady myself. It’s hard AND you can do it, I tell myself.

Two New Projects for 2026

📚 Working-Class Writers
This project grew out of the now infamous Checkout 19 list and a radio documentary by Claire-Louise Bennett.

It includes:

• Tove Ditlevsen

• Ann Quin

• Annie Ernaux

On ’s suggestion, I’m also adding:

• Tillie Olsen

• Grace Paley

What interests me here is how work, class, and constraint shape voice, ambition, and literary form.

📚 Those Who Stay and Those Who Go
This project supports my novel-in-progress, set in 1970s communist Bulgaria, and centers on political dissidents, artists, and intellectuals working behind the Iron Curtain. It also keeps returning me to a question I can’t let go of: how professional ambition lives alongside personal values.

Some early anchors (thank you, ):

• Siblings — Brigitte Reimann

• Fog at Noon — Tomás González

• Lesser Ruins — Mark Haber

Figures I’m reading around:

• Julia Kristeva

• Marina Abramović

• Christo Javacheff

• Georgi Markov

This is demanding reading, emotionally and intellectually. I’m excited to begin and also bracing myself for its impact—as someone who has chosen to build an intellectual life away from her place of origin, and who lives daily with both the benefits and the costs of that choice.

If this year’s list feels smaller than last year’s, that’s intentional. My professional life has reached an inflection point. I have less time, less slack. I won’t read as much in 2026 as I did in 2025. I feel a flicker of sadness about that, and also relief. Choosing fewer things more carefully feels like an adjustment to reality rather than a diminishment of ambition.

When our book club met last weekend, I was struck by how many people had arrived at similar conclusions through different routes. No one wanted numeric goals. Instead, people were shaping reading lives that could be sustained.

Here’s a sampling of some of the very practical, humane approaches to reading we talked about:

• Genre “lanes” (one fiction, one nonfiction, one poetry, one classic at a time)

• Slow-read communities with built-in pacing and guidance

• Tandem reading (print + audio) for demanding books

• Shelf-reading years and temporary book-buying bans

• Location-based rules (bed-only books, morning books)

• Theme-based curiosities carried across many texts

• Language repair through reading in original languages

• Medium-based goals, including returning to sustained paper reading

• Author deep dives rather than constant novelty

• Seasonal rhythms, with lighter reading protected in summer

• Poetry as daily practice

• Social goals focused on conversation

What stayed with me wasn’t any single method, but the shared orientation toward attention, pleasure, depth, and endurance.

And I have some questions for you:

• When did reading start to feel harder for you — and what changed around that time?

• What kind of structure actually supports your reading (if any), and what tends to shut it down?

• What would “enough” reading look like for you this year?

Hi! I am so glad that my planning post resonated with so many of you! I have loved hearing about your own systems and philosophies and the notebook porn has been unreal! More please!

On that note: our next No Book Assigned Bookclub will be happening on Zoom this coming Saturday, 1PM Central. We typically cover MANY topics but the focus this time will be on reading goals. If you are working on adding more intention to your reading in 2026, I think you’d really enjoy being in conversation with other dedicated readers and learning from one another. The No Book Assigned Bookclub is one of the perks I offer for paid subscribers and to make it easier to join, I am offering 26% off annual subscriptions between now and Saturday. If you are interested in joining but for whatever reason are unable to upgrade, please let me know! I know people. 🤭

The details to our Zoom will be emailed to all paid subscribers on Thursday.

December is typically not a great time for me reading-wise. I panic that the end is near and try to catch up while work and personal obligations pile up. Instead of feeling grateful and reflective, I feel frazzled and disappointed. It’s the worst of me. BUT THIS DECEMBER WAS DIFFERENT. A couple of things happened that made it so:

✨ 1| When I started planning my December, I told myself to accept that work would be busy (people were NOT circling back nearly enough!!!) and also that I should make myself emotionally available for my kid, who’s 8 and in peak holiday spirit. December was simply not going to be the time to get a lot of me-time. I was right. And I wasn’t bitter or resentful about it because I had anticipated it. And then — the weekend before Christmas — Rumi figured out that Santa wasn’t real. I felt incredibly grateful that I’d already set aside that weekend for holiday prep with her and was available to pivot and indulge in the magic of Christmas which she now knows comes not because of the existence of a magic men but because of the profound love humans feel for each other.

✨ 2| I had finished November on an extremely high note when I finally completed Anna Karenina. Reading Anna Karenina has been such a lifelong dream for me and loving that book felt so incredible. I was happy and proud and that buzz just stayed with me for so long. In a way, it didn’t matter what would come next. I.HAD.READ.ANNA.KARENINA. And, finally:

✨ 3| During my Live with Sara Hildreth, I got the brilliant advice that one way to avoid holiday reading stress would be to focus on reading a really good BIG BOOK. I read what I read but, ultimately, I was just looking forward to hopping on a plane the day after Christmas and sinking into Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai — the book had been on my radar for a while but ESPECIALLY after reading about it in Sarah Chihaya’s memoir, Bibliophobia. Doorstop December became a thing and I’m here to report from the other side — it’s the best thing that could have happened to me!

Quite predictably, then, when I figured out how to calm the fuck down — I was in turn able to have a lovely month of reading in bursts big and small. Not only did I enjoy everything I touched, but I also managed to read a book with friends AND devoured a novel by an author I am now trying to add to my completionist list. All in all, an excellent way to close out an already stellar year.

I love that I am finally in a stage of life where I have not only learned some lessons but I also have the wherewithal to live by them.

📚 Books mentioned:

• Things I don’t want to know: On writing — Deborah Levy

• Little Lazarus — Michael Bible

• Butcher’s Crossing — John Williams

• Is Mother Dead — Vigdis Hjorth

📚 Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing — Deborah Levy

Things I Don’t Want to Know is Deborah Levy’s first volume in her Living Autobiography trilogy and a response to George Orwell’s essay Why I Write. Levy reframes Orwell’s four motives — political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm — through the lived experience of a woman writer navigating personal history, gender, and the act of writing itself. Levy moves across continents and decades — from South Africa to England, through Europe, and across different moments in her life — showing how her relationship to writing was shaped by geography, politics, and family.

We meet Levy as a child in apartheid-era South Africa, where her family’s emigration echoes political upheavals and personal dislocation, and again as a teenager in England, “playing at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners,” trying out the idea of self. Across these scenes, writing is not an abstract craft but a behavior, something you do in the margins of life — in awkward cafés, waiting rooms, and rented rooms far from home.

To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

The book is a song to a life lived in different worlds, pivoting between political history and the intimate struggles of voice and identity. It’s a slim book, but it carries the weight of decades.

📚 Little Lazarus — Michael Bible

Little Lazarus unfolds along two paths: one intimate and human, the other strange, slow, and almost mythic. At its center are Francois and Eleanor, two lonely teenagers growing up in a small Southern town called Harmony. Both are shaped by emotional absence and familial neglect, and when they find each other, their bond feels immediate and urgent. Being together offers the possibility of escape from lives that already feel foreclosed.

Their story builds toward a pivotal night on a country road, an event that fractures their lives. But the novel is less concerned with what happens next and more focused on how people live with what has happened. Guilt, grief, longing, and memory settle in, altering the shape of adulthood.

Running alongside this narrative is the story of Lazarus and Little Lazarus, two clairvoyant tortoises (yes, you read that right) who pass through centuries and across continents. Nearly immortal, they move from caretaker to caretaker, strangers who briefly intersect with their long lives before disappearing. Through them, the book widens its lens, placing individual suffering inside a much larger temporal frame.

At first, this structure feels whimsical, playful… even absurd. But over time, it becomes devastating. The tortoises act as witnesses, reminding us how brief and frantic human life appears when measured against deep time. It’s a novel that asks for patience and openness — and rewards both with something tender, unsettling, and hard to forget.

📚 Butcher’s Crossing — John Williams

I read this book with Mike of and Martha of . We all loved it.

Set in the 1870s, Butcher’s Crossing follows Will Andrews, a young, Harvard-educated man who abandons his comfortable life in search of authenticity and meaning in the American West. He arrives in the small Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing and joins a buffalo-hunting expedition led by Miller, an obsessive, taciturn man determined to locate a rumored untouched herd deep in the Colorado Rockies.

The journey that follows is grueling and unforgiving. Williams devotes long, rumbling passages to the mechanics of the hunt — the mass slaughter of buffalo, the physical toll of isolation, hunger, and winter, and the gradual erosion of morale. Andrews begins the expedition believing in transcendence through hardship and communion with nature. What he encounters instead is excess, futility, and moral vacancy.

What makes the novel so unsettling is its methodical dismantling of the frontier myth. This is not a story of rugged individualism or noble endurance. It’s a story about obsession — about what happens when an idea (purity, truth, mastery, wealth) becomes more important than consequence. Miller’s single-minded pursuit of the hunt feels less heroic than pathological. Andrews’s idealism is slowly stripped away. He is not enlightened but emptied out, forced to reckon with the damage done in the name of meaning.

Williams’s prose is sober and precise, and the emotional impact accumulates slowly but steadily. Butcher’s Crossing feels eerily contemporary in its critique of extraction, ambition, and the fantasy that suffering itself confers value. As I have mentioned MANY times before, Stoner by John Williams is one of my life-ruiners and because of that, I had resisted reading this book for fear of destroying my perfect opinion of its author. I should not have worried.

📚 Is Mother Dead — Vigdis Hjorth

Is Mother Dead centers on Johanna, an artist who abandons law studies and family for an artistic life in America, leading to a deep rift with her conservative family, particularly her mother. The catalyst of the story is a major retrospective of Johanna’s work — work that draws heavily on her childhood and family life. When her mother refuses to attend the exhibition or acknowledge her success, Johanna is pulled back into a confrontation she has long tried to avoid.

The book unfolds largely through Johanna’s interior monologue and memories. She revisits her childhood, her parents’ emotional coldness, and the long-term impact of maternal rejection. The narrative is insistent and repetitive, circling the same emotional wounds again and again. There is no dramatic revelation and the long-anticipated confrontation between the daughter and her mother does not resolve the tension that frames their relationship.

The book is equal parts difficult and compelling. Johanna’s pain feels real and justified, yet the novel resists turning her into a straightforward victim. Instead, it stays with the discomfort of unresolved grievance: the way old injuries harden over time, the way telling one’s story can feel both necessary and isolating. The book suggests that some relationships do not heal; they calcify. Is Mother Dead felt reminiscent of Will and Testament in its reflection on the the cost of truth-telling — especially for women — and the uneasy freedom that can come from finally refusing to soften one’s account for the sake of peace. This is only my second book by Hjorth but I am now officially a stan.

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

❤️ Favorite books of 2025:

• January - Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

• February - Open Throat by Henry Hoke

• March - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

• April - Assembly by Natasha Brown

• May - The Wilderness by Ayşegül Savaş

• June - Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

• July - Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş

• August - The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

• September - Big kiss, bye-bye by Claire-Louise Bennett

• October - The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

• November - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• December - Is mother dead by Vigdis Hjorth

As I mentioned in my planning post last week, I am in a constant battle with myself. I absolutely cannot stick to a plan. Anything that feels prescriptive triggers something rebellious (childish??) in me and, somehow, makes me feel paralyzed. I stop moving altogether.

At the same time, I care deeply about my reading life. I want it to feel active and intentional, not aspirational, guilt-driven or haphazard. So instead of trying to decide what I would read in 2025, I focused on how I wanted reading to function in my life — the conditions that make it possible for me to read steadily, joyfully, and without resentment.

What surprised me is how well that worked. Reading didn’t feel like something I had to protect or squeeze in. I resolved to read and everything else rearranged itself around that decision. It was glorious.

Below are a few notes from the year — how I read, what I read, and what I want to carry forward.

Below are the “goals” I set for myself at the beginning of the year. They’re less goals in the traditional sense and more orientations — ways of pointing myself in directions that felt exciting rather than constraining.

Looking at this list now, with a bit of editorial distance, I can see something very clearly: I was mostly trying to give myself permission to have a personal taste and to enjoy it. In how many different ways have I said some version of find what you like and read more of it?

Still — it worked.

🟢→ SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS MADE
🟡→ SOME PROGRESS MADE
🔴→ NO PROGRESS MADE

Regardless of how awkwardly I may have articulated these at the time, the approach worked. I didn’t have a single bad reading month. 🤯🤩🥳 Looking back, the volume I read feels less like an achievement and more like a side effect of being in a state of reading flow — a phrase I almost hesitate to name, for fear of jinxing it.

🦦 What actually helped me stay in flow:

• Monographic reading — returning to the same writers repeatedly and reading authors in conversation with each other. This genuinely made me feel like I “leveled up” as a reader. In 2025, I became a completionist in Ayşegül Savaş, Claire-Louise Bennett and Constance Debré, while reading multiple books by Deborah Levy (thank you ), Elena Ferrante (thank you ), and Jenny Erpenbeck (with help from my favorite Erpenbeck sherpa, ).

  

• Reading projects instead of reading plans — I defined smaller, self-contained arcs by author or theme and that gave me structure without rigidity. For my 19th Century Wives Under Pressure project, I read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, for example. I will continue working on this project in 2026 and have a few others to share soon.

• Being selective about new releases. I read far fewer buzzy books and felt zero regret about it. I always keep a close eye on what’s coming out but my sense of reading peace definitely increase once I stopped letting the PR machine dictate my reading choices

✈️ Where and how reading fit into my life:

• I read essentially every day in little spurts. I read a few pages in the morning before I shower and get ready for work. I started commuting to my office 4 days a week and that gave me more time back and forth to listen to audio books. I always brought a physical copy of my current book in my bag and most days I read a few pages at lunch. I listened to audiobooks while doing dishes at night and did Family Book Club with my husband and 8 year old basically 365 nights of the year. I read before bed most nights, too. I read in longer sits on weekends.

  

• I got BIG chunks of reading while flying to and from Puerto Rico in January, and then again to and from Europe during our summer vacation (even though I can’t read much at the beach). One of my favorite reading experiences was reading Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş while on a train to Berlin and that felt so fitting. I went crazy and finished Anna Karenina over Thanksgiving weekend… a day of leftovers and reading in a pile on the sofa with my kid and my husband. It was one of the best days of my year.

• Biggest frustration: I didn’t make the library my primary source of books, even though I wanted to. I know that reading from the library has so many benefits — including curbing your consumerist impulses — so I really hope to do better on this front in 2026.

  

I’m writing this on December 22, with some reading still ahead of me, but here’s where things stand. This year, I read 81 books. I have never read this many books in a single year in my whole entire life (I am 44). BUT — more importantly — reading has never felt easier. I was never not reading, there were no slumps.

⭐️ Favorites and standouts:

• Favorite novels (in the order I read them):

  • Pond — Claire-Louise Bennett

  • The Wall — Marlen Haushofer

  • Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy

It feels unhinged that all three lived in the same calendar year. These are now forever-books for me.

• Favorite nonfiction:
  On Giving Up — Adam Phillips
  This book helped me process long-shelved grad school grief in ways I didn’t realize I still needed. It also brought many of you to this newsletter.

• Favorite poetry collection:
  Ecstasy —
  Sexy, tender, queer, big city life, so many gin and tonics. I adore his work.

• Favorite new release:
  Big Kiss, Bye-Bye — Claire-Louise Bennett
  I know. I will shut up about her soon. Probably.

• Favorite series:
  Constance Debré’s Trilogie, completed this year with Name. Playboy is still my favorite, but the three books together make perfect sense as a unit. Her next book is one of my most anticipated reads of 2026.

• Favorite longform essay: When does a divorce begin? by Anahid Nersessian for The Yale Review.

• Favorite publisher(s): Semiotext(e), 7 Stories Press, Transit Books. My year would have felt very different without them.

⭐️ Books and authors that stayed with me:

• Favorite new-to-me authors:
  Claire-Louise Bennett, Ayşegül Savaş, Jenny Erpenbeck.

• Favorite book characters:
  The unnamed narrators of Claire-Louise Bennet; Lenù (The Neapolitan Quartet) and Levin (Anna Karenina). Apparently I love self-questioning nerds.

• Books that will forever stay with me:
  Open Throat by Henry Hoke; Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (you never forget your first one); all of Bennett; all of Savaş; The Wall by Marlen Haushofer; Visitation and Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck; A Girl’s Story; and, towering over everything, Anna Karenina. The drama! The yearning! The bad decisions! The torment!!!

  

• Book that made me feel part of a community:
  Reading — and raging over — The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante years after everyone else. The grief people still feel after finishing those books made me feel deeply understood.

• Strangest thing I read:
  Open Throat by Henry Hoke, Ghost Fish by , The Cows by Lydia Davis, Little Lazarus by Michael Bible (YSR). They all share one thing in common. I’ll let you spot it. 🐾

• Book everybody loved but I didn’t:
  On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. I got it. I didn’t feel it. The existence of four more volumes fills me with dread. Still — books that don’t work for us matter just as much because they clarify our taste.

  

As I am writing this and thinking about reading goals to set for 2026, I am realizing how often in the past I have tried to make goals around CHANGE. But given the fantastic year that I had, I feel that this time around, I am focused on keeping a few things intact.

• A reading-centered life.

• Organized, intentional reading.

• Fewer goals, more continuity of self — it feels like such relief to be here.

On a more meta-note: I started writing about books because I needed focus and accountability. I wanted a reason to prioritize reading and people to talk to about what I was finding. What I didn’t expect was how sustaining this community would become.

I try to respond to every comment you guys leave on my posts because the conversations matter to me. My reading life is genuinely richer because of what you guys bring into it — your experiences, your disagreements, your recommendations, your questions, your enthusiasm.

I can’t quit my job and read all day (tragic), but I do take my work on this newsletter very seriously. I owe you as much, given how much you give ME. Thank you for being here and for caring about books in the particular, thoughtful ways that you do.

Some questions for you:

• What kind of reader did you feel yourself becoming this year?

• Was there a book you didn’t just enjoy, but carried?

• Do you tend to plan your reading, or does it organize itself around your life?

One of the most common questions I get from readers of this newsletter is some version of: how do you find the time to read as much as you do?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: I resolve to make time. It happens because I work very hard to be focused and organized everywhere else in my life, so that when I am done doing what I need to do, I have a chance at reading. What I aim for is for my default state to be reading, thinking, and writing — not scrambling or catching up.

What follows is the my personal planning system that makes that somewhat possible. It’s the result of years of trial and error, shaped by the constraints of a full life and a brain that needs both structure and space. My hope is that you might find a few small ideas here that help you protect the parts of your life that matter most to you.

Note: My friend Nikki who is my endless inspiration for all things notebooks and planning previewed this post and asked for more notebook pages for illustrations, which I thought was excellent feedback. I am adding images but it’s late at night as I am doing this so the quality is far from great. I don’t think it will really matter but please tell me if you want me to re-take them. However, you should know that a lot of THIS takes place at night… so in a way, these dark images are a better representation of my reality.

Before I get into the system itself, here’s a quick sketch of the life it’s designed to support.

I’m a VP of Strategy at a medium-sized tech firm. I run a team spanning UX research, design, and marketing, and I also carry my own project load. I sit on three nonprofit boards. I’m a mom to an eight-year-old only child — which is both easier and more intense in its own particular way — and I publish this newsletter weekly while also working on a novel.

I’ve considered publishing less frequently to “open up space.” Strangely, it’s the weekly writing rhythm that gives shape to my time right now, so I’m sticking with it. Also worth noting: I’m a very typical Pisces. I need a lot of solitude, a lot of interior wandering, and a generous margin for daydreaming and vibing with the universe.

All of which is to say: yes, finding time to read is genuinely hard. I don’t question anyone’s busy season. I’m living one.

I didn’t just wake up busy. I’ve been busy for a long time. The system I’m sharing here is the result of years of experimentation and anchored in human-centered design—the problem-solving framework I use professionally in my user experience work to build technology that function in the real world, under real constraints

.At its core, human-centered design starts with observation rather than aspiration. As I run this method on myself, I am designing for the person I actually am (not the aspirational person I wish I were). I map my days, weeks, and months to understand what my life truly requires of me—and only then built simple systems to support that reality.

In practice, this process cycles through the following steps:

1. Observe (and tell the truth)
I pay attention to how my days actually unfold. What happens daily/weekly/monthly. Which items on my to do list are non-negotiable. What consistently gets postponed. In the example I have shown above, I made a map of all the aspects of life that I keep track of and then use that braindump to identify any changes I needed to do in 2026.

2. Define the real problem
I try to name the actual tension that causes stress in my life: too many roles, limited cognitive bandwidth, competing forms of care, uneven energy across the week.

3. Design something small and flexible
I create lightweight planning structures. I really fight being rigid and push against perfectionism. My goals is to find ways to help myself do what I need to do, so that I can do what I want to do.

4. Test it in real life
Whenever I make changes to any part of my system, I make myself live with them for a while in order to see what happens. Where does it help? Where does it get ignored?

5. Revise without drama
If something doesn’t work, I change it. No system is permanent because no season of life is.

Along the way, I’ve borrowed heavily from Cal Newport’s ideas about deep work and slow productivity.

While I don’t agree with every aspect of his framework—most of us don’t have the autonomy of late-career academics—I deeply identify with his orientation toward depth: in thinking, reading, writing, and living. What I’ve tried to do is translate those ideals into a system that works inside a full, adult life rather than pretending constraints don’t exist.

These are the areas I’m actively trying to wrangle:

• Personal: family life, home and errands, travel, health and wellness

• Work: own workload, team stuff, company stuff, board service

• Projects: reading life, Substack, long-form writing

Everything has to coexist inside the same 24 hours.

Family comes first. Everything else is subordinate to that and as I make daily choices about where my energy should go, I remind myself that:

• I don’t want a good job. I want an interesting life.

• I should aim to work smarter, not harder.

• Being disciplined enough helps me feel at ease with myself.

• I want to make an impact and be proud of my work.

• I want to make time for deep work and long thinking.

These principles remind me why I do what I do, since everything here competes with time I could otherwise be spending with my husband and daughter OR standing between me and my next favorite book.

🤓 Annually

My brain rejects traditional goals and rigid plans. Instead, once a year I write down big, sometimes ridiculous wishes and then set them aside. I review them periodically but mostly let the universe do its thing.

I know this sounds kooky, but it works for me. A couple of years ago, my friend and I were practicing manifesting by sending voice memos to each other. One day I sent her a memo saying, half-laughing, “You’re not going to believe this, but I hit 10K subscribers on my Substack.” At the time I probably had around 200 subscribers and wasn’t even writing about books. The idea sounded completely absurd — and yet, here we are.

I also define a very small number of big projects for the year — rough sketches, not detailed plans. For example, this year I need to revise my novel and begin looking for an agent. On the reading front, last year I started experimenting with defining rough reading goals which worked really well for me. I am still working on my reading goals for next year but don’t worry, I will share them in early January.

🤓 Quarterly (Seasonally)

Being married to a teacher and having a school-aged child means a lot of our life runs on the academic calendar. At the beginning of each semester — and again at the start of summer — I:

• Review major personal and professional events (travel, big projects)

• Adjust — i.e. lower — goals and expectations accordingly

School breaks are not for hitting big professional goals. Some seasons of life are simply about treading water and not drowning. I plan for that.

🤓 Monthly

This is where things get real. At the end of each month, I:

• Review the month ahead: travel, birthdays, major deliverables, milestones

• Figure out how many weeks are in the month so I know how many Substack posts need to exist

• Plan when my monthly reading round-ups and reader interviews will go live

I also maintain a continuous task list:

• Instead of writing and re-writing my to do list, I keep a single list to rule them all

• Add new items to THE LIST as they come up

• Identify time-sensitive tasks

🤓 Weekly

Friday or Sunday afternoon:

• Plan the upcoming week: major meetings, deliverables, family events or outings, Substack posts, personal errands (see THE LIST above)

• Slot these into the appropriate days. I love seeing all my TO DOs for the week on a single page. This allows me to focus my attention on how to be most impactful and also how to break down bigger projects into multiple working sessions during the week.

• Check in on team goals and task progress in Notion (only use Notion for work)

• Prep 1:1 agendas and priorities

• Highlight my personal due items and add focus blocks to my work calendar so that I can get my things done.

🤓 Daily

I start every day on paper in my notebook.

• Review the top three tasks and deliverables for the day

• Keep a running log of what I am working as I am doing it - some people call this interstitial journaling, ADHD planning or captain logging; it helps me tremendously with staying focused and I then use the notes to report my billable time (agency life)

Most of my planning for the day actually happens the night before. I love hitting my desk already knowing what the plan is. So, at the end of the workday, I take a little time to:

• Review tomorrow’s calendar

• Make sure my focus time did not get disrupted.

• Check Notion for project and task updates

• Quick reflection or journaling - I don’t do this daily.

🤓 Habit Tracking

I try not to track more than a couple of habits at a time, because otherwise it becomes overwhelming. Right now I’m tracking:

• Supplements intake

• Steps (aiming for over 6K per day — American workdays are making us deeply unhealthy)

  

More things I hope to add in later in the year:

• Book revisions

• Pilates classes

• Project pan (no new beauty or skincare purchases until I’m out; we are multi-dimensional people around here)

I won’t add more habits until these feel fully assimilated.

🤓 Ad Hoc

• Capture tasks on sticky notes or in the continuous task list as they come up; I also have a small pocketsized Plotter notebook that I carry with me everywhere and use for notes on the go.

• Review and sort them later into Notion or my planner.a

My notebook ecosystem is basically the same as what I shared earlier this year. The only big change I am making in 2026 is to replace my Paper Republic Weekly Planner with a Hobonichi Cousin planner.

I loved the Paper Republic planner as a notebook but it was too small for the current state of craziness in my life. I needed a more complete view into my life, especially a MONTHLY spread that the Paper Republic does not have and I was missing.

I keep a single planner because all aspects of my life need to fit inside the same 24 hours of the day. When I have a busy work week, I know I won’t have energy for much social activity. On Substack publishing days, I try to stay away from meetings if I can — my adrenaline runs high and I come across as … mildly deranged (do we need a support group for this?!).

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the rest of my notebooks, their purpose and how I use them.

Most days, the only two books I touch are my Planner and my work notebook. I know that when I share this list, many people will freak out — it’s too many notebooks, etc. That’s the wrong conclusion. It’s too many COMMITMENTS, perhaps, but I only do what I love and what gives me energy… so, that’s that. The notebooks support the life, not the other way around.

What you’ll notice is that nowhere in this system do I schedule time for reading. Reading is the default state I am constantly trying to return to. I’m far from perfect. I spend too much time on my phone. I’m human. But I try to be focused and organized in all other areas of my life as much as I can so that when I’m done, I’m actually done — and I can sit and read in peace.

🤓 Questions for You

• Do you have a personal planning system, or are you mostly improvising right now?

• Which part of this resonated most — or felt most unrealistic — for your life?

• Do you think reading happens because of discipline, or because of the conditions we create around our time?

Pre-script: 25% off annual subscriptions between now and end of 2025. Please support the writers you enjoy!

It started innocently enough. I heard a cursory mention of Pond in a YouTube video by a creator who has since deleted their account. I loved the cover and bought the book on impulse. I read it in January… and that experience was so singular and exhilarating that it set the tone for my entire reading year.

Reading Pond awakened a side of my reading self I didn’t know existed. One minute I was a normal human with a normal reading life… the next I was literally salivating over a discussion of breakfast bananas. Talking about this book—or any Claire-Louise Bennett book—is hilarious because anything you say about it makes you sound slightly unwell. For example, my favorite section of Pond is about stove knobs: only two of the three work, the narrator attempts to replace them but the particular type of knobs have been discontinued, and this leads her into a philosophical reflection on impermanence and our doomed quest to hold on to life while watching it slip away. The entire book is bonkers—in the best way. A masterful exploration of what happens to a rare, active mind when its owner is enveloped in solitude.

Over the course of the year, I became a Claire-Louise Bennett completionist. One of the best days of my year was when my 8-year-old discovered Checkout 19 in a used bookstore for me.

I nearly cried—partly because I’d found the book, and partly because my child knew who Claire-Louise Bennett was. 🥹🥹🥹 Checkout 19 follows a young girl who discovers reading and grows into a writer, shaped by the books she loves and the life that forms around them.

While nervously googling when her next book might come out, I stumbled upon Joan Publishing, a contemporary press in London. Joan had published a long essay by Bennett, inspired by a painting by Dorothea Tanning. Jennifer Hodgson writes of the book:

I think Fish Out of Water is about recognition, that extraordinary moment of encountering a work of art that makes you reel because it seems to beckon you… to lead you back to yourself but as a stranger… There’s still chance to recover ourselves and the world as new and totally strange.

I love this description. It distills the piece, yes—but more importantly it captures my experience of her work as a super-fan: reeling from the strangeness, unable to look away, feeling beckoned because it feels like a roadmap back to a version of myself I thought I’d needed to demolish. The solitude, the strangeness, the lack of coherence — traits I’d spent years trying to outgrow — I finally allowed to exist again. I feel a desperate sense of gratitude for this strange, beautiful work and the permission it offers to be free both from and with oneself.

Her third novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, is the least strange of her works but still challenges and entertains in familiar ways. Because the writing is partly autofictional and because Claire-Louise Bennett absolutely refuses to give a fuck about repeating herself, several familiar themes return—especially memory and the stories we tell ourselves across time. But reading an author so intensely over such a short period also makes you notice their quirks, their weird food obsessions. That’s how I found myself scouring the internet and my local grocery stores for Scottish oatcakes… which are now, embarrassingly, a major food group in my diet.

So… I read the books. I read the interviews, the podcasts, the scattered fragments of her thinking online. Each book felt like a spell, and each consecutive one pulled me deeper. It has been such an intense experience—I’ve felt very implicated, very seen, very… deranged through all this? Deranged is probably the best word because when I finished her last available book, my first emotional response was panic. A kind of spiritual bereavement. A low-grade existential whimper. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went out and bought black eyeliner. Normally I read a book, write about it, and move on. But here, I seem to have entered a form of literary attachment that feels borderline transgressive. I’m obsessed with the interior of this stranger’s mind. She’ll publish another book eventually, I told myself. But who knows when—or in what form—or what state I will be in by then?

Last week — unable to simply sit with my feelings like a normal person — I began compiling a list of every book mentioned in Checkout 19. Around 130 titles. By the time I was done, I felt spellbound. I’d tracked many of the titles while reading, but seeing them typed up felt unexpectedly vulnerable, almost revealing. I wrote them down in the order they appear in the book, so reading through the list felt a bit like reading someone’s private diary. Please don’t judge me but… it’s been delightful. I am still incredibly sad that I have no idea when I’ll get to read her next work, but I feel comforted knowing I can stay close to her mind by reading my way through her list.

When I posted a Note about what I had done, I knew I was with my people when many CLB fans reached out asking me to share the list. But it was who suggested that I write a post about it:

So. There you have it → the whole story: one reader, one author, one escalating pattern of behavior that probably says something about my psychological architecture… but let’s not dwell on that. Below is the full list of ~130 books mentioned in Checkout 19. If you’re the kind of reader who wants not just the list but the infrastructure around it, I also made a Google Doc with the books organized by theme.

The list below gathers ~130 books and authors mentioned in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19. Some references in the novel include both author and title; others mention only an author. To keep these distinct while still creating a useful reading guide, each section is split into two parts:

1. Works explicitly mentioned in the novel (author + title).

2. Suggested works for authors Bennett names without a specific book.

• List 1 (in this post) groups everything by form/genre (novels, poetry, essays, etc.).

• List 2 (in this Google Doc) groups the same material by theme (interiority, language, politics, the uncanny, etc.).

Together, the lists offer a navigable map of the literary landscape surrounding Checkout 19.

Key

• Author, Title — explicitly mentioned by Bennett (both author + title appear in the novel)

• Author, Title (suggested) — a representative work by an author mentioned without a specific title

📚 NOVELS & NOVELLAS

Mentioned by CLB (author + title):

• Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

• E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

• Roald Dahl, Switch Bitch; Danny the Champion of the World

• Alan Sillitoe, A Start in Life

• John Milton, Aeropagitica

• John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

• Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

• L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

• Virginia Woolf, Orlando

• Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

• Albert Camus, The Fall

• Goethe, Faust

• Robert Walker, The Walk

• David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

• Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

• Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The letter of lord Chandos

• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

• Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

• Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

• Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit

• Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

• Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing

• Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra

• Anne F. Garréta, Sphinx

• Fernando Pessoa, The book of disquiet

• Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling

• Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

• Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

• John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

• D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

• Bram Stoker, Dracula

• Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

• Ann Quin, Object Lessons

• Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar

• Fleur Jaeggy, Proleterka

• Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy

• Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet

• James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

• J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

Suggested works by authors CLB mentions without titles:

• Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (suggested)

• Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (suggested)

• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (suggested)

• Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (suggested)

• Thomas Bernhard, The Loser (suggested)

• Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (suggested)

• Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (suggested)

• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (suggested)

• Colette, Chéri (suggested)

• Madeleine Bourdouxhe, La Femme de Gilles (suggested)

• Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (suggested)

• Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (suggested)

• Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual (suggested)

• Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (suggested)

• Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity (suggested)

• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (suggested)

• Marlen Haushofer, The Wall (suggested)

• Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (suggested)

• Agota Kristof, The Notebook (suggested)

• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (suggested)

• Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter (suggested)

• Anna Kavan, Ice (suggested)

• Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (suggested)

• Silvina Ocampo, Thus Were Their Faces (suggested)

• Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (suggested)

• Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (suggested)

• Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (suggested)

• Mercè Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves (suggested)

• Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls (suggested)

📚 SHORT STORIES, NOVELLAS & STORY COLLECTIONS

Mentioned by CLB (author + title):

• Roald Dahl, Switch Bitch

• Clarice Lispector, Boy in Pen and Ink

• William H. Gass, The Pedersen Kid

• Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell

• Lorrie Moore, Birds of America

• Samuel Beckett, The Calmative

• Peter Handke, A sorrow beyond dreams

• Maeve Brennan, The Rose Garden: Short Stories

Suggested works by authors CLB mentions without titles (story-focused):

• Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (suggested)

• Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (suggested)

• Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection (suggested)

📚 POETRY & POETIC PROSE

Mentioned by CLB (author + title):

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

• Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

• T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

• Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud

• D.H. Lawrence, The Poetry of the Present

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale

Suggested works by poets CLB mentions without titles:

• Ezra Pound, The Cantos (suggested)

• William Wordsworth, The Prelude (suggested)

• Anne Sexton, Live or Die (suggested)

• Inger Christensen, alphabet (suggested)

• Natércia Freire, Poemas (suggested)
  

📚 PLAYS & DRAMA

Mentioned by CLB (author + title):

• Plato, Phaedrus

• David Hare, Racing Demon

Suggested works by playwrights CLB mentions without titles:

• Euripides, Medea (suggested)

• Racine, Phèdre (suggested)

• Molière, Tartuffe (suggested)

• Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (suggested)

• Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (suggested)

• Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (suggested)

• August Strindberg, Miss Julie (suggested)

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet (suggested)

📚 ESSAYS, CRITICISM, MEMOIR & AUTOFICTION

Mentioned by CLB (author + title):

• Janet Malcolm, A Girl of the Zeitgeist

• Mary Gaitskill, The Trouble with Following the Rules

• Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980

• Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

• Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

• Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words

• Nell Dunn, Talking to Women

• Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story

• Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Suggested works by authors CLB mentions without titles:

• Joan Didion, The White Album (suggested)

• Renata Adler, Speedboat (suggested)

• Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (suggested)

• bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (suggested)

• Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments (suggested)

• Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon (suggested)

• Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy (suggested)

• Diana Athill, Stet (suggested)

• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (suggested)

• Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (suggested)
  

📚 PHILOSOPHY, THEORY & POLITICAL THOUGHT

Mentioned by CLB (author + title):

• Plato, The Republic

• Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Suggested works by authors CLB mentions without titles:

• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (suggested)

• Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (suggested)

• Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (suggested)

• Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (suggested)
  

📚 COMMERCIAL / POP FICTION

Suggested works by authors CLB mentions without titles:

• Sidney Sheldon, Master of the Game (suggested)

• Jeffrey Archer, Kane and Abel (suggested)

• Danielle Steel, Zoya (suggested)

• Jackie Collins, Hollywood Wives (suggested)

• James Herbert, The Rats (suggested)

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⭐️ And now, because this is a community of deeply normal people:

• What is the strangest thing you’ve ever done because you loved an author so much?

• What do you make of the lists?

• Are you seeing any titles you are interested in reading? Maybe we can read some together in 2026.

✨ A quick milestone note before we dive in: I just hit a big Substack milestone—10,000 subscribers! I started writing here in April 2024, so it feels like a good moment to reflect. I’m considering a post about what I’ve learned from the experience. Would that interest you? I love these kinds of pieces, but I know they can drift into navel-gazing, so I wanted to ask first.

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