Issue 110: Everything I read in February
Radical presence, giving up + the poetics of notebooks... among other things
I didn’t expect to get much reading done this month. Between a writing course with assigned reading, a family trip for my birthday, and unexpected work stress, I figured February would be a wash. Then work threw in a curveball—organizational changes that suddenly put me in charge of things I wasn’t expecting. I felt like that girl crying at her desk after accidentally girlbossing too hard.
One night last week, I made tea, did my skincare routine, and got in bed with a book, hoping for some peace. But I couldn’t focus to save my life. After an hour of rereading the same paragraph, I gave up and grabbed my journal instead. I made a two-part to-do list—one for work, one for my personal life. My work list had 26 items; my personal list had 47. No wonder I couldn’t focus.
But when I gathered my books to write about them for you, I realized that, despite the chaos, I had a really fun reading month. I read three great works of nonfiction, three novels (including a new all-time favorite), and a poetry collection. I was too busy to be strategic in my selections—two of the novels were even chosen for me. And yet, I loved them all. Once again, I’m reminded that the right books find you at the right time, and there’s something so magical about that
Books mentioned:
How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell
On Giving Up — Adam Phillips
The Word Pretty — Elisa Gabbert
Margo’s Got Money Troubles — Rufi Thorpe
Victim — Andrew Boryga
Open Throat — Henry Hoke
I Was Working — Ariel Yelen
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (in progress)1
Non-fiction
📚 How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell - Odell's manifesto arrived in my life precisely when I needed it most, like a friend showing up with soup when you're sick. Between the 73 items on my to-do lists and the constant ping of notifications, this book offered a lifeline. Odell is such an pop-culture phenom by this point and her work has been reviewed so widely that I probably don’t need to give you detailed notes about the author herself. But just in case you, like me, have been avoiding the book thinking that all the podcast interviews have already covered everything there is to know about it — do not. Unlike many nonfiction best-sellers these days, this book is most definitely not what could have been an article in The Atlantic. Odell’s voice and perspective are so singular and the examples she shares throughout the book are so ridiculously idiosyncratic that you will most definitely want to read this in full for yourself. Nobody else could have written this book, which is what I love the most about it.
The book is not about abandoning productivity (impossible in this economy), but about reclaiming attention as a form of resistance. Odell explores what it means to truly see the world around you—the birds, your neighbors, the hidden patterns of your own neighborhood—as an act of radical presence. She introduces the concept of bioregionalism as a way of understanding and engaging with the place where you live, based on its natural systems rather than political or economic boundaries. She argues that bioregionalism is about deeply observing and learning from the local environment, including its plants, animals, watersheds, and ecosystems, rather than seeing a place merely as a backdrop for human activity.
Odell contrasts this with the disconnected way we often move through the world—tied to digital spaces and globalized systems that obscure our physical surroundings. She suggests that cultivating a sense of bioregional awareness can be a form of resistance against the forces that demand constant productivity and distraction. I really loved this concept and have decided to practice — I am trying to make a list of all the birds, animals and plants we have right in my own backyard. On a sunny day earlier in the month I looked out of my window and saw what felt like 500 robins playing and chirping in my yard. I am obsessed with robins and felt so happy to see them that I ran downstairs and walked right into the backyard to see them more closely. The moment I opened the backdoor I was hit in the face by a foul smell… I looked around and saw that our entire deck was COVERED in bird shit. It was so disgusting, I loved it.
📚 On Giving Up by Adam Phillips - There's a particular kind of relief that comes from a psychoanalyst giving you permission to abandon things. As I wrote in my essay on leaving academia inspired by this book, Phillips doesn't advocate for surrender as defeat but reframes it as a necessary process of discernment.
What dreams should we hold onto? Which ones might we need to release? I read this during an especially busy time at work, stealing moments in between meetings to read a page or two, finding myself making lists of things I might benefit from giving up: perfectionism in first drafts, expectations about how much I can read in a month, that third cup of coffee that makes my hands shake.
The prose in this book is dense in places but worth the effort, like a conversation with a particularly insightful therapist who sees your patterns before you do. If you and/or someone you know have refused to go to therapy because you worry that your therapist would not be smart enough to help you, this book offers a great alternative.
📚 The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert
This book was exquisite. Gabbert — a poet and an essayist — writes in an approachable and warm style, the essays in the collection read like letters from your smartest friend. Her explorations of aesthetics, literature, and perception are both intellectual and deeply personal. I found myself underlining entire paragraphs about the nature of beauty and taste, about why certain sentences resonate while others fall flat. Her essay on poetry (more on this later) arrived just when I needed it, a perfect alignment of reading synchronicities that seem to happen when you're paying attention.
For all the notebook fiends in our midst, I highly recommend the opening essay in the collection, Personal Data: Notes on Keeping a Notebook:
Notebooks achieve so much of what poetry tries to achieve, but organically — they begin and end arbitrarily, in medias res. Ready-made erasure with an offhand effortlessness, abstractions interspersed with specifics. Fragmentary profundity. No forced closures. The epiphanies fall where they may.
What I loved the most about reading Gabbert was that the whole book felt like a permission slip to think about the exact things that fascinate you, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. In addition to the essay on notebooking, I also adored On the pleasures of front matter in which Gabbert documents her complete and total fascination with book introductions, epigraphs, and translator notes — I laughed and wrote feverishly in the margins of my book — ME TOO, ME TOO. The whole book is just a love letter to reading. Grab it.
Fiction
📚 Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe - I had seen so many people rave about this book but, for some reason, I have a hard time with novels dealing with contemporary internet culture so I was resisting reading it. However, it was assigned reading for my writing class and I am so glad to have read it because the book is truly so fun—loud, charming, and completely oddball. It actually made me crave reading and Kevin Wilson who are similarly fun, FUNNY but also ridiculously smart.
Margo is messy in the most compelling way, a young woman who turns to OnlyFans to solve her financial troubles while navigating her strange relationships with her college professor, her unusual parents (her dad, a former professional wrestler, moves in with her to help take care of her baby) and her own desires. What could have been a merely provocative story is actually a nuanced exploration of sexuality, economics, and the commodification of … everything… in the digital age. I found myself staying up late, telling myself "just one more chapter" as I followed Margo through her questionable decisions and moments of startling clarity. It's funny and heartbreaking in equal measure, the kind of book that made me definitely not miss my 20s and appreciate that I did my time pre-social media. If you like audiobooks, the audio version of this one is narrated by Elle Fanning and she is wonderful.
📚 Victim by
Boryga's novel cuts through the noise of identity politics with surgical precision. Following the story of a young Puerto Rican man who discovers that leveraging the traumas of his past might be his ticket to success, it explores the uncomfortable commodification of suffering and identity. In his review of the book in The New York Times, Mateo Askaripour’s describes Javier — the protagonist of the story — as “hustling Icarus” which I found so hilariously well-put. Guided by a well-meaning college counselor, Javi writes a convincing college application essay that puts a certain spin on his upbringing in the Bronx that gets him accepted to a prestigious liberal arts college eager for “students like him.”
In college and post-graduation, Javi’s background becomes both burden and currency as he begins to build a successful career as a writer who trades in pure fabrications and half-truths about what it is like to be an educated brown man in contemporary American society. I felt both immense anger and sympathy for this character… What is one supposed to do when your worst experiences become your most valuable assets? What is the cost of the stories we tell about ourselves? In a culture that tries to distill us all to the simplest characteristics of our identities, how can we blame anyone for creating a personal brand through omission and revisionism? It’s literally what sells.
I read this in small, intense bursts, often setting it aside to stare at my ceiling and think. If you have been on an American college campus in the last twenty years or so and have benefited from a scholarship based on your national, ethnic or other identity… I think you should definitely read this. It did not make me feel good about myself at all but I felt called out in a kind way. Highly recommend.
📚 Open Throat by Henry Hoke
My new all-time favorite. Hoke's novel, narrated by a queer mountain lion living in the Hollywood Hills, accomplishes what seems impossible—it makes you forget you're reading a book at all. The voice is so immediate, so present. There's a hunger in this book, literal and metaphorical, that speaks to something primal and urgent.
The mountain lion's observations about humans—our waste, our loneliness, our strange behaviors—become a mirror reflecting our complete disconnection from the natural world and from each other. I know this book sounds so ridiculous and odd but I promise you, you will love it. I finished it in one fevered sitting and immediately wanted to start again.
Poetry
Recently, Rumi picked up a children’s poetry anthology at a library book sale. Unprompted, she went through the whole book, added sticky flags to her favorite poems, and made a list of authors to check out at the library.
She's been working through them, though Maya Angelou remains her favorite. A few weeks ago, I walked into her room and found her writing lines from Phenomenal Woman on her window with a dry-erase marker.
All cuteness aside, I feel like her approach to poetry is quite genius: 1| find a good anthology, 2| mark what you love, 3| list the poets who resonate, and 4| get to work. As someone who has always felt unprepared for and unworthy of poetry, I’m taking this to heart.
This month I read I Was Working by Ariel Yelen (thank you for the recommendation) and I found it so charming and funny. In her essay What Poetry Is, Elisa Gabbert says:2
I believe that to read poetry, one must have a mind of poetry. You must enter a state where you come to understand meaning-resistant arrangements of language as having their own kind of meaning. It's quite similar to those Magic Eye posters from the '90s: If you haven't figured out how to look at them, you can't believe that anyone really sees the dolphin.
I was so lucky to have had just read this essay as I ventured into Yelen's book. What would have otherwise been probably a little intimidating, became an exercise in seeing dolphins. I would read the poems slowly and carefully, many of them out loud, and try to inhabit the moments and small interactions captured in this collection. I really liked this one:
Held the door for her
Then had to go right
Back out the same door
He held the door for
Me then I used my
Key to go back out
Bought a tunafish
Sandwich and chips, lunch
Is served! At my desk!
As I was reading it I had this really vivid memory of pre-lockdown office work and the rush of lunch hour, people going in and out of office buildings, holding doors for each other, intuitively and organically coordinating who goes which way as we enter and exit buildings, in a rush to grab a bite to eat. I would not think this experience worthy of memorializing but here is a poem that shows me otherwise. Patiently working through it I am now thinking I may have a mind for poetry after all. hundreds of years.
Favorite books of 2025:
January - Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
February - Open Throat by Henry Hoke
And some questions for you:
Would you recommend other books similar to Victim by Andrew Boryga that show the problematic nature of identity politics and letting personal branding get out of hand?
Looking for recommendations of anthologies of contemporary poetry. Got any?
I made progress on Anna Karenina this month too but fell a little behind schedule. I think my problem is that the slow read is a little … too slow for me … and I am considering doing an immersion into the book and maybe reading just it for a while.
I met Jenny Odell in person at a talk for Saving Time (an acquaintance is a close friend of hers) - she's absolutely delightful, a bit shy, and every bit the person you believe she is through How To Do Nothing.
I would recommend really reading Anna Karenina. We have always told our daughters “Levin not Vronsky”.
I am doing a slow read of Remembrance of Things Past. I need to speed up. 200 pages in 2 months seems too slow.