Issue 82: The Reading Life of... Michelle Martin

+ a fascinating method to help you organize your upcoming reading season

When Rumi and I returned from the library this past Saturday, I retreated to indulge my Substack reading habit. Noticing an influx of new subscribers, my first thought was: I'VE BEEN HACKED. After a brief panic, I discovered Coleen Baik of

The Line Between

had featured my no-bullshit guide to annotation in her Substack Reads edit. 😳

Coleen wrote:

The thing that I’m also struck by in A reading life is her intentionality around consumption, particularly when it comes to longform fiction. Reading literature requires muscle that I feel has been sadly atrophying among most of us, so it’s refreshing to come across someone bent on going the other way. 

This unexpected spotlight left me surprised and humiliated. Yes, I'm on Substack longing for an audience (why else share my annotations publicly?), but the terror of new readers stumbling specifically upon my unpolished journal entries (and my greasy journal covers) was overwhelming. As my daughter would say: JESUS CRISIS! 🫣

But - of course – the un-polish wa…