READ ALL ABOUT IT
Since 2012, I’ve been writing about books. And the act of reading. And the importance of story and narrative. But, mostly, the underlying theme of all I write is how taking a moment to stop and digest some longform text — instead of scrolling, instead of watching a video, instead of multitasking — can be one of the most grounding things we can do for ourselves. Here’s the one-stop online home for all this writing.
You can read more about me and my work by moseying over here. Want to peruse periodic “essay drops” — excerpts from my work-in-progress essay collection about Homesickness? Here ya go.
Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy is like holding up a funhouse mirror to different cultures — in this case, an unnamed Soviet Bloc country and England. (But like the novel Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego, Goldsworthy in Iron Curtain occasionally inserts little factoids and artifacts from other countries, underpinning the fact that even down to the most basic of things — let’s throw out food shopping as an example — everywhere has its own “way.”) Everything looks worse — or a little crazy — when viewed from a different vantage point.
Weird Ideas
I’ve been mulling over these two quotes from the bottom of yesterday’s @literaryhub daily email. I like them not just because they resonate with me as a writer, but they force me to reckon with why a book is “good” (in my eyes) or not. I love reading things that take me to unexpected places (I don’t mean that in a #readinginspo travel-via-reading kind of way) — writing that makes me go, “I would never have dreamed of mixing those words up like that.”
Remote Control
I’ve been thinking about “active” reading, not just a let-the-story-wash-over-me thing. It’s on my mind because, lucky me, I got some (v minor) insights into student life recently.
The Past
“She’d picked up this book about a doll’s house from the shelf in her room quite casually and fondly, remembering how she had liked it in her childhood, not at all expecting to be ambushed with overwhelming emotion. Every so often she looked up from the page and stared around her as if she hardly knew where she was — but she was at Kington, which was the beloved scene of her past anyway. So her glance through the panes of the old glass in the arched window, to the yellowing rough grass in the garden and the alders which grew along the stream, didn’t restore any equilibrium. It wasn’t only the recollection attached to the words she was reading — a memory of other readings — which moved her. The story itself, in its own words, tapped into deep reservoirs of feeling. The writer’s touch was very sure and true, unsentimental — one of the doll’s-house dolls died, burned up in a fire. The book seemed to open up for Alice a wholesome and simplifying way of seeing things which she had long ago lost or forgotten, and hadn’t hoped to find again.”
St. Patrick’s Day with Roddy Doyle
“If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.” – Roddy Doyle
A Small Place
My brother recently sent me an article that Noam Chomsky contributed to regarding ChatGPT. Chomsky is technically a professor of linguistics, but really, he’s a “public intellectual” or “social critic.” It landed in my inbox around the same time I was organizing my old grad school materials. I re-discovered the book Is There a Text in this Class? by Stanley Fish, who was influential in the rise of reader-response criticism. (Something interesting that I’ll explore another day!) Anyway, all this sudden immersion in the idea of “criticism” is very appropriate given that I’d been reading A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid for #ReadingJamaicaKincaid w @ifthisisparadise
I Finally Read American Dirt
From Newsletter Issue No. 13:
Remember when a little novel called American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins was published in 2020? It was a much-anticipated work of fiction that was meant to shed light on and give voice to people who found themselves in the crosshairs of the migration crisis happening at the border between the United States and Mexico. Oprah selected it for her book club. Stephen King provided a blurb and called American Dirt “Extraordinary.” Sandra Cisneros (family roots in Mexico) and Julia Alvarez (family roots in the Dominican Republic) both praised the book.
Art is Everywhere
I’m in Charlotte, NC for < 48 hours, but had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with a friend at the Picasso exhibit at Mint Museum Uptown. This is the only picture I took; it’s an installation on a wall of windows that spans four stories and is 3,720 square feet. It’s ‘Foragers’ by Brooklyn-based artist Summer Wheat.
Laura Zigman and Gap Khakis
In January, The Boston Globe published a story about the writer Laura Zigman. Maybe you remember her as the author of the bestselling 1998 novel Animal Husbandry. Or maybe you just remember the movie adaptation called Someone Like You starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd. When I think of Animal Husbandry, I think of chick lit that was more literary than what is currently marketed that way. Remember the 1999 novel A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank? To me, these two novels — plus Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding — encapsulate a specific late 90s vibe. They were like the literary world’s version of Gap’s dancing-in-khakis ads.
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
We’ve got another snowy day today, and I’ve been thinking about how snow is often romanticized. Don’t get me wrong: There is something so satisfying about “tucking in” and feeling unburdened by the rigmarole of daily life. Especially if it’s over a weekend; today is Saturday. Somehow Laura Ingalls Wilder even managed — in the rose-colored, made-for-publishing view of her childhood — to make The Long Winter seem dreamy.
Annie John
When you’re a child, “school” and “family” are the countries you travel between, each offering up a seemingly impenetrable border. I attended four different schools for K-12 (if you count a trimester I spent at a “sister school” across the country), and because none of them were a part of a natural progression (i.e. the elementary that feeds into the middle, etc.), each transfer felt like an initiation into a new nation where the students — even if residents of the same region — were different. Adults don’t necessarily notice these nuances, but kids sure do. School is their LIFE. I’ll always laugh at the line “She doesn’t even go here!” from Mean Girls because it totally encapsulates the “in” or “out” situation of being a part of an institution. (And also because if you ever met someone in a different context, you automatically knew what they meant when they asked, “Where do you go?” No need to finish that prepositional phrase.)
Growing Up Rich
“But isn’t all art derivative?” = a short topic of discussion this weekend with a friend.
The Marriage Portrait
I was an English major in college, but I have not read a text with the same intense scrutiny as I did then since…then. (That would be 1998 for purposes of tabulation and judgement.) Well, maybe I did back in 2019 when I (haphazardly?) decided to read one Shakespeare play per month. I mean, I do think I read carefully and with a critical eye and all that jazz, but it’s still different. Who has time to consider and then write 10-page papers about the meanings and various uses of “the”? (Just to exaggerate a tiny bit…)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
The NYT’s “Overlooked” column, “a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times” — has got to be one of the most interesting recurring features in a daily newspaper. (Just my 2c.) I’ve posted about different ones before, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (author of Dictee). This one, about the 19th-century Black poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, was published toward the beginning of February, Black History Month.
My Phantoms
I like reading about visual artists and their work and how capturing those elusive things like “light” and “shade” might be what makes a work…work. And how the work of a truly skilled person differs so greatly from the caricature-ish work of, well, me — or a child who reaches for a crayon to draw a house with a pitched roof, four windows, and curlicued smoke coming out of the chimney. What the non-artists among us put to paper might be how we see and interpret an object, but when set against the actual setting, the disconnect is clear.
Now is Not the Time to Panic
My friend Ashley sent me this article about a woman who, oopsies, knocked over a Jeff Koons sculpture that then shattered into “at least 100 pieces.” This story conjures a lot of responses, which I will first summarize via emoji: 😱😂🧐 They are: 1) second-hand shame and embarrassment (because who else has “what if this happened” thoughts in museums and galleries?); 2) genuine laughs at its ridiculousness, esp since it’s love-him-or-hate-him Jeff Koons; 3) (this is the best one) intrigue about how “the meaning of art” perpetuates itself in unexpected ways. (See to see an excerpt of the part of the story wherein people wondered if this was Banksy-esque performance art and someone wanted to purchase the shattered pieces.)
Through the Window
Nearly 10 years ago, I read this: “…writing is a matter of examining the world, reflecting upon it, deducing what you want to say, putting that meaning or message into words whose transparency allows the reader, now gazing through the same window-pane from the same position, to see the world exactly as you have seen it.” – Julian Barnes, Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story
What a Reader Wants
“That’s all a reader really wants — to know the author better. Even if it’s a novel, they want to know the author.” – the novelist Cecil Dawkins to Natalie Goldberg.
Lessons in Chemistry and Easy Beauty
Everyone loves Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. What’s not to like? It’s entertaining, it’s charming with brisk storytelling, it addresses important topics. It’s pretty heavy-handed in that regard, but I wonder if that’s partly Garmus’ point since the characters’ one-dimensionality must be intentional. (I really do believe this has to be a stylistic choice on the author’s part.) I decided to read it sort of like a fable. Like how I think La La Land is a fable. (I am a huge La La Land fan! I wrote about it together with Milkman by Anna Burns back in 2019.)
Let’s BeReal
From Newsletter Issue No. 12:
Sometime this autumn, I became a BeReal-er. (I just made up that term. We have TikTokers, so what shall we call people who use the app BeReal?) If you’re not familiar, BeReal sends a notification at a different (i.e. unexpected) time each day to all users with the cue, “It’s time to BeReal!” Users then take a photo of whatever they’re doing, wherever they are at the moment — simultaneously, the app takes a quick snapshot of your face. Here's a rundown of the app from the New York Times Magazine back in August.
