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.
I’m a Reader: Here’s My Response
From Newsletter Issue No. 14:
The other day, I came across a draft of my thesis for my masters program. I have a MA in Media Studies, and in 2003 — just a few months before I had my first child (timing is everything!) — I completed an ethnography of a group of children of immigration in one neighborhood in Charlotte, NC and how their media preferences were shaped. Because of guidance from my advisor, I used a framework from a book called Is There a Text in This Class? by the scholar Stanley Fish as a way to frame my own work. In academic circles, Fish is known as one of the main proponents of something called Reader-Response Criticism. The Cliff Notes version of RRC is that the main lens through which to view literature is the reader and his or her experience as opposed focusing on the author. In the introduction to Is There a Text in This Class? Fish writes…
Fiction, Reality, and The Beautiful South
I’m really intrigued by “the role of the reader,” but on the flipside, I’m also very intrigued by how “real life” infiltrates fiction — or not.
I Have Some Questions for You
The second season of The White Lotus created so much buzz late last year, yet nothing I read seemed to point to how the entire show was underpinned by themes of “gaslighting” — how others convince us something is true and maybe more importantly, how we convince ourselves that something is true. (Maybe this analysis is out there and I missed it?) Characters continually wonder: Is my partner having an affair? Is this person attracted to me? And — zinger — is this cabal of “high-class gays” (to borrow Tanya’s phrasing) trying to kill me? Or…does the “evidence” just overwhelmingly tell me so, ergo it’s true? I thought this last season was brilliant.
The Library at Home
As we prepare to leave this house — and as we let prospective buyers through if they’ve heard about its future availability — Matt and I have spent many weekends organizing, purging, donating, scrubbing. Which of course included a massive tidy of some bookshelves. I know it’s likely I’ll be asked to “stage” them better — fewer books, more #decorativevases. Because as we all know (due to pox-on-society HGTV), the goal is to “remove” traces of oneself and one’s family from a home when it’s for sale. And since, in many ways, the books on our shelves tell my life’s story…out they go. But I can’t live like that in real life.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Amy’s Version
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Amy’s Version. Matt and I have been in Charlotte for a few weeks but have taken turns going back to Massachusetts on weekends. This weekend was my turn, and when I got up at 4 am on Friday to get to the airport, I saw that my flight was cancelled. Flying to Boston was going to be essentially impossible until Monday. Not helpful! After going through possible parent-less scenarios (could our son Uber to our house from his school, get our car, and criss-cross New England alone to these appointments at colleges?), we decided I would fly into a different airport and figure out the last part when I landed.
This is Happiness
“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that…”
My Name is Leon
Since college (or earlier?), I’ve pondered the theory that there are a finite number of story structures (ie “overcoming the monster,” “tragedy,” etc.)
Colleen Hoover, Crocs, and Bestseller Lists
So what are bestseller lists good for? I mean, I know they’re good for authors and publishers and might give a book a nice zeitgeisty pat on the back, but from a reader’s perspective…what’s the point? Are they “good” for readers? The number of books I’ve read in the past few years that I’d put in the “excellent” category *and* were on some sort of bestseller list is minuscule. #venndiagram
The Idiot
How in the world had I never read this book before now?!?!
Reading Culture
I’ve been thinking about the interplay between a person helping to shape a culture versus a culture helping to shape a person. “Culture” meaning the shared beliefs and values of any subset of people, I suppose.
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.
