Connected. Curious. Good.
from my email newsletter | issue no. 20 | January 20, 2025
Hello, and Happy 2025!
Using the subject line “some reading wisdom,” my dad emailed this excerpt from a Peggy Noonan column the other day:
“Reading deepens. Social media keeps you where you are. Reading makes your mind do work. You have to follow the plot, imagine what the ballroom looked like, figure the motivations of the characters—I understand what Gatsby wants! All this makes your brain and soul develop the habit of generous and imaginative thinking. Social media is passive. The pictures, reels and comments demand nothing, develop nothing. They give you sensations, but the sensations never get deeper. Social media gets you stuck in you. Reading is a rocket ship, new worlds.”
(By the way, if you ever make it as far as the bottom of these emails, I always include a quote about reading under the headline “Am Reading,” which — also by the way — is a play on the very old-school social media hashtag #amwriting, as in “I am writing.” So, no, I don’t think social media in and of itself is bad, but it has its place, and it sure doesn’t replace reading complex text.)
My daughter and I went to a Clare Rojas exhibit at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. This piece is called "Tired of Thinking." (And yes, that's the subject's wine glass in her shoe on the table...) I'm going to venture that this woman isn't necessarily tired of "thinking"...I wonder if she's tired of the onslaught of info being pinged her way, particularly through electronic devices. Just a very not-veiled personal interpretation!
I’ve been sending out these e-missives since 2019, which is when I produced my first community literary event. The newsletter has evolved: Whereas it was once more newsy and devoid of my own thoughts except for the long-form blog posts I’d link to, it’s morphed into a space where I do share my own writing more effusively — about books, but also about creativity as well as community/place/home(sickness) — as I fine-tune my own book proposal and manuscript. These later newsletters have run the gamut from a close read of American Dirt and all its surrounding controversy to more esoteric and theoretical analyses: How does browsing a bookstore in tandem with someone help us understand them better? When does a book’s “journey” begin and end with you? What's Reader Response Criticism and what does that have to do with book clubs?
It's been a good exercise for me to reflect on how I’ve gone from starting a blog on a whim in 2014, to an Instagram account in 2018, to producing events in 2019 to…? These are all small endeavors — no going viral in these quarters! — but I’m just going to go ahead and call it my A Lifely Read Empire nonetheless.
All that to say, I’ve been thinking about what my aim is for this email space as we embark on a new year. My hope is that after reading here, subscribers (that’s you!) might feel:
< Connected … to something/anything. I think a lot about the word “tether,” which is one way to feel about connection. Maybe this newsletter makes you feel a connection to a book, maybe something I write makes you feel connected to the people around you or to the place you live, maybe it simply prompts you to think about “connection” more. “Tether” can have a negative connotation (ol’ ball and chain, anyone?!), but often, feeling “tethered” grounds us.
< Curious …to pick up a new book (or any book at all after a long while if that may be the case); to understand more about creativity in general and how literature has a place on the creativity spectrum.
< Good … about life. What I mean by this is that I want this missive to be edifying in some way. (Hopefully in many ways.) I can be a snarky and sarcastic person, which I believe can be ok if it’s tempered and not just for the sake of it. But I feel like our spaces — particularly our online spaces — can be so devoid of “goodness.” There’s a reason “brain rot” was the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2024. “Good” is a solid word, and I think we all need something solid to hang our hats on.
I started that original blog while living in Dublin after coming across this quote in Through the Window, a book of essays by the British writer Julian Barnes. He wrote:
“…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.”
I wondered if I might apply the same philosophy as a reader — and here I am 10+ years later.
So, here’s my "window-pane" — thanks for looking through it with me. If you know someone who might be interested in this vantage point, please feel free to forward this email to them, and if they wish, they can subscribe HERE.
A view outside of a window where we are currently living.
Latest Reads
*** If you're looking for an easy way to come up with ideas for your next read, you can screenshot or save the graphic below. And as always, I share more about the books I read on Instagram; see below for direct links to each post. (PS: Someone is helping me revamp my website, and the majority of my Instagram posts — like 700+ of them — will eventually live there, as well as on Instagram.) ***
The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Choice by Neel Mukherjee
Playground by Richard Powers
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
Pearl by Siân Hughes
Same as It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo
Read This! (i.e. some quick links)
< "Celebrated New Yorker Writer Enlisted as Model." Patrick Radden Keefe, author of nonfiction blockbusters Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (as well as the host of the crazy "Wind of Change" podcast) caused a flurry when he appeared on J. Crew's Instagram account earlier this year. Break out the barn jackets and roll-neck sweaters because not only are literary figures good role models (well, sometimes), I guess they are actual models as well.
< "The psychology behind the well-being benefits of libraries." "We love libraries!" has become kind of a buzzy — yet often fuzzy — sentiment. Here, via the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, is actual academic research on why libraries really are so great.
< NPR's 2024 'Books We Love.' In case you missed it, here's the latest edition of what NPR used to call The Book Concierge. Maybe this interactive, digital tool will help you find your next read...
Am Reading
“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn your back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”
— Niall Williams in 'This is Happiness”
(pretty much one of the best novels ever written...)
Know someone who might be interested in periodic dispatches about books, reading, and how they intermingle with day-to-day, real life?
Feel free to forward this email and let them know they can subscribe HERE.