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.
The Fell
There’s a difference between isolation, “alone time,” and loneliness. Maybe they intersect a bit, but the distinct ways that we experience — and perhaps sometimes crave — solitude don’t really share qualities, beyond the obvious granular one, with each other.
Dayswork
Some real literary figures feature in Dayswork, a novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (who are married to each other). Namely, Herman Melville, but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Lowell, literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, and the still-living and Pulitzer-winning Melville biographer Hershel Parker (thinly veiled as “The Biographer”). They aren’t characters, exactly, as they play the historical figures that they actually are only through the lens of the protagonist’s internet deep dive as she becomes obsessed with Melville during the early days of the pandemic — that time when we were all sequestered inside with our computers as our only tethers to the outside world.
Tom Lake
I recently read a New Yorker piece titled “Becoming You: Are you the same person you were when you were a child?” In it, writer Joshua Rothman references a study of 1,037 individuals in New Zealand who are interviewed by a psychologist periodically from childhood to midlife in an attempt to understand humans’ connections with their “past selves.” (This kind of thing fascinates me.)
Seven Steeples
When one’s world becomes smaller — because of, say, a pandemic, or in the case of Sigh and Belle, a couple who are “too solitary, with a spike of misanthropy…[and who become] curious to see what would happen when two solitary misanthropes tried to live together” — there are questions to be asked…
We Are Not Ourselves Was My Night Book
Maybe this is odd to many of you, but I generally don’t read in bed before falling asleep. I think this may be atypical for “readers” – after all, during my Covid isolation in May, I started re-watching Little House on the Prairie (hey, it was what I was in the mood for!), and I noticed that even Pa read in bed before reaching peak shut-eye mode. While Ma munched on popcorn. Btw, my family will tell you that I enthusiastically embrace both reading and nightly popcorn, ergo I am clearly an Ingalls at heart…aaaaand now my childhood dream has come true.
Post-Pandemic Reading Skills
“Pandemic Has Pulled Reading Skills Down Into ‘New Territory.’” We saw this coming — and this NYT article explains that the US was seeing lower literacy levels even before 2020 — but this just makes me so very sad. There’s a lot at play here: missed school (both remote and in-person), teaching vacancies, fewer educators trained in phonics and phonetic awareness.
Case in Point: Framingham School Libraries
“Students in Framingham are checking out more books from the library: Here’s why.” This MetroWest Daily News article popped up online yesterday. Framingham borders the town where I live.
Station Eleven
Station Eleven was published in 2014, so I’m wondering what all the pre-2020 readers thought of this, Emily St. John Mandel’s “pandemic novel.” I can’t stop thinking about it. Not just because of the mentions of contagion, incubation periods, symptoms, and quarantine that are all so eerily familiar. Those phrases will resonate with a post-2020 reader in a different, more concrete way.
Powell’s and “Downtown”
“How will brick-and-mortar stores fare in a time of continued fear over a deadly, airborne plague? What happens to city life when sidewalks are strewn with the rain-soaked belongings of people who can no longer afford rent?”
Reading + Pandemic = Travel? On Amy and Isabelle, Beyond Babylon, and Being Well-Read & Well-Traveled
I’ve never really bought the “reading is like traveling” argument. Reading is reading, and travel is travel, and never the twain shall meet. (Reading an Elin Hilderbrand book is just as good as actually being on Nantucket? Girl, please.) On Instagram, I occasionally tussle with the idea of why we read – and inevitably, someone brings up “travel.” I’m not saying that is not their experience, but it has never been mine.
The Mystery of Leadership: On Kingdomtide, The Secret Life of Bees, and Becoming a Curious Expert
If anyone can be a leader, are all leaders experts?
Crazy times, huh? When you don’t encounter as many people in day-to-day life as you used to, you tend to think a bit more. I’m generally more of a pensive person – happy to observe the intricacies and tendrils of life unfolding – but since about mid-March, this pensive side has gone into high gear. Well, in one sense. There is a lot more time to “think.”
