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.
In the Dream House
Memoirs: I typically don’t read them, but I just finished one. Introducing…In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. (Introduction probably not needed for many of you bibliophiles.)
Labrador
When my brother and I have been back in our hometown together – which has happened, oh, maybe twice since our parents moved in 1995 – we say “This/that is so…weird” over and over. Which is, well, weird because there is nothing “weird” about where we’re from. (In fact, it’s kind of amazing!) What we are trying to articulate – albeit very poorly – is that nostalgia is a strange bugger. How does one make sense of one’s childhood memories? Not the concrete ones, but the “feelings” of: how your elementary school was or what it was like to take swim lessons. And the people, of course. Remember Mr. X? What about that family from Sweden who lived in the house across the street for 9 months? All those kids beaming from a class photo? You know how it goes. A stew of moments.
A Little More Human
A long time ago, my husband worked with someone who introduced him to the book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. At the time it felt wild (sort of like how Tom Cruise pawing at his invisible swipe screen in Minority Report seemed ca-razy), but now a novel like A Little More Human, by Fiona Maazel (and published in 2017), doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. This book is part literary fiction and part…speculative fiction?
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Danish writer Dorthe Nors. File under: Scandinavian literature can needle human emotion in a spectacular fashion – probably because it does so in an almost-but-not-quite dull manner. (One of the best books I’ve ever read is The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am by Norwegian author Kjersti Skomsvold.) I checked out the (few) 1-star reviews of this book after finishing, and as I predicted, they declared it “slow” and “meandering.” Well, I guess I’m a one-star gal because that’s what makes the novel work.
