While I’m not necessarily convinced of the benefits [for me] of reading a novel that stars a thoughtful protagonist who has a hard time shaking her neuroses because she possesses the kind of mind that seeks “deep” over “simple” and therefore forces her to analyze situations to an agonizingly detailed degree … I know that I sincerely can’t quit ‘em.

A question after reading Real Americans by Rachel Khong: How often do you suspend disbelief while reading fiction? I don’t mean like “this guy is driving around with his zombie ex-girlfriend” (yes, I’m referring to I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore) or “these sea creatures are talking” (Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, which I have not read yet, but would like to). Those novels are considered literary fiction — not sci-fi — so readers accept the impossible as sort of an artistic method (maybe akin to Picasso’s portraits?) instead of world-building fantasy. No, I guess I mean more like a novel that is trying to be realistic, but instead feels a tiny bit like a sitcom when it comes to the neatly tied-together details.

The guttural cries shot into my heart via my clenched intestines like a squishy and hard-won fist. All I can think of is my mom taking a can of Whole Peeled Tomatoes (while thinking how weird it is that this is the official name of this product) and squeezing them into the sauce, like a water balloon that bursts stains instead of refreshing water. Convulse, cry. Convulse, cry. I don’t mean to be dramatic — but it felt dramatic.

All Fours by Miranda July: I met with 4 friends to talk about this one the other week. Was it a book club? I guess — we were meeting to discuss a book. There did happen to be wine + cheese (+ Amelie’s macarons thanks to @librarian.in.the.woods). We were all women. But somehow it felt different than what popular culture thinks of as a book club. This open group — not everyone knew each other — was an outgrowth of the trio that met at my place a couple of months ago with History of the Rain (Niall Williams) as our catalyst.

Here’s a text I received from my dad the other day. My parents are in the middle of a road trip to Northern California — a bit of a John Steinbeck pilgrimage. But they first travelled due west and stopped in Los Angeles, they city they moved to after they were married and also the city where I was born. They lived in a few rentals here and there before purchasing their first home, pictured. Yet I imagine each of the homes leading up to this house on stilts held daydreams…because daydreams don’t require ownership, just an imagination.

Have you noticed publications (Atlantic, NYT) touting the benefits of reading aloud? I’ve enjoyed seeing these headlines because the first community literary event I produced in 2019 was just that: a read-aloud. It was called Book Covers (like a cover band, but “cover readers”), and there was a theme and a panel discussion following the readings — which were done by prominent community members and authors — + a run sheet + a sound system + press releases etcetcetc.

Once in a while, I’ll come across a video of an over-the-top church service. The latest is a pastor making his “stage entrance” via makeshift rollercoaster. Okaaay! Welcome to the commodification of something sacred. “Commodifying” something is maybe just another way of saying “treating as a finite good” or perhaps “cheapening something into a more digestible state.”

I read a lot of Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter while in Italy — and even had it in my backpack during our day in Cinque Terre, where a lot of the novel takes place. (Why I didn’t pull it out and take some cool meta pic with the book in the foreground is beyond me…) I think a lot about buildings and structures that endure — maybe especially when they’re perched on a tenuous-looking precipice? — and I love ruminating on the repurposing of spaces. Case in point: Giunti Odeon, a former Renaissance palace in Florence that now houses a café/bookstore/cinema. …

“Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible. ‘The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.’ To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.” This is from David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Whether or not you like Brooks, it’s fair to say he can address a topic with ease and clarity; I found this one — which zeros in on something I think about quite often — an excellent read.

But what happens when someone seems to be actively eschewing being known? Or, how about this: What if by hiding oneself away a person may actually be more known? Does visibility = being “known”? Or is it something more? …

What does it mean to live in a library? There’s sort of a cachet to co-habitating with so much art, culture, and knowledge, á la From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, isn’t there? In the 21-st century this would take the form of a quick-edit video posted to social media: “Come with me as I tour a library-turned-apartment!” Or “POV: You live in an old library.” (And then cue all the book-lovers responding with 😍😍😍 [🙄])

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.

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.

I’ve finished this book and it nonetheless remains a mystery to me — and that is probably why I love it so, so much.

My husband and I read a book together. (Wow, cool, cue massive applause.) This is of interest because Matt is pretty much a self-professed non-reader of books. But back in 2020, he declared he wanted to read an “Amy book” with me. It was awesome, and we read The Overstory by Richard Powers. Fast forward to 2024, and I said, “Let’s do that again!” I had started The Nix and was enjoying the breezy style. So I declared it so.

From Matt:

My boss at a college internship thought I was funny, and remarked that I should try standup comedy. I’m glad my ego didn’t take the bait. I’m the worst storyteller. Since then though, I’ve thought about how fun it would be if I were to jot down comical scenarios & observations that I’ve come across over the years in a notepad. I could workshop them with Amy, and have multiple hilarious bits at the ready when hanging with friends, or maybe even, one day, on stage. I never did that.

The blurb for or any quick synopsis of They Came Like Swallows — a tender book (almost, maybe, perhaps a novella?) by William Maxwell and first published in 1937 — will focus on Elizabeth (or Bess to her sister) as mother and wife and how her two sons, husband, and other family members and neighbors view her as “goodness” personified. That is true, and it’s a beautifully executed portrait of the nuances found in each of these relationships. The 1918 influenza informs the context. (So that feels kind of close, particularly when a character gripes about closed schools and churches.) …

More books like this — like Benediction, by Kent Haruf — please.
More books that:
* Rely on simplicity to convey complexity;
* Demonstrate the intricate connections and bonds that cause people to either lean toward each other or — at their worst — fractiously repel one another;
* Embody, well, embodiment. (I think “embody” is such an interesting word, just as I think “incorporate” is a fascinating word. What does it mean to have life’s truths played out via our physical bodies, our corporal selves?)

From Newsletter Issue No. 20:

“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.”  — Peggy Noonan

A book depository, a book wishing well, a land of forgotten books?

Here’s a supposedly click-bait-y article from The Atlantic — I mean, with Taylor Swift as the focal point, how can it not be? — that is actually a look at some of the pitfalls of the publishing industry as it stands today. And a booster of sorts for not just raiding your own books (both read and unread) but for checking out used bookstores as well.

Here’s Part 3 (of 4?) of a roundup of nonfiction I’ve read lately. Some of these I’ve read with an eye toward my own writing (style, subject, etc.), some were just for fun.

Something that I don’t think is talked about enough is the role of “admiration” in relationships. Often — if not always — the people we feel the most drawn to, the people who become the closest of friends, the people that we just feel good around … possess qualities that we admire and that we want to (even if just on a small level) try to emulate and replicate. Not in a creepy SWF stalker way, but in a gently magnetic way.

I finished Siân Hughes’ Booker long-listed debut novel early this morning after getting about 3 hours of sleep (oy), and the slog sped up and her vision became clear.

While I’m not so sure about this transitive peach logic, I adore the rest of this sentiment by Natalie Goldberg. (I love her books about writing so very much. I think it was a teacher who first introduced me to the classic Writing Down the Bones — and I’ve never looked back. This excerpt’s from Old Friend from Far Away.)

I wanted to say that this book hurt my feelings, with (what I thought was) that Nora Ephron phrase in mind. But actually, it turns out that the Nora Ephron book I was thinking about is called I Feel Bad About My Neck (and not something like My Neck Hurt My Feelings), so maybe I should say that I Feel Bad About This Book. I know that this is just a matter of preference because this is how I felt while living in Brooklyn.

There’s a lot in this book that touched a nerve for me (namely, bouncing around rentals with young children due to affordability and/or landlord nastiness…been there, done that in NYC and Dublin) and there’s a lot that may touch a nerve for others that I can’t necessarily relate to (navigating different cultures as a biracial person)…

I was a pool rat when I was a kid, and each decade since childhood, I’ve faithfully returned to the water — albeit often with yearrrrrs in between. Each reinstallation of the Swimming Routine summons (faux) existential angst about things like buying a new lock, new cap, new goggles; understanding the ins and outs of the location (like the time I was convinced I was “locked out” of the pool but it was just that I was a whole hour early for open swim…cue me banging on the door like a lunatic until I just decided to sit in the sauna 🫠🥵), wondering if muscle memory will take over. (It always does.)

“Make good choices!” is the de facto cry of parents. Which in one way is the same as my parents telling me to have a safe flight … of course we all know I have no choice in the matter. My point being: Telling your child to make a “good choice” really doesn’t actually do anything except make a parent feel better via a false sense of control because navigating “making good choices” is sort of this specter that hangs out in the ether throughout years and years of parenting. You hope that common sense just sort of rubs off on them as you model good choice-making, but it’s not like you can role-play or narrate every single situation that a child might encounter. (But of course we all know the general highlight reel…)

Margo’s Got Money Troubles…people adore it. Apple is adapting it for TV. The gist: Margo is a 19-year-old community college student who gets pregnant by a professor. She decides to keep the baby. Yes, it’s a take on power and how people — particularly young ones — can find themselves in tough situations, yadda yadda. The aforementioned analysis is very true, but it’s sort of like saying this about a book: “It’s trying to say that everyone is equal.” Or, “We should love each other.” We know!!! (Or rather: Most of us know.)