Sifting through text messages, emails, and the letters scattered around my office, I pieced together a calendar of books and the people who made them matter.
All books are really two books: a first book containing characters and complications that make them do things, and a second book about that first book.
All of us are viewing but one face of the cultural sphere. The one I see will always be different from yours, but damned if I won't try to show it to you.
I spent a lot of time rereading the same books I used to sneak into my desk back in old days. We don’t need to feel apologetic about loving these books.
The experience of suddenly gaining new ears for an author is one I can perhaps best compare to the effortless French fluency I sometimes achieve in dreams.
I like how her poems pull me here and there, and leave me elsewhere. “What’s a life for?” she asks, mid-poem. Let’s read and figure it out. Or just wander.
2019 was bad in many ways but the reading was good. If anything, that’s what I’ll take into 2020. More books and writing. Less indecision and trepidation.
Is it sacrosanct to so gleefully abandon a bad book in an airport? I will not mention them here because I am incapable of speaking briefly on bad books.
This year, a joyful change: from the skittish chapter-hopping of the scholar put to market to the languid page-turning of a person who puts pleasure first.
It doesn’t make the writing any less hard but it makes me feel less alone, like I’m part of this wonderful group of people whose deepest loves are literary.
The feeling was like those days when fear for a sick friend leaves you unable to eat, afraid any action could disturb some delicate superstitious balance.