i loved this whole post and your thoughts on each piece of writing! i’m definitely in the headspace of trying to be consistent and diverse with my reading goals
i completely agree! i think sometimes i burn myself out if i stay in one style or genre for too long, and since college that’s sorta led me to just not read as much altogether — but i am falling back in love with reading and definitly need to pace myself/give myself some structure in my approach.
Agreed! “The goal of reading, for me, is to think more clearly, deeply, and (ideally) originally—and then write essays that contain those qualities. Sometimes that requires reading an entire book; sometimes it means reading just the specific chapter, or specific passages, that help me frame an argument.”
Celine! I adore this. You've inspired me to read much more "omnivorously." Re: guys who only read books to scale their startups (lol) I read/heard somewhere that business writing is akin to grunting. I don't want to knock it too hard but it can be ROUGH
thank you Catherine!! and yes, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to read widely and omnivorously but with discernment—there's insightful and interesting writing everywhere
there's SO much bad business writing, it's kind of amazing (also some really good business writing—but not enough??)
+1 for Balzac – his books are total romps. I'd def recommend Lost Illusions (part of La Comédie humain). The film adaption from 2021 is also fantastic.
And ++1 for diversifying your reading. I've fallen into the McCarthy/Hemingway/DFW/productivity dick-lit trap in the past and worked at breaking out of it. This year has been about trying more fantasy and sci-fi for me: in part because I've skipped over it, in part because all my friends love it and, you know, I love and respect them and want to know what they like. It's good for the soul.
"dick-lit," lmao…but yes, it's so easy to fall into a particular reading niche and just…never experience the pleasures of other forms of writing! my problem, historically, has been reading too much contemporary literature or too much "useful" writing (politics/econ/self-help), so it's really fun to be in a literary-fiction and canonical-novels period of my reading life
I used to read a LOT of fantasy/sci-fi when I was younger, less so now…but I really love Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem trilogy (there are particular scenes that really stand out in my memory as incredibly moving on an emotional level, AND conceptually/scientifically extraordinary) and I've been meaning to read Stanisław Lem at some point; he's the writer that all my sci-fi friends with good taste adore
there's definitely something special in experiencing something that your friends really LOVE; it's a nice way of getting closer to those friends and understanding their world!!
I love to hear your enjoyment of Ghost Pains bc I’ve been intending to read it! And other stories are killing it atm with their catalogue. The opening comments on how to read well are so true - it’s why I gave myself a classic reading goal for this year bc I hated how I’d gotten into a cycle of reading mostly contemporary lit since school. Since the arbitrary goal (infront of an audience which = healthy pressure to actually do it) I have noticed such huge change & growth in my reading! The way I think & approach my reading & writing has infinitely improved! I didn’t except this level of growth when I started it but looking back it seems maybe naive I didn’t see it coming. Long may it continue. It has me thinking of all sorts of ‘focuses’ I can try and bring in for making sure I’m keeping my reading and mind # fresh and as best as it can be.
Ps I also have the fear everytime I write a newsletter that this time it will be the one that is tragically and obviously dumb, will loose me all my subscribers and brandish me an idiot who can’t write. What a great club to be in!
I'm both happy and sad to hear that this is a familiar fear…but yes! nothing to do about the fear but press onwards and choose to be dumb in the moment so we can be (hopefully) more knowledgeable in the future
(and often we're not really that dumb in the moment, either!)
I love an arbitrary goal tbh…I do think of you as someone with excellent reading taste, and so it's comforting to hear that you too need these arbitrary goals to explore more!
I think there's something quite fun about deliberately engineering one's reading—I've had a similar experience as you in seeing surprising growth and change when doing so. A few years ago, I decided to focus on some topics I never studied in school (art history, econ, literary theory, political science) and sort of DIY an education in those areas. It's really exciting to feel that the growth has been tangible and that I can be a slightly-more-informed dilettante!
Your newsletters are always great reminders that I need to read more contemporary literature, this one especially so! Sometimes I just feel like there are so many great dead authors whose works I haven't read that reading contemporary authors would take my time away from that project—I guess part of me just feels like it's less risky to read a work that's been "vetted" by time, but as a writer myself, I do feel like I could benefit a ton from seeing what's new these days. Sometimes my writing tends towards the archaic, and I think that's why 😂
As an aside, I find it much easier to tolerate contemporary fiction than contemporary poetry. But now I want to check out Victoria Chang's Obit!
thank you for reading, Ramya! and I relate to that dilemma—sometimes I read a kind of mediocre contemporary novel and think…why did I read THIS when I could have been reading Flaubert (or a similar person who everyone says you MUST READ, &c)
but then the joy of finding a contemporary writer who speaks so directly to my current anxieties, the current moment, what life is like now…that's really special and makes it worth it! I really think Jessi Jezewska Stevens is like that (who wrote Ghost Pains)…and Lydia Davis…and both are short story writers, so easy to commit to!
I have only recently started reading poetry, tbh, and so I find myself gravitating to prose poems the most. Victoria Chang's Obit poems work really well for people who primarily read fiction/nonfiction imo—they have a candor and imagistic directness that feels more prose-y and familiar
Thanks for the shout-out! I LOVE My Night at Maud's and find Rohmer deeply comforting. Next I would recommend The Green Ray, or for something a little more bracing, La Collectioneuse.
oh, La Collectionneuse seems perfect for summer tbh! I do want to watch all of his moral tales eventually—there's something very peaceful about seeing different adults speak seriously and also flirtatiously about the lives they want, the loves they want…
I look forward to your recaps every month 🥹 I love how much care and thought you put into your reading ☺️ I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk about your writing process? I can never get myself to interrupt my reading to take notes because it takes me out of the book
thank you Sofia!! this is so kind, I really appreciate it
my writing process for these is extremely haphazard! I do use Goodreads and Letterboxd to track what I'm reading/watching, and mostly read library Kindle books—so I can save my highlights and refer back to them
and when I'm doing these writeups, I'll usually list out all the books I've read, go through any highlights I've saved + read a few other summaries or reviews of them + do a short writeup of the most memorable feeling/sensation/impression/scene
it's honestly been really good writing practice to do these recaps—when I started writing more formal book reviews, I realized how hard it was for me to just write the extremely basic plot-summary-ish bits (something like "this is a novel set in ___ featuring a protagonist who ___ and the plot is about ___ and the writing style is ___")…the recaps are nice because I'm basically practicing that skill for 10 or so works at a time, and I've definitely noticed myself getting a bit more decisive/faster as I write them!
I don't really take notes while reading (aside from ebook highlights), but I will often text friends after or write in my journal or something about some impressions (usually it's something like "I LOVED this book, there was an amazing scene where…" and not a complete review), and that helps keep some of the info in my memory, I think?
The successful business bros are out there reading real literature! In her interview with Tim Ferris, Claire Hughes Johnson speaks very lovingly of Virginia Woolf. A great moment for the literary girlbosses out there
You put into words a direction I was yearning for last winter after being disappointed with book after book listed on NYT bestsellers. Up until last winter, I rarely read “classics.” I went on a binge reading books written before 1950s by authors from all corners of the world. It was eye opening and filled my reading cup.
thank you Janet! and yes, I didn't really read a ton of classics until recently (the last few years)—it's amazing how good and deeply entertaining they can be, and also how exciting it is to read books from outside the US (where I grew up) or outside the English-speaking world
I love how you described it as filling your reading cup—I felt the same way, it was so invigorating to read some of these works
I'm only halfway through this (excellent as always) newsletter but had to stop at the James C. Scott obituary link to comment before I forget - he was an incredible writer, and 'Domination and the Arts of Resistance' changed my life a little bit, I think. I read it when I started my PhD and I come back and back to it as the submission date gets closer and closer. Truly rearranged how I think about power and resistance and the public/private spheres in oppressed societies.
thank you Raechel! I really appreciate your writing and of course appreciate everything the Cleveland Review is doing for LITERATURE and CRITICISM right now
Enjoyed Kwaidan much more than you did, apparently --certainly a film that is much more about visual and aural style creating a certain atmosphere than it is about plot. I just enjoy living in that eerie, hyperreal world for three hours.
For me, those beautifully un-memetic sets, those costumes, the color temperature and midcentury filmstock, the lighting and Toru Takemitsu's score combine to have that visceral, pre-verbal effect that you describe farther down in this post. With a handful of exceptions it just doesn't look like any other film.: a horror movie with bright pinks and salmon-orange sunsets.
I think my problem with Kwaidan is that I am always anticipating the next plot development when I watch a film—and if I feel I KNOW what is going to happen (and then it does happen), the film seems a bit rote! totally agree that there is a kind of eerie visual quality to it that is really very special, though
always look forward to your monthly roundups, thanks for the shout! i cracked my ARC of Lazy City last summer but decided it was more of a cold-weather read...might be time to dive back in!
thank you for reading!! also, this is an interesting question…what season certain books should be read in…I'm putting off reading any more Fosse because he seems like a seasonal-depression-season kind of writer
i loved this whole post and your thoughts on each piece of writing! i’m definitely in the headspace of trying to be consistent and diverse with my reading goals
thank you Miranda!! and the diversity also makes it very fun, imo (I honestly get SICK of BOOKS if I read the same thing over and over)
i completely agree! i think sometimes i burn myself out if i stay in one style or genre for too long, and since college that’s sorta led me to just not read as much altogether — but i am falling back in love with reading and definitly need to pace myself/give myself some structure in my approach.
Agreed! “The goal of reading, for me, is to think more clearly, deeply, and (ideally) originally—and then write essays that contain those qualities. Sometimes that requires reading an entire book; sometimes it means reading just the specific chapter, or specific passages, that help me frame an argument.”
thank you Lily!! I do think that reading inevitably improves writing (and also that reading is REQUIRED to become a decent writer!)
Celine! I adore this. You've inspired me to read much more "omnivorously." Re: guys who only read books to scale their startups (lol) I read/heard somewhere that business writing is akin to grunting. I don't want to knock it too hard but it can be ROUGH
thank you Catherine!! and yes, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to read widely and omnivorously but with discernment—there's insightful and interesting writing everywhere
there's SO much bad business writing, it's kind of amazing (also some really good business writing—but not enough??)
I try not to think too hard about all the books I'll just never have the time to read 😭
+1 for Balzac – his books are total romps. I'd def recommend Lost Illusions (part of La Comédie humain). The film adaption from 2021 is also fantastic.
And ++1 for diversifying your reading. I've fallen into the McCarthy/Hemingway/DFW/productivity dick-lit trap in the past and worked at breaking out of it. This year has been about trying more fantasy and sci-fi for me: in part because I've skipped over it, in part because all my friends love it and, you know, I love and respect them and want to know what they like. It's good for the soul.
"dick-lit," lmao…but yes, it's so easy to fall into a particular reading niche and just…never experience the pleasures of other forms of writing! my problem, historically, has been reading too much contemporary literature or too much "useful" writing (politics/econ/self-help), so it's really fun to be in a literary-fiction and canonical-novels period of my reading life
I used to read a LOT of fantasy/sci-fi when I was younger, less so now…but I really love Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem trilogy (there are particular scenes that really stand out in my memory as incredibly moving on an emotional level, AND conceptually/scientifically extraordinary) and I've been meaning to read Stanisław Lem at some point; he's the writer that all my sci-fi friends with good taste adore
there's definitely something special in experiencing something that your friends really LOVE; it's a nice way of getting closer to those friends and understanding their world!!
I love to hear your enjoyment of Ghost Pains bc I’ve been intending to read it! And other stories are killing it atm with their catalogue. The opening comments on how to read well are so true - it’s why I gave myself a classic reading goal for this year bc I hated how I’d gotten into a cycle of reading mostly contemporary lit since school. Since the arbitrary goal (infront of an audience which = healthy pressure to actually do it) I have noticed such huge change & growth in my reading! The way I think & approach my reading & writing has infinitely improved! I didn’t except this level of growth when I started it but looking back it seems maybe naive I didn’t see it coming. Long may it continue. It has me thinking of all sorts of ‘focuses’ I can try and bring in for making sure I’m keeping my reading and mind # fresh and as best as it can be.
Ps I also have the fear everytime I write a newsletter that this time it will be the one that is tragically and obviously dumb, will loose me all my subscribers and brandish me an idiot who can’t write. What a great club to be in!
I'm both happy and sad to hear that this is a familiar fear…but yes! nothing to do about the fear but press onwards and choose to be dumb in the moment so we can be (hopefully) more knowledgeable in the future
(and often we're not really that dumb in the moment, either!)
I love an arbitrary goal tbh…I do think of you as someone with excellent reading taste, and so it's comforting to hear that you too need these arbitrary goals to explore more!
I think there's something quite fun about deliberately engineering one's reading—I've had a similar experience as you in seeing surprising growth and change when doing so. A few years ago, I decided to focus on some topics I never studied in school (art history, econ, literary theory, political science) and sort of DIY an education in those areas. It's really exciting to feel that the growth has been tangible and that I can be a slightly-more-informed dilettante!
Your newsletters are always great reminders that I need to read more contemporary literature, this one especially so! Sometimes I just feel like there are so many great dead authors whose works I haven't read that reading contemporary authors would take my time away from that project—I guess part of me just feels like it's less risky to read a work that's been "vetted" by time, but as a writer myself, I do feel like I could benefit a ton from seeing what's new these days. Sometimes my writing tends towards the archaic, and I think that's why 😂
As an aside, I find it much easier to tolerate contemporary fiction than contemporary poetry. But now I want to check out Victoria Chang's Obit!
thank you for reading, Ramya! and I relate to that dilemma—sometimes I read a kind of mediocre contemporary novel and think…why did I read THIS when I could have been reading Flaubert (or a similar person who everyone says you MUST READ, &c)
but then the joy of finding a contemporary writer who speaks so directly to my current anxieties, the current moment, what life is like now…that's really special and makes it worth it! I really think Jessi Jezewska Stevens is like that (who wrote Ghost Pains)…and Lydia Davis…and both are short story writers, so easy to commit to!
I have only recently started reading poetry, tbh, and so I find myself gravitating to prose poems the most. Victoria Chang's Obit poems work really well for people who primarily read fiction/nonfiction imo—they have a candor and imagistic directness that feels more prose-y and familiar
Thanks for the shout-out! I LOVE My Night at Maud's and find Rohmer deeply comforting. Next I would recommend The Green Ray, or for something a little more bracing, La Collectioneuse.
oh, La Collectionneuse seems perfect for summer tbh! I do want to watch all of his moral tales eventually—there's something very peaceful about seeing different adults speak seriously and also flirtatiously about the lives they want, the loves they want…
Possibly his best film, in my opinion, that or Le Genou de Claire.
Wow this is so GOOD, excited to subscribe! I love to read widely but you’re showing me how it’s done lol. Goals
thank you Anna, this is such a kind comment!!
🤗📚
You must read Balzac’s epistolary novel “The Memoir of Two Wives”!!! Anna Karenina meets Madame Bovary.
As a side note, Flaubert was hilariously dismissive of Balzac commenting “what a man he would have been had he known how to write”.
thank you for this recommendation—I really love epistolary novels, so that's perfect (and also LOVED Anna K!)
the Flaubert-on-Balzac quote is also so funny—I love writers dissing other writers, and some of them (Nabokov…) were really quite invested in the enterprise https://lithub.com/the-meanest-things-vladimir-nabokov-said-about-other-writers/
I look forward to your recaps every month 🥹 I love how much care and thought you put into your reading ☺️ I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk about your writing process? I can never get myself to interrupt my reading to take notes because it takes me out of the book
thank you Sofia!! this is so kind, I really appreciate it
my writing process for these is extremely haphazard! I do use Goodreads and Letterboxd to track what I'm reading/watching, and mostly read library Kindle books—so I can save my highlights and refer back to them
and when I'm doing these writeups, I'll usually list out all the books I've read, go through any highlights I've saved + read a few other summaries or reviews of them + do a short writeup of the most memorable feeling/sensation/impression/scene
it's honestly been really good writing practice to do these recaps—when I started writing more formal book reviews, I realized how hard it was for me to just write the extremely basic plot-summary-ish bits (something like "this is a novel set in ___ featuring a protagonist who ___ and the plot is about ___ and the writing style is ___")…the recaps are nice because I'm basically practicing that skill for 10 or so works at a time, and I've definitely noticed myself getting a bit more decisive/faster as I write them!
I don't really take notes while reading (aside from ebook highlights), but I will often text friends after or write in my journal or something about some impressions (usually it's something like "I LOVED this book, there was an amazing scene where…" and not a complete review), and that helps keep some of the info in my memory, I think?
thanks for asking and thank you for reading 💌
The successful business bros are out there reading real literature! In her interview with Tim Ferris, Claire Hughes Johnson speaks very lovingly of Virginia Woolf. A great moment for the literary girlbosses out there
so true…Woolf is an icon to us all…
You put into words a direction I was yearning for last winter after being disappointed with book after book listed on NYT bestsellers. Up until last winter, I rarely read “classics.” I went on a binge reading books written before 1950s by authors from all corners of the world. It was eye opening and filled my reading cup.
thank you Janet! and yes, I didn't really read a ton of classics until recently (the last few years)—it's amazing how good and deeply entertaining they can be, and also how exciting it is to read books from outside the US (where I grew up) or outside the English-speaking world
I love how you described it as filling your reading cup—I felt the same way, it was so invigorating to read some of these works
I'm only halfway through this (excellent as always) newsletter but had to stop at the James C. Scott obituary link to comment before I forget - he was an incredible writer, and 'Domination and the Arts of Resistance' changed my life a little bit, I think. I read it when I started my PhD and I come back and back to it as the submission date gets closer and closer. Truly rearranged how I think about power and resistance and the public/private spheres in oppressed societies.
ahh, thank you for mentioning this! Domination and the Arts of Resistance looks really fascinating—I was thinking of reading Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance and wonder if the 2 books would pair together well? (I read this tiny thing by Weiss earlier this year and really wanted more of his thoughts https://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-abstract/1/2/20/23354/The-Necessary-Decision-Ten-Working-Theses-of-an)
it's really special to find writers who have a formative experience on you as a thinker AND you as a thinker working on a particular project!
What a generous roundup! So many recs and such rich thoughts accompanying them. And thanks for the shoutout, love the CRB support!
thank you Raechel! I really appreciate your writing and of course appreciate everything the Cleveland Review is doing for LITERATURE and CRITICISM right now
Enjoyed Kwaidan much more than you did, apparently --certainly a film that is much more about visual and aural style creating a certain atmosphere than it is about plot. I just enjoy living in that eerie, hyperreal world for three hours.
For me, those beautifully un-memetic sets, those costumes, the color temperature and midcentury filmstock, the lighting and Toru Takemitsu's score combine to have that visceral, pre-verbal effect that you describe farther down in this post. With a handful of exceptions it just doesn't look like any other film.: a horror movie with bright pinks and salmon-orange sunsets.
I think my problem with Kwaidan is that I am always anticipating the next plot development when I watch a film—and if I feel I KNOW what is going to happen (and then it does happen), the film seems a bit rote! totally agree that there is a kind of eerie visual quality to it that is really very special, though
always look forward to your monthly roundups, thanks for the shout! i cracked my ARC of Lazy City last summer but decided it was more of a cold-weather read...might be time to dive back in!
thank you for reading!! also, this is an interesting question…what season certain books should be read in…I'm putting off reading any more Fosse because he seems like a seasonal-depression-season kind of writer