What I was reading in May

Started
Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew Bose
Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
Silent House, Orhan Pamuk

Finished
Too Much and Not the Mood, Chew Bose

May was a fitful month. I had a hard time settling into reading and felt like I was reading everything poorly. I had a time finding my way into anything I picked up, until Too Much and Not the Mood.  Chew-Bose’s book is a gift – it felt like meeting someone for the first time and knowing immediately you’re going to get along so well. What Anne Shirley would call “kindred spirits”. A better echo, in some ways, than Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. I feel about Too Much the way a lot of friends feel about Girls or Broad City – voices of an era...or voices of me! Chew-Bose’s meditations on nook people and her preoccupation with bright sidewalk glare felt much more my speed, my world of people.

Radical Hope – it’s still feeling like a necessary thing. I’m still kind of limping along, feeling a bit burned out on despair. I could use some hope, and these letters delivered it, but I couldn't push through to finish the collection. It might have been too much to hope for, given how emotional letters can be, and particularly those written across generations. 

I also had the chance to see a dress rehearsal of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte while back in New York for a weekend. That felt like a gift too. I mean, in a practical sense it was, from my dad, but in a larger cultural sense too. What a gift to go to see a performance, what a gift for it to be that performance.