What I'm reading this month (...and last month)

January

Finished
Citizen, Claudia Rankine
All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister

February

Started
Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
1968: The Year that Rocked the World, Mark Kurlansky
Glass House, Brian Alexander
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

Finished Field Notes from a Catastrophe

I hadn't realized my February reading was so restless. I'm still figuring out how to make reading a more regular part of my life, so that may be part of it-- trying to walk the line between glut and avoidance. Part of it too, surely, is trying to carve out the time for books like Citizen and Between the World and Me, books that have been on my list for a while, books that I start and immediately realize should be read with full attention, and not, say, before bed or on the elliptical at gym, two places where I've done much of my reading over the last year.

(I like reading at the gym, although I'm also a bit ashamed of it. I know that I'm probably working about as hard as I would be if I was watching television, and that I work out longer when I read than when I listen to music, even if it's at a lower intensity, and that above all, if I like doing it and it's not hurting anyone at the gym, then it's fine -- but still the shame remains.)

I started Citizen during the last few days of 2016 and find myself coming back to it again and again. It's on my list to re-read. I knew Citizen was poetry, going in, but hadn't read enough about it to be prepared for the ways that Rankine plays with form or how effectively. I had heard the buzz, but now that I've read it, really and truly, Citizen is vital and necessary and something to return to in the coming months and years.

I had intended to read All the Single Ladies in 2016, but wound up locked on a waitlist from last fall until this January and by the time it arrived I had forgotten I had put a hold on it at all. I started reading it on the elliptical at the gym on a Friday night and wound up frantically pedaling and texting a friend who had recently read it, desperate to convey my excitement at hearing a stranger express the same disappointment I had felt as a girl when all the women I read about wound up married and somehow diminished. I spent the next three Friday (...and Saturday) evenings at the gym pedaling away and reading about single women in American history -- really, an ideal night. It was such a relief to read stories of women forming deep, complicated, fulfilling friendships with other women and have those relationships be presented as valuable and normal instead of aberrant or a poor substitute for male attention.

I spent the rest of January kind of messing around with history -- beginning to re-read both the Zinn and the Kurlansky, ping-ponging back and forth between the two and trying to decide if I wanted to start from the beginning of this country's bloody history or jump into just one bloody year whose events feel fairly resonant right now. I ultimately decided to start from the beginning, but was interrupted by the arrival of a few library books.

I also dipped my toes into Carson's Silent Spring (a book I was supposed to read in high school but never did) and then had to return it to the library before I made much progress at all. From what I can tell there are only 2 copies in circulation in Chicago, and I admit, I thought I'd be the only one looking to dive into history in this particular way, but it looks like others are thinking about the likelihood of having to rebuild in the coming years and are also looking for guidance from those who helped push for the (now-threatened) legislation in the first place. Well, good.

Losing out on Silent Spring brought me to Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a re-working of 3 essays Kolbert wrote for The New Yorker in 2005 about climate change. 10 years out and it's a chilling read. I had thought it was a more recent book when I requested it from the library (Kolbert's Sixth Extinction, maybe? Or some disaster novel set in California that I clearly don't remember well enough to know much about), but I was glad that this was what I wound up with. While I was reading about researchers jamming a boat into an ice floe to study it and discovering that it was melting too fast for them to collect all of the measurements they expected to in 2004, the New York Times published an article about a crack in an antarctic ice shelf that's been growing rapidly since 2014, so it all felt really timely and really sobering and also really hopeless.

As for books in progress right now, as I mentioned, Between the World and Me is something I want to give my full attention to, which requires some carving of time in the evening or weekend. I'm still not great at this, but the rewards of spending real time and attention on this book make me want to improve and quickly.

Glass House is also hitting close to home and is demonstrating my complete ignorance around high finance and private equity. It's also making clear how damaging that ignorance can be.

...looking ahead to March, I'd like to be able to find a book to read before bed that isn't about economic disaster, environmental disaster, and/or crushing systemic injustice. That reading is vital and it's what's been missing, but it's not exactly great bedtime reading. 

What I was reading in 2016

This is perfunctory-- a recording of what I read last year so I can get into details about what I'm reading this year. 

January
Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran-Foer
The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison
The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Hillary Chute

February
--

March
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
Embroideries, Marjane Satrapi

April 
This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki
Patience, Daniel Clowes

May
In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larsson
The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante
Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
Handbook, Kevin Budnik

June
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante
Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit

July
--

August
Summerland, Michael Chabon
Gratitude, Oliver Sacks
Ten Years in the Tub, Nick Hornby

September
(1599 - Abandoned)

October
The Quieting

November
Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson
The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli

December
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing
The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante
Like Life, Lorrie Moore

unfinished/still working on
The Third Coast, Thomas Dyja
And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts

(I set a goal of reading two books a month last year and looking back at this list now, I see that I failed to meet that goal a few times, and that I exceeded it others. I see that I counted graphic novels and a poetry chapbook, which is reassuring.)

Read read read read read read

Ready, set, word vomit. I’m currently reading Ten Years in the Tub, a compilation of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer. I’m barreling towards the end of the decade’s worth of columns, 50 pages from the end now, and pushing ahead with this sort of urgency and nervousness, because I’ve set myself the goal of READING MORE and READING AT LEAST ONE BOOK A MONTH and have failed multiple times this year already, and it’s making me nervous.

Read read read read read read read

My ‘homework’ this week is to read Gloria Anzaldua’s excerpt in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is from Borderlands/La Frontera. Specifically “A New Mestiza” (or part of it).

It’s my homework because I’m trying to find pleasure in things again, because I selected this as something good to reach toward, something that would fill a particular hunger, something that I am afraid of.

So I’m reading around it, circling around and around until I’m prepared to drop into it.

Anyway, there’s this point in one of Hornby’s earliest columns where he reflects on reading, (actually, it’s the first sentence of the first column, so there you go. I don’t know why I thought it was a few columns in, a sort of awakening of the purpose of the column itself. Apparently not everyone tumbles into projects without quite knowing their purpose or structure the way I do.) “…about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it’s going badly, when books don’t stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you’d rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph or reread the last one for the tenth time ” (25).

For the past two and a half years, reading has pretty much been going badly, moving in fits and starts, when it moves, it if moves at all. There was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Great Bridge and then part of Devil in the White City (abandoned because I didn’t particularly want to read about women being dismembered, I wanted to read about figuring out how to build a skyscraper) and then just darkness, really. I don’t really remember what I read in between, although I remember reading Euphoria in huge gulping sections at an airport, on the plane, on the bus back from my home airport, and then Never Have I Ever in a similar way on a different trip. I remember reading Kavalier and Clay and wanting to thrust it into the hands of everyone I’d ever known, and that I started Revolutionary Road, but it was so bleak that it almost couldn’t be bourne … there was The Department of Speculation, which I loved but know I’ll have to reread if I hope to retain any of it, and All My Puny Sorrows which I loved so deeply too, which put Miriam Towes on my map, someone to return to, someone who speaks the same language. I started The Third Coast and On Photography, but had to return them both to the library too soon, but that was this year, so put a pin in that. I read Station Eleven at the end of last year, in dollops, horrified and mesmerized, and that sacrificial plane still haunts me. The year I moved into the first apartment of my own, I read Wild and most of Tiny Beautiful Things.

So it turns out I do remember – I really remember—what I read between the first month of post-college life and now. I remember even if I’m embarrassed at the paltry list. I remember because I hold reading in such a particular position in relation to myself. Reading is how I made my way through the world when I was young, and how I hid from it when I was teen-aged, and now, as an adult, I long for the security I got from reading – but am suddenly slightly fearful, as if maybe it was all a hoax, and I never learned anything from books at all.

So I charged headlong into it this year, resolving to read more, making a promise to read at least one (but really two) books a month, making a list to keep track, and setting up a tally in my brain, ready to tip everything into guilt halfway through any given month. In some ways, this felt like a promise to read myself back to myself…but in others it felt like tricking myself into becoming a shadow of someone I used to be.

And so I’ve settled, somewhere near the bottom third of the year, half keeping up with my resolution, half padding the list with small collections of essays and graphic novels and memoirs. I’ve been plugging away at Ten Years in the Tub for 3 months now really, it’s absurd to keep reading this book about reading other books. But I take a kind of comfort in it. It’s so passive that there aren’t any stakes at all. I can watch someone doing a thing I love without having to commit to doing that thing I love. I can read about someone else’s reading and not have to stake any of my time, or personality, or decision making on that activity myself.

Although…there’s an undeniable joy in reading someone who loves reading. In hearing again and again arguments about the value of spending time with books you’re  enjoying instead of books the cool people say you should be enjoying. There’s a pleasure in encountering the same rallying cry – love what you love, and don’t be ashamed// disenchantment is not cool – across ten years of a project.

I finished Ten Years in the Tub last night, a little after midnight. I’m going to fudge the line a bit and claim it as an August read, even if it was read in June and July too. Even if technically it was September when I crossed that finish line.

Two books came in to the library, and I’ll pick them up this week, or this weekend. I’ll read that essay tonight and walk into tomorrow – feeling what? Accomplished? Absurd? Sad that things have shrunk so small? Proud? Embarrassed?

I’ll see when I get there.