End-of-year anxiety season is upon us, my friends, and us book nerds are not exempt. Once the Big Book Awards are announced, it’s all Best Of… lists, and with that, all bets are off. You work all year on minding your own business, and the moment the lists start popping up, the anxiety begins to creep in. Why didn’t I read more?! Why didn’t I read the “right” books?! What happened to all those good intentions // personal syllabi, etc.?!

In an effort to preempt my own anxiety, I have been reflecting on how to finish the reading year STRONG. With two months left of 2026, there is still plenty of time to get my head on straight, allow myself a minor freakout, recalibrate, and… if I do this right, there’s a chance that 2026 could become one of my favorite reading years in recent memory.

Today, I’m sharing a little of my thought process as I work through all this. AND, I’ve called upon some friends to check in and see how they’re doing, so I can feel supported and inspired by how they’re approaching their own end-of-year reading.

I am very pleased with myself for setting GOOD goals for myself in January. I knew not to pick a number to reach (guys, truly, we don’t do that anymore) AND — more importantly — I built goals that were an evolution of my reading in 2025. This year was never meant to be a reinvention. I really loved what I read last year and started 2026 basically wishing for more.

So, a lot of my reading was focused around works by authors I love — Constance Debre, Vigdis Hjorth, Annie Ernaux — OR, works by my favorite authors’ authors (I don’t know if you guys have heard me mention … but I really love Claire-Louise Bennett). This has been incredibly helpful because I never experienced decision paralysis AND all of the pages have felt like they belonged together somehow. The reading has felt quite additive. 10/10 recommend.

Another reading goal that has progressed to my satisfaction was my effort to read more books set in Eastern Europe and/or during the Cold War and working through how young, bright people handled their professional ambitions in that period. This body of reading is related to my own writing project and it has been really satisfying to explore.

I read SOME poetry in 2026. Most notably, I got over myself and finally started reading Carson… which, I must say, was perfect timing on my part. However, I was in such a frazzled state of mind for so much of the year that I honestly could not manage more. So, that’s my one goal that I am kind of sad about not quite hitting. BUT, because I did so well in those other two and because I did make SOME progress on the poetry front, I don’t care so much that I didn’t finish Middlemarch (please don’t hate me) and, quite frankly, forgot about my Working Class Writers project (it really IS such a good project).

All in all, not bad. The one learning that I do want to share is that having a couple of well defined reading projects that can anchor you is a great way to keep reading when you don’t have the time and energy to do all the nerdy things that you would normally do to research and uncover new things to read.

I have a number of specific books that I would like to get to before the end of the year and I talk about a bunch of them in this little video I made: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, more Fleur Jaeggy and more Anne Carson because she is THE BEST.

However, I am most excited about trying to finish up War and Peace before the year is over. I had such an incredible experience reading Anna Karenina around this time last year… and I felt so proud of myself being able to say, “In 2025, I read Anna Karenina”... that I am really looking forward to another BIG milestone read like that.

In fact, if I had to give one tip for how to finish the year strong… it would be this: pause and think about the ONE book that you are just dying to read and make reading it your goal. Just that one. Best case scenario, you read it and it inspires you to read more. Worst case scenario, the holidays take over and you only have time to read just one book… but even the worst case scenario is an AMAZING outcome, because the book is your DREAM book.

I reached out to a bunch of friends and asked them three questions: 1) How are you feeling about your reading year so far? 2) What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read? And 3) Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

Initially, I thought I would condense the responses but I felt so much comfort in reading them that I am sharing in full. I know that it shouldn’t be surprising, but still, I appreciated how differently different readers approach their reading and it feels so inspiring to read all this but ultimately, what matters is to retreat into your own world and make the choices that make sense for you in your current season of life.

📚 Cams // Cams Campbell Reads

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

I feel GREAT! The more I study Russian classics, the more my passion for them grows. It feels like it’s a body of literature that I will never exhaust. This is the first year I really feel I’ve found my groove in how I want to read, by which I mean reading with purpose and eschewing other things to make room for it. Doctor Zhivago and The White Guard had both been on my shelf for decades. Reading them for my channel was very rewarding. Completing Moby-Dick was another incredibly rewarding experience. My reread of The Lord of the Rings, followed by a first read of The Silmarillion over the summer, was just bliss. I bought a new garden chair this year and spent a lot of time sitting under the privet hedge with those books. Hosting slow reads is work I love, but it’s still work, and my AuDHD can derail me. I’m doing okay. I’ve shown myself that I can complete these projects, so there’s no reason why I should fail with the current ones! I’m also close to finishing War and Peace IN RUSSIAN! I’ve been reading my Briggs translation every day with Simon Haisell, then listening to the Russian audiobook. I’m letting it flow through me, rather than beating myself up for my poor comprehension. And d’you know what? My comprehension has come on in leaps and bounds!

The one issue I would like to address is finding a balance between deep, slow reads for my channel and reading literary and genre fiction for myself. Oh, and more poetry. I have read some poetry this year, but not as much as I would like.

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

A BIG success for me would simply be having kept up with the slow reads that I’m hosting right now. I hold my TBR loosely, so I’m okay with not completing it — I almost certainly won’t! TBRs are aspirational, right? I am glad, however, to have picked up a Dickens novel. In 2024 I set myself a goal of reading one Dickens novel a year. By September this year I still hadn’t picked one up. Then a friend of mine on Substack announced a slow read of David Copperfield to run through till March 2027, so I jumped in. It’s not quite a 2026 goal, but close enough!

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

It’s not a competition. The books will wait. But other things do compete for our time. If you are disappointed because you haven’t read as much as you would have liked, think about what you might replace with reading. For me, it’s movies and TV. I’d also recommend trying audiobooks if you haven’t already—playing a favourite audiobook while doing chores feels like a life hack, and sometimes the narrator can really bring a book to life! Frank Muller did that for me with Moby-Dick!

📚 Natalie // Flights Library

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

It’s been difficult to judge how this year has been for my reading life, mainly because this is the year I started creating short-form videos and other media about reading. It turns out that reading and talking about what you’re reading in a way that excites people are two very different skills. Both take tremendous amounts of time and energy for me, especially because of how deeply I like to engage with literature.

On one hand, I’m really pleased with my reading life this year: not only have I connected with other like-minded readers, but publicly sharing what I’m reading has also helped me develop my thinking around my interests, leading me to more books I might not have found or read otherwise.

However, creating this media has also meant I’ve had less time to read than I’d like, and my backlist of titles that I want to read has grown more rapidly than ever before. Something new I’ve been thinking about on my reading journey this year is how to be a smarter reader -- specifically, can I read in a way that makes it easier to recall these observations and analyses when creating content about them?

But overall, I’m delighted by it -- I’ve never felt more in tune with my curiosities and interests.

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

A few years ago, I set an annual end-of-year reading goal: to read a big, classic work of literature during the week-long break I get from my office job during the holidays. So far, I’ve read Anna Karenina and Brothers Karamazov in past years, and this year I’m torn between War and Peace, or The Magic Mountain. If I can continue this personal reading goal, I’ll consider this year a resounding success.

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

I think it depends on why a reader feels disappointed; I imagine it might be related to not reading a certain number of books, or comparing their reading life with another reader’s. If that is the case, I encourage my fellow reader to ask themselves what they’d like to get out of their reading life. I’ve personally found that the more in tune I am with my curiosity and interests, and how those shape what I’d like to read, the less relevant the question of being disappointed with my reading life becomes.

📚 Martha // Martha’s Monthly

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

Truthfully a little disappointed. This year has been the first time in a long time that I have been reading much, much less. Reading is not at all about tracking the numbers, but when you have been reading at a very consistent rate for over five years, you absolutely do notice when that changes! I know I am reading less for good reasons - I’m busier, working harder on establishing a new career and trying new things - but I do miss the volume I used to have! I have spent a lot of time this year grieving my reading life, and coming to terms with the fact it looks a little different right now.

But despite all of that I am pleased I have managed to adapt my reading life around all the new things I have been doing. I still absolutely adore reading, work hard on making time for it, manage to read excellent books and satisfy all my reading desires, which is ultimately all that matters!

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

At the beginning of the year, when I thought I would continue to maintain the same reading pace, I did set reading goals. These goals were not about numbers, but about specific books and objectives (eg read more translated books from Asia). Frankly I have not once revisited them because as soon as I hit a slump in January (almost immediately after I set them) I knew myself and those goals weren’t meant to be this year. I’m ok with that. It’s good to be ambitious even if it doesn’t happen.

I don’t have any specific reading goals I am trying to meet before the end of the year, but I do want to prioritise reading some big books! Particularly, ‘Wolves of Eternity’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard, ‘Lies and Society’ by Elsa Morante and ‘The Song of Stork and Dromedary’ by Anjet Daanje. If I read 2 out of 3 of these, I would consider 2026 a big success because it is always so easy to put off reading the big books - especially when you’re busy!

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

Reading is like anything in life, it is constantly changing. The wonderful thing about it is that it is always there for you. Reading phases come and go, and it doesn’t mean you’re any ‘less’ of a reader if you’re in a phase of not reading much right now! If this is you right now, my tip is to not fight it, which was the best piece of advice I got this year from Traci and Ezra. Giving my reading space and time held enormously this year.

If you’re disappointed in what you’re specifically reading, I would advise you to try and interrogate what it is you want from your reading life. Maybe what you want out of your reading life has changed, so you might need to check in with yourself. It’s okay to change your mind on what you want to read. Frankly, that’s the spice of life!

📚 Kiran // zafarnama by kiran gill

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

For most of this year, I was feeling really disappointed by my reading life. I wasn’t reading as much and when I was reading, nothing was exciting me. It’s only in the last two or three months that things have changed and I’m feeling invigorated by literature.

At this current moment: I’m reading multiple books, both fiction and nonfiction, at once, which is something I find exhilarating as it allows me to make connections across books and time periods and, more importantly, I’m following my curiosities, and that looks like: reading about Genghis Khan, getting my hands on the Gwendoline Riley novels that have not been published in the U.S., and picking up books I know nothing about, such as A Tale Unmasked by Lady Nijo. (The lady in question was a Japanese noblewoman and an accomplished poet who wrote about her experiences as a concubine to Emperor Go-Fukakusa before becoming a wandering Buddhist nun. I was obsessed!!)

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading?
Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

This year, the only reading goal I set was to read 100 books and though I normally accomplish this goal… I’m slacking! As of writing this, I’m sitting at 60 books and I’m in no rush to read 40 more books before the year is up (imagine lol!).

However, I did make a list of books I’d like to read before the end of the year and I would feel accomplished if I tackled a few of those. I just picked up and devoured A Working Mother by Agnes Owen and I need to read another book by this brilliant Scottish woman before the year ends!! I’d also like to get back into the practice of reading a poem a day.

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

I think the question to ask is: why are you feeling disappointed by your reading life? Have you encountered too many duds? Do you not have enough time? Are you not in the headspace to read? Each question has a different solution.

If you’ve read too many dull books, go re-read a favorite or pick up a backlist book from an author you love. If you don’t have enough time because of life responsibilities, give yourself grace. If you don’t have enough time because you’re scrolling too much… throw your phone in the ocean! Or, get a Brick device and swap that scrolling time with reading. (If you don’t want to get a Brick device, try putting your phone physically away - ideally somewhere random. A few weeks ago, I put my phone in the fridge and forgot about it.) If you’re not in the headspace to read, pick up a beloved book from your childhood or a comic novel.

My final piece of advice… Go to your bookshelf and pick up whatever book is calling to you. Forget about the books people are talking about on the Internet! Forget about the GoodReads reviews! Surprise yourself.

📚 Terrell // The Half Marathoner

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

You know, this is such a great question and one I’ve never actually thought of – I tend to look at my reading life a book at a time; I’m really only focused on what’s right in front of me, at any one particular moment. So, I’ve just finished The Outsiders because I wanted to read the same book my 13-year-old is reading in school right now, while I’ve also just started East of Eden because I saw that Netflix has a new series based on it, which I’d like to see because I love being part of cultural events, even in a small way.

When I look back over the year, there are things I feel good about – my reads ranged from big, sprawling books like Jill Lepore’s These Truths to Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride to Amran Gowani’s Leverage to Tove Danovich’s Under the Henfluence to Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, which I adored. So, as you can see, I really go all over the place. 🙂

At the same time, I have half-finished books and others I’ve bought but are still sitting on my bedside table (and piled up on the floor right next to it). Some I’ve tried, gave up on, then tried again… I don’t feel great about that. But that’s part of a reading life too, isn’t it?

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

One really big reading goal I have, that I don’t know if I’ll ever actually complete but still is fun to think about, is reading all of Robert Caro’s work – everything from The Power Broker to his four volumes to date in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. I’m completely fascinated by Johnson and what he was able to accomplish, especially in the areas of civil rights and social programs, before the Vietnam War ultimately consumed his presidency. It’ll be extremely hard to finish those before the end of 2026, though. Maybe I’ll put them on my 2027 and 2028 lists!

I’d also like to add Lepore’s follow-up to These Truths, which is called We The People, a book about the history of the Constitution. And I’d also like to add more philosophical fiction – fiction that really reaches for something big, like The Brothers Karamazov (which I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read!) and novels like that. I’m inspired whenever an author has ambition, when they aim to create something beyond what they think they can.

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

The one thing I’d recommend is to pick up and read books you’re truly, honestly enthusiastic about – don’t read anything just because you think you ought to, or because everyone else is reading it. I remember hearing something the famed photographer Richard Avedon said once, that in his career, what he had tried to do was “follow my enthusiasms,” to go where his heart was truly calling him to go.

So if your heart is telling you to read steamy romance novels rather than weighty historical nonfiction, by all means embrace the steam! And if you love John Grisham but it feels a little square because everyone else is reading Gabrielle Zevin, by all means stick with the Grisham thrillers. I think you’ll only really get something out of reading if you’re truly absorbed by it, which means you need to at least like it a lot. Trying to read something you don’t like is like trying to eat something you can’t stand – you’ll only do it through gritted teeth, and even if you choke it down you’ll promise yourself never to do it again.

You want your reading life to be full of wonders, I think. And you’re the person who gets to decide what’s wonderful to you.

📚 Becca // Bookstack

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

This has been a very exciting reading year for me! After a couple of disappointing years where quantity won out over quality, I decided to stop counting the number of books I read and concentrate on reading more intentionally. This led me to create specific reading projects, make book lists accordingly, and follow the new ideas that arose from my reading (hello reading rabbit holes!) I created a Substack devoted to books and literary life, and started writing longer form essays about women writers and artists.

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

My goal for the rest of this year is to finish a biographical study of artist Georgia O’Keefe, and then write an article for Substack about her. I’m reading a very chunky biography by Roxana Robinson as well as three other supportive books about her work and her creative style. Also planning to re-read Sense and Sensibility (before seeing the new movie version), and will study a volume of poetry by Sharon Olds. Also on the 2026 reading list is Partita, Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel. Will I do it?? Who knows. Now that I see it all written it down in black and white, I’ve scared myself! But I’ll still consider 2026 a successful year of reading.

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

My advice to readers is to follow your interests and your heart. You don’t always have to love what everyone else loves! Choose the authors and genres you enjoy and you’ll want to read more. And give yourself grace – if you don’t finish everything on your list, the books will wait. I’ve just been through a period of time when nothing I read seemed interesting or well written. I was churning out the reading so I could rack up my Goodreads Reading Challenge Numbers. For 2026 I stopped caring about that, and it helped me choose my books much more deliberately. I went back and re-read some of my favorite authors from the past, and it was like meeting up with old friends. Creating different reading projects based on my interest in a subject has increased my excitement around reading. Also meeting so many interesting people writing about reading on Substack – like you, Petya! – has been very inspiring.

I’m seventy years old, and my philosophy is that I no longer have time in my life to read books that don’t speak to my soul!

📚 Adhithya // Cluttered Papers

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

I’m feeling great about my reading year, I read so many books that I wanted to read and many that I was surprised by. As a writer, I wanted to read more actively this year like a self structured study, and I don’t know if I’ve achieved what I set out to, but it helped me enjoy the activity of reading much more. I also started attending a book club and it was mind expanding to see how different people could perceive and appreciate the same book in many different ways. I have a mild feeling that I’ve pushed myself too hard because I’m feeling a bit exhausted to be honest.

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

I have one project that I set for myself this year — to understand the short story form. I approached this by using a guide book, The Lonely Voice by Frank O’Connor, which is a study of the short story form. Each chapter lists and discusses stories by one great author, like Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, etc. I set myself the project of reading every short story listed in the book, writing down my observations, and comparing them with O’Connor’s analysis. I have read 7 out of 11 chapters, covering over 200 short stories, and I have learned so much! I appreciated O’Connor’s insights, but I also got a feel for what matters to me in short stories and where I differ from him. It helped me shape my own perspective about the form. It also resulted in my essay about Chekhov’s life and work which helped me connect with so many wonderful people who liked the article (including you!).

I would be glad if I could complete the project by reading the remaining chapters and short stories before the year ends. But regardless, I’m quite happy with what I got out of it. And I also know that this is merely scratching the surface, because there are so many more fantastic short story writers not mentioned or discussed in the book whose work I’m eager to check out!

I am also reading the Booker Prize shortlist and reviewing each book. I’ve scheduled it in such a way that I can complete the series before the prize is announced. I’m on the fifth book out of six, and I’ll be happy if I can complete the project. Just a small challenge I set for myself, and I’m enjoying it a lot.

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

Yeah, a few. First, it’s okay to read however little you can, whenever, as long as you enjoy it. You don’t need to beat yourself up for not keeping a reading habit as long as you enjoy the moments you do read.

Second, if I’m in a slump, it’s almost always because I’m trying to read something I think I’m supposed to read instead of something I enjoy reading. At such times I read something that just feels fun, and that helps me get back into the groove. It’s great to have reading goals, but it’s always easier to stack goals when you’re already moving, and it’s easier to get moving when you find it fun.

Third, it’s okay to abandon books! At any stage. That’s time you could spend on a book you like instead. And you can always return if you change your mind.

📚 Ucheoma // Ucheoma’s Writing Syllabus

How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

I read like I’ve never read in my life this year because I was writing my PhD qualifying exams. I feel so educated!

What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

I have already met my reading goals because I passed my exams. I think I can officially retire for the year. My brain needs to rest.

Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

The year is almost over. Make your reading list manageable. If you read just two books before the year ends, you have done a great job. Prepare to go again in 2027.

I hope reading through all these different perspectives has made you feel a little less anxious about your own reading year and maybe even inspired you to make some plans for these final two months. Or perhaps to abandon some plans altogether!

🤓 Let’s talk about where we are and what we want from the rest of 2026.

• How are you feeling about your reading year so far?

• What would it take to make 2026 a BIG success in terms of reading? Are you working towards specific reading goals you are trying to meet? Books trying to read?

• Any tips for readers who are feeling disappointed by their reading life right now?

One of the more annoying paradoxes of contemporary life is that while we have more leisure time than any generation in history, we somehow feel less free. So much of our unscheduled time comes in small chunks throughout the day, and because those little pockets feel insignificant, we end up wasting them scrolling. Happiness researchers call these precious pockets of free time TIME CONFETTI and recommend using them wisely to increase our happiness and contentment. For me, reading is my go-to time confetti activity.

It’s become a tradition in our community for me to surprise you guys with a time confetti post every once in a while. Here’s how it works:

Time confetti! 🎉

A few months ago I shared, quite vulnerably, that after years of religiously writing my Morning Pages, the time had come to come clean about the fact that the method no longer worked for me:

With my particular flavor of Eastern European personality — broody, pessimistic, self-critical — instead of serving as “emotional windshield wipers,” the Artist’s Way is fertile ground for downward spirals. I can start page 1 by bringing up a minor grievance, spat or inconvenience. By page 3, I have described, defined and dissected it to such a degree of detail that I am convinced my life’s about to fall apart because of it. The negative effect only compounds over time. Conceptually, I am 150% on board with the idea of personal journaling // diaries for mental clarity and reflection… but this particular method hasn’t been working for me, so I decided to explore.

I felt quite vindicated when the recent Marina Abramović interview from The New York Times started making the rounds last week and in that interview she jokingly explained the truth about us Slavs. I am Slav, she says, We are coming from the countries that are never happy. When we are there, we are not happy. When we leave the country, we are not happy.

So, with the understanding that I am working against very powerful forces, I wanted to share a couple of journaling methods that have truly made a difference in my effort to be a little bit less whiny and generally more clear-eyed about not missing my own life.

The first discovery came courtesy of our own community here. On one of our Community Zooms a few months ago, we were talking specifically about how we journal, and several people — Karen, and Kim — mentioned that they had good experiences with multi-year diaries.

⚡️A 5-Year Diary

The one I ended up getting is this one from Midori. It’s a red cloth-bound notebook with gold lettering and small, whimsical illustrations of doors and gates throughout. The paper works great with a fountain pen. BUT — many companies make them, and I guarantee you will find one in most bookstores that sell stationery. The idea is that you write a little blurb about each day, and because you have dedicated space for five years, you get a chance to revisit your past self as you keep up with the diary.

I keep mine at my desk, and I have been writing in it every night before I go to bed since July 17th. I am shocked to report that I have not missed a day. Other than brushing my teeth and kissing my kid, I don’t honestly remember the last time I did ANYTHING with such regularity.

What I like about this diary format is that the small space really forces me to think hard about how I want to memorialize a day. In my typical A5 notebook, even when I start positive, I tend to digress into grievance. But in this notebook, I only have 4 lines to write in, and when you pause to think about it, even the shittiest day will let you squeeze out 4 lines’ worth of love or wonder.

On days when I am tired and just ready to go to bed and get it over with, I write down what I was reading and that’s that.

Sometimes, of course, I am having a genuinely hard day, and I am grateful to have a bit more space to let things out. I really hope it’s clear that I am not advocating for ignoring one’s true feelings or suppressing emotion. But I am continuing to explore easy ways to journal WITHOUT spiraling way down into darkness. And, as I previously mentioned, I am finding again and again that the materiality of journaling is a major key to that endeavor.

⚡️Journaling on HARD days

In an earlier post, I shared how much I loved journaling about hard things using brush pens, style. And now I have another similar idea that I am enjoying even more. As always, I start with my date stamp at the top, which automatically makes any blank page that much more whimsical and fun. I then draw imperfect horizontal lines with a colored pencil and begin writing my journal entry as I would in a normal notebook.

I do this ESPECIALLY when I am in a MOOD, and I am finding that there is something about this particular trick that makes my brain get really playful and almost childlike. I feel like it awakens the LITTLE kid in me, and even when she is having a hard time, she still prefers to drop the complaining and draw with her pencils instead.

I know that there are several therapists in our midst, and I would love to hear what you all think about why this works. I feel like there’s got to be an actual explanation that goes beyond “because it’s fun.”

P.S. For all the notebook and stationery nerds, the combination of Geranium Lake pencil + Blue LePen looks so chic to me! Especially in this particular MD notebook with its pale blue grid lines

My final notebook discovery came as a result of me missing time in my book journals. I find my book journals infinitely more satisfying and non-embarrassing compared to my regular journals. However, as life has felt incredibly overwhelming recently, I actively chose to prioritize READING over JOURNALING ABOUT READING.

⚡️Small notebook as bookmark

As a notebook enthusiast, I love that notebooks can be both a creative hobby AND a very practical tool. I do try to insert an element of fun and creativity in any notebook I own but at the moment, I am definitely in a very practical stage of life. Even when I have more time for play, though, my reading notebooks are in service of the reading, never the other way around.

In the last few months, I have really been loving using a little Field Notes notebook — they really ARE tiny — as a bookmark. It gives me a little taste of book journaling without interrupting the reading itself. Whenever I come across something that makes me curious, instead of reaching for my phone, I jot it down to look up later. This has saved me from countless instances of going online to check something “really quick” and remembering, two hours later, that I was in the middle of a book.

Before I go, I wanted to share that I have really loved having Zoom Coffee with so many of you guys. I am honestly blown away by your kindness and your friendship. As I have shared in some of our conversations, I honestly came to Substack looking for friends, and I am so grateful to have met so many of you. I love the spirit of our community and how kind and supportive we are of each other.

One of the most common questions I have started getting, especially in the Zoom Coffee sessions, is how to go about building a community on Substack. I think many people are thinking about starting their own newsletter or committing to working on the one they already have more seriously.

I am always happy to answer individual questions BUT, in case it’s helpful, I wanted to ask if you would like me to add an additional Community Zoom (maybe later this month or in November) to talk specifically about Substack business.

There are plenty of people out there sharing very good advice… but I wanted to offer since I know it can feel awkward to ask. Do not be shy! Tell me if it would be helpful.

🤓 And, before I go, three questions for you:

• Do you keep a diary or journal? Have you ever abandoned a method that once worked for you?

• Do you have any little tricks for getting yourself out of a bad mood or a negative thought spiral?

• Would you be interested in a Community Zoom dedicated to talking about Substack? Whether you’re thinking about starting a newsletter or trying to grow the one you already have, would it be helpful to get together and talk about what works, what doesn’t, and everything in between?

Of all the notes and questions that I get from newsletter readers, the most common one goes something like this:

When I was younger // When I was a student // Before I was a parent… I used to read a lot and I love books but I have fallen out of the habit. I am desperate to get back on track… but scrolling and Netflix have become my new norm. I really miss my brain. Can you please help me, how do I even begin?

First of all, I want to acknowledge the implicit sadness in this question. There is so much that is hidden in that “I used to”... and I recognize it because I have felt it, too. We live in a day and age where we are all pros in the game of comparison but there is nothing sadder than comparing yourself unfavorably to a former version of yourself.

I have collected some thoughts on the subject as someone who was there not that long ago and now spends a lot of time talking to some of the most inspiring readers around. My hope is that reading this will help you understand that if you truly want to make reading part of your life, you absolutely can and you are not as far off as you might think.

⚡️ Figure out what’s getting in the way

The most important thing I want to say to you is that you are not alone. Many people feel overwhelmed and incapable of focusing on reading right now.

• Maybe you are not reading like you used to because you are in a season of life that requires your attention to be elsewhere. It could be work, caregiver responsibilities, your health. If you are not reading because you are physically or mentally exhausted, focus on your animal body: feed it, rest it, move it, soothe it. A relaxed, rested body is more capable of reading than a stressed, exhausted body.

• Sometimes you feel tired not because you are doing too much but because you are not doing the things that you really want to be doing. I cannot even tell you how frequently I have found myself climbing the wrong ladder, winning a race that I never intended to compete in. I am constantly trying to figure out if the things I have said yes to are in fact things I actually want to do because, ultimately, those are the things that are keeping me away from my family and from my books.

• Getting older somehow seems to help in spotting the misalignment between what you are doing and what you want to be doing. But a simple way to speed up this particular bit of earned wisdom is to journal about it. Make a list of all the engagements and obligations that are keeping you busy, drained and tired. Mark up all the things you are doing out of inertia, obligation, or perceived social pressure. You will be shocked how much time you uncover.

  

• If journaling helps you figure out how you can create some space for YOUR BRAIN… journal some more to gain clarity on whether it’s READING that will give you your brain back. Reading books is an obvious way to engage with the world of ideas but it is most certainly not the ONLY way. There are so many examples here on Substack of people pursuing all sorts of projects and passions that help them come alive to themselves — watching films, having conversations with people they admire, making art, learning for learning’s sake, being intentional about their living spaces… the list goes on and on.

• Remind yourself that YOU are the BOSS of YOU. Because you are not a sociopath, you understand that there is plenty that we all need to do because we live in community, serve on teams, etc. HOWEVER, nobody loves a martyr and MANY around you will benefit from you dropping balls nobody meant for you to carry in pursuit of things that feed your soul.

⚡️ Stop waiting for ideal conditions

Once you’ve decided that you are no longer doing things simply because you think you should AND have come clear with yourself that reading is the thing that you WANT to be doing instead:

• Find little pockets of time to dedicate to it. The biggest readers you know are reading as much as they do because they are reading here and there, ALL the time, whenever, wherever. We all have our “ideal reading preferences” but the reality is much different. On my busiest days, I read for 15 minutes during my lunch break. Yes, I try to read in bed before I fall asleep but I also read in the carpool line, waiting at a doctor’s office or at the pharmacy, in the 5 minutes when a Zoom call is over and somebody generously decides to “give us some time back.” I am grateful, always. No snark.1

• Reading begets reading. Once you start making time to read a little bit, you will find that it becomes easier to find time to read a little bit more. That’s why it’s so important not to set off by giving yourself MASSIVE reading assignments. Just start small and trust the process.

• It’s easier to always be reading than to sometimes-be-reading. I describe reading as my default state and that makes it easier for me to get back into a book. Sometimes I feel like my job is an interruption from my real — reading — life.

• To make reading your default state, you would probably need to open your mind re: audiobooks if you are not there quite yet. spoke so eloquently about that in his interview a few weeks back:
  
  ”The hill I will die on is that listening is reading. We’ve been listening to stories far longer than we have been writing and reading them. To listen to a book is primal, intimate fireside magic. I’ll typically listen to between one and three hours as I go about my day. I love how listening imprints the story onto places and activities so that a book embeds itself into certain memories. This way, you revisit past places when you re-read old books, and vice versa.”
  
  Audiobooks have been a lifesaver in my busiest seasons. Some days, the only reading I can do is during my commute to work or while doing the dishes after dinner.

• Another controversial take — you can be reading, even if you are not READING. Looking for books, trying to decide what to read next, reading reviews of what other people are reading all support the PRACTICE of reading and are as important as the physical act of reading as well. When you are having a difficult day and you have no time or brain capacity for your novel, engaging in any of the above-mentioned activities will help carry you until you can actually sit down with a book. That time is not lost, in fact, it helps make you a better reader.

⚡️ Find your way back to YOUR own taste

I am now partial to Substack but when I was in the depths of my depression and missing my reading brain so badly it hurt, I spent hours on TikTok. Doing so got me excited about certain books that sounded “like me” in a way that I had not previously experienced in my life. Watching brief videos of interesting, young, intelligent people who shared earnestly what they were reading and loving, and wanting to be in conversation with them is what truly brought me back to life. Do not let lazy takes about TikTok or any other platform for that matter color your opinion on what’s worthy of your attention. The internet is big, find your people.

• In fact, I think that allowing yourself to connect with book nerds on the internet is a great way to start reinvigorating your taste, especially if it’s been years since you’ve chosen your own reading.

• You don’t have to listen to me, but if you are trying to rebuild a reading habit, I actually advise against going after BIG AWARD lists since those can sometimes give off pretentious vibes that may overwhelm you and, more importantly, also may make you think that there are books that you must be reading, which is not what you want to feel. You want to find a way to connect to reading in the most idiosyncratic, personal way

  

• You want to feel excited about the books you are reading, even if they are not cheerful, happy or exciting themselves. If you are reading a book and it’s bringing you DOWN to the point where you don’t reach for it, you are going to have to learn to DNF. The best readers DNF all the time. One of my current goals is to DNF more books.

• A lot of book content on the internet, including here on Substack, is focused on new releases. The publishing industry OWES it to writers and readers to continue to discover and support new writing talent and help new books find their readers. YOUR responsibility is to YOURSELF. You don’t owe it to anybody to keep up with new releases, lists, recommendations or whatever trends seem to be driving the discourse at any given moment.

• When in doubt, look for a classic you have been curious about. Especially if you are picking up titles as an adult, you will be shocked to discover that books that you read as assigned reading in high school now feel like a legit romp! They are funner and hornier than you remember, so many of them are total page turners and yet have a timeless quality to them, which for me personally often feels like a better reading experience than the alternative. My favorite classics-focused writers on Substack are , , and .

⚡️ Your reading life belongs to you

• The internet will make you wonder if your reading life is beautiful enough. Don’t believe it. We are all worthy of books and there are many ways to be a reader.

• It is your responsibility to figure out what makes sense for you. Work on figuring out what genre, author, period, themes, and other factors activate your pleasure centers. The biggest competitor to reading time is SCREEN TIME… and you know how powerful THAT draw is. You will have to work hard on finding what you like.

• If not reading feels like a loss of identity, like you are unable to access a part of yourself that you love and treasure…. Resolving to return to reading and making it a central part of your life is not merely an exercise in productivity or time management. It functions as a vehicle of self-articulation, it’s a way of declaring and standing up for oneself.

My personal journey back to reading took me ~5 years or so. It took me a long time but never for a second did I question whether I missed it. I missed it deeply every second of every day and I longed for the day when I would read again without questioning what the point of it all was. At times it felt like a battle, other times it felt like a bar fight. Regardless, it’s what needed to happen because that process of returning to reading was also the process of building trust in my own capacity to be in charge of myself. I thought I missed reading — and I did — but I think what I missed even more was the feeling that my brain belonged to me.

I really hope that some of you will feel comfortable sharing what feels difficult about reading right now and that the community can offer their gentle care and support. Reading, like most things, feels better with friends.

🤓 Questions go here:

• What gets in the way of reading for you right now?

• What makes you WANT to read — a particular kind of book, a ritual, a person, a place, a community?

• If you’ve ever lost your reading life and found your way back to it, what helped?

I was EXTREMELY homesick this month. I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents and Bulgaria and my own book and my place in life… but it wasn’t until I sat down to write about what I had read in September that I started to wonder if my reading had not caused the whole thing.

I read three novels and three works of nonfiction in September:

• Make your art no matter what — Beth Pickens

• Hotel Casanova — Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer)

• Baldwin: a love story — Nicholas Boggs

• Grief is the thing with feathers — Max Porter

• Siblings — Brigitte Reimann (translated by Lucy Jones)

• Traveling in the direction of the shadow — Iana Boukova (translated by Ekaterina Petrova)

On the surface, not exactly an obvious grouping of books, except that somehow I managed to spend the month reading about people leaving home, people losing the people they love, people trying desperately not to lose the people they love, i.e. the immigrant experience in a nutshell.

I’ve talked before about what a weird, confusing experience it is to be an immigrant because, on the one hand, it has enriched my life in every possible way. I have seen the world. I have met people who are nothing like me, some of them even live in my house. My heart is open, my mind is open too. And I have developed attachments to people and places I could never have imagined loving when I was growing up. But also… I left.

Being in another country, Patricia Lockwood writes, is like being dead, you see how people go on without you. I can’t imagine she is specifically thinking of immigration, but Jesus Christ. There is something self-murderous about leaving a place and then watching, from afar, as everyone you love quite reasonably continues to have a life there just as well. I think when I was younger I experienced the back-and-forth as exciting, and I did feel a lot of it borderline glamorous. I also experienced it often enough that perhaps I didn’t register the accumulation of what I was missing. Now I go back less, my parents are older, I am older, and I am much more aware of how much life has happened absolutely without me.

So this was apparently the ideal emotional condition in which to read six books.

📚 Make your art no matter what — Beth Pickens

I started the month with Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What, which I have already talked about a little earlier in the month. Beth considers anybody who feels a deep and profound need to make creative work an artist. I really appreciate this definition because, especially in America, we have internalized this fairly deranged idea that you become an artist the moment someone agrees to pay you for your work. And at the same time, anybody who has felt the creative urge can testify… that’s not how it works. I still have trouble calling myself an artist. And yet I also know that when I am not reading and writing, I become miserable. I feel like I am constantly churning on myself, with nowhere for any of it to go.

For a long time I didn’t understand that about myself. I just knew that I was depressed. But a therapist told me that the opposite of depression is not happiness but expression, which came back to me while I was reading Pickens. I don’t know that I would make quite such a sweeping claim myself, but I understand what it means in my own life. I have been recommending this book to all my writer friends.

📚 Baldwin: a love story — Nicholas Boggs

I avoided Nicholas Boggs’s biography of James Baldwin for months despite all the beautiful noise around it because I have read embarrassingly little Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room, the letter to his nephew, bits and pieces here and there. I had somehow decided that I needed to earn a biography by reading more of the work first… but early in the month I was looking for a long car book and just thought, what the hell. I am so glad I did.

This biography is really quite fantastic, and I think listening on audio may have actually helped me circumvent what some readers have described as repetitive writing. Although I am beginning to suspect that what may be perceived as repetitive writing was, most likely, the reflection of cyclical patterns in Baldwin’s lived experience — the constant coming and going and his inability (or unwillingness) to settle down in one place.

I loved the biography’s framing: telling Baldwin’s story through the people who recognized him and made room for him. His teachers saw his talent early. The painter Beauford Delaney gave the young Baldwin a model for what it might look like to be Black and gay and an artist — and to take all three of those identities seriously. There was Lucien, the young Swiss man with whom Baldwin fell in love and who became an anchor of his life and work for so many years. And there were the relationships that eventually brought him to Istanbul.

You get this extraordinary picture of a person becoming himself through other people… but not by changing himself to mold to their expectations but rather by revealing himself and allowing himself to be changed through being loved.

I was especially interested in the sections about Baldwin’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement and the strange position he occupied within it: his rhetorical gifts making him enormously valuable, while his homosexuality also making some of the movement’s leaders reluctant to place him too visibly at its center. But the part of the biography that got under my skin given my own particular state of mind this month was all the leaving. I felt such a profound sense of kinship following Baldwin out of Harlem to Paris, Switzerland, Istanbul and back to the States. I understood his deep need to get away from America in order to figure out how to live and work, and simply how to be himself. And my heart broke with him as he, like so many of us like him, kept on discovering — over and over and over again — that being elsewhere produces its own kind of loneliness. The book suggests that he eventually understood some of that loneliness not simply as a cost of the work but as an essential space in which the work became possible…

I had hoped reading the biography would tell me which Baldwin novel I should read next, and instead it made me want to read the nonfiction, particularly the writing from the civil rights years. I came away with the impression that although he thought of himself deeply as a novelist and playwright, there was something about the combination of fury, emotion, intelligence and urgency in him that found an extraordinary form in the essay. If, like me, you have wondered if you should read the biography before being very familiar with Baldwin’s work, I think you would have an incredible experience going either direction.

📚 Hotel Casanova — Annie Ernaux (trans. by Alison L. Strayer)

If reading the Baldwin biography made me feel that I didn’t have enough of him in my background, reading this new essay collection by Annie Ernaux presented almost the opposite problem for me. I have now read so much by her that I should, theoretically, be impossible to surprise. AND YET! Annie continues to completely rock me with a subject or a sentence or some small, hideously accurate observation about human behavior … Every time, no exception.

Hotel Casanova collects shorter nonfiction pieces she published over several decades, and it contains all the usual Ernaux material — sex, class, shame, desire, aging, memory, the weirdness of being a person in public. The title essay is about an affair with a married man whom she meets largely to have sex in a sleazy pay-by-the-hour hotel, but somehow the whole ordeal does not feel sordid. Ernaux describes the madness and humiliation of desire without abandoning the woman experiencing it and judging her. And, I believe, it is this kind of simultaneous objectivity and lack of judgment that makes her such a beloved documentarian of a female existence.

My favorite piece in this collection, however, was about a “clochard” who begins holding the door at Ernaux’s local post office in exchange for money. At first everyone is perfectly happy to hand him their spare change. He is young, clean, pleasant-looking; he performs a small service but a service nonetheless. But then he keeps coming back and, eventually, Ernaux catches herself becoming annoyed when she finds him sitting on the ground with his cup rather than standing to open the door. What bothers her, she realizes, is that she does not think he has exhausted himself sufficiently to be sitting down.

The reason why this essay hit me so hard is probably because I am myself in the middle of a similar experience. An unhoused man came to our door asking for help a while back and I was happy to give him food, money, some clothes. I am now, however, in a cycle of assisting and avoiding that continues to fill me with sadness and rage. Like Ernaux in the essay, I catch myself having the “wrong” thoughts but try to remind myself that there is no morally enlightened happy ending in this situation.

If you have been curious about Ernaux but not sure where to start, I think this book would actually be a good introduction to the major themes in her work. And, if you read it and find yourself drawn to a specific essay, the good news is that most likely there will be a longer book by her on the subject.

📚 Grief is the thing with feathers — Max Porter

A young father and his two boys are grieving the sudden death of their wife and mother, and into the house comes Crow. Crow is grief, probably, but he is also a character, a caretaker, a tormentor, a comedian, perhaps a hallucination, perhaps something magical. I kept trying to decide how literally I was supposed to understand him until eventually I stopped caring. He was there.

Once Crow was there, he also followed me out of the book and right into my weekly calls with my parents. My parents, knock on wood, are fine, but they are getting older, and lately when I talk to them I have become increasingly mindful of the fact that they are not going to be fine forever. At some point there will be illness and there will be loss, and because of the life I have chosen, I will not be there for much of the ordinary aging that comes before that. I find myself disassociating during phone calls because I cannot bear the thought of losing them and holding back tears, only able to talk about superficial things just to keep myself from crying.

Since reading this book, I have found myself thinking about Crow during our conversations, almost sensing him sitting somewhere nearby. And I know it sounds kooky but it hasn’t felt uncomfortable or threatening or psychotic. Instead, that presence has felt reassuring. We are still here together on this plane of the living AND there is also this other thing that I know is coming. This knowing feels new and I don’t quite know if the book brought it to me or if it was already there and Crow told it to stop hiding.

I don’t know whether I would recommend reading this book while actively grieving. But for whatever reason, I found it comforting that as a result of reading it I have now acquired such a strong image for the grief I am already carrying around. A truly, truly special book + a Sally Rooney favorite, too, apparently.

📚 Traveling in the direction of the shadow — Iana Boukova (trans. by Ekaterina Petrova)

I then picked up this book with a mix of emotions. Reading Bulgarian books is not a given for me. I go through periods of being very engaged with contemporary Bulgarian writing and periods when I basically refuse to look at it. I have come to understand the latter as a kind of protective mechanism. Sometimes keeping up with Bulgarian literature feels like one more way of keeping track of a version of a life that is happening somewhere else. It reminds me of what I am missing, and sometimes I just don’t want to know.

Over the last few years, though, I have started finding my way back through books like Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter and René Karabash’s She Who Remains and while quite nervous, I was also extremely excited to read Iana Boukova’s Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow.

This is a nineteenth-century historical novel populated by people who seem to have wandered in from a traditional Balkan legend: gamblers with impossible luck, old grandmothers and toothless grandpas, young women who run away and join the gypsy karavans, many many many brothers, monks and craftsmen and murderers and people with abilities that seem to sit right on the border between improbable and otherworldly. I haven’t read many of her works but the novel really reminded me of ’s novels. It is vivid, historic, and mystical — a true homage to the storytelling traditions of our region.

I was shocked by how much I loved it. I read it slowly, and it felt poetic to me in that at times I felt swept up in the stories while not being entirely sure what it all meant or even what it was all for, but Boukova left me with dozens of unforgettable images: stone bridges, mountain villages, old people sitting on benches, Bulgaria bleeding into Turkey and Greece until the whole region feels less like a set of countries than a half-remembered landscape coming right from the depths of my childhood. It is an extremely cinematic book that gives you not only unforgettable characters but also an immersive sense of place. There was something very 1001 Nights about it and I found it so soothing but it did absolutely nothing for my homesickness.

Also, I don’t often have a chance to say things like this — but the translation from Bulgarian is incredible and a work of art in its own right. If you read it, pay attention to the names. 🤫

📚 Siblings — Brigitte Reimann (trans. by Lucy Jones)

Finally, I read Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings on ’s recommendation from a while back. This is a short novel set in East Germany in 1960, about a family in which the oldest son has already left for the West and the younger son is preparing to do the same. In contrast, their younger sister Elisabeth is an artist who has genuinely invested herself in the socialist project. She lives and works in an industrial community and teaches workers to paint, inspired by the idea that people who work in factories are equally capable of making and experiencing beauty. This particular storyline connects to the GDR’s Bitterfeld Way, which encouraged artists to engage with industrial workers and sought to diminish the separation between art and working life. Reimann herself participated in this program, even though she never fully joined the Communist Party and was oftentimes critical of it.

Reimann allows Elizabeth’s belief in the ethical righteousness of the socialist movement to be real and deeply felt without making it uncomplicated. Elisabeth is not simply a dupe of the regime, and Uli, the brother who wants to leave, is not simply a heroic dissident. They love one another desperately AND understand the world differently. When Elisabeth realizes that Uli genuinely intends to go, her political conviction becomes inseparable from her terror of losing him. She prevents him from leaving by telling her fiancé (a well meaning communist bureaucrat ) about the plan and it is hard to describe the absolute betrayal felt by Uli.

This past month but also in general, I spend so much time thinking about what it means to leave because I am the one who left. Siblings made me think about what leaving feels like for the people who stay behind.

Between recommending Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and now Siblings, if I ever get to finish and publish my book, Regan is definitely getting her own line in the acknowledgements.

My Book of the Month pick for October is Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon — another potentially heartbreaking immigrant story because they all are.

This particular novel follows a Korean family from Seoul to California as they immigrate in pursuit of better future for their children. These ideas around the gains and losses around an immigrant experience not only mirror my own personal life journey but also — I know I am biased — are always such an incredibly fertile ground for literary exploration. I am really looking forward to immersing myself in this book and participating in a big group reading project alongside others. I know that many of you are looking forward to this one as well. Let me know if you plan to read it.

And here we are… September was just one of those months when my reading and my actual life got unusually tangled up with each other, until I could no longer tell which one was aggravating the other. And I do apologize for writing what feels more like a Dear Diary post than proper book reviews… but that’s what all the reading felt like to me, so I decided to share as it was.

🤓 And now… let’s chat!

• Give me your best books about leaving, staying, homesickness, exile, family, grief, belonging — or whatever else you think I was accidentally reading about this month.

• Which fall books are you excited about? Who else plans to read American Hagwon?

• And, as always: what was the best thing you read this month?

There is so much I love about readers. I love that we are generally curious people. I love that we sniff each other out and can find so much in common even when our particular tastes are nothing alike. I love that we all think we are nothing special and yet, when pushed a little bit… we divulge our idiosyncratic little habits that inevitably reveal just how many different ways there are to be a reader. How many different ways there are to connect to the written word. It’s for that reason, exactly, that I wanted to introduce you to Erin Duncan.

Erin is a reader and writer, originally from the Bay Area, who now calls Maryland home. I met Erin through her beautiful Substack — Notes from Erin — where she talks about her reading, interviews authors she loves, and shares thoughts on music… all braided together in a way that feels both unique and inviting. I have never quite encountered this way of interacting with books before. In reading Erin’s work, you get the sense that she has a musical soul and that she walks through the world picking up its subtle sounds. She then brings that sensitivity to everything she touches, including the books she reads. It is wonderful, magical, and so inspiring.

I hope you love getting to know Erin through this conversation as much as I did.

Tell me a little bit about what role reading plays in your personal and professional life?

Reading has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. As an only child, reading was always my companion and comfort, and it still plays that role for me today. Growing up, my parents really prioritized my reading; taking me on reading dates, entering me in reading competitions at my local library, or just reading to me or with me, and those experiences shaped me into a life long reader.

As I have gotten older, reading has stayed my comfort blanket: a way to detach, stay curious, or find language for things I can’t necessarily articulate. Professionally, reading found its way in during my years as a music journalist, when I read constantly about musicians to better understand their creative processes. These days, I lead social media strategy, so I tend to read more newsletters or articles related to my work than books. Reading today is mostly for leisure and is something that is just for me.

PKG: As a parent of an only child, this answer was music to my ears (no pun intended). I truly hope that by helping Rumi in her journey as a reader, I am also helping her become an adult who will never be without a friend or companion because she can always find one between the pages of a book.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

On average, I read between 8-12 hours a week. I tend to read the most in the morning after I come back from the gym. I listen to an audiobook during my workday on days when I have light meetings, like Monday or Friday. I will also listen to an audiobook when I’m cooking or running errands, and I read for about an hour or 40 minutes before bed.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

My reading has changed over the years. When I was younger, I would read anything and everything. Once I started doing music journalism, I went through a decade or so of reading almost nothing but music memoirs and biographies, some about musicians I already loved and was fascinated by, like Marvin Gaye (Divided Soul by David Ritz) and Rick James (Glow by Rick James and David Ritz), and others about artists I knew less about going in, like Joni Mitchell (Reckless Daughter by David Yaffe) or Eric Clapton (Clapton by Eric Clapton).

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of historical fiction, which is probably my favorite genre right now, though I still read a mix of fiction and nonfiction. I think the genre fascinates me because it takes craft to write about a time period or historical figure audiences may be familiar with and still make the story feel alive, while being mindful of the legacy and narrative already attached to it. I’ve also been dabbling in romance, which isn’t usually a genre I enjoy. I’ve always found romance to be too predictable, but Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan and Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley changed that for me. I love how Kennedy Ryan’s books have another theme running through them, like mental health or caring for parents, and Deep Cuts isn’t a traditional romance book; it’s more of a story with a love story intertwined, as well as a journey of finding oneself. I enjoyed so many things about the book, like the musical element and the references to the Bay Area, where I’m from.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

One reading habit that I have is writing down song lyrics or albums that remind me of a chapter, a line I read, or even a character. Sometimes that turns into a newsletter; sometimes it becomes a mental thread that connects to something else entirely.

Notes from Erin

Reading sad love songs like novels

A few weeks ago, I spoke with author Tiffany L. Warren about her new novel, A Harlem Wedding. During our conversation, she said something that has stuck with me: sad love songs make great novels…

Read more

4 months ago · 5 likes · Erin Ashley

I recently read Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola, and a line about two characters listening to Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor album stood out, so I wrote it down, and it ended up reminding me of another book I read and loved: No Sense in Wishing by Lawrence Burney.

Some of my habits also shift with the weather. During the summer I tend to read more print or audiobooks, and in the winter I learn more toward e-books so I can read under the covers (literally). In any season, though, I always come back to reading on the floor in front of a window. I have been doing this since I was a child, whether it was sunny or storming, and I still do it now, or I read on my couch in front of the window instead. When I bought my new couch, it was to make sure I had a comfortable place to read, and I guess also so my guests would have somewhere to sit too.

PKG: OK, tearing up picturing little Erin reading on the floor in front of a window and feeling so heartened knowing that big Erin protected that beautiful habit for them.

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I take notes while I read, and I will admit, my system is a little chaotic. I’m a mix of a digital and print notetaker, though I am working to adopt a better and more streamlined system. On the digital side, with every book, I start a new Apple Note, and if there aren’t many notes or things to remember, I delete it. I also read on my Kindle, where I highlight quotes and jot notes as I go, then I add some of those to an Apple Note or my notebook once I’m done. For print books, I always read with a highlighter, and my favorite pen is the Paper Mate Flair felt tip. I’m a quote person, so I highlight often and jot the page number in my paper notebook so I can find it again.

With historical fiction especially, I take a lot of notes on things I want to look into further, which adds its own layer of chaos. And are you ready for more chaos? I often type up my print notes and add them to Apple Notes because I fear spilling water in my notebook and losing every single note; and, less dramatically, if I don’t have my notebook, I can still reference my notes. In Apple Notes, I add tags so I can reference them later, whether in conversation or for something I’m writing.

PKG: This all feels very professional AND super practical. I really love how discoverable and usable Erin notes are.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

To keep track of what I want to read, I have an Apple Note that has books I own and want to read. I also use Storygraph and tags to identify things I want to read, either from things I own, things that I was recommended, or things I’m interested in, and I just filter between the tags.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

I get ideas for what to read from so many places. Often it starts with another book, an author I like, or a friend recommends something to me – all of my friends are readers, so we’re always sharing recommendations. A lot comes from Substack too. For one, Petya, I get a lot of recommendations from you and your newsletter. I subscribe to other readers and writers here: ’s Bookwild podcast and newsletter, , ’s BookLetter, , — The Unstacked, and ’s bookdates in her newsletter Extracurricular. Also, I made friends with a bookseller at my local bookstore, and she often gives me books to read based on what she already knows I enjoy.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

When deciding what to read next, I am a mood reader working within a few planning constraints. I read a lot of ARCs, so I’m always trying to be mindful of their release dates, which impact some of how or when I read. Outside of ARCs, if I read something dark, I need something light, and if a book gets me interested in a topic or an author, I add those to my list. I read a lot of historical fiction, and it often sends me down a rabbit hole, so I keep finding new books based on the setting, a character, or a nugget of information I come across. When my holds become available on Libby, that will inform my reading. Lastly, as of this June, I counted 114 books I owned but hadn’t read, so I’ve been prioritizing those as well.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

I wouldn’t say reading has replaced any of the things that I should be doing. I have been a reader my whole life, so it’s a non-negotiable for me, the same as everything else. And with audiobooks, I technically am still reading even when I clean my house or grocery shop.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

If I were to give tips or advice to people who wish they were reading more, I would start with not putting so much pressure on yourself. If you can find ten minutes in your day, or even just make time to read a paragraph or an article, that counts as reading more.

Another thing is switching the format. If you want to read more but don’t have the time to sit down with a physical book or an e-book, try an audiobook. You can listen on a walk, during your commute, while you cook, or while you’re doing something else. An audiobook is an easy way to immerse yourself in a book, even when you don’t think you have the time.

My last tip would be to use reading as a reward when possible. I wake up early to workout just so I can reward myself with anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of reading once I’m done. That sets the tone for my day and gives me an immediate dopamine boost.

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

I have five books I always recommend to people for different reasons. First is my favorite book of all time: I’m Down by Mishna Wolff, a coming-of-age memoir I picked up years ago because of the cover. It remains one of the funniest books that I have ever read, so I always preface it by saying it’s a good comfort read. The Color of Water by James McBride sits close behind it, another coming-of-age memoir, and one whose detail has stuck with me since first reading it in high school.

​As a music lover, David Ritz is one of my favorite writers and has written a few of my favorite biographies. Two I always recommend are his books on Marvin Gaye: Divided Soul, about Marvin’s life, and After the Dance, which David wrote with Marvin’s wife, Jan Gaye, about their relationship. The last book on my list is Jazz by Toni Morrison, the first of hers I ever read. The prose, storyline, and setting all came together in a way that was both lyrical and haunting.

Erin and I have had a chance to talk in person a few times now and I am just convinced she is the coolest. We have a standing plan to have salad for lunch and then go bookshopping in DC. When that happens, we will have to let you know because I know many of you would love to join in.

🤓 In the meantime:

• Do books ever make you think of particular songs or albums? What’s a book-and-music pairing that has stuck with you?

• Is there a reading habit or ritual from childhood that you’ve carried into your adult reading life?

• Is reading a non-negotiable part of your life? If so, where does it naturally fit into your day?

It feels a little barfy to share this — but here it is. Earlier this month I made a promise to myself that I will begin revising my novel-in-progress with the goal of completing my first revision before the end of the year.

I completed my first draft in December of 2023, feeling pretty good about it, and just set it aside to gain some critical distance before starting the editing process.

To keep myself busy and stay in a writing flow, I turned my attention to this Substack. Because I had been writing daily in order to complete the draft, I had fallen into a pretty good rhythm, so it felt easy to keep the momentum and keep writing, even if the format and subject matter were quite different. Also, not working on my own writing meant that I had more time to read.

Several times I thought I was ready to start editing, but I did not quite know how to go about it (guys, I don’t know if you have heard, but writing a novel is HARD). Also, I was having so much fun chatting with you, good people of Substack, that I did not want to pause publishing in order to do difficult, invisible work

A couple of weeks ago I started reading Make Your Art No Matter What by . Pickens is a therapist who somehow figured out that she really gets along with and is really helpful to artists, so her whole practice is now mostly dedicated to helping artists maintain a sustainable art practice. I know about her through ; she is incredible.

In the book, Pickens defines an artist as someone who is deeply compelled to make creative work, and when they are distanced from their practice, they become unwell and their quality of life is diminished.

Her core philosophies break down the definition further:

• Art as a Health Requirement: Pickens views a creative practice as a vital prerequisite for a healthy, whole life. For a true artist, making art is a compulsory act of self-care and mental wellness, rather than just a casual hobby or an optional career path.

• Separation from Capitalism: You do not need to earn money from your work to be considered an artist. Pickens teaches that navigating capitalism is simply a structural reality, and an artist’s identity exists entirely independent of market demand, commercial success, or employment status.

• The Three Core Needs: She notes that an artist requires three baseline structures to sustain this identity: making the work, cultivating an intentional community of supportive artist friends, and consistently consuming inspiring art and ideas.

Reading the book made me realize that even though working on this newsletter has been so life-affirming to me as a writer these last few years, I have been neglecting a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Because of this newsletter, I am now in community with YOU, and our conversations about books and reading have felt absolutely life-giving. Reading and writing about books, in conversation with so many incredibly dedicated readers and newsletter writers, has also consistently inspired me to expand and deepen my understanding of what I find interesting and thought-provoking. Doing this work, I have figured out what I care about. None of this is a waste of time. In fact, I believe it has been the greatest gift, and I am not willing to give it up.

However, I have been feeling a certain kind of ennui recently. At first I thought I was approaching a reading slump, but that wasn’t it, because I have been loving most, if not all, of what I have been reading. Then I wondered if I was approaching writing burnout…. But that’s not it either. I have a long list of draft ideas and I have so much that I am dying to discuss with you. Then, reading Beth’s book, I started to wonder if maybe I was preemptively mourning the fact that I would not finish my book. After all… I wasn’t working on it, and maybe the joy of writing my newsletter was just the result of me having found a writing container that fit better. But then THAT thought — the thought of letting go of my book project — made me feel sick to my stomach. And that’s when I knew.

Of course.

It is honestly a little bit embarrassing that it took me this long to recognize that feeling because I have been there before. But living the way I have been living — working, reading, writing like a madwoman — I think I had completely overloaded my system to the point of making it impossible to hear my own inner voice … honey, it’s time.

Despite the confusion that has been swirling around me over the last few months, the way these things work is that once you have that true moment of clarity, it starts to look like things are lining up in conspiracy to get you moving.

In a list of 17 ideas for how to make the most of back-to-school season written by , this one about committing to completing a creative project by EOY jumped out at me:

I re-stacked and shared mine without even thinking. It just came out so clear and so true.

It took me ~10 years of thinking about my book to actually start writing it in earnest, but then it took about four months to complete that first draft. Having that as a baseline, and knowing that I do love to work in intense bursts, gave me the confidence to know that it would be a lot of work but I definitely COULD do this in this timeframe. I tagged because she runs Fuck You Write Your Pages — an accountability group for writers — and her next cohort starts on September 14. You know it, I’ve signed up. Finally, earlier today posted her fall reading reset challenge. Take the next two weeks, slow down and read one book (any book!) well. Per Sara:

You can choose to participate with an 80 page novella, the book club selection you’ve been putting off, or even something you’re already reading! This reading challenge is about two things: joy and intentionality. What you read is up to you and I’ll share prompts, ideas, and strategies in the hopes of facilitating deep, joyful reading. My hope is that this brings some mindfulness to what is an overwhelming publishing stretch, and serves as a reminder that this is a wonderful season to hit the reset button.

Sara’s slow-read challenge came at just the right time for me, as I had been trying to figure out how to balance working on the novel while also reading // writing for Substack, which I am not willing to give up completely. Participating in this exercise will force me to intentionally slow down without freaking out that I am not doing enough. And, hopefully, that will open up the space I need to get my ducks in a row for revising.

I considered not sharing all of this publicly. I mean, who cares… just shut up and write your pages, right?

BUT… because we have shared so many Substack-minutes together in the last few years, it felt important for me to let you know that I am working on this project, since it will most likely end up affecting my publishing schedule. I’m not making any decisions yet because I am trying to see how much energy I have and where I need it to go. I can imagine needing to read less but being able to write more. I can also see how I could keep reading but feel incapable of writing both a newsletter and a book.

I also know that many of you who read these words are suffering from the same heartache as me… and you are breaking your own heart because you are doing everything but the ONE thing that will make it go away. Whether you are an artist or you are still too embarrassed to admit to yourself that you are one, I hope that my sharing encourages you, too, to make your art, no matter what.

🤓 So, let’s chat:

• Are you willing to commit to completing a creative project by the end of the year? If so, what is it?

• Is there a project you know you need to return to—or begin—but keep finding very good reasons not to?

• What would you need to do less of to make more room for the creative work that matters most to you?

My plan for August was to read one of my summer PROJECT books — Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann. I got hyperfixated on this book earlier in the year as it is Claire-Louise Bennett’s favorite book. She loves it so much, apparently, that on the back cover of my translation, she is quoted saying that if she were to read only one book for the rest of her life, Malina would be it because it has everything. Everything?! Ok. As you can imagine, I hyped myself UP. I brought it with me on vacation in JUNE …. And have been reading it — on and off — since then. With August being Women In Translation month, I just had this idea that this would be the PERFECT time to finish it and tell you all about it. Well. I really like this book but it’s a challenging read and, unfortunately, it’s not been a summer for challenging books for me.

When things get difficult, my natural tendency is to dig in and keep going, probably double-up on effort. You can call it resilience, you can call it self-confidence, you can call it stubbornness… Whatever. My point is, if I want to get something done… I will get it done. I am even not afraid to ask for help and in the case of The Project Book… I did. I sent a desperate plea to Zito Madu who is also a fan and he very kindly assured me that — no, it’s not just me; yes, it is confusing. He gave me just enough background that I felt like he had helped me walk over to the railing and now, holding on for dear life, I could probably continue on my own. I also took an afternoon to do some library research and made myself a nice little Malina course packet — just the way that Dr. Hayley has taught us. Armed with direction AND resources, I felt like I was moving.

And then… Simon sent me his responses to The Reading Life questionnaire:

I start at the beginning and read through to the end! I always finish books, even if I need to put them down for a decade or two. I wouldn’t dare express an opinion about a book I haven’t finished. I don’t rate or rank books – this popular convention strikes me as a strange and undignified way to treat a story, but each to their own. I’m not precious about my books: I dog-ear the pages, scribble in them and drop them in the bath. If I love a book, I know I’ll come back to it. So I don’t fret about understanding everything. I let myself daydream; I forget bits, misremember and make things up. If these are habits, they seem fairly chaotic and anarchic – and I can live with that!

So many of you guys emailed me to share that you loved the interview but when Natalie McGLocklin told me reading it healed something in her, I kind of wanted to cry because… same. I am honestly so obsessed with spending every available minute with my books and I love challenging myself in my reading. But I do know that there will always be ebbs and flows in reading as reading is a part of life, and life ebbs and flows. I am currently in a season of my professional life that is extremely demanding, I am living pedal-to-the-metal every single day… and I actually do not believe that such intensity means that I have no room for reading… In fact, because I am so completely immersed in work during most of the day, reading feels especially necessary as a way to take care of myself and my soul at the end of the day.

BUT…. maybe this is not the time for the reading packet… and the most rigorous of close readings. Maybe, to paraphrase Simon, this is the time to read my very serious books as unseriously as possible… the time to not fret about understanding everything. And to trust that if I truly love the book as I think I do, I will come back to it. Maybe next month, maybe in a decade.

📚 Books mentioned:

• The Palm House — Gwendoline Riley

• The Dry Heart — Natalia Ginzburg (translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye)

• Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives — Nao-Cola Yamazaki (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton)

• Transcription — Ben Lerner

• Fallow — Sarah Anderson (gifted by Book of the Month)

• Traveling Mercies — Anne Lamott

• The Land and its People — David Sedaris

Fiction

📚 The Palm House — Gwendoline Riley

Before Simon told us to relax, I read The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley in a decidedly unrelaxed way. I ran through the book because Riley is both plainspoken and magnetic, and I love her sense of humor which continues to leave me … confused. For example, in this novel we meet Putnam and Laura — writers and friends. Putnam has worked as an editor at a serious literary magazine for ages but after a new editor-in-chief destabilizes the fine weather within the magazine’s ecosystem, he decides to resign from his coveted position and proceeds to mope about it with vigor. His friend, Laura, is committed to checking on him and making sure he is ok — despite the fact that Putman has chosen to resign AND he’s recently come into some inheritance money. At the same time, Laura herself navigates the precarity of her own economic position as a freelance writer as we are let in on the neglect and mistreatment she suffered as a young child. As I mentioned, I find Riley hilarious but her humor was making me very self-conscious and uncomfortable, somehow. I could tell that there was a rhythm to the jokes, a logic to the tone of the novel but I could not quite crack what it was.

So, dear ones, I made a spreadsheet and mapped out the narrative register of each section of the book against the emotional weight that it carries. The chart that visualizes the data appears to have formed a ring in which the relationship between language and emotion is almost perfectly inverse.

A decidedly unprofessional way to handle a novel but we all have our own devices. I am probably an even worse data analyst than I am a literary one, however, I do think that the exercise helped me see that the closer the novel gets to pain — I think Laura’s childhood chapters are the clearest example of that — the less its language appears willing to perform it. We may be dealing with HARD things but, by god, we are going to be chuckling about it all. At the same time, as we bemoan the end of an era as Putman resigns from his job… we feel an impending sense of dread and doom (I was anticipating THE WORST) — I used to have such promise. I used to have such confidence in life — only to realize that all the suffering is probably a tad exaggerated and the optionality for Putman much greater than it is for Laura. What a drama queen.

📚 The Dry Heart — Natalia Ginzburg
Translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye

The Dry Heart was my first Natalia Ginzburg novel — another Claire-Louise Bennett favorite, off my Checkout 19 reading list — and my favorite book I read all month.

It tells the story of a young woman who meets a man and ends up marrying him even though she knows he loves another. It’s a perfect little novel: quick, taut and just… understandable without feeling basic or simplistic. The setting and the style also gave me strong flashbacks to my summer of reading The Neapolitan Quartet last year and I felt so happy to be in the company of interesting and complicated Italian women again.

📚 Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives — Nao-Cola Yamazaki
Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton

Speaking of complicated women, I really liked Don’t Laugh… by Nao-Cola Yamazaki in which a 19 year old art student falls in love with his much older art professor. They have an affair that is somewhat short-lived but nonetheless filled with tenderness and longing. This story made me think a lot about first loves — mine but also others’ — and wonder if so many of those early relationships are equal parts awkward, problematic but also expansive and unforgettable because we are encountering each other with so little boundary or expectation and are unencumbered by experience and “knowing.” This was a really sweet book, it comes out in the States later in September.

📚 Transcription — Ben Lerner

I also finally read Ben Lerner’s much acclaimed Transcription after everybody — including my husband — told me I would love it. I did. It was my first Lerner and I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit that I had resisted reading him because he is so fucking beloved.

In Transcription, an unnamed narrator travels to Providence, RI, to interview his aging mentor, Thomas. On his way to the interview, the narrator drops his phone in water and, incapable of confessing to his mess-up, proceeds to conduct the interview while pretending he is recording. A few years later, he is at a conference dedicated to the now-deceased mentor’s work where he jokingly admits to the mishap and is surprised to discover that his little omission is not perceived as harmless by his peers.

In the final chapter of the book, the narrator spends time with the mentor’s son, Max, who is dealing with difficulties within his own family.

I read this novel with utmost vigilance… I knew it would be subtle and nuanced… and it was. The book is a thought-provoking meditation on mentor / mentee relationships and how those are similar to but also different from father / son relationships. It is also a very touching take on parenting (especially in and around COVID-times, as we still call them in our house)... how scary and destabilizing our contemporary moment is, and how horrified parents are that we are able to provide so fucking much for our children and yet kids today (in America, anyway) suffer from ever-evolving varieties of stress and anxiety that leave even the most dedicated and doting parents at a complete loss.

Finally, the book is also an urgent exploration of how fully technology has infiltrated contemporary life. And how, if in the not-too-distant past technology could be a source of artistic possibility and creative experimentation, it has now become the infrastructure that determines both our professional success and, increasingly, our biological survival.

A lot of profound questions, in other words, offered in an incredibly small container… all of them are ultimately questions about what we transmit to one another, what gets lost in the transmission, and how little control we have over what survives.

📚 Fallow — Sarah Anderson

My final novel of the month came courtesy of Book of the Month who are also kindly sponsoring this month’s reading wrap-up. Fallow is the debut novel by Sarah Anderson and it follows Natalie — young, broke and uninterested — as she struggles to make ends meet while working an uninspiring and oftentimes demeaning job at a call center.

Her life changes when she is offered an unusual 10-year contract as the first corporate surrogate for a company looking to create equity in the workplace by providing their senior women with the opportunity to skip pregnancy and thus minimize the impact on their professional careers. As in any good story, it takes the length of the book to figure out which part of it feels like a dream and which part of it is a nightmare but I’m not going to lie — as a professional woman in America — none of the scenarios depicted in the book appeared too far-fetched.

I was in back to back zoom calls literally the DAY before I gave birth to my own child only to return back to work 11 weeks after as that was all that my insurance would cover…. One of my most distinct memories of early motherhood was pumping while sitting on a bathroom floor while at a client meeting at Amazon in Palo Alto. They had ONE mother’s room on the floor where our meeting was hosted, I couldn’t book it because I wasn’t an employee and none of the dudes in the meetings knew what to do with me… so off to the bathroom floor I went, with my brand new pump and my brand new JCrew suit. As I was reading Fallow, I had sharp flashbacks to those days and thought that depending on the day, I would have loved to be a Natalie or any of her female clients.

I find it very interesting that clearly, as a nation, we are going through it in the context of women’s reproductive health and care…. And also recognizing how truly dystopian our various corporate practices are. Fallow joins Yesteryear in what I am sure will be a serious body of work that attempts to process the authentically American venn diagram of traditional gender role expectations, individualism and corporate greed. I think this book does a very good job in both diagnosing the problem but also gesturing toward a solution. I am also genuinely hoping it gets the treatment because nobody breaks down a satirical novel better than she does.

Non-fiction

I read two amazing essay collections this past month too. I read Traveling Mercies by so that I could talk about it with — I will be sure to share that conversation when it’s out. I also read the latest by David Sedaris — The Land and Its People.

📚 Traveling Mercies — Anne Lamott

This was a re-read for me, 23 years after the first time… TWENTY THREE?! And the book felt even lovelier the second time around. Anne Lamott is one of those people who have a funny story and a lesson about even the direst of circumstances and reading these essays on her stumbling into love and community with the grace of what she calls god… offered many opportunities for self reflection (and self-talk). As someone who grew up without religion, I feel no need to participate in a formal church community but Anne Lamott (and Mary Karr, too) have taught me over the years that if you keep an eye out, you will always find evidence of the presence of a higher power around you. If you haven’t read Anne Lamott’s work, everybody will recommend her craft book on writing — Bird by Bird — but I think that this one is actually a better introduction to some of the recurring themes of her work.

📚 The Land and Its People — David Sedaris

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that in my attempts to improve my experience with my personal notebooks, I have rediscovered David Sedaris. I have been binge-watching interviews with him on YouTube — watching teach him to clap may be one of the highlights of 2026 for me.

When went off about audiobooks, I had this instant urge to start listening to something really good and I went for The Land and Its People. If you are somehow unfamiliar with Sedaris — his books are typically collections of personal essays inspired by his family, his own life and his travels — and are told with a very specific mixture of sarcasm, tenderness and wit. My best friend was just asking me about him because she said she has only read one book by him ages ago and found his sense of humor very macho. Which is NOT AT ALL how I experience him. I find him self-deprecating and emotionally hyper-intelligent. So… I won’t tell you that you will definitely love him because clearly not everybody does…. But I will tell you that I have been listening to his essays on my way to work and on my neighborhood walks and GUFFAWING, laughing SO HARD. His essay about accepting Pope Francis’ invitation to visit him at the Vatican had me literally screaming in the car.

I am not a religious person… but when a month that starts in self-inflicted reading suffering and ends in reading-induced tears of joy and happiness, you gotta wonder… maybe there is something out there after all and she is a funny one.

❤️ Favorite books of 2026 so far:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

• April — Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

• May — Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

• June — Show Your Work | Keep Going | Don’t Call It Art — Austin Kleon

• July — Journal of a Solitude — May Sarton

• August — The Dry Heart — Natalia Ginzburg

I am so curious how finishing the month on such a lighthearted note will affect my reading in September. As you can imagine, just the thought of September makes me think of back to school and I want to get all organized and SERIOUS… but hearing Simon advocate for daydreaming and laughing my guts out while listening to David Sedaris is really making me wonder if I should remain focused on keeping things light.

Would love to chat about this with you guys over coffee — I have added a bunch of Zoom Coffee slots to my September calendar, which is one of the paid subscriber perks I offer.

If you are curious about upgrading your account, I am offering a 20% Back To School discount through the end of September.

🤓 But before I go:

• What does “reading seriously” mean to you—and do you actually enjoy doing it?

• Are you a dig-in-and-figure-it-out reader, or are you comfortable not understanding everything?

• What book are you currently giving yourself permission to come back to in a decade?

When sent me his answers to this interview, I wrote back almost immediately to tell him that I had teared up reading them. So corny, I know. But I had been thinking about something that I suspect a lot of us who spend time in the online book world have felt: when does all this enthusiasm about reading start making people feel bad about reading?

There are reading goals and reading challenges, elaborate TBRs and annual wrap-ups, lists of classics we should have read by now and increasingly impressive stacks of books consumed each month. Even those of us who genuinely just love books can get caught up in what I described to Simon as an ever-escalating internet arms race. Read more. Read better. Read more widely. Take better notes. Remember more of what you read.

And Simon — whose reading life is, by almost any measure, wildly ambitious — made me feel better about all of it.

Simon hosts year-long slow reads of ambitious reading projects such as War and Peace and Wolf Hall. He spends entire days close-reading a week’s assigned pages. Reading and writing about books have become his livelihood. And yet, as you will see below, his answers contain remarkably little anxiety about being a Good Reader.

He dog-ears his books, he forgets things… he daydreams while reading and sometimes misremembers what he’s read. He doesn’t rate books. He doesn’t keep track of what he wants to read. His carefully constructed reading plans are routinely derailed by what he calls “whims and sudden squalls of curiosity.” And when I asked what advice he would give to people who want to read more, his first instinct was that maybe we should stop making people feel as though they ought to be reading more in the first place.

What a relief.

Tell me a little bit about what role reading plays in your personal and professional life?

OK, so reading has now become my life and livelihood – although I don’t recall making a conscious decision to become a professional reader. For as long as I can remember, reading has been one half of an imaginative inner life. Reading or listening to stories is like breathing in, and writing is breathing out. For me, it is almost unimaginable to do one without the other. I read to write and write to read. Together, they make this creative space where new ideas and stories meet old and familiar thoughts and feelings, and if I stop visiting that space for any length of time, I start to go a little loopy.

For most of my life, this creative obsession has been a solitary and private pursuit. Yes, friendships have formed around a love of certain books, and I have shared my writing with a few close friends. But outside of university, I never joined a book group or a writing circle. When I started sharing my reading life on Instagram in 2018 or thereabouts, I had no idea that I would wind up hosting an enormous slow read-along of War and Peace in 2023 that would take over my life and become Footnotes & Tangents.

Four years later, I have written twelve guides to support slow reads of some of my favourite books. We’ve done Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (three years running!), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as well as books by Pat Barker, William Golding and Alan Garner. Most days I have to pinch myself to realise that my professional life is spent reading and writing about books I love, and that I get to introduce them to new readers all over the world. It’s a bewildering, bemusing, but ultimately joyous state of affairs. Long may it continue!

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

Well, first things first, I am a fanatical audiobook listener. The hill I will die on is that listening is reading. We’ve been listening to stories far longer than we have been writing and reading them. To listen to a book is primal, intimate fireside magic. I’ll typically listen to between one and three hours as I go about my day. I love how listening imprints the story onto places and activities so that a book embeds itself into certain memories. This way, you revisit past places when you re-read old books, and vice versa.

I’ve got two kids under six, and they demand my attention in the morning and after work – times I used to spend reading. These days, I’m unlikely to pick up a hard copy of a book before bedtime, and I’ll probably be too tired to read very much. The days of curling up in bed with a book for hours and hours are a distant memory! But fortunately, I’ve got the read-alongs and book guides, and they demand my full attention. I start most weeks with a close reading of that week’s scheduled text, a task that can take a full day. Of all my reading, it is the most rewarding.

PKG: I could not agree more re: audiobooks. Here’s a post I wrote on the topic — A guide to audiobooks from a former skeptic — early on into my experience with audiobooks. Like Simon, I am a very enthusiastic fan.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

The best books take you places – figuratively, intellectually, emotionally. They are generative and expansive, inspiring and insisting on new lines of inquiry and invention. They make you want to live, to know more, and to create. As the name of my Substack suggests, I like to read books that send me off on a tangent or call for footnotes, real or imaginary. Typically, historical fiction and classics lend themselves to this kind of reading. But also translated fiction, where the social and cultural context is unfamiliar. I like to read into the unknown.

Has my taste changed much? You know, I don’t think it has. I’m still reading the same hodgepodge of British folk fantasy, ancient myths and legends, classics and literary fiction that I was reading thirty years ago. There are big holes in my reading. Beyond John le Carré, I haven’t hacked into thrillers. Beyond Frank Herbert, I’m at a loss with most science fiction. I know nothing about Romance; I wish I enjoyed cosy murder mysteries more than I do, and embarrassingly, I think Tolstoy is a beach read. I’ve re-read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast many times, but cannot finish The Lord of the Rings. Sorry Tolkien fans!

If I gravitate towards classics and literary fiction, it is a matter of habit, temperament and inclination. As far as I am concerned, the notion of a Canon of Great Literature is absurd. Taste and aesthetic judgement change over time and vary across cultures and societies. A book is great if the reader finds greatness in it. Stories are what you do with them, and if my tastes have changed, I think I have become better at finding the good and the interesting in whatever I read, and have learned to ignore the bad. This makes me a terrible critic and a useless reviewer of books, but a happy reader nonetheless.

PKG: This is where I teared up first because I felt a strong sense of recognition. I, too, largely am able to find the good and the interesting in everything I read. I also cringe at snippy take-downs of books by critics because my respect for the effort and ambition of writing is too big.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

Gosh, I doubt any of our habits are truly unique! I think I’d need an anthropologist to watch me read, as I don’t think I’m self-reflexive enough to know my own habits. I start at the beginning and read through to the end! I always finish books, even if I need to put them down for a decade or two. I wouldn’t dare express an opinion about a book I haven’t finished. I don’t rate or rank books – this popular convention strikes me as a strange and undignified way to treat a story, but each to their own. I’m not precious about my books: I dog-ear the pages, scribble in them and drop them in the bath. If I love a book, I know I’ll come back to it. So I don’t fret about understanding everything. I let myself daydream; I forget bits, misremember and make things up. If these are habits, they seem fairly chaotic and anarchic – and I can live with that!

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

Ordinarily, no, I don’t take deliberate notes for a book. The story, style, and ideas inevitably seep into whatever I am writing at the time, but I don’t take systematic notes. I just read for the joy of it, occasionally underlining something and making a mental note to return to anything I find particularly interesting. I usually forget.

The slow read-alongs at Footnotes & Tangents are different. There, each book is a more careful re-read, and I am always working towards a weekly post. I annotate the text and make notes on areas for discussion and research.

I’m not attached to any special materials. Pencil will do; pen is better. My handwriting is tiny, so a fine liner of some kind is best. Since my schooldays, I’ve been using a black Pilot V5 0.5. I think it’s because my Dad uses them (he was a school teacher). They do the job. I like dotted paper. I try to do as much of my work away from a computer screen – not always successfully. This year, I got a BYOK typewriter for distraction-free work, and I’m trying to use that more.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I don’t! Perhaps I should, but all my attempts to make lists and keep track of books have fallen out of use. If a book keeps popping up on my radar, I will eventually read it, but there is no system.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

Books suggest other books, so the more you read, the more books will present themselves. I especially enjoy our slow reads for this reason, as they give us the opportunity to pick up adjacent and related texts that I would otherwise never have read. For example, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower led me to Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, the story of the Jena School of early German Romanticism.

Once a month, I ask my Substack community what they are reading and what books they would like to read with us. Last year, lots of people suggested AS Byatt’s Possession. I read it and loved it, then read Byatt’s The Children’s Book and loved it even more – so much so that we’re starting a slow read of it in September.

PKG: I am feeling a VERY strong urge to join this slow read.

Podcasts are great for book recommendations. Last year, I binged episodes of Backlisted and discovered some superlative books: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Ulverton by Adam Thorpe, and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Those last two need the slow-read treatment at some point – magnificent magical books.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

I’d say I read best from my gut. I need to feel excited and inspired by the next book, and plans take out all the impulsive spontaneity of reading. A few years ago, I did attempt a Read the World project, picking a handful of books from each country I “visited”. I discovered a lot of interesting authors this way – Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tash Aw, for example – but my reading plans are always blown off course by whims and sudden squalls of curiosity.

It’s a bit ironic then that this solitary, chaotic, mood-reader has become the accidental host of slow, organised read-alongs. I have often set the reading schedule a year in advance, essentially planning a significant portion of my reading far into the future. This may go against my nature, but it does open up all kinds of possibilities for communal, close and intentional reading that I would otherwise miss out on. I read extensively around our set reading, discovering more books and thinking about future slow-read projects.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

I’m not sure if there is anything I SHOULD be doing. Listening to audiobooks means I can do all those tedious activities like exercise and cleaning while also reading. But there’s stuff I wish I did more of, but I choose to read instead. In particular, watching TV and films and playing computer games.

If I had my life three times over, I’m sure I would get lost in box sets, watch three or four films a week, and idle away hours playing Civilisation. I haven’t played a game in years – they’re so addictive and immersive, and you lose all track of time. But so much fun! I’ve seen less than half a dozen films in the last year, if that. We went to see Nolan’s Odyssey last month, and it made me think we should do regular movie nights because there are so many films I haven’t seen. Oh, and music! There’s not enough music in my life.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

I think, first, it is important not to give the impression that people should read more. Chronic, obsessive readers like ourselves can sound a bit pious and worthy when we get onto the subject of the benefits of reading. We enthuse so much about books that we forget that the reading life is one among many. There is nothing inherently inferior about choosing not to read, nor will reading necessarily make you a better, kinder, happier, more interesting person. I wish!

So step one is: don’t feel bad about how much you read. Don’t compare yourself to other readers out there, living lives wildly different to your own, with their own priorities and commitments. Start where you are and start small. Pick a book you really want to read. Find ten minutes a day when something like scrolling on social media can be replaced with a little reading. And start. It’s the hardest part, but it creates the habit and appetite for more.

This has been the magic of reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a chapter a day, with the community at Footnotes & Tangents. Tolstoy’s epic is made up of 361 short chapters. Many people who join our read-along have lost the habit or joy of reading. And when you’ve lost your reading mojo, the idea of completing a beast like War and Peace seems impossible. But each chapter is not only short but far easier and more enjoyable to read than you might imagine. The power of this daily habit and the sense of achievement upon finishing War and Peace have boosted many readers’ confidence and renewed their appetite to read more and more challenging books.

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

Well, I’ve just mentioned one of them! Honestly, I think everyone should give War and Peace a chance. Depending on your preconceptions, you might expect a dense and dry nineteenth-century novel or a miserable Russian meditation on war and death. War and Peace is neither of these. It is light and pacey, full of humour, drama, and sharp observations on character and human nature. And it is an eminently humane and wise book about the meaning of life. Don’t be intimidated by its size, or those long Russian names! Pick it up today and thank me later.

Inevitably, I also recommend Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, starting with Wolf Hall. Some wit dubbed our year-long slow read “Wolf Crawl”, and the name stuck. Perhaps you have no interest in historical fiction or scant knowledge of Tudor England. Well, these books may surprise you. They are a rags-to-riches rise-and-fall tale of power, ambition and revenge; a story about the public performance of self, the unreliability of memory, and the making of the modern world. It’s also a first-rate ghost story, and it will haunt you for the rest of your reading life

What I love so much about sharing thinking space with is that he so beautifully shows a way of being a reader that allows you to take books very seriously without yourself as a reader very seriously. Who cares if your reading life is not perfect if it perfectly fits into your very real and imperfect life?

🤓 Let’s talk nicely about Simon behind his back!1

• Which of Simon’s tips and practices resonated with you the most?

• What’s one expectation about being a “good reader” you’d happily let go of?

• Simon says his reading plans are often derailed by “whims and sudden squalls of curiosity.” What’s the last bookish tangent you followed, and where did it take you?

It takes a lot of trial and error to discover what you like to read. I know it’s obvious on some level but it bears repeating — if you are not liking what you’re reading, you simply must try reading something, ANYTHING else and FAST. Because as you do, you will eventually stumble upon a figurative bookstore aisle where finally you will be surrounded by works that make sense to you.

Some of us are lucky to arrive at our intuition sooner than others. Those of us who are late-bloomers in identifying our literary preferences just get bonus points for not giving up on ourselves. I spent most of my 30s stumbling around like a drunk person, picking up this title and that… not all of it totally off the mark. But it wasn’t until two years ago that I felt that I had a reading PROJECT — a cohesive point of view, a sensibility — that I was after. As you can imagine, I feel very protective of my discovery. There is enormous pleasure in finally making sense to oneself as a reader.

Over the years — and especially after embarking on this newsletter — I have also learned a lot about the various ways in which one can be a reader. As a result, I have become increasingly suspicious of the puritanical effort to stay focused on a specific genre, tradition or type of literature long enough to become recognizable for it. Some of that pressure, I think, is connected to a broader capitalist logic around productivity. A focused reader is a classifiable reader, they are easier to understand. And once a reading life becomes legible, it also becomes easier to convert into output: criticism, recommendations, expertise, content, a brand.

A reader who reads across genres is more of a wild card. A mix of high and low reading signals a willingness to entertain reading for work AND for pleasure, for discernment AND escape, for education AND entertainment. That kind of reader may be harder to summarize — and therefore harder to package. In other words, a diverse reader is not only not behaving like a worker, reading with an eye toward output but she is also a less predictable consumer. A focused reader is an understandable consumer, a classifiable consumer, a targetable consumer. Once your taste becomes legible, someone can SELL to you — and, increasingly, your own reading can be turned into something you sell to others.

Either way — what may make you appear a “better,” more serious reader to “the culture” is also what might be putting limits on what you allow yourself to read and how. In a way, being a “better,” more professionalized reader may be making you a less free reader, beholden to the invisible hand of the algorithm.

I have definitely grappled with the idea of embracing my current hyperfixations with the awareness that a) some of the particular reading I tend to gravitate toward in the moment can be quite challenging both intellectually and emotionally

and b) I may simply be cutting myself out of interesting reading that can be fulfilling in different ways. Not to mention the tinges of embarrassment I carry around taking my reading and myself too damn seriously.

My baby-attempts at identifying reading that is smart but not exhausting have yielded mixed results, with my most famous failure including my foray into trying to appreciate romance. Which — spoiler alert — did not work for me and only made me retreat deep into the familiar territory of odd, artistic and impenetrable literary fiction.

The best readers that I love, trust and admire all seem to allow themselves to read “off-season:”

After two years of talking with serious readers, I have noticed that the best ones have a go-to genre that they read when needing to step away from the main stream of things. Amor Towles loves to read suspense series during the summer. Deborah Craytor started a trend during one of our early community zooms by getting everyone excited about reading horror. , who is one of the best known book nerds on Substack, shared in her Reading Life interview that embarrassingly-not-embarrassingly she loves to read self-help.

Every time I go to my local Friends of the Library sale, I watch patrons walking out with a stack of Lee Child, Kate Atkinson or John Grisham novels and my heart feels this pang that all they have to do to close the distance between current state and perfect state is to make it home and brew a cup of coffee. I think I envy their ease. They know what they like, they buy six of them, they go home. Nobody appears to be standing in the parking lot asking whether Jack Reacher sufficiently coheres with their intellectual project.

When the New York Times posted their list of the 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century, I was intrigued. To build the list, the Book Review sent ballots to novelists, editors, booksellers, librarians and other book lovers, asking them: What are the 10 best thrillers published since 2000?

Freida McFadden and Lee Child took part. So did S.A. Cosby, Gillian Flynn, John Grisham, Alyssa Cole, Stephen King and hundreds of others. Readers can also participate by voting for their top picks.

Here are gift links to the project, c/o The NY Times:

Even though I was familiar with several of the titles on the long list, I had only read a small subset of them and, after spending some time with the final list of 50, I felt compelled to reach out to the Book Review editors with some questions. I was grateful to receive very thoughtful responses from New York Times Book Review Deputy Editor Tina Jordan, which I am sharing below in full and would love to discuss:

Many of my readers primarily read literary fiction, but they’re also curious about what they should reach for when they want reading to feel effortless and immersive. What separates a truly great thriller from one that’s simply a page-turner?

The elements that elevate a thriller are the same elements that elevate any piece of great literature: excellent writing, originality, the author’s skill in grappling with complex moral issues.

There are so many different kinds of books that fall under the thriller umbrella: classic mysteries, courtroom dramas, psychological thrillers, cozies, espionage fiction, crime novels. What these have in common, of course, is that they’re plot driven. Does that make them all “simply page-turners”? I would argue that the answer to that is no: The best ones are much, much more than that.

Do you think readers should have an “offseason” in their reading lives? I’m fascinated by the books we choose when we’re tired, stressed, traveling, or simply don’t want to work so hard as readers. Do you see thrillers filling that role, or do you think the best thrillers demand just as much from readers — just in different ways?

Pick up John le Carré, Tana French, Lawrence Osborne or Marlon James, and you’ll find books that demand just as much from a reader as traditional literary fiction. But at the same time, the genre also offers fantastic stories that are pure enjoyment.

What we reach for when we’re tired or traveling is personal. My own comfort picks range from midcentury spy novels and Sarah Caudwell mysteries to Lee Child and Sarah Waters. Whether someone turns to suspense, romance or fantasy, it’s not about working less, but enjoying the storytelling.

Which 3 titles from this list would you specifically recommend to someone who reads mostly literary fiction and wants permission to downshift, without it feeling like a lesser choice?

I disagree that reading a thriller would be a “downshift” for someone who reads mostly literary fiction. Great storytelling is great storytelling, regardless of the genre. High concept suspense and literary craft aren’t mutually exclusive, and many of the finest modern novels operate in both spaces. In fact, two of the novels on this list won Pulitzers (The Sympathizer and The Goldfinch) and two others were shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Room and Fingersmith). If someone who reads mostly literary fiction wants to try a book with excellent prose and depth, I would recommend starting with those.

I must own up to the fact that as I read my own questions back, they absolutely reek of genre-ism. Tina Jordan is basically telling me, RESPECTFULLY, you have no idea what you are talking about. Which is absolutely fair. She is actually disagreeing with the very premise of my questions.

I truly fear that as readers we become less free when we organize ourselves around perceived seriousness and cultural prestige… but then, when I had my chance to talk to people at the ultimate prestige literary institution, I couldn’t help but question which thrillers were respectable enough for a literary-fiction reader. The irony.

Over the last two years I have been working hard on building a reading life based around curiosity, pleasure and personal appetite rather than external validation. I have thought endlessly about the difference between books that are “good” and books that are good for me. I have written about reading taste and intellectual insecurity and all the invisible systems of hierarchy and status that get in the way of a truly authentic reading life. And yet, apparently, so much of the language in my questions is the language of labor: “work harder,” “downshift,” “off-season.” Even while arguing that reading should resist the logic of productivity, I still measure books by how much labor I imagine they require of me. To be clear, I don’t think the answer is to begin pretending to enjoy genres that simply do not work for you. But I definitely do not want to become the kind of reader who knows in advance what she is allowed to like.

I do appreciate the perspective of the Times’ list because it introduces readers to a broad swath of writing generally united by its focus on plot-driven suspense and storytelling. Of Tina’s recommendations, I have already read Room and The Goldfinch, but I am adding Fingersmith and The Sympathizer to my list right away, as well as The Trees by Percival Everett, which did not make the final 50 but I know would be both well written and morally complex. I know that people on the internet generally love to argue over the accuracy or utility of this type of list — why these titles, why these voters, etc. — but I appreciate this genre-focused list more than the broader “Great Books” list that preceded it.

As I attempt to widen my scope, I still find genre-based scaffolding helpful. There is something about testing out genres, one at a time, that appeals to the social scientist in me. I am obviously making no attempts to be scientifically accurate or objective, but I do want to enter into experimentation with a commitment to fairness and rigor. I will attempt to introduce chaos into my reading mix, but will want to do so in an orderly manner.

🤓 Help me think through this a little bit more:

• Has knowing your taste ever felt limiting?

• When do you feel the most free as a reader? When do you feel the happiest and most satisfied?

• Thriller people: if you could give a literary-fiction reader three books to change her mind, what would they be? Did you like The NY Times list?

As we tumble forward fall and watch award lists and buzzy new releases file past, I have been thinking a lot about what makes a book find its moment. I know that IT IS COMPLICATED and there is no ONE THING that determines whether a book will be received as intended. However, I have a theory.

I believe the best books contain, somewhere inside them, a core — a source of energy that resists rational explanation. I think that most books grow from just such a core but not all authors manage to build outward from it without losing it. The ones who do — who let the book grow while keeping that source intact — are the ones who break out.

Kitten by Yu came out earlier this week and, surely, by this point you have seen a review, an author interview or any number of thoughtful pieces about the book. In a sea of releases, Kitten is clearly breaking out.

When I first read the book back in March, I wrote about “the discomfort of going home but not quite belonging there anymore, while not having anywhere else that feels better just yet.” I thought that ache was the book’s core.

Having now read the material Stacey shared with me for this interview, I think I was only half right. The ache is real, but it’s rooted somewhere even more specific — in a promise made to a mother, and the particular betrayal of breaking it by simply growing up. There is such vivid feeling, innocence and despair in that broken promise that somehow all of the internet is losing their mind over a book about a girl and her boyfriend’s cat.

It truly IS charming. Please read it.

The conversation that follows is the second installment of Source Material — an occasional series of conversations with writers I admire, tracing the raw material behind their work.

Stacey, please tell us about your new book! What was the idea / character / image that set you on your path to write it!

Kitten is about a woman who once promised her tricky, inordinately affectionate mother she would never grow up… and is now, God forbid, growing up. It is about class, love, the allure of helplessness, and one very special cat. Think Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation with more heart, Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend with more edge, and Levy’s Hot Milk but swapping the sensual Spanish seaside for a moody New England one.

I’ve always wanted to write a book about growing out of childhood, particularly how our narratives of childhood interfere with our experience of adulthood. As a child, I couldn’t imagine ever growing up. And as an adult, I was constantly romanticizing my own childhood, convinced that both I and the people I loved were happier when I was younger. I wrote Kitten to confront and detangle this feeling, but also to honor it. Childhood is the one thing we all, every single one of us, share in losing.

Finally, to address the cat in the room…a big component of Kitten is that this lost young woman, Katie, develops an unhealthy attachment with her boyfriend’s cat. I’ve always been drawn to the non-human and the animal, and what our relationships with them say about ourselves.

I feel an affinity with the vulnerable and the little, and thought it would be fun to take that affinity to the nth degree.

Please share 3 to 5 books that make sense alongside KITTEN: inspiration, theoretical references, works you are fighting with?

1. Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, about a woman named Sophie who accompanies her hypochondriac mother to Spain to seek increasingly bizarre treatment for a mysterious ailment. Unsurprisingly, this was a huge inspiration for me. I was struck particularly by the lines “My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.” which recur throughout the book. I loved the cleanness and intensity of this sentiment, violent both in its imagery and simplicity. The prose in Hot Milk is otherwise very sensorial and descriptive, so the bluntness of language used to describe emotion is especially striking. It feels very true. You can use all the beautiful language in the world to describe any random place or person, but when talking about the thing you love and fear most in the world, you need only a few simple words

2. My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang. This is a poetry collection, and I actually quote one of its poems in my epigraph: “I told the love of my life to baby me but he fell short.” Zhang’s writing is singularly evocative, obsessive, gross, and beautiful. She’s never afraid to be base; she almost dares you to call her immature. The collection explores the drama of being born, the humiliations and ecstasies of life and love. It feels very childish and animal in the best way, both qualities I wanted to harness in my novel.
   

3. The Idiot by Elif Batuman. This book taught me the importance of voice. It was the first time I encountered a voice so alive, compelling, and self-possessed that it almost obviated the need for plot, or conflict, or any of the other things that give a book momentum. Everything was interesting because the narrator was interesting. Everything she observed had value because of the way she observed it. With Kitten, my narrator is extremely passive, which obviously risks a boring reading experience. Crafting a distinct voice was one of the ways I got around that.

   ---

Now that the book is done - what are you doing / reading / listening to in order to take a breath from the intensity of the writing process?

I am saying yes to any and all plans. I am seeing more of my friends than ever. I find myself cherishing and seeking more physically grounding experiences - reading outside in the park instead of my house, going dancing - almost as a contrast to how psychological and isolating writing and publishing a book is.

As for reading, I find myself drawn, at the moment, to contemporary backlist novels. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner was an absolute delight and shock to the system. I just read Outline by Rachel Cusk, a big blind spot of mine. And I also recently finished my first Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge. Though, as far as novels about the aftermath of 9/11 and Bush’s America go (joking, ish), I prefer Atocha.

My Kitten playlist has been such a grounding force throughout the writing of the novel, but I kind of can’t bear to listen to it at the moment! It’s so moody and throws me right back to when I would take hour-long walks by the sea, wet-eyed and frustrated and doubtful that I would ever finish the book, just begging for my brain to come up with something that would solve everything.

I listened to the song “Crybaby” by Nanna for like one month straight. I felt it shared an emotional heart with my novel, particularly the lines “All the very best of me was given to the dogs on the street / Well, I don’t have a problem with crawling on fours.” It’s strikingly vulnerable, almost over-exposing in its confession of loneliness. That, to me, was my character Katie.

Happily, I have a new Kitten related playlist: one for the launch parties I’m throwing in London and New York. It starts with the below song, which sounds to me like joy and possibility.

As luck would have it, I have read two of Stacey’s three reference books — Hot Milk and The Idion — and I am struck by how different those two books are from each other but how much sense they make as a backdrop to Kitten and how much sense they make together as a group! I haven’t read Jenny Zhang’s poetry collection but I am familiar with her work from when she used to write one of the best personal style blogs on the internet (with , I can’t be the only one who remembers!!!) …. so My Baby First Birthday is an instant add-to-cart moment for me.

⚡️ Now, let’s chat about it all:

• Did you notice how frequently Stacey quotes favorite lines from novels and music? I felt really inspired to be better about memorizing my favorite lines from the books I love.

• I loved Kitten and I have really enjoyed reading Stacey talk ABOUT Kitten. What is your take on reading writers interpretations of their own work? Do you care or do you let the work speak for itself?

• Are there other books or authors whose source material you'd be curious to learn about?

In Journal of a Solitude, the poet and novelist May Sarton laments the aftermath of a disappointing book review:

I have become convinced since that horrible review (unimportant in itself) that it is a message, however deviously presented, to tell me that I have been overconcerned with the materialistic aspects of bringing out this novel, the dangerous hope that it become a best seller, or that, for once, I might get a leg up from the critics, the establishment, and not have once more to see the work itself stand alone and make its way, heart by heart, as it is discovered by a few people with all the excitement of a person who finds a wildflower in the woods that he has discovered on his one. From my isolation to the isolation of someone somewhere who will find my work there exists a true communion. I have not lacked it in these last years, and it is a blessing. It is free of “ambition” and it “makes the world go away,” as the popular song says. This is what I can hope for and I must hope for nothing more or less.

She is trying so hard to believe that she has grown past ambition, past the need for traditional success… she almost has herself convinced. And it’s painful to read these passages because you can feel her devastation and yet you cannot tell her that, in time, the critics do come around and that decades past her death, her beautiful poems, novels and journals continue to make their way to new readers, heart by heart. And that many of us will experience true communion not only because of how connected we feel to her work but also to each other by discovering our shared interest and affinity for it.

True Communion is a good way to describe my July.

📚 Books mentioned:

• Journal of a Solitude — May Sarton

• Art Work — Sally Mann

• Life of M — Rachel Cusk

• Go Gentle — Maria Semple

• Man Overboard! — Kathleen Rooney

• the unexpected afterlife of salon rose — Amy B. Scher

📚 Journal of a Solitude — May Sarton

May Sarton’s journal was my treasured companion all month long — my favorite book of July, love at first sentence, pages upon pages underlined top to bottom. As I mentioned a little while ago, I have been collecting and reading the work of famous diarists in an attempt to learn how to keep a journal without sounding pathetic to myself. And, with May Sarton, I had my butt handed to me a little bit because her collection is a constant yo-yo between feeling steady and uplifted and feeling deeply lonely and depressed. She falters between being upset about her anger and resentments and being kind and gracious with herself, understanding that her discomfort and despair are the very sources of her creative energy and must therefore be embraced.

What brings her back from the depths of despair:

• Nature

• Her garden

• Writing letters to friends, thought partners, readers

• Winning over the stray cat that will take her food but won’t accept her affection

• Her lover X

• Her fellow townsmen and women in Nelson, New Hampshire

• The kindness of simple folk

• Being judgy (but fair).

• Poetry — reading it, writing it

⚡️ On her time spent with Virginia Woolf:
She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was starling.

⚡️ The purpose of poetry vs. the novel:
Perhaps because the poem is primarily a dialogue with the self and the novel a dialogue with others. They come from entirely different modes of being. I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

⚡️ On lunch:
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning’s work.

⚡️ On ambition:
Not easy to find the balance, for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

⚡️ On the Flemish painters — Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch:
I suppose these paintings speak to me with such force because they represent all that I hope to do in the novels and in the poems. THey compose the world without ever imposing a rigid schema upon it and make us see even the domestic scene at its most banal with a sudden sense of revelation, with poignant recognition. The painters look at reality with devotion, and what we see is life never sentimentalized, but enhanced.

⚡️ On “long-eared” animals:
Isn’t it true that long-eared animals — rabbits, donkeys — have a special charm?

Last week, during my Zoom Coffee with Khionna Douglas, we talked about how you know you are enjoying a book when you start writing notes to the author in the margins. You may be mad or frustrated with them — but they got you by the neck. All month I have been LOL-ing, WOW-ing, and !!!-ing at May. At some point I even told her, It gets better, May. I truly felt like I met a friend through time and space in this book, not to mention an iconoclastic queer poet who broke both artistic and social boundaries with the singularity of her life and her work. Recommending this book to you all PASSIONATELY and forever grateful to for first putting in on my radar so many months ago.

📚 Art Work — Sally Mann

Speaking of iconoclasts, earlier in the month I read Sally Mann’s Art Work — her memoir about her creative life. I, of course, was familiar with Mann’s Immediate Family series that featured her young children in beautiful and provocative poses.

However, I was not familiar with Mann’s larger body of nature photography NOR with her writing, and the memoir actually made me love her even more. Because of my entryway into her work (through the children portraits), I had always thought of Mann as a shit-stirrer and a provocateur… but her memoir helped me see her as a sensitive poet at heart. Her spirit is warm, elegiac and very Southern… inspired by the land, its ghosts and its history and reflected not only in her writing but in her nature photography as well.

Mann wrote the book with young artists in mind — to show and encourage them to stay with their work and continue to push through the pain of creation as that pain is easier to endure than the pain of not producing your work1. She is an equal advocate for both order and passion in one’s artistic pursuits and on multiple occasions leans on Flaubert:

To paraphrase, indeed mangle, my hero Flaubert, you should be regular and orderly in your life, so you can write like an avenging angel.

In the context of the month that I was having, I was fascinating by the inclusion of many diary entries (reproduced as photographs, which was really neat to see) and letters with the photographer Ted Orland who Mann met early on in her career while attending the Ansel Adams Gallery Yosemite Workshops. Their prolific correspondence spanning decades is a constant source of strength, clarity and levity for Mann who for years struggles to find her path into the art world and to be taken seriously. And even though the book is definitely written for a younger audience, I felt genuinely inspired by the clarity of Mann’s vision and her insistence on staying with an idea for as long as it needs to be fully formed. Sadly, most good things require that you have the patience to put in the work and… alas… TIME.

📚 Life of M — Rachel Cusk

The BIG novel for me this month was Life of M — Rachel Cusk’s new novel that is about to hit bookstores in late August. True to form, the book is set in an unspecified European city (that feels a lot like Paris) and puts an unnamed novelist (that feels a lot like Cusk) in conversation with her famous actress friend — M — about the quality and nature of her life as an incredibly recognizable person in the world. The story opens with the narrator telling M that she is thinking about writing her “autobiography” and the actress likes the idea. The narrative that follows alternates between descriptions of the two women’s direct interactions over the course of their friendship — book events they attend together, long conversations in M’s garden — throwbacks to M’s earlier artistic projects and the narrator’s personal reflections on the meaning of an artistic career and the impact of celebrity on one’s ability to cultivate and maintain a stable sense of self.

If you are already familiar with Cusk’s work and follows literary gossip, you are probably already aware that the book is apparently based on Cusk’s friendship with Natalie Portman and that Natalie Portman is, allegedly, not happy about how the book makes her look. I personally do not care about celebrity culture — all my favorite celebrities are novelists with two notable exceptions2 — and early on found this particular theme of the book a little offputting. Like, I know that Cusk’s work is typically autofictional and therefore, the M character was probably based on an actual person. Once I learned that the character was based on NP, I could see how certain references could be interpreted to be directly borrowed from her career. But, to me — honestly — it all read like it could have been any other actress who started in the industry as a young child, got to play a number of overly sexualized roles and then had to fight tooth and nail to build a reputation as a person of intellect and substance.

Note: Similarly to M in the novel, Natalie Portman has had a long partnership with Dior and has participated in book events for / with the brand. Portman also has a bookclub that seems to have stopped running in March of 2026.

I am sad and annoyed that the book has already become “The Natalie Portman Book” when, to me, the most interesting aspect of it was the fluidity between the narrator and M’s narratives and how much the two needed each other in order to validate their own ambitious pursuits. M, for example, meets the narrator at a reading and is quick to allow the friendship as she is looking for proof of her own intelligence and high-mindedness. The Cusk-esque character in turn is carefully documenting the transparent nature of M’s continuous metamorphosis while gradually acknowledging the instability of her own personality:

Our personalities seem like strangers to us. It is this self, unanchored in time, breathing in the darkness, that is real.

More than a commentary on celebrity culture and/or female exploitation in the film industry (which, somehow, I cannot imagine Rachel Cusk giving a flying fuck about) — I read the book as an exploration of the concept of “no-self.” There are not explicit mentions of this idea but in Buddhism, anattā, is the idea that contrary to Western ideas of selfhood, humans do not have a core, fixed, “authentic” self but are, instead, a changing mix of physical and mental processes: physical form, thoughts, perceptions, feelings, awareness, etc. and therefore it is futile to keep searching to uncover an “authentic self.”

I find the way in which Cusk draws out this idea of no-self in this book both incredibly moving and also delightfully familiar as echoes of Cusk’s earlier work: the interplay of professional ambition, family and age in this new novel at times feel like a throwback to both the Outline trilogy — especially Kudos — and the devastating honestly of A Life’s Work — Cusk’s memoir of becoming a mother. From the current vantage point, it appears that Cusk has developed a softness and an acceptance that her younger self was not ready for. In describing M’s strife — for creative singularity, for erudition, for social approval — she is able to relinquish the “ugliness” of her own experience. She’s dealt with that ugliness in the past “by trying to pay attention to myself.” But through documenting someone else’s inability to accept the permeability of their self, she is finally able to let go of her own and what at times in her life has felt like catastrophe can now feel a whole lot like freedom.

I know that these are strong words… but this is probably my most favorite novel by Cusk yet. 😳

Because it was July, it felt appropriate to take my foot off the pedal a little bit, readingwise and I read three “lighter” novels that kept me reading while making endless tomato sandwiches, supervising playdates or trying to convince my sweet aging dog to go for a walk in the sweltering Memphis heat.

📚 Go Gentle — Maria Semple

Go Gentle is Maria Semple’s latest novel. Semple is the author of Where Did You Go Bernadette which is one of the most FUN novels I have ever read. I will read anything that Semple writes but I already know it’s never going to quite match Bernadette for me. This book follows a middle-aged Philosophy professor who teaches stoicism and is a moral advisor to a wealthy family. Life is good as she enjoys her work and her life as a divorced parent of a clever teenager when she gets mixed up in what feels like a heist that puts both her personal and professional life in jeopardy. The book is a romp — between the stacked cast of characters and the quick snip of the plotline, I must confess that at times I couldn’t quite follow who’s who and how the various clues tied together. BUT, Maria Semple’s signature mixture of wit and delight covers up any try-hard indiscretions… so, I too, will go gentle on her.

📚 Man Overboard! — Kathleen Rooney

I also read Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney — about a man who finds himself bopping in the ocean, apparently after having flipped overboard while on a cruise with his family. He is unsure if he’s fallen or if he’s jumped but present circumstances have him fighting to survive. The book is equal parts funny and tender, reminding me in voice and tempo of Dolly Alderton’s Good Material and maybe some of Nick Hornby’s work… while also giving me some of the sadness and anguish of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (I know, I know… an odd set of comparisons but I stand by it). Thank you, for the recommendation!

📚 the unexpected afterlife of salon rose by Amy B. Scher

Finally, I finished the month with the unexpected afterlife of salon rose by Amy B. Scher. This book — wildly and unbelievably inspired by real-life events — is told by Salon Rose who opens up on page one by sharing, “the first dead body i ever see is my own.” The book is part murder mystery, part coming-of-age story and is inspired by a horrific week in Scher’s life when her father died and her twenty-two year old cousin — Salon Rose — was murdered. In the opening to the novel, Amy shares that she survived her grief by “listening to true crime podcasts, carrying my dad’s ashes around in the toothpick holder he used for weed, and writing this book to try to find meaning in it all.” The story is odd, funny and full of heart… but my favorite part about it was the voice of Salon Rose who basically rings off the page. It’s an imperfect reference… but the book really made me want to rewatch Juno. Who remembers it? Also… reading it, I just kept thinking… how fucking amazing humans are that we are able to take our most profound broken-heartedness and transform it into art that is both silly and hopeful.

My reading this month felt extra special because I spent a lot of time grabbing Zoom Coffee with so many of you guys and getting to chat about books, newsletters, journaling and the weird joy of making real friends on the internet. I was again reminded of how much I value my book friends while reading Kim Ourada’s responses to The Reading Life questionnaire last week3.

There are many reasons to be a reader and a writer on Substack — I do know that many people are building SERIOUS careers on this platform. But to me the best part, always, is the connections and conversations I made with other readers and I will never stop feeling grateful for that.

❤️ Favorite books of 2026 so far:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

• April — Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

• May — Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

• June — Show Your Work | Keep Going | Don’t Call It Art — Austin Kleon

• July — Journal of a Solitude — May Sarton

I hope your July has been fun and I look forward to seeing some of you on our Community Zoom this coming Saturday! Please bring your Commonplace Notebook if you have one and be prepared to do a QUICK show-and-tell on how you do it! If you are unable to upgrade your subscription but would like to attend, be sure to send me a note and I would be happy to comp you!

🤓 And… before I go:

• What was the BIG book of your month — the one that you carried around and organized your life around?

• For Cusk stans — is the Natalie Portman drama making you more or less excited to read this book? And can you please promise me that you WILL read it so we can talk about it some more?

• And, finally, isn’t it true that long-eared animals — rabbits, donkeys — have a special charm? Donkeys are my favorite animals. 🥹

This letter will introduce you to one of my favorite readers — KIM OURADA!!!

— taught math in Chicago for many years, until she recently retired. When she shared her news a few months ago during one of our Community Zooms1, we all wanted to know what her retirement plans were and we all screamed when she said “books and yoga”… because, isn’t that the dream life that so many of us around here share?! So well deserved after 20+ yeas spent in the company of high-schoolers. I hope this conversation inspires you to commit to a lifelong pursuit of learning and the humility and simple daily discipline that pursuit requires.

I also hope that the conversation inspires you to join a literary community or conversation — Kim shares her favorite spaces below. Kim isn’t a creator or a critic but she is a beloved and respected member of a half-dozen reading communities across Substack and Instagram, showing up to other people’s Zoom calls and Discords month after month. In fact, I know that many of you will recognize her not only from her thoughtful comments to my posts and our Reading Life Community Zoom but from other communities you belong to as well. Please wave if that is the case! 👋

There’s something about this moment we live in that makes so many of us determined to stake a claim, do our own thing, be the one with the opinion. It’s an ego-driven impulse that I am not proud of and absolutely recognize in myself as well. I am personally so inspired by Kim who seems to have the opposite instinct: a discerning eye, real taste, and no compulsion to plant a flag. How very cool.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

To answer this, I want to share a bit about my background. My first career was as an interior designer in Denver and Chicago. While I loved the creativity of the profession, I felt something was missing. Taking advantage of my husband’s tuition benefits at DePaul University, I returned to school. I fully embraced a liberal arts education, double majoring in mathematics and cultural anthropology with a minor in French. I completed my Master’s Degree and taught mathematics for 29 years (just retired). For me, it was never just about the teaching of math—it was about sharing with my students the value of being curious every day.

Reading reflects my love of an interdisciplinary life. It fuels my natural curiosity, broadens my worldview, and is a tool for self-discovery and personal growth.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

I thrive on routine, but I don’t closely track my habits. During my time as a teacher, I built a regimented daily reading habit. Living just a mile from work meant I could spend 15 minutes reading before arriving at school at 7:00 a.m. After school, I carved out 15 to 30 minutes of transition time. In the evenings, I closed the day with a book in bed (typically around 8 pm). And…there are always those interstitial moments.

Retirement gives me the free time I need to build new routines. However, mornings will always be my most productive reading time. I can tap into the mental reset that exists after sleep, before decision fatigue has entered the day.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

I don’t know that my taste has changed more than it has expanded. I have a natural craving for novelty and broadening my worldview. Translated fiction isn’t something I read years ago, but it is now an important part of my reading life. Also, when I read broadly, I give myself the opportunity for “aha!” moments—those instances where seemingly disconnected ideas result in an interesting connection. That is one of the most exciting feelings in my reading life!

The literary blind spot I have is romance, and I frequently struggle with non-fiction.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

Nothing unique.

PKG: This is absolutely NOT true. There are two very specific reading habits that I have picked up on Kim’s direct advice. No. 1, when I book starts to feel inaccessible — if possible — pop it on in audio format AND listen to the narration while you follow along on the page. That is brilliant advice for mastering your attention in distracted times. No. 2, if book journaling feels inaccessible, simply copy the first and last line of the book in your notebook. AMAZINGLY HELPFUL AND SATISFYING. I bet by the time I publish this post, I will think of a few more!

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I am a fan of paperbacks and never hesitate to annotate, and dog-ear, my books. My favorite tools are Blackwing pencils, which I stock up on during Independent Bookstore Day.

There is a sensory experience of reading with them—from the smell of the California incense-cedar to the intentional pause required to sharpen the lead. I use a ruler to underline passages because it slows down my mind so I can re-absorb the line.

PKG: Blackwing pencils are A Reading Life community favorite! also mentioned them in his interview last year and I have been using // loving them ever since, too. In fact, Blackwing pencils have become my de facto bookmarks of choice.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I am a StoryGraph fan but my journals are my memory keepers. I have two journals, one of which is a reading log, which is a new habit for me. Instead of restarting my book count every year, I just keep a continuous count. (See image above).

My second journal contains the first sentence, last sentence, and narrative voice, plus whatever else I am drawn to. Those three things really trigger my memories about the book.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

Thank goodness for all the pearls of wisdom that now exist in the online space. I have found trusted curators on Instagram and Substack. I get so bubbly talking about the creators I love! Here are my tried-and-tested favorites — the ones that actually feed my literary life:

• Fiction Matters by — Instagram/Substack/Discord, with Zoom book discussions. She originally also ran Novel Pairings: Classic Books, Modern Readers; I joined both because of how masterfully curated her selections are. Sara hosts a monthly Buzzy Book meeting, a monthly Book Club (literary and classic fiction), and runs a very active “reading among friends” Discord.

• A Reading Life by moi 2— Instagram/Substack, with Zoom “reading life” discussions and thoughtful monthly reading posts. There’s a weekly community space where followers share their Last Read, Current Read, and Next Up — some great conversations and finds have come out of that. Petya also opens up her journaling life in a way that’s been a constantly evolving source of inspiration for me. When I read her about page — “This is a space for anybody who wants to live an intellectually inspired life” — I knew it was a good fit. She’s genuinely one of the most personable creators in the book space.

• Martha’s Monthly by — Instagram/Substack/Discord, with bi-monthly Zoom discussions. Martha’s knowledge of translated fiction is rich, and she’s a fantastic guide if you want to read differently. Her monthly reviews — with a Buy/Borrow/Bust verdict — surface gems I’d never find on my own, and her Zoom discussions have grown into a genuinely thoughtful community.

• Footnotes and Tangents by — mostly Substack, some Instagram. Simon describes it as writing “guides for the books I love” and running read-alongs at a gentle pace — and honestly, it’s a gift of adult education. I never would have gotten the depth I did on the Wolf Hall trilogy without his weekly guides (true to the name — footnotes and tangents). The comments section is not to be missed; Simon often adds as much depth there as in the post itself.

• Read the Classics by — Substack. Henry filled the gap when Novel Pairings closed, and I subscribed immediately — every month I found myself saying “oh, I want to read that.” He runs a year-long slow read of a classic; this month it’s Bonjour Tristesse, and between his translation recommendation, video post (where I nod along more than I’d like to admit), and community discussion, he’s scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. In August we’re reading Their Eyes Were Watching God — a book I’ll admit I’ve been a little intimidated to read on my own.

• Booker of the Month by — Instagram, also on Substack. We read and meet monthly to discuss a Booker-nominated title (some months we double up with two books). Great discussions, but also a lot of laughs — a genuinely fun-loving community.

Each of these creators has its own niche in my reading life. It sounds like a lot, but I always pick and choose so it never subverts my own reading goals.

Finally, I am super lucky that my local library is about a mile away. Walking out of the library with a load of books is the best way to sample or to follow something tangential to a current read.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

I am both. Because I have honed in on curators who fit my broad reading tastes, it's easy to participate in read-alongs while honoring my reading preferences. But I also grant myself the space to follow my own reading plan or mood.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

Yoga and daily walks are essential to my routine. I’ve discovered that listening to audiobooks makes my walking time fly by, even though I have mixed feelings about how the format affects my reading experience. That said, I find that audio works perfectly for a re-read.

Social time in limited amounts. I have always enjoyed my alone time.

Cleaning, yuk, 15 minute chunks in various places daily. I can’t think when there is clutter so clearing surfaces is a mental must!

My husband and I have created a collection of easy, nutritious meals. While he puts a vinyl record on to cook dinner, I retreat to enjoy a few quiet moments of reading.

PKG: Here to co-sign on audiobooks for re-reads AND as cleaning companions. Yuk is right.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

It seems counter-intuitive, but reading multiple books at once actually helps me read more. It keeps things fresh allowing me to shift my focus depending on my mood. That said, if a book completely captivates me, I’ll happily abandon the multi-book approach and stick with it until the end.

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

Because my interests are eclectic, I can never single out just one favorite book. From the breadth and depth of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, to celebrated Booker Prize nominations, to translated fiction and Foundry Editions releases, I would like to think of my shelves as a collection of diverse experiences. I don’t love one book over another; instead, I value each for the unique ways it has shaped my mind.

Maybe I should have talked about my reading snack/obsession of hot air popcorn that I spray with avocado oil and sprinkle on pink sea salt…

PKG: 😂

When I was in my 30s and in my GirlBoss Era — running in heels, #building and all that — I remember having a conversation with a co-worker who shared how excited she was about her retirement plans. I thought, how pathetic to feel that way about one’s life and count the days to a life of leisure; just get a better job already. Ah, Baby Petya. I’m only sharing my shame in search of forgiveness. I have since learned that there are no gold stars for worker bees and there is more to life than the achievement olympics… and this chat with Kim reminded me how much beauty and fulfillment there is in a quiet life of inner piece and good books.

— thank you so much for taking the time to share your reading life with us and I am genuinely so excited for you to finally be able to enjoy your retirement!

🤓 And now, let’s talk nicely behind Kim’s back:

• Which of Kim’s tips and practices most resonated with you?

• Are you community joiner, a quiet lurker or do you like to do your own thing?

• What other literary communities do you enjoy being part of?

A few months ago my friend gifted me a copy of Helen Garner’s diaries. I brought the book to my office at work where I read it in little bursts when I have a solo lunch break. The book inspired me to pick up a few more diaries of inspiring women and go to them for ideas on not only how to live and work but also how to journal.

See… I’ve been journaling on and off since I was in 5th grade, pretty religiously since 2019. For most of this time, I have been doing three pages of freehand writing each day, inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Even though this method of journaling worked for me for a while…eventually, I found it unhelpful. With my particular flavor of Eastern European personality — broody, pessimistic, self-critical — instead of serving as “emotional windshield wipers,” the Artist’s Way is a fertile ground for downward spirals. I can start page 1 by bringing up a minor grievance, spat or inconvenience. By page 3, I have described, defined and dissected it to such degree of detail, that I am convinced my life’s about to fall apart because of it. The negative effect only compounds over time. Conceptually, I am 150% on board with the idea of personal journaling // diaries for mental clarity and reflection… but this particular method hasn’t be working for me so I decided to explore.

In addition to Garner, I picked up May Sarton’s Journal of a solitude which I’d first heard about in Reading Life interview. I also grabbed volume 1 of The Diary of Anais Nin (opened to a random page in the bookstore and oh lawd I blushed so hard, I should have bought this sooner!!!).

I am still making my way through these three collections and enjoying them immensely – so many reading kinks activated!!! — but, alas, I am not learning much about how to avoid moping. Here’s Sarton, on page 1:

Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange — that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and “the house and I resume old conversations.”

I mean…SAME. But I did not come here to learn how to withdraw and ruminate. I already know how to do that. Still. What a joy to find a kindred spirit.

As I continue to research and learn more about different modes of journaling, I have also given myself permission to try and play a little bit. Here are three alternatives to morning pages that I have experimented somewhat successfully with… the ultimate goal being to document and reflect but also to lighten the fuck up.

⚡️Commonplace Journaling

For me, Commonplace Journaling is absolutely an alternative to morning pages. I only copy quotes from my favorite books and, even then, I copy only my most favorite of favorites. I find that when I look back on those pages, I get a really sincere and transparent picture of what I was reading, thinking and feeling drawn to at the time. Indexing the quotes and identifying the underlying themes behind the quotes I copy also feels a lot like self-administered psychoanalysis because I am describing what I was subconsciously fixating on.

At the same time, digging all of that out through somebody else’s (beautiful) words feels less squirmy and pathetic. 10/10 recommend.

⚡️Captain Logging

Since my natural tendency is to spin and overanalyze, I thought it would be interesting to find a way of journaling that would put me in a different mode of interaction with my world. I was looking for a way of documenting that would feel more focused on the present, more focused on “objective” reality… So, I started reading about captain logging as a way to accomplish that.

A captain’s log (or ship’s logbook) is an official daily record maintained by the commanding officer of a ship. It functions as a historical and legal document, containing operational details such as weather conditions, the ship’s position, daily speed, route, crew activities, and any notable incidents. People have been keeping this type of diary for ages — basically cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life. I did not know that this practice had a name but I grew up watching my very own grandfather write in his tiny pocket-sized weekly diary every night. I was too young to know what he was doing at the time but I do remember being so curious about it. He would just sit in a corner at the kitchen table and write just the most trivial things about his days — got up, fed the goats, ate porridge for breakfast — so much of it repeating day in and day out. When he passed away all the cousins were curious about what happened to his journals but they seem to have been lost. It’s those trivialities that make up a day, a week, a life. And I have been trying to write daily reflections in my planner, focusing on the main beats of the day (where I was, what I ate, who I saw), just to force myself to be more in the moment.

I really like this. My life is still my life, but I am documenting it through a very specific editorial lens. It feels lighter, for sure.

⚡️Brush Pen Diary

The last practice I have been playing with — this is quite silly — is writing in my same ole journal, about my same ole things the way I normally would as part of morning pages practice… but instead of writing with a regular pen, using a soft brush pen. I read about this in ’s notebook deep-dive for . Austin took inspiration from Lynda Barry

Writing BIG and in that soft, feathery felt-tip pen makes my hand move with a lighter touch across the pages… and it feels to me that doing so “softens” my thinking, too. Even if I do start off wanting to complain, my “brush pen accent” on the page is sillier and, childish, almost. And, if you know me, those are not words I would ever use to describe myself. But… it seems… it’s something that’s in me and I am grateful when I am able to coax it out.

In theory, morning pages work because they remove all barriers between thought and page. And maybe I benefited from training myself how to write in a way that removes all filters. But over time, I have realized that unfiltered language simply generates more unfiltered language… and for someone broody and self-critical like me, that feels a lot like throwing gasoline on the fire. What these recent experiments have shown me is that a little structure — a commonplace book, a captain's log, even a brush pen — can slow thought down just enough to make room for actual reflection.

🤓 Three questions for you:

• Those of you who recognize yourself in me and were able to break through the negative patterns — what kind of journaling has helped you?

• Whose journal should I read to help me SEE examples of journaling that is not all doom and gloom?

• And beyond diaries themselves — any books (craft books, guides, unexpected sources) that gave you a genuinely new way to journal, rather than just more reasons to?

We’ve reached the midpoint of the year and I thought it would be appropriate to share a review of where things stand for me right now. I already did a little video version of this — a slightly more spontaneous take on the subject — and I am so glad I did because prepping for it and speaking off the cuff helped me realize that things don’t always have to FEEL good in order to BE good.

2026 is a professionally challenging year for me — in a good way — but as a result I have felt busy, overloaded with big challenges and lots of nights of “catching up” on work. That in turn cut into my leisure time — my reading has felt a little less smooth sailing and more catch it when you can, in any way you can. It almost feels like a miracle that I have been able to keep going, in large measure due to the fact that I claim reading as my default state. But still. It’s been an effort.

📚 READING: the intertexts of Checkout 19

However — thank you, past self — when I went mad and made a list of all ~300 books mentioned in Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett, I did my future self a huge favor. Not only did I find a way to stay within the mindscape of a favorite author but I also made myself the best TBR // Reading Syllabus I could probably have wished for. Some of my best reading of the year so far has been pulled directly from that list of texts. Specifically, I have become singularly fixated on reading the Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy. I recently recommended Sweet Days of Discipline (tr. Tim Parks) — a dark, moody, ethereal story of friendship and desire set in a posh Swiss boarding school — for ’s excellent collection of Ten books short enough for summer afternoons. I also loved her SS Proleterka — a short novel about a young girl and her father as they set off on a cruise through the Mediterranean. Her work is so sparse but atmospheric and it captures the oddness of girlhood and young womanhood so perfectly.

Jaeggy was very close to the Austrian superstar Ingeborg Bachmann — who also happens to feature prominently in Checkout 19 and, I am gathering, is also a Claire-Louise Bennett favorite. So much so that three of the epigraphs in Checkout 19 are quotes from the book and Bennett’s blurb for it goes as follows: “If I was permitted to keep one book only it would be Malina. Malina has everything.” I am working my way through the book right now — it’s not a breezy read but it is so incredibly rich and thought-provoking — and I keep thinking, wow, sometimes you don’t realize you are in a conversation with a set of minds across time and space and you don’t even know how any of that is possible. But it is. It is.

[Another author I have absolutely loved discovering this year is Gwendoline Riley and I was convinced that I found her work through the Checkout 19 list as well… but after I recorded the video, I checked my references and she’s not on it. Yet, she belongs to it. I plan to read The Palm House later this month and really look forward to it. I think that Riley is getting better with each book.]

📚 FRIEZE + ART WRITING

Another one of my desperate moves in an attempt to linger in the CLB universe was to subscribe to Frieze where Bennett is a contributor. I even gushed to about it. As you can probably guess, I have yet to read a new piece by her in the magazine but six months into my subscription, I feel forever changed by the magazine. Not only have I loved reading about new art shows around the world, I have found myself completely surprised and captivated by the work of incredible artists AND have discovered — at the tender age of 45 — that I am fascinated by contemporary sculpture as an art form.

As I mention in my video, this discovery has made me feel quite sad at times — Why on earth did it take so long?! What path could my life have taken if I had discovered that I enjoyed reading about visual art earlier in my life?!... But, once I sober up, I am able to actually see how beautiful it is to discover such a meaningful corner of one’s heart so late in life… like… how cool to be surprised and so moved?! And, how EXCITING it is to grow older and know that there are so many surprises ahead, still.

📚 NOTEBOOKS et al.

No update of mine would be complete without making at least a brief mention of how my notebook life is going. The one big revelation that I wanted to share is that after thinking of myself as a pretty steady A5 or larger notebook person for my whole life, I have just realized that all of a sudden, I love something smaller. Part of this has been influenced by the fact that I now go into my office three times a week and for portability reasons, a smaller notebook makes sense. I have been partial to the thick but compact Stalogy Editor Series 365 Day notebook which I have been using for work notes and loving that it’s bigger than a tiny passport // pocket size thing but small enough that I can place it between my laptop and me while I work.

I have also been using this fantastic hard-cover Kokuyo Sketch Notes notebook that sent me a while back — I just set it at my desk and use it as my scratch pad for capturing random, fleeting thoughts as they pop into my head. It’s essentially a book of lists — grocery lists, newsletter ideas, books that caught my attention here on Substack. I am using it in the same way that people capture notes in their Notes App but I like this better because of how tactile it is and also it does not distract me in the same way that picking up my phone does.

I have, of course, continued to play in my small, pocket-sized Paper Republic notebook for my junk journaling time and continue to learn and enjoy so much because of that practice. As a paper lover, I have been getting a lot of satisfaction out of these small books because they give me that giddy sense of completing a notebook and moving on to the next one much more quickly and we know how much we love that feeling. DOPAMINE.

Thinking about all of this, I am feeling that happy-tired-optimistic feeling that one gets at the end of a good beach day. It’s been an exhausting half of the year but all of this activity has felt enjoyable, productive and wholesome. I love when I feel confident in my track — doing my own things, following my own beat — but also being able to experience the expansive nature of my very personal idiosyncratic choices… yes, in many ways it all feels very much like same ole, same ole…. BUT at the same time, I am noticing that I am pushing my own edges and I am feeling my heart and mind growing in surprising directions which feels really, really good.

🤓 Before I leave you:

• What have you been reading and loving? What invisible string has been holding all of your favorite books together?

• What has surprised and delighted you? Have you stumbled upon any unexpected interests or hobbies?

• If any of the above has felt hard or challenging — how can I and/or this community support you?

This is a very spontaneous idea — but if you think you could benefit from chatting with me about your reading, notebooks, newsletters or any other related subject — I am opening some Zoom Coffee timeslots for the month of July. Please sign up or let me know if we need to pick a different time.

I would love to help! Sign up details after the paywall. ↧↧↧

July Zoom Coffee with Petya
Sign up directly on Calend.ly or email me at petya.grady@gmail.com if the open slots don’t work for you! I will try to be flexible!!!
xo,
Petya

About twenty years ago I stole my friend’s copy of Hayden Herrerra’s biography of Frida Kahlo and boarded a flight from Munich to Philadelphia. I opened the book as soon as I buckled my seatbelt and did not look up for ten hours straight. That reading experience is one of the highlights of my life as a reader and I have been chasing that high ever since. The only time I have come close to experiencing that same feeling of complete absorption and exhilaration was this past January. I began reading The Last Samurai as we boarded a flight from Memphis to Santo Domingo and finished it, breathless and trembling, as we were landing back in Memphis a week later. 10/10 recommend.

When I started packing for our summer trip to Europe earlier this month, I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out what to bring. I considered giving Middlemarch another try after starting and abandoning it last summer. I considered bringing War and Peace (lol). But in the end, I decided to bring The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann and Missing out - In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips. I am a massive Lydia Davis fan and was really hoping to have an intense, immersive experience with her work. Plus, I knew that she could be both poignant AND insanely funny, which I thought would be great for a summer read. Malina, in turn, has been on my list for a while but aggressively so since the book bubbled up in my Checkout 19 syllabus AND I learned that Bachmann was one of Fleur Jaeggy’s closest friends. Finally, I really wanted to read that particular Adam Phillips title because I had been feeling painfully homesick and nostalgic and I suspected that he would say things that I needed to hear.

Well… that was the plan. And here’s how it went:

I read a significant portion of the Lydia Davis collection but after a while, I noticed that I was losing interest and was unable to read for long stretches of time. Part of it was the fact that I was reading short stories, I think, which felt very stop and go but after a while, I felt that the stories themselves were starting to feel a little monotonous and repetitive. While my husband and my kid were splashing in the water at Seixal’s famous black sand beach, I decided to set the book aside and rest my eyes for a moment…

The book was a great beach pillow but I decided that using it that way was probably my sign to set it aside for a bit and return to it at a more opportune time.

I moved on to Malina. I felt HYPED to read it… but had I done a little bit more research on it, I would probably not have brought it with me… not because I don’t like it but because I really do. The book is a THINKER and is written from a super claustrophobic, almost solipsistic point of view. I love nothing more than a novel about the fragmented consciousness of a complicated woman but, frankly, it was not the kind of thing I could read sitting next to my kid while someone was handing us pretzels.

Mildly disappointed, I thought that maybe once we left Madeira and made it to Bulgaria, I would settle in and read my thematically appropriate psychoanalytic book. But once we made it home, I felt such a profound sense of love and belonging… more so than I have ever felt in the 27 years since I first left… that I just could not make myself even pick up the book. This is not an immigration-focused Substack but maybe one day I will share more about the roller-coaster that has been my experience and maybe you guys can help me make sense of it.

My parents are getting older and I am finally finding myself able to let go of any impatience or resentment I may have carried in the past. Watching them work so hard on building meaningful, loving relationships with my kid and my nephew felt honestly so healing and beautiful. I really felt grateful for being able to stay in the moment and notice how much love there was between all of us there.

Those of you who’ve been reading me for a while know that I have never been able to relax about a single thing in my life and are probably wondering why I am so lowkey about all the reading that I did not do while traveling. But careful readers will remember from when I shared my planning method earlier in the year that I actually plan for busy seasons and slow reading periods. I know that many people find summer to be the most fertile ground for catching up and doing massive amounts of reading. For me (and probably most working parents in America)... summers are a shitshow of logistics and broken routines. I used to hate it but now I plan for it and what I truly mean by that is that I lower my expectations and then lower them some more. I am basically focusing on keeping my kid safe, cared for and appropriately stimulated and in whatever free time I have from work, I just choose to throw on my old swimsuit and hustle everyone to the community pool so that we can experience summer as a family even if we need to do so in the most American way with our ridiculously small vacation allotments. In my experience, PLANNING NOT TO READ is painful and disappointing but not as disappointing as planning to read but not being able to do so. It is important for me to make an effort to fit reading into every available nook and cranny of my life but I also do not want to fight my life at every turn. Acceptance is such a beautiful feeling.

All that being said, I had a great reading month.

📚 Books mentioned:

• Show Your Work — Austin Kleon (re-read)

• Keep Going — Austin Kleon (re-read)

• Don’t Call It Art — Austin Kleon

• The Things We Never Say — Elizabeth Strout

• A Sense of Occasion — Brodie Crellin

📚 Show Your Work | Keep Going | Don’t Call It Art —

Before we left for vacation, I re-read Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work and Keep Going in preparation for his Reading Life interview (which brought so many of you here! WELCOME, WELCOME!!! I know that you are my people). I also read his new book — Don’t Call It Art — which felt both familiar in tone but new and additive in message. As I mentioned in my introduction to the interview, I have been a massive fan of Austin’s work for years but intuitively so. However, as I was reading him this time… I couldn’t help but notice how incredibly insightful his advice felt in the context of newsletter writing and from now on I will be recommending these books to anyone who is wondering if they should start a newsletter — You don’t have to be a genius! — or if they have the time — Share something small! Teach what you already know! — or if they are good enough to deserve an audience — You have permission to be bad! — or if they need a growth strategy — Forget the noun, do the verb… You don’t need a vision!

Austin is not only an incredible artist and a good human, but also a real reader. I can’t imagine why you would not be familiar with his work already but if you are not, I am so happy to be the person who introduced you to him.

📚 The Things We Never Say — Elizabeth Strout

I also read Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, The Things We Never Say. It follows Artie Dam, a 57-year-old high school history teacher on the Massachusetts coast. By all appearances, he’s content: well-liked by his students, married thirty years, out on his sailboat most weekends. But Artie is secretly contemplating ending his life. A decade-old wound sits at the center of it — his son Rob survived a car crash that killed his girlfriend, and has stayed withdrawn ever since. An unspoken distance from his wife, Evie, only deepens Artie’s isolation. Then a chance incident cracks that isolation open, forcing him to confront a secret his own life has been keeping from him, and to reckon with how little we ever really know the people closest to us.

I really enjoyed this one. Earlier this year I set out to discover my off-season genre, and after a failed attempt at romance appreciation, I took my friend Kate Jones’s advice and gave Strout a try. Like everyone else in the world, I have fond memories of Olive Kitteridge, so it seemed like sound advice. I didn’t love this particular book, but it was a shot in the right direction. Strout’s writing is gentle, kind, truthful, poignant — and there’s so much of it. That’s how Strout herself described her love for William Trevor’s work, when Pandora Sykes asked who she turns to for clarity, comfort, and wisdom. I think her answer explains exactly why so many readers around the world are drawn to hers. If you have read more Strout than me, do share what I should read next!

📚 A Sense of Occasion — Brodie Crellin

Finally, I just completed A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin, which I started reading on a Saturday morning in my own bed, in my own clean sheets, propped against my own reading pillow, with a cup of coffee in hand. Between the relief of finally being home after two weeks of travel, the ideal reading setting, and a book that was both thematically and stylistically fun to read… I felt so happy in this book, I thought I would cry.

It’s a queer mix of Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss and an Elizabeth Strout-like universe of characters who are touching in how bad they are at concealing their loneliness.

When Mary — an odd-ball art teacher — dies suddenly, her family converges on her small house in an English village to organize the funeral. Patch, her daughter, is aimless in life, working a deadend job and muddling through her dating life, entering messy situationships with her cousin’s ex. Robin, Mary’s ex — an English-teacher-slash-actor eleven years her junior — shows up to support his daughter but also makes time to visit the local lay-by where he used to meet farmers for sex. And Jude, Patch’s estranged cousin, drives in from Naples — funded, like everything else in her life, by upper-crust parents. Jude scores high in executive function but is equally lost. It takes a while to figure out if she is legitimately affected by her aunt’s passing or if she is looking for an opportunity to act superior to her estranged cousin.

Thrown together over a sweltering funeral weekend, old resentments and desires keep surfacing, pulling their fragile reconciliation apart. Running underneath it all is a queer current — the part of the book that I enjoyed the most — Robin’s cruising is just the most visible example of an entire family whose sexual selves rarely match the ones they present to each other and the world.

Like Strout, Crellin is extremely skillful at pushing the story forward while moving between past and present without info-dumping. The novel does this formally, shifting among Mary’s, Robin’s, Jude’s, and Patch’s points of view and letting flashbacks fill in the history only as each scene needs it, rather than front-loading it.

I really loved the older characters’ plotlines — Mary and Robin, the singularity of their personalities, the oddity and authenticity of their relationship, how alive and trapped by class and circumstance they felt — and found the younger generation’s characters, Patch and Jude, so incredibly annoying and entitled by comparison. I haven’t decided yet whether that’s the book’s asymmetry or mine. Funny and charming without trying too hard, the book is a great story of how class, gender and sexuality have a million different ways of interweaving and defining the contours of one’s life. I really liked it.

The PLANNER Community1 likes to talk about the elusive concept of PLANNER PEACE — the idea that if you put in an effort, you WILL be able to find the perfect notebook or system that will fit your needs, your taste and your brain… so much so that you will never want to change it. As you can imagine, many have heard of the concept but few have lived it. I have not experienced PLANNER PEACE but this month I felt like I experienced READER PEACE. I had this strong sense of KNOWING and ACCEPTING what, how, when and why I read and I felt very much at peace with that. I am trying to hold on to that feeling because I know it’s fleeting.

❤️ Favorite books of 2026 so far:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

• April — Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

• May — Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

• June — Show Your Work | Keep Going | Don’t Call It Art — Austin Kleon

I hope you are having an amazing summer and that, above all else, you are at peace with your reading.

🤓 As always, I have some questions for you:

• Do you read more or less while traveling?

• What is your ULTIMATE reader experience that you try to replicate?

• What does READER PEACE look like for you?

In February 2024, while writing Lifequakes — a newsletter about life transitions — I wrote a post about discovering BookTok via a podcast interview with . I was a little shy about it but was in a hard, dark stretch and looking for a way back into something that felt alive. For that reason, I was willing to be open-minded. The premise of the post was that if I could trick the algorithm into showing me things that were actually good for me, maybe I could use it as a small, dopamine-adjacent bridge back to the world I actually wanted to live in. It worked better than I expected. One of the first people I discovered on BookTok was Yu.

I don’t remember the exact video but I do remember the quality of her attention — the way she talked about a book as though she had actually lived inside it and was, a little bit, still there. At the time, I had no way of knowing how much she had read but was fascinated that she seemed to read SO carefully. It was my first time encountering such a reader online… not a braggart but a devotee.

She put Stoner by John Williams on my radar. I know that in the last couple of years the book has gone through several waves of discovery and criticism … I am aware that it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. It’s a quiet, boring (?!), brutal, heartbreaking novel about a man whose life accumulates largely without his participation — a life of near-misses and muted disappointments, held together by a love of literature so private and so sustaining that it barely registers as love at all. It was, for me, a life-ruiner in the best possible sense and I’ve given Stacey credit for introducing me to it many times and I’ll keep doing it.

By April 2024, I had made the pivot that turned this newsletter into what it now is — an ongoing conversation about books and reading as a way of anchoring one’s life — and Stacey is a big reason why I made that shift. I really, really, REALLY wanted to be in conversation with people who read the way she reads. I wanted to build something that could hold that conversation.

Since then — and I say this with the utmost sense of disbelief — the internet has done its thing and Stacey has somehow become one of my favorite book friends on the internet and one of my most reliable sources of reading inspiration. We are constantly in each other’s inboxes talking about what we’re reading, and we have overlapped in our obsessions with a consistency that I can only describe as eerie but delightful — most recently over Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (there were, I will not lie, tears), Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, and Gwendoline Riley’s devastating novels just to name a few. We share a particular affinity for psychologically complex, character-driven fiction — novels that take seriously the inner worlds of people who, on the surface, may not necessarily appear remarkable.

And now Stacey has written just such a novel.

Kitten comes out in August and I have already gushed about it in my March reading recap, but I want to share it again here:

My most anticipated debut of 2026! The Galley Brag of all Galley Brags! Katie is drifting, financially dependent on her boyfriend and estranged from her mother. On vacation, she becomes fixated on his cat, Silver, who, unlike her, gets to be helpless and still be cared for. The book captures the ache of early adulthood so perfectly: the discomfort of going home but not quite belonging there anymore, while not having anywhere else that feels better just yet; the confusion and volatility of romantic life²; the inability to tell what is you and what might be class, racial, or other difference between you and your partner. There’s also that constant feeling of being out of place in every aspect of your life… so much so that you start behaving in ways that feel almost bizarre, simply because you don’t know what to do with yourself. I really loved this book! I want to give it to all my college friends and inscribe it — we made it.

I believe — and this is a conviction I’ve developed recently — that you can tell when an author is a devout reader. I don’t mean someone who reads a lot, or someone who has logged their books on Goodreads, or someone who keeps a tidy shelf. I mean someone for whom reading is a practice in the way I use that word here: a sustained, attentive engagement with other minds, other forms, other ways of inhabiting language. A writer who has read in that way carries something in their prose that a writer who hasn’t simply doesn’t have — a porousness to influence, a felt sense of where their own work sits in a tradition, an understanding of what’s been done and therefore what they’re responsible for doing differently.

Some writers write books before they have read enough books. You feel it, I swear you I can. The sentences are confident but rootless. The ambitions are present but unmoored. It doesn’t mean the books are bad. It means they exist in a slight vacuum — as though the author arrived at the page without having first spent years as a passenger.

Stacey is not that. Stacey is a reader in the deepest sense. And I think that tracing her reading life offers real insight into the kind of writer she is on her way to becoming.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

I don’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t reading. As a child, I was obsessed specifically with the physicality of books, the texture and smell of the pages. To this day I still sniff as I read (unless it’s a very old book - I know people love the smell of old books, but I worry about mold). I prefer the zing of paperbacks to the typically more muted scent of hardcovers - though you’ll occasionally get one that’s sharp as glue, like the UK hardcover of Saba Sam’s Gunk. This is why I can’t really do e-books. A book’s particular scent is such a vital part of my experience of reading, and I remember exactly how each book smelled long after I finish (okay! because you’re begging! My favorites are the Penguin paperback of Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, which reminds me of the paperbacks I used to read as a kid, kind of nutty and crisp; the Mariner edition of To The Lighthouse, just sooo addictively creamy [though my copy has faded by now], and Vintage Classics, the Paperback Standard). My favorite spot in my apartment is my sofa, which sits sandwiched between floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Because it’s such a small space, it actually smells, quite powerfully, of books.

Moving on to stop myself from devolving into some literary Jean-Baptiste Grenouille… outside of my personal love of reading, it’s also entwined with much of my professional life. Many of my first jobs were in publishing, from internships at W.W. Norton and Writers House to a freelance gig reading for a book scout to my first full-time role as a publicity assistant at Penguin Random House. I eventually left publishing when I realized I wanted to really try and be a writer. I feel grateful my twenty-three-year-old self made that quite impulsive choice. I recently read Alexander Chee’s How To Write an Autobiographical Novel, where he describes how a friend once discouraged him from working in publishing with something along the lines of: “You don’t want to hear about how people in publishing talk about authors.” That made me laugh. For me it wasn’t so much how publishing talks about authors but the lack of time and energy I had to a) read for pleasure and b) nurture my own creative life. But also, you do see how making and selling books is truly a business and therefore follows the same ruthless capitalist market logic as anything else.

Still, leaving publishing was a bit devastating, because I’d worked towards it for so long. To keep a foot in the book world, I started posting about what I read online. The world had yet to really open up from Covid, I was bored, and, because of the conversations I was exposed to while working in publishing, I knew how important platform was becoming for aspiring authors. The consensus, during my first publishing internship in 2019, was that platforms were non-negotiable in non-fiction. But by the time I left publishing in 2022, that expectation was beginning (to my horror!) to creep into fiction. I didn’t have even an outline of a draft of a novel back then, but I wanted to set up my future self, the one I hoped would have written one, as well as possible…

Now, for the first time, I find myself engaging with books from the other side as a debut author. No space exists between personal and professional: the two are fused. I can’t read a book for pure pleasure, at least not at the moment. A good book will give me pleasure, but it will also inspire, teach, inform, or complicate my own writing, or my thoughts about writing.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

Typically, almost every day. On weekdays, I read in small bites on my commute to work (a secret benefit of living in a city so inconveniently vast as London). I like to spend at least one afternoon over the weekend reading.

Sometimes, though, I’ll go days or weeks without reading. Earlier this year especially, I couldn’t read at all. I was overwhelmed with the stress of having my debut novel come out and constantly spiraling over the permanence of what I had done… fiction completely depressed me. I was reading from a really selfish place. On the pages I would just see myself, all my fear and insecurities.

I’ve only recently returned to my normal reading rhythm. I credit summer for restoring to me a sense of myself.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

I’ll read anything with good characters, strong voice, and confident execution, but some of my reading kinks (a term so cleverly coined by you!) are:

• Complex, intimate parent-child relationships where the parent sits like a boulder at the heart of the book: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

• Books that explore individual agency with the logic of tragedy: predeterminism, systems and society encroaching on the self. I guess this is often (but not always) a social novel. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room… and my favorite Shakespeare play Romeo + Juliet.

• Voyeurism and desire, especially to do with class; the coveting of beauty, the beauty of the illicit, the illicitness of desire, all that. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

• Books with a sense of play. Orlando by Virginia Woolf is one of the most playful, curious, enchanting books I’ve read. Possession by A.S. Byatt has so much fun with form, plot, and romance tropes. These books roil with momentum, like you can feel the story asking: ‘and then, and then, and then…’

As for how my taste has changed: When I was younger, I proselytized on the altar of lush, descriptive prose. I was a staunch Fitzgerald > Hemingway type. These days, I find myself more drawn to and impressed by writing that’s sharp, clear, and direct. Annie Ernaux, Gwendoline Riley, even Elena Ferrante, who writes these beautiful long ropey sentences but always in quite plain language. (Still, a juicy prosey book can still completely bewitch me - see Line of Beauty.)

PKG: SEE WHAT I MEAN!!! My reading twin!!!

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

I think I’ve unwittingly answered this already with question 1!

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I annotate frequently but sparingly. I like to read with a pen in hand to underline sentences I like, unless I’m in transit, where I’ll doggy-ear pages to underline later. Many times I’ll have read an entire book on the tube, so it’s totally devoid of markings but twice its size with folded pages. I relish sitting down and revisiting each marked page, searching for the lines that affected me. This practice helps me absorb and appreciate the book that much more. I wonder if I should start doing this even when I have a pen at the ready…

Outside of that, though, I’m pretty lazy with my annotations. Most of the time, I just leave a star or an exclamation point. Or a ‘ha.’ I love my ‘ha’s.

As for highlighting, I couldn’t possibly! That feels like desecration, for some reason. Probably because when I was a kid, highlighting was my primary form of annotation, and I took it too far…

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I keep a list on my Notes app of books I’ve read and want to read, but I’m not great about updating the latter. A few years ago, when I first started my TikTok channel, I uploaded reviews for every book I read, but this proved unsustainable. I still occasionally share books I like, but I’m more private about what I read. Despite what it may seem, I find talking about books challenging; I get frustrated when I’m unable to detail the extent and depth of a book’s greatness. I admire critics so much for this ability.

Sometimes I’ll take pictures of books I find interesting in bookstores, only to forget about them straight after. But I have a loose faith that the books I’m meant to read will find me eventually (there goes my penchant for fate and tragedy), even if it’s through the logic of the marketing funnel: it takes at least seven spontaneous sightings of a product for you to consider buying it, etc. etc…

PKG: I have also almost given up on trying to keep track of what I want to read. There is so little space for mysticism in our lives and I feel that assuming that the right book will find you at the right time is one way to allow for that magic to stand a chance.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

I think there are three main sources:

1. Recommendations from people whose taste I trust even if it’s not always similar to mine - whether that’s bloggers like you, , or , my agent and editors, or my friends. What matters more than what people read is how they read. I resonated deeply with this piece by Sara Hildreth on reading generously. I trust people who read with critical curiosity. I will hesitate to take a recommendation, for example, from someone who disparages a book simply because they found the main character disagreeable, which happens mind-bogglingly frequently! To me, that betrays a limited approach to literature.

2. Books loved by writers and characters I like. Julia Armfield’s blurb pointed me to Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, a taut little novel about a fracturing relationship between two siblings in 60’s East Germany. I want to read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James because it mattered so much to Selin in Batuman’s The Idiot. Sarah Chihaya’s beautiful memoir on her reading life, Bibliophobia, gave me the best TBR, which I’m still reading through.

3. Books by indie presses whose lists I like. Indie presses publish far tighter, more curated lists than Big 5 publishers, so you can really get a feel for their taste. I found myself enjoying Pushkin Press books and reached for Ice by Anna Kavan, which was unlike anything I’d read before. It’s haunting and dreamlike and almost malevolently alive… I still can’t shake the feeling of horror from reading the final line.

4. The little well of embarrassment in the back of my mind over books I feel I really should’ve read by now. Anna Karenina, for one - my friends go slack-jawed when I tell them I haven’t!

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

I’m definitely a mood-reader. A particularly striking recommendation will send me straight to the bookstore on my lunch break. Or I’ll come upon a fantastic excerpt online and immediately seek out the book. This is what happened with Shame by Annie Ernaux; I happened upon the first line somewhere - “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon” - and ordered it within the minute. One of the first books I ever pre-ordered, Molly by Blake Butler, found me through this tweet.

Still, I try to curb my spontaneity by setting goals around the types of book I’m reading. I like to read at least one translated, one non-contemporary, and one non-fiction book a month. Last month, my translated picks were Mornings without Mii by Mayumi Inaba and The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg, which also functioned as non-contemporary. My nonfiction pick was, like many others, London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. I listened to the audiobook, which was great for many reasons but also for the way Keefe pronounces ‘genuine,’ like it rhymes with ‘swine.’ This made me bristle and giggle every time (even while hearing about ghastly crimes). I can’t help but feel he didn’t account for the word genuine to appear so frequently in the book. Genu-eye-n! Why! I checked online and in both the US and UK it’s pronounced genu-win, so maybe it’s a regional thing. Anyway, I say it like that now occasionally to have a little fun.

A mix of the kind of planning above and mood-reading works best for me. I also abandon books without hesitation if I’m past a point and the book simply isn’t working for me. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s a bad book; it’s just not for me, and I don’t want to waste my time.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

All of the above. But I’m most aware of when I’m not writing. Not writing bears such a negative psychic weight on me, and I feel it acutely when I spend a whole afternoon reading someone else’s prose. But the effect of my writing going well, even if it’s just one short, difficult passage squeezed out at the beginning of the week, is like a balm that makes reading more joyous and satiating than ever. Reading somebody else’s prose then, I feel inspired, and grateful, and moved more easily than normal.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

Make a very simple plan: decide on the book you want to read (don’t spend too much time deliberating! When in doubt, just go to a bookstore and ask a bookseller) and obtain it. Maybe make a list if that doesn’t scare you! And start small. Read for ten minutes before bed, or before work. Now that it’s summer, take your lunch outside with a book. Little moments add up!

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

I’ve spoken at length about all the books previously mentioned, but outside of those I’d say Bluets by Maggie Nelson, which taught me how to feel. For people getting back into reading, The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue is my go-to recommendation. It’s perfectly plotted and loads of fun, but it also offers a clear yet nuanced moral and cultural perspective. More recently, I have been shouting far and wide about Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt. Her voice dances.

Below is a list of all the books mentioned in this interview — it is SO good. Add Kitten to the top of it — it publishes in August, and you'll want to have been early.

📚 Books mentioned above:

🤓 Tell me what you think in the comments:

• Stacey says what matters more than what people read is how they read. Who in your life — online or off — reads in a way that you trust? What is it about them that earns it?

• She mentions going days or weeks without being able to read at all earlier this year — and credits summer with restoring her sense of herself. Have you ever lost your reading life for a stretch? What brought you back?

• Stacey listed her reading kinks — voyeurism and class, parent-child dynamics, books with a sense of play. What are yours?

is a writer, artist, and designer who has spent his career mapping what it actually looks like to live and work as a creative person. His books — Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep going — have been a lifeline for me at multiple points in my life, and his newsletter is one of the few I read the moment it arrives. What I love most about Austin’s work is his particular mix of wisdom, humor, and generosity. He shares not just his outputs but his process, which is, I think, the reason his work has such broad and enduring appeal. He is beloved by artists and us mortals alike.

Austin’s writing has been personally meaningful to me at more than one inflection point, and increasingly so as A Reading Life has evolved. What started as a desperate attempt to claw my way back to some intellectual life after being physically and creatively depleted postpartum has grown far beyond what I originally imagined. And throughout that process, I have constantly questioned my right to be doing any of it. The critical voices in my head are NOT quiet and Austin’s work has helped me (keep going) in very concrete ways. He’s the reason I write about books even though I’m not a critic (you don’t have to be a genius), and write about them the way I do (write good stories) — in my own voice and in my imperfect way that if it has any appeal it is because it is mine. And, when I do get in my head, which happens much more frequently than you guys could possibly imagine, I think of a specific reader of this newsletter and (make gifts) write a post specifically to them, clicks and open rates be damned, just writing in a way that I hope will connect for that one person and mean something to them specifically.

Austin is also, for the record, the reason I own a datestamp and begin every day by stamping my notebooks — my work notebook, my personal journal, my junk journal, my commonplace. I genuinely cannot explain why this gives me such distinct joy, but it does. It is one of the main characters of my bliss station.

I love Austin’s work so much… I have been bugging him to do The Reading Life interview since July of 2024!!! And for the longest time he couldn’t (he was deep in a book and needed to stay focused, which I completely understood) but told me to stay in touch. So I kept asking. Austin kept writing. And - guys - as of this week, the book is out.

Don’t Call It Art is the fourth book in his artist handbook series, and Austin describes it as:

In his characteristically light-handed way, he has written something that feels, to me, quietly radical and profound. This book is a warning against spending too much time self-mythologizing and performing a creative identity — for the algorithms, for an audience, for ourselves. Doing so unintentionally can put up walls between ourselves and the actual work we need to be doing. The antidote Austin proposes is not discipline or ambition but play: unserious, unlabeled, imperfect making. The idea is that when we stop trying to produce something worthy of our self-image, we create the conditions where real work — surprising, alive, authentic — becomes possible again.

Today, with very little further ado, I am beyond excited to share Austin Kleon’s responses to The Reading Life questionnaire. P.S. All images in the post are used with Austin’s explicit permission.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for the second time. I first read it over the 2010-2011 holiday break, so it’s been, oh 15 years? I believe that every time you pick up a book you’re a different person than you were the last time, so it becomes a new book. This time around, I’m struck by how many of McMurtry’s influences I’ve read since then — specifically Don Quixote and Tolstoy’s gigantic novels — and how much more I understand the Stoic/Epicurean tensions that McMurtry highlights in his introduction to the anniversary edition. It’s got stuff that’s as bloody and horrific as McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (which came out the same year!!) but it’s also funny and fun to read. It’s a great book, a classic, a genuine page-turner. I might read it again in 15 years.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

I couldn’t really say, as it varies greatly depending on the season. I like to read non-fiction in print with a pencil in the morning or afternoon and fiction every night on my e=reader before bed. (Non-fiction wakes me up, fiction puts me into the dream state.)

I read a lot in the summer when the kids are off school. Around 3PM I get into our pool and with a book and just float around and read until dinnertime. Summer is when I tend to tackle big books — I’ve read Don Quixote, Dune, Middlemarch, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, Iain McGilchrist’s massive books, etc.

You can tell which books on my shelf got read in the pool because they’re warped from being waterlogged.

How do intense personal or professional periods affect your ability to read?

When I’m writing, I need something really escapist and different from the material I’m working on. I often find that my depression is usually correlated with my inability to find something good to read. (For example, it’s hard for me to be too depressed when I’m reading Lonesome Dove.)

I find that as the world loses its mind, I want to spend time with people in the past who kept their heads. For most of the past winter I read a dozen pages of Montaigne’s Essays in the morning, and a Sherlock Holmes story every night. It was wonderful. Mark Slutsky has this idea of “good-handedness” in a book, the feeling you’re in good hands. (Although, I would guess that the good-handedness of a book depends on the hands that are holding it.)

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

Hell, I don’t know. [Laughing.] I’m like Alice in Wonderland, in that I am biased towards books with pictures, and often think, “What is the use of a book without pictures?” Graphic novels and comics, sure, but what I really love are big ol’ collections of newspaper strips, like Schulz’s Peanuts, Bushmiller’s Nancy, or Jannson’s Moomin. (In another life I would’ve liked to be a cartoonist.) I love the Quentin Fiore paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, the heavily-designed stuff like Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. I love books where the illustrations act as punctuation and help tell the story, like Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, or more recently, Sally Mann’s Hold Still or Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal. I think Lynda Barry’s What It Is is probably my favorite book of the 21st century.

PKG: Our household is also totally and completely obsessed with the Moomins and Tove Jannson. I just recently acquired her biography — Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin and can’t wait to dig in. She is incredible.

But if a book doesn’t have pictures in it, I’d prefer its author to write great sentences and have a sense of humor. I have a hard time with humorless stuff. I’ve read all of Charles Portis’s novels 2-3 times. I love Tim Kreider’s essays.

Oh, and I love books about music and musicians, especially oral histories, like Please Kill Me and Meet Me in the Bathroom. I’ve read, like, ten books about the Beatles, but I’ll read about anybody, too: I’m not a gigantic fan of Van Halen, but I’ve read 3 books about them.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

I actually read myself a lot? Not my books, but I have a little sidebar on my blog that has a list of posts that were published “on this date,” and I’ll try to read those every day, just to refresh my mind about the kind of material I have. I often re-read my diaries “on this date,” as well — 2026 feels a lot like 2018 to me, so I’ve been checking in with myself, reminding myself what it is to go crazy, and trying not to go there again.

When you re-read yourself this way, you detect a lot of patterns and find that you have your own seasons. (I learned to do this by reading Thoreau’s abridged journal every day with little sticky notes on the days in each year that were closest to the current month and day. I went through the book twice doing that and learned a ton, about Thoreau, and about what it’s like to keep track of yourself.)

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils, etc?

I always read paper books with a pencil — the usual marginalia: I underline, I scribble notes to myself, sometimes I get bored and doodle. I dog-ear, too, when a passage is particularly great and I know I want to go back to it. I highlight a lot on my e-reader. I try to go back through the books and copy the highlights into a big quote file, but I’m lazy, so not that often.

PKG: We have to take a moment and take in Austin’s notebook shelf. How beautiful is this? For the notebook fiends in our midst, be sure to take a look at Austin’s break down of his notebook ecosystem on ’ newsletter - Noted.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

In my noodle. [Taps forehead.] Usually by buying the book — you can expense books on your taxes when you’re a writer, which is as good a case for being a writer as any, I think.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

I aspire to reading like a DJ builds a setlist, letting the last book lead smoothly into the next. Sometimes that’s easy and direct: I picked up Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper because C. Thi Nguyen brings it up so much in his books like The Score. Sometimes when I’m reading I’ll note down books the author mentions that sound good on the back flap and pick one of those when I’m finished.

But usually it’s haphazard and random. I believe in my friend Alan Jacob’s dictum: “Read at whim!”

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

If you keep your phone out of arm’s reach, you get done what you want to get done. I leave my phone in the kitchen when I go to bed and I leave it in my studio when I go out to get in the pool. Those are about the only reliable times I get reading done.

I’m not a particularly fast reader and I don’t actually think I read all that much. I just do it every day. Same with writing: I don’t think I write all that much, but I show up week after week and the days pile up.

What is one book that you find yourself recommending to people over and over and over again?

This may sound shocking, but I don’t really like recommending books to people! I also don’t like foisting books on people (except for my own) and I don’t really love it when people foist books on me. What I love is when people just talk about books they love. That’s what I do in the newsletter, and that’s what I’ve done in this interview, I hope.

Austin’s answers are, characteristically, full of warmth, specificity, and the kind of practical wisdom that makes you want to go read / write / make something something immediately. I’ll hope you do just that but before you go…

🤓 Tell me what you think in the comments:

• Austin describes reading himself — revisiting his old blog posts and diaries “on this date” — as a way of tracking his own patterns and seasons. Do you have any version of this practice? What would it mean to read yourself as a reader?

• Austin says he doesn’t like recommending books — he’d rather just talk about books he loves. What’s the difference, for you, between a recommendation and simply sharing enthusiasm? Do you agree with his distinction?

• Austin reads non-fiction in the morning to wake up and fiction at night to ease into dream-state. Do you match what you read to the time of day or your mental state — and has that ever changed how a book landed for you?

A quick note for our friends who are new here: every month I write a post about everything I read. Sometimes the books cohere thematically and I am able to talk to them as a group, other times the only thing connecting them is that they all happened to land in the same thirty days. But I love the discipline of it. Knowing I’ll have to share this update keeps me reading and, more importantly, keeps me paying attention

📚 Books mentioned:

• What’s So Great About the Great Books — Naomi Kanakia

• Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

• Permanence — Sophie Mackintosh

• The Water Cure — Sophie Mackintosh

• First Love — Gwendoline Riley

• My Phantoms — Gwendoline Riley

• Red Doc> — Anne Carson

When I pick up a novel, I typically don’t move on to the next one until I am finished. With nonfiction — I take more notes, I need more time. I had a very interesting experience of spending a lot of the month with ’s new book — What’s so great about the great books? — and I thought it was the perfect backdrop to all the contemporary reading I was doing.

📚 What’s so great about the great books? — Naomi Kanakia

In her 20s, Naomi Kanakia started reading the Western canon because she wanted to be a better writer. She picked a list and went after it, reading as a lay person — the way she would approach any contemporary work of fiction — trusting that eventually it would all make sense. Spoiler alert: it did. In reading the great books, Naomi discovered a shortcut into the history of ideas and a record of how seriously humans have always taken the questions we think belong to us. The political despair, the moral confusion, the exhaustion with institutions — it's all there, and it's handled with style, rigor and integrity, even if the reading experience itself sometimes comes with "a bit of a health-food quality" to it.

I loved reading What’s So Great About the Great Books? partly because over the last couple of years I have been following the ADHD-brained version of this plan — intuitively picking up classic titles here and there, talking myself through the shame of getting to these titles so late in life (so late is not the same as too late1). Reading Naomi’s book had me revisit ’s Lifetime Reading Plan which I have referenced many times before. As much as it saddens me to admit it, I am not sure that I can ever commit to such a rigorous reading project, but perhaps the most disarming argument in Naomi’s book is the argument in favor of owning your curiosity, of being open to the potential of your own intellect and being unafraid of reading work that will challenge you stylistically, morally, philosophically. In fact that’s probably the best reason to be doing that reading in the first place.

📚 Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

Reading Naomi’s book was truly good for my soul as a reader as it created the mental space I needed in order to allow myself to learn and read in a direction that I have felt curious about for ages but kept self-centering. When I read Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt earlier this spring, I went looking for the NYRB cover art and discovered it was a Chantal Joffe painting, a painter I had a vague familiarity with but whose work I had not explored in earnest. I spent a great deal of time in May learning about Joffe’s work, which in turn led down the corridor of her friendship with writer and art critic Olivia Laing. Apparently, Chantal read The Lonely City, wrote Olivia a fan letter and invited them to sit for a portrait. Olivia accepted and thus began their friendship. Last year they made this incredible book — Painting Writing Texting — part paintings, part essay collection.

The book explores the idea of artistic practice and the specific relief of having someone in your life who understands what you make. There’s a section on their various trips to Venice and how they each respond to the same experience through completely different work. What the book is actually about, I think, is the question of whether friendship can be a form of creative metabolism, whether being known by the right person changes what you’re able to make… And, for me at least, that is an absolute fact.

I then read four novels in a row that were all, in different registers, asking what women actually want… as in… Who are we, actually? And what the fuck is the point of all this when those who are supposed to love and protect you are probably the ones who harm you the most? Why bother be a partner? Why bother be a daughter?

📚 Permanence — Sophie Mackintosh

I read ’s Permanence after devouring this conversation with . The story follows Clara and Francis who begin a relationship after meeting in the most romantic way at an art museum, being hypnotized by the same painting. Too bad that Francis is also married and the father of a young child. We travel through the highs and lows of their affair when one day the two find each other able to be open and public about their relationship because they are now residents of a city in which everyone else around them is similarly removed from the real world and allowed to exist with no risk of punishment or shame with their lover. I was worried that I would find the premise of the novel gimmicky but found the dream-like quality of Mackintosh’s writing bewildering and fitting for the liminal world of love and betrayal she has built in Permanence. The book moves back and forth between the two worlds as we learn more about the nature of the relationship, about the level of love, commitment and sacrifice it demands from both of them and the mechanisms at work that make them move back and forth. Permanence brought me flashbacks of On the Calculation of Volume v.1 — which is not a book that I enjoyed — and I thought it handled similar questions around marriage and relationships with much less construction and artificiality while hitting similar disorienting notes.

📚 The Water Cure — Sophie Mackintosh

Mackintosh put me in a dream-like state that I wanted to stay in for a little while longer, so I picked up her debut novel — The Water Cure. In this book three sisters live on a remote island, raised by their parents to believe men are the source of all harm. Father disappears. Three men wash ashore. Mother disappears next. In the absence of clear explanations of who and why, they are left with no other choice but to explore the hydraulics of familial loyalty, sexual desire and self-preservation, which in Mackintosh's hands are almost indistinguishable from one another. I loved the eerie atmosphere and strongly sexual undercurrents of this novel. I am starting to realize that I truly love reading psychologically driven dystopian novels, so if you have recommendations, do share!

📚 First Love — Gwendoline Riley

I then picked up Gwendolyn Riley's First Love: Neve, trying to be a writer, saddled with a husband she probably shouldn't have, parents who divorced badly, a former situationship she can't metabolize. Minimal and anxiety-inducing and — this is the part that got me — genuinely funny. Riley earns her comedy by keeping Neve's self-awareness just sharp enough that she's in on the joke about her own life, without sufficient awareness or chutzpah to do anything to change it. That gap between knowing and changing is where I find myself a lot recently and Riley has given me a lot of material to push against as I ponder my own patterns.

📚 My Phantoms — Gwendoline Riley

Because apparently one Riley wasn't enough, I read My Phantoms immediately after. If First Love is about the damage you absorb from the people you choose, My Phantoms is about the damage you absorb from the people you didn't. We meet another tyrannical, deeply problematic father but also, specifically, a mother, Hen, whom the main narrator Bridget has managed down to one dinner a year and considers “the problem” contained. It isn't contained. What Riley does here that's so unsettling is refuse to make Bridget simply right about her mother. The cruelties run in both directions, the resentments are never fully named, and what accumulates under the surface is something that resists the word "love" but also resists every alternative. By Naomi's definition, a book is great precisely because you cannot separate what you love about it from what most disturbs you, and this one definitely qualifies. I don’t know if you can tell but I am an immediate Riley fan.

And before I move on — can we have a moment for the NYRB Editions cover art?! For First Love (L), we have Jean Cooke’s Cinema Paradiso (c. 1980s) and for My Phantoms (R), we have Up the Road in Pigeon Pie (also by Cooke).

📚 Red Doc> — Anne Carson

I finished the month with Red Doc> — Anne Carson's follow-up to Autobiography of Red, which I read and reviewed in January. In this one, Geryon is G., older and keeping a herd of musk ox somewhere in a frozen north (at a reading, Carson said that it’s somewhere Upstate NY). His best friend / lover Herakles is back too, renamed Sad. Sad is a war veteran with PTSD, showing up with his damage intact. To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing, Carson writes as G. and Sad, together with a female artist friend roadtrip across an icy plain, end up in a psychiatric facility, encounter ice bats, etc. The book looks like poetry, moves like a novel, and somehow yet feels like neither poetry nor novel. Carson does not bother to fill in the gap between the two books — the decades of fictional time, the complete change of form, etc — and this novel felt more disorienting to me that Autobiography of Red… It felt to me that Carson maybe was thinking about Geryon and Herakles… and then wrote this book to herself, just to see what if… I found it a little denser and more challenging and hope that commonplacing it will help me see it more clearly.

More than usual, at the end of this month my brain is on an upward spiral of associative reading. I always say that I love to leave a book with at least one other title to push me forward. I ordered Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House the moment I finished My Phantoms and a triptych of Laings → The Lonely City, The Garden Against Time, and Funny Weather. I already have Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma at home and feel super inspired to continue my journey through the oeuvre. I also picked up Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers for another example of a novel in verse.

❤️ Favorite books of 2026 so far:

• January — Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

• February — The Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen

• March — Repetition — Vigdis Hjorth

• April — Loved and Missed — Susie Boyt

• May — Painting Writing Texting — Chantal Joffe and Olivia Laing

It’s wild that we are almost halfway through the year. I have been so lucky in reading but I am also incredibly tired. I have a super fun reader interview to share with you guys next week and then I plan to take a couple of weeks off while we travel to unplug, check in against my reading / writing / human goals and come back to tell you all about it. We are traveling to Madeira for a week and then Bulgaria to visit my family. I am so excited, I can cry.

But before I go today… you know that I always have…

🤓 Some questions for you:

• Where are you on the shame to self-acceptance continuum with your reading of the great books?

• Do you have a lifetime reading plan?

• What are you current reading hyper-fixations? Any overlap with mine?

I have wanted to talk to for a long time. We first met, as so many wonderful literary friendships now begin, through Substack — bonding over our shared love of classic literature1 and the pleasures terror of building a reading life in public. Over time, I have come to admire not just Naomi’s taste, but the quality of her attention. She reads with rigor and reverence, but also with a kind of self-awareness and self-possession that I find deeply inspiring.

What I love about Naomi as both a reader and a writer is that she has created a perspective that feels entirely her own. Again and again, she gives herself a job and goes after it — whether that means immersing herself in the classics, Middle English literature, Thomas Bernhard, or the history of magazine culture. There is something deeply motivating about watching someone pursue intellectual life with that much vigor, sincerity and curiosity.

The timing for this conversation is no coincidence. Naomi has a new book coming out next week: What’s So Great About the Great Books? — a thoughtful and generous defense of reading classic literature.2

In the book Naomi writes that she is drawn to great books because they possess integrity — they take their own ideas seriously and pursue them with nuance and complexity.

The Great Books are, more than anything, marked by their tremendous rigor, their drive to hold their own ideas up to scrutiny. And in that rigor, that paring away of what’s easy and facile, they bring us closer to the world-in-itself — the true, objective world that we can never know through reason alone. And it’s my contention that this rigor and honesty and care is synonumous with taste.

The passage perfectly describes Naomi’s own work as well.

What follows is a generous tour of Naomi’s reading brain: why she reads, how she reads, how writing shapes her reading life, and how she sustains attention in an age designed to fracture it. I have been anxiously anticipating this conversation and I’m so excited to finally be able to share it with you.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What role do books and reading play in your personal and your professional life?

As a kid, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy, and I grew up wanting to be a sci-fi writer. Within the SF community, the advice to aspiring writers is that you should read everything—so, after college, I decided that if I was going to be a serious writer I needed to read all the classics. You know, stuff like Proust and Tolstoy and Herodotus—all the books I’d heard about, but never read.

I got very into reading these books, and to this day I have a similar pattern, where I’ll pick up some book I’ve vaguely heard about, and then I’ll get extremely engrossed by that time/author/period/style and read a dozen related books. And then I’ll move on.

About four years ago, I started writing about books, first for literary periodicals like The Los Angeles Review of Books, and then for my own blog, . As a result, my reading had to change—now I read not just to educate myself, but with an eye to whether I can write about this book.

As an outgrowth of all this writing about books, I ended up with a contract from Princeton University Press to write a defense of reading the Great Books (i.e. all those old great books we’ve all heard about). And that book, What’s So Great About The Great Books?, will be coming out next week, on May 26th.

On an average week, how much do you read and when?

For years and years, I would track my reading time, and I always struggled to read more than fifteen hours a week. Eventually, all this tracking started to feel very odious and compulsory, so I stopped. Now my perception is that I mostly read in the evenings and at night, after my daughter has gone to bed. But I also read sometimes in the afternoon after I’ve finished writing. I highly doubt that I’m reading more than fifteen hours a week.

What do you like to read? How has your taste changed over the years?

I like all kinds of things! The main change is that about five years ago, during the pandemic, I realized that I’d read most of the classic books that I was truly excited about reading, so I’d need to stretch and go further afield, reading things that sounded less appealing. This was a great decision—it led me to pick up Chaucer, and I got very into Middle English literature. I also went through a phase where I read a lot of Kant and Hegel—very difficult, but quite rewarding.

PKG: My husband’s dissertation is on Kant’s aesthetics … and I have been scared to read it since he defended it 20 years ago. Reading Naomi’s book and now the interview is giving me the perhaps delusional confidence that maybe I am ready for it.

I also started to read this strain of very Romantic maximalist literature (think Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Wright) that’s out of fashion, but which I ended up enjoying a lot.

So nowadays I really look for whatever I’m resistant to. For instance, for years I was very allergic to the classic 20th-century domestic realist story (I was like, this is just stories about sad middle-class people), but when I finally picked up John Cheever I loved him, and that sent me on a tear, where I read lots of these New Yorker stories.

What’s a reading ritual or habit you’ve developed that’s unique to you?

Like all people nowadays, I struggle with fragmented attention. Whenever I feel like I’m getting too distracted, I’ll use a little stopwatch and set a timer for twenty minutes during which I’m not allowed to look at my phone. During that time, if any thoughts occur to me, I’ll just jot them down using a pen and paper (or, lately, the stylus for my Kindle Scribe). Once I’ve done this a few times in a week, my mind will settle down, and I’m able to concentrate better.

But I’ve gone through ENDLESS rituals to maintain the integrity of my attention. It’s such an ongoing struggle. I had years when I would lock my phone in a timed safe, but after I had a child, it started feeling irresponsible to be out of touch for hours at a time.

Do you take notes while you read? If yes, are you particular about your materials - notebooks, pens, highlighters vs. pencils?

Yes, nowadays I read mostly on my Kindle Scribe, which is a large Kindle that has a stylus that allows you to take notes on the page. I use this to jot down stray thoughts—I almost never look at these notes, but it keeps my hands occupied and keeps me from looking at my phone.

How do you keep track of what you want to read?

I have notions. Sadly, my reach exceeds my grasp—when I get into a topic I end up buying around three times as many books as I end up reading. But these recent purchases end up in a pile somewhere (or on the most recent page of my Kindle library), and the pile structures what I read next. I also keep a lot of random books around the house and sometimes I’ll browse through them, and they’ll send me in a totally new direction. For instance about fifteen years ago I bought a Kindle version of Njal’s Saga, the greatest of the Icelandic family sagas.

Three years ago I randomly opened the file and got absorbed, which set me onto a three-month journey where I read a lot of Old Norse literature.

Where do you get ideas about what to read?

Writing a newsletter has really changed my reading life, because now I’m in conversation with my audience and with other newsletter writers. A lot of the time, I read things because they’re bubbling up on the internet. For instance, I just read Yesteryear because there’s been so much Substack discourse about it. I’d also been hearing about Walter Ong a lot, so I read his big book, Orality and Literacy.

Then I’ll have some longer-term projects—I’ve gotten into reading Thomas Bernhard for what I hope will be a big piece, and I’ve been reading a lot of literary journals too—I have a huge stack of issues of The Yale Review, The Believer, The Baffler, etc in my living room.

How do you decide what to read next? Are you a mood-reader or a planner?

For big writing projects, I have developed a sense for what kinds of books I’ll need to read in order to start making an argument—I’ll move both forward and backwards from an author. I’ll read both their influences and the people they influenced. Then I’ll read some of the secondary literature about them. There’s definitely a process to this kind of reading. In the beginning I have to read a lot, in an exploratory way, but towards the end, my reading needs to get narrower and more focused on what I need to make my argument. The trick is to read enough that you feel confident in what you’re trying to say, but not so much that you get bogged down by the complexity and feel unable to say anything at all.

PKG: Finding the balance between “enough to feel confident” and “not so much that you get bogged down” is so hard! I was incredibly impressed by how readable Naomi’s book is, given its lofty subject, and my overwhelming feeling of it was one of embodied knowledge. #goals

The same is true for smaller projects. I’m always looking out for topics where it’s possible to just read one book and then write a post about it. Then there’s a rhythm to these bite-sized projects too.

What’s really hard is for me to read a one-off book that’s disconnected from my overall writing life. In February, I reread Les Miserables. It’s extremely long—took a month to read—and blew a hole in my writing schedule because it only resulted in one (not particularly popular) post. I can do that once in a while, but not often.

Oftentimes my blog gets sorted into seasons. Last year, for the first half of the year, I was writing mostly about 19th-century American literature, and for the second half I wrote mostly about 20th-century magazine culture. This happens pretty naturally, as a result of my changing interest, but it’s always scary when I’m between seasons, looking for something new that’ll hold my interest long-term.

It’s really exciting when that happens though, because it gives me the chance to sell my readers on something new.

When people ask me how come I read as much as I do, I frequently just give them a list of things that I don’t do as regularly as I probably should: exercise, clean house, spend time with friends. What do you choose NOT to do in favour of reading?

I love playing video games. But about fifteen years ago, I essentially stopped. For a while I convinced myself that I was too mature for games, but then maybe ten years ago I bought an XBox and spent a hundred and fifty hours playing Fallout: New Vegas, one of the best games of all time. It was such an immersive, awe-inspiring experience. I played Disco Elysium five years ago—same thing, one of the best games I’ve ever played. Such an intricate, well-told story. Since then I don’t think I’ve really completed another game—just don’t have the time to drop a hundred hours into a game anymore.

It’s very sad. Do you know how many incredible games have come out in the last fifteen years?

PKG: LOL.

I am 100 percent positive, I would love Baldur’s Gate 3, but I’ve never played it. If I told this to myself at age fifteen, she would be appalled! Do you mean Baldur’s Gate 3 finally came out and you’ve NEVER played it? But there’s just no time.

Do you have any tips or advice for people who wish they were reading more?

Go easy on yourself. This is true not just in my reading life, but for the pursuit of any goal—perfectionism is the true enemy. People spend months beating themselves up because they’re not reading every second, all the time, but really the best thing is to start small, just set a timer and read for ten minutes. I think you’ll find that if you set out to read for ten minutes, you’ll often end up reading for an hour or two. But if you tell yourself you must read for two hours, then frequently you won’t start at all, and the day’ll be lost.

My years of tracking my reading made me very realistic about how much I read—I almost never did more than fifteen hours a week, but that was enough to read Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, Tale of Genji, Story of the Stone, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and hundreds of other difficult and intimidating books.

What books do you find yourself recommending over and over again?

Recently I’ve become convinced that Robert Caro’s The Lives of Lyndon Johnson (his four-volume biography of the former president) is the closest thing contemporary America has produced to a Great Book. This series is a titanic achievement, a study of power and governance in 20th-century America. The depth of research is incredible, and it’s full of hundred-page mini-essays and asides, like Caro’s long study of rural electrification, or of the way that power works in the Senate. I read the first three books in high school, and I’ve since read them several more times, and each time I’ve come away inspired.

What I found so inspiring about this conversation is that Naomi speaks about reading from the other side of sustained effort. You can feel, in her answers, the accumulated weight of years spent following curiosities all the way down — through difficult books, changing interests, moments of resistance and breakthrough. How cool that she is sharing her experience so openly with us and showing us that we, too, can do this if we try.

🤓 So let’s chat about this:

• Which of Naomi’s tips or reading habits felt most relatable to you — and is there one you’re curious to try in your own reading life?

• What has your relationship to the “Great Books”?

• What’s a “war story” from your own reading life — a difficult book, obsessive phase, abandoned project, or unexpected literary rabbit hole that changed you as a reader?