good reads
In May of 2023, I spent an afternoon reading Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle poolside at a luxury eco-lodge Kasbah outside of Agadir, in the Atlas mountains of Morocco. I associate Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars closely with each other - not because they have any literary relationship, but because I read them both in Sante Fe, New Mexico in April of 2021 under string lights on the back porch, tucked under a blanket to hide from the cool high desert nights. I toted Maggie Nelson’s Bluets around Europe on my first solo trip abroad, cracking it open in a random cafe I ducked into in Lisbon, hiding from a sudden downpour, and finishing it on my friend’s couch in Madrid. I sobbed great gulping sobs into my cotton mask on a flight to Nicaragua in October of 2022, trying not to wake up my sleeping boyfriend beside me. I won’t ever forget finishing Cixin Liu’s Death’s End at four in the morning in my twin bed in a theater group house in July of 2017, my heart ripped out of my chest, dumbfounded by the lurching journey he took me on over six hundred pages and thousands of years, then walking to work the next day, a bit cowed under the huge expanse of the sky.
I love to read. It is one of those core, fundamental, deep-rooted things about me. It’s one of those statements though that I feel compelled to follow up with “no, but I really love to read”, as if to set myself apart from all of those other people that read, but don’t read, if you know what I mean. What I mean is that I’m a compulsive, aggressive, intense reader, a bratty and judgemental reader, voracious, exacting, and hungry.
But I’m not a perfect reader - I’ll give you the caveats. I’m a dilettante. I read very literally, and I’m lousy with symbolism. From a purely technical standpoint, I’m sloppy and careening - an unintentional speed reader, gulping down sentences, paragraphs in one go, going back and retracing my steps when I skip some key information or hit some prose that’s so beautiful I need to sip on it longer. At eight or nine, I lay on the floor of the playroom while my mom quizzed me on the plot of the latest American Girl book I had inhaled, suspicious of my pace. I knew even then that you didn’t have to read every word in its exact order to get the book. Even now, when I try to slow myself down and take in each. Word. In. Order. In. A. Sentence. I lose the plot, the flow, the pacing of what I’m reading.
I’m disrespectful to authors. I’ll see a digression in a science fiction novel about the exact gravitational mechanics of space flight, and I’ll appreciate briefly that the author took the time to research and document his findings extensively for whoever wants to read all that, and I’ll move right along unrepentingly onto the next page. I skim Johnathan Franzen when he gets too Johnathan Franzen-y. I dogear books, leave them sprawled open face down on the counter, spill food, get them wet in the rain, and pummel them in the bottom of my backpack. My e-reader, a knockoff Kindle and a necessary evil of a mobile lifestyle is beaten up, scratched, cracked, and chipped after about nine months of ownership. Most transgressively, I pirate books, telling friends defensively that I’d use a library if I could, but it’s not feasible with my lifestyle. I steal books from hotels and co-living spaces and abandon them in different cities. I buy and resell the same books from English language bookstores across Europe, happily taking 1 Euro for my 10 Euro purchase, considering it the cost of doing business. And when I can, I purchase new books constantly, helpless to the siren call of well-curated bookstore display, a slim paperback with a compelling synopsis, a new release that’s not yet available for illegal download on the depths of the internet. I can’t accumulate a collection while I travel, so I lend books out with fervor, vaguely remembering that my copy of On Beauty is with Chris in Virginia, I left The Argonauts with Anna in Spain, and shipped Y/N down to Carolyn in New Orleans. I think Frannie has Educated and Reagan has The Female Persuasion and Alex has No One Is Talking About This, and I’ve lent out at least four copies of The Secret History that I never saw again, one of which memorably my friend reported destroyed after a downpour while hiking the Appalachian Trail. I don’t intend to get any of those copies back, but I like thinking of them dotting a map of the world, as well-traveled as me.
Reading is such an interior experience that I’m convinced, on some level, that I am the only one who loves it as much as I do. I’m judgemental when people read more casually than I do, and somehow territorial when someone is more serious than me. There’s nothing collaborative about reading - it’s only something you can share when you put the book down, or before you pick it up, by volleying recommendations back and forth, trading opinions. I sidestepped literature classes after the tenth grade after reading The Crucible thrice and The Great Gatsby twice in my public school education, otherwise leaving gaping holes in my knowledge of the canon, which I haphazardly try to fill when I pick up some random Penguin Classics selection from Edward McKay’s. Perhaps had I sat around some wooden table in some Northeastern college debating the great Western novels of our time with like-minded peers, I would see it as a team sport, but instead, I’m a knife out here trying to sharpen itself.
The issue I run into: people have bad opinions about books. Good, wonderful people in my life read absolutely awful books. I have about three people in my life whose opinions on books I trust, and each of us feels equally adrift trying to sift out the wheat from the chaff out there in a world of junk. My mom tells me about these Facebook groups she’s in for book recommendations, or navigating the various tastes and temperaments of her neighborhood book club members. “She told me that The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt was the worst book she’s ever read,” my mom announces, and we grouse together. “I can’t trust anyone’s opinion!” my friend despairs, and we compulsively add each other’s recent reads to our own wishlists, clinging to trustworthy recommendations where we can find them. We are concentric circles, aligned in taste but not perfectly overlapping. I’ll never forgive my best friend for not finishing Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. My sister reads and loves the same bizarre science fiction trilogy that I adored, then turns and develops an appetite for Colleen Hoover. “Life’s too short to struggle” my mom texts me sagely after giving up on my absolute top favorite book of 2021. I despair, then send her another recommendation.
I have learned though that being a reader does not make you a writer. I can spot good writing - it leaps at me off the page. I am frequently stopped in my tracks by a perfect sentence, gnawing on it for a bit before moving on to the next line. And I’m wowed by the process of constructing something like that. To come up with a sentence like that - wow. To come up with a sentence and place it in a sea of sentences. To take your paragraphs and shape them into a story. To decide on a beginning, middle, and end, and fill all of them with good, solid, devourable words. I listen to podcast interviews with my favorite writers and chew on my cuticles when they talk about spending a year, two years, or five years on some of my most beloved books. Reading, for me, is binging, inhalation, gulping something down fast. Writing seems deliberate and delicate. I think that I have neither the discipline nor the disposition for something like that.
Nevertheless, traveling has made me want to write.
Embarrassingly it was not the cumulation of years of quality literature piling up in my brain that inspired me to give it a go. It was reading a book and thinking, with a bit of delusion, “I could do that”. It was Joan Didion’s South and West, read while my friend and I were road-tripping - well - south, and also west. I read her precise, particular observations of the same land that was flying past my window. I loved everything she noticed and I suddenly felt like I wasn’t noticing enough, that I was letting the landscape float through my eyes and out the back of my head. Don’t get me wrong: I did not sit and think I was meant to become the next Joan Didion, but rather I read a brief and vivid book about a woman noticing new things around her at the same time that I was noticing many new things around me, and that was enough to spur me to start writing things down. Things my roommate said, or that we heard, or people we saw, or things we did. This was during a very strange and wonderful year of my life and I wanted to remember everything. We were living in a different city every month (which is what I still do to this day, but this was the first time I ever did it, and therefore was experiencing peak feelings about it), and I was learning that being different places made me feel different. I wanted to capture it all and try and explain it, and document it all before I started forgetting.
Since South and West, I’ve developed a penchant for reading books set where I’m traveling. Nonfiction, history, educational books, and most travel writing never make the list. I seek out just a shared rooted sense of space. I read Leaving the Atocha Station in Spain, and some back-to-back Annie Erneaux translations curled up in Normandy. I read The Interior Circuit, which is set in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, minutes from the places the author describes, and spent evenings in Marrakesh reading slim volumes of other writers (the contemplative The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti, and the unsettling The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles) describing the same markets I had just spent the day weaving through.
Nothing may top my summer reading my way through Italy, though - Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts on a patio in Sicily, and Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, which traces her family’s journey through Italy almost exactly inverse to the path I took. I read most of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim on a beach in Cefalu one morning before work, and I strolled the cavernous Basilica de Santa Croce in Florence mere hours after reading about Lucy in E.M. Forester’s A Room with a View taking laps around the same ancient halls herself.
So many authors have used Italy as a backdrop to characters overhauling their lives and escaping themselves, and who could blame them? I sat on a rooftop in Naples last summer, my laundry fluttering on the clothesline beside me, reading an Elena Ferrante novel and stretching my newly tanned legs out into the relentless July sun, slowly and impractically falling for the boy I had met only weeks before with whom I was talking a spontaneous summer vacation with along the Amalfi coast. Are you kidding me? Couldn’t you write ten novels about that?
More recently, I took a trip to South Korea - my first trip to Asia, and the furthest I had been from home before. Ten days off work and two massive, long-haul flights allowed me to swallow down four or five books by Korean authors in translation during the course of the trip. I’ve been trying to become a more thorough reader recently, trying to parse the themes and meanings between the lines in the books I pick up. I sometimes feel like a middle schooler learning about symbolism for the first time. Water means rebirth, being made new again, a writer reminded me. Journeys are actually quests, meals represent communion. Another book’s introduction explains that science fiction reflects a society’s anxieties at the time it was written. A newsletter writer I follow laments authors including physical action with no purpose behind it. “In fiction, when you just plop those physical acts into your story or your novel, you’re copying the surface but not the deep reality. In a story, each act should further ground us in the reality of the story,” he demands. I flip through my books and wonder “Why did this author do this?” I look at my own writing and wonder “Why is this sentence there?” I stare at the pages during my trip and wonder “What does this book tell me about the world I’m standing in right now?”
So I read, and I write, and I read more. My continued strategy for learning how to write has been reading things I love and saying “Let me try that”. This has been about as useful as deciding to build a house after watching a few episodes of HGTV. I have no tools in my toolkit but a fantastic knack for reading my own stuff and knowing when it’s very mediocre. I can clock great writing but not produce it yet. I read a book recently that I quite harshly judged when I reviewed it online. The idea of the narcissism of small differences, as best I understand it, suggests that you are most annoyed by the traits in other people that are most similar to your own worst tendencies. “She writes like a reader trying to be a writer,” I fuss in my Goodreads review. I’m irritated by my own limits.
But I like the challenge. I want to have discipline, patience, and conciseness. I want to learn how to end an essay without a big vague hand-waving cumulative paragraph, and I want to learn how to stop listing things in groups of threes. I want to learn to say things in ten words instead of a hundred. I love being a reader but I’d also love to be a phenomenal communicator and merciless editor. There’s just so much to work towards. I went to a talk recently by a novelist I love, where he talked about dabbling in non-fiction writing. He spoke about dropping to his knees and weeping at the juvenility of his own efforts (relatable). And he spoke about picking up a book of essays by an author he loves and thinking: “I wonder if I can do that.” (relatable!) It seems as good a starting point as any.
An unsympathetic note from my friend-turned-editor after I wrote my first draft ever
So I spill water on my e-reader and I pirate three books and buy one more from a bookstore the same day. I read three sentences of a book, give up on it, and devour a third of the next one at dinner by myself. I read about someone swaying on a train in the Seoul metro while I sway on a train in the Seoul metro, and I stand in the Naples plaza from My Brilliant Friend and picture the shops and characters I grew to adore over thousands of pages. I crack spines and skip paragraphs and get unbearably envious of great writing and scurry off and try and imitate it myself. I feel spoiled to love so deeply a well that will never run dry.