May 9, 2023

Reading Good

I’ve been trying to solve the mystery of why my reading life has been especially rich and fruitful in 2023. Like, rich and fruitful beyond my own usual very high standards of what constitutes a rich and fruitful reading life. Partly it’s quantitative—I’m currently reading my 75th book of the year, which is the most books I’ve ever read by this time of year since I started keeping track in 2018. And this is partly because I got my first iPhone in November, which charges from my laptop downstairs, which means that my phone is far from bed and almost never the first thing I reach for in the morning. On many days, I read instead, and those half-hours definitely add up to something. But part of the quantity is qualitative too, because it’s the release of wonderful absorbing novels that have kept me going, big releases from Eleanor Catton and Rebecca Makkai that more than lived up to the hype, and books I only picked up because of all the hype (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Lessons in Chemistry) and I was so glad I did. But it’s not all been hype—I’ve loved rereading Elizabeth Strout’s back catalogue on the coattails of Lucy Barton, and picking up a 1990 short story collection by Joan Clark, and continuing to discover William Maxwell. Part of it is that I’ve found my own personal influencers, readers like Lindsay Hobbes and Lauren LeBlanc whose recommendations tend to satisfy. I’ve also been using the library more than I have in years, partly to keep up with the influencers I just mentioned without going bankrupt, taking months to finally get a book into my hands…but then I have to read it right away once I do because there’s more holds behind me and it can’t be renewed (this is the situation with Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds, which I’m reading right now upon the recommendation of my friend Julia). I don’t feel overwhelmed by all that I still need to read, or all I’m never going to read, or all the books that other people are reading, because I feel confident in my own personal reading trajectory (and glad too that it’s not just made up of all the things that I’m being told to read, or that everybody else is reading so I’ve got to do it too.) I think part of the richness and fruitfulness is also that I, for the first time in a really, really long time—like maybe even a decade?—am feeling relatively steady on the ever-shifting ground of reality, and I’m not even afraid to say that for fear that reality is going to come now and knock me over, tempting fate. I’m feeling good, and so I’m reading good, which is a sentence I’m going to leave right there, never mind the grammatical atrocities being committed. But then, as I always wonder, could it be instead that I’m reading good so I’m feeling good? (Certainly, for me, a poor reading streak and feeling terribly have often coincided.) Which comes first? How does one ever know, or begin to untangle it all? This is one of those existential questions that, it’s likely, I will never understand.