In 2018, I decided to keep track of my reading. I kept things in that same space for four years, until things got pretty unwieldy. I took great pride in row after row of completed book, took great pride in the difficulty & variety of what was there. When I decided to write more deliberately, though, I moved my reading reflections over here.
There’s no row after row of book covers. And as I moved away from social media in 2025, I am more and more ambivalent about this part of the blog, a part that is by no means half of it, no matter what the headings & tags might suggest. I am reading for myself mostly, but at some level, I know that this space will hold me accountable.
I try to take the barest of notes these days — unsuccessfully, seeing as teacher-reading habits are ingrained in me for the best. I try to read deeply but briskly, to remind myself that I am in control of the pace of a reading, but that the pace should be close to the level of speech. To read at the pace of research would be for whatever readers happen upon this space, not for me.
Which is a lengthy way of saying that I lost track of what I read these weeks.
Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration is a horrifying and funny alternate history set in 1976 England. There’s a lot of his alternate history that was beyond my knowledge (particularly PM Wilson, the model for that novel’s pope), but I didn’t let that bother me too much. I hung onto the deep critique / examination of the cost of faith and the demands of power. And I was dazzled by the ways that Shakespeare & Keats, de Kooning & Sartre & others were reimagined in this novel that I’m certain I purchased because NYRB published it.
Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral by Jessie Redmon Fauset is a fantastic novel about sisterhood, about NYC, about the varieties of love, and primarily about passing. I’m pretty sure I bought it because of this article on Fauset’s astonishing career as an editor & encourager of Harlem Renaissance-era authors & poets.
The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas is my favorite book of this year. It’s one of two Norwegian books I read this month. The other, The Copenhagen Trilogy, is (depending on which part you’re reading) a stark or direct, moving or frustrating, hopeful or jarring account of growing into one’s best & worst selves; it’s a fantastic work of nonfiction, with no predictable tropes or self-aggrandizing airs. Back to The Birds, a novel centered on Mattis, a middle-aged man with mental challenges living with his middle-aged sister Hege. Their life is predictable & small — knitting sweaters, looking for work, making allowances & suffering for one another in the ways that only middle-aged unmarried siblings can. Until a sign comes that Mattis alone can read, and until a man comes that Hege alone can need. It’s realistic in the most painful ways and magical in the most realistic ways. It’s got one of the five best endings of any novel anywhere.
I definitely read more, but that’s what I can remember.
middleagedmiddlechild. 