Now I am reading Daniel Deronda by George Eliot for EAGENOTS1. I didn’t have the foresight to prepare for EAGENOTS last year, so I am not at all regretfully rereading Daniel Deronda instead of sinking my teeth into Felix Holt, the Radical. Something to look forward to next year…

Also this month, I read the first half of the Granta Generations edition from 2024, which I picked up at Trident Booksellers in Boston. I thought James Scudamore’s account of meeting Stephen James Joyce—grandson of the James Joyce—was well done and entertaining. Perhaps at the man’s expense, though he does sound like a bit of a nightmare. I don’t know though. I would probably feel possessive too if my grandfather were James Joyce. Although I don’t really care about James Joyce (yet), so it would have to be someone else…like Virginia Woolf. If Woolf were my grandma, I’d definitely burn her letters unless she explicitly told me not to. Except Woolf isn’t a great example because letters are really quite beautiful and not all about how much farts turn her on…

Well, anyway I must have gotten bored in the middle of the magazine, but I might read the rest next month! There’s a piece by Gary Indiana at the end that I want to read and a few other enticing titles.

Additionally:

• This Vulture piece by Griffin Dunne on his father, journalist Dominick Dunne’s love for obituaries, and his mission to get dad a front page slot in the New York Times upon his passing. Charming, funny, moving.

• The Rose Horowitch we live in a post-literate society thing in The Atlantic. Chilling, maybe dramatic, but probably not.

• An old opinion piece in the Times called “The Tyranny of Convenience,” by Tim Wu. This was linked somewhere and I can’t remember where now, but it succinctly diagnoses one of the main things I think is WRONG with the WORLD at the moment. Do inconvenient things.

• ’s profile of Johnny Knoxville, not because I’m a Jackass girl (truth be told I’ve never watched any of the original show or any of the movies or any of the spinoff content)—I’ll just read pretty much anything Molly Young writes. Predictably enigmatic, lowkey sad, but in a good way.

AND with delight in my heart I read, Emily Wilson’s takedown of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the LRB. I haven’t seen the movie yet, and I have no hate in my heart for Nolan or his movies (unlike Wilson, clearly, LOL), but I thoroughly enjoyed her hit piece and thought a lot (though not all) of it made pretty good sense. I was then amused but not terribly surprised to learn that everyone was criticizing her for criticizing him. As if the current most prominent translator of Homer has nooo idea what she’s talking about and is just being a petty bitch I guess (which she is, but let her cook). I then stumbled upon ’s amusing “we can let emily wilson be a little mean, as a treat,” and nodded along the whole way. As she says:

Folks are fretting and wringing their hands at a scholar’s apparent haughtiness. Is it possible that in her review, Emily Wilson hurt Christopher Nolan’s feelings? Shouldn’t she have been gentler? I feel insane. Who cares!

Finally, I want to let you guys know that I recently took the Q train uptown for dinner. The Q is a line I don’t normally take, and I was floored, upon finding myself in a train car from my childhood, by how immensely superior the old subway car design (and lighting!!! so important) is when compared to the sterile, fluorescent, hospital-blue, personality-less bench-seating ass aluminum tubes we’re forced to travel around in these days. Would it KILL this CITY to put someone with a modicum of taste in charge of these types of aesthetic decisions???? This is the kind of seemingly innocuous but insidious change that marches us closer to total aesthetic meaninglessness. Just one it’s better cause it’s clean and modern step at a time, baby.

Until next month, catch me looking disgusted by my surroundings on the E train with all its extra space and shine and shimmer.

A couple summers ago, my dear friend Maddie discovered a personality assessment called The Four Tendencies that some woman named Gretchen Rubin came up with. Gretchen is a NYT bestselling author, podcaster & speaker. She describes herself on her website as “one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature,” which feels like a crazy claim but okay, Gretchen.

Anyway according to her, there are four types of people: upholders, who respond well to both internal and external expectations, obligers, who meet external expectations but struggle to meet the expectations they set for themselves, questioners, who need to understand why they should meet an expectation before they’ll do it (i.e. all expectations become internal expectations), and rebels, who resist expectations entirely. I’m a questioner (according to Gretchen’s free quiz) which generally means that once I decide to do something, I do it, and in December, I decided to go an entire year without buying any books.

Additionally, two key things have helped me maintain my resolve over the past six months and sixteen days. First, I own approximately 100 books that I’ve never read before, and on top of that another ~150 good ones that I have read but could read again if I so choose! These are estimates as I’ve never actually counted. I may be way off as I’ve never been good at guessing how many pennies are in the jar etc., but the point is that I’m not starved for reading material. Second, I’m having fun!

I thought I might have some ~key takeaways~ to impart at or around this half year milestone, but truth be told, I don’t. Of the books I’ve read off my own shelf so far, some have proven to be spectacular (why did I wait!?). Others have been whatever (my lack of eagerness to read after initial purchase was prescient). Most have been good to great, none really have been very bad, and that is because I have good taste.

You can find all my reviews of these mostly great books grouped by month here. Thus far, my favorites have been:

• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

• Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

• The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

• Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal

• The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard

• Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins

• Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Honorable mentions to Dune for being outside my normal wheelhouse and still a total delight. Also maybe for being the longest languishing book of all. On the Calculation of Volume IV should probably also be on my list of favorites, but I feel that as part of a series, it’s hard to distinguish my love for it from my existing love for the three books I’d already read, and besides that it never languished at all (more on this BREACH OF PROTOCOL below).

Interestingly Tom Robbins was the only author that I was sufficiently taken with to want to read two of his books in a row. Among the authors I’ve read so far this year, I also own other books by Hemingway, Didion, Marilynne Robinson, D.H. Lawrence & Virginia Woolf. In fairness to these listed authors, I think they’re wonderful. When it comes to choosing books, I’m just more likely to jump from one thing to another than I am to dive deeper (whether in regard to theme, time period, author, etc.).

The book I least enjoyed was Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, and I’m sorry for that. I’m just not that into abject misery.

Interlude to admit that while I have not bought any books in the strictest sense, I have acquired a few:

I procured a copy of ’s fabulous cookbook Better at Home. I did this by preordering it last year, forgetting about it, and then getting a call from my bookstore telling me that it had arrived. This does not count. The cookbook is great; I shared a recipe here.

My friend Karen kindly bought me a copy of Love & Fame by Susie Boyt after reading about how much I enjoyed Loved and Missed and how saaaad I felt about that fact that none of Boyt’s other novels are available in the US. Karen brought Love & Fame to me all the way from London! We don’t look a gift horse in the mouth in this house.

I picked up two books off the street in April. These were Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence, which I have already read, and Light in August by Faulkner which I have not. There was also a copy of short stories by Roald Dahl that I would have picked up if not for the other lady walking town the street who swooped in and grabbed it before I could.

My darling mother has struggled enormously with the premise of my project, so if you feel badly for anyone in this situation, it should be her—cruelly thwarted in her goal to always be buying books for me. A couple of allowances have been made. First, Always Home by Fanny Singer, which she bought for me at our friend Troy’s new cookbook store, Wild Sorrel Cookbooks. Then, after I posted about wanting to read it, Constable’s Year by Susan Owen’s. Thank you, Mama.

Because I’m not perfect, I was planning to subtly imply to my sister Kathryn that I would enjoy it if she bought me a copy of On The Calculation of Volume IV. She read my mind before I could even drop my hints. She also acquired something called The Butter Book for me, which I haven’t even properly flipped through, but which I love for the fact that it looks like a stick of butter.

On food & cookbooks, I also saved Erin O’Brien, author of unoriginally titled but enticing nonetheless cookbook, Dig In!, from losing a sale. I was over at my Baba’s when she informed me that she’d be sending her copy back, since there weren’t that many recipes in it that looked good to her, and she’d already photocopied the few that did. When I saw how hefty the stack of those ‘few that did’ photocopies was, taking this book for myself and thus eliminating the possibility of a wrongful return just seemed like the right thing to do. You are WELCOME Erin.

Finally, I signed up for a little workshop taught by Sonia Feldman back in February, and a copy of her debut novel Girls Girl was included in the cost of the course. It arrived in my mailbox last week.

Interlude concluded.

There are so many books left to be read. Here are a few that call to me at the moment:

Thoughts, pleas, warnings?

That’s all for now, xx.

I know I say this about every poem I post, but this poem truly MUST be read out loud. Unlike many poets of his time, who wrote in conventional meter (like iambic pentameter or other similar rhythms), Gerard Manley Hopkins was drawn to a rhythmic structure that harkens back to the Anglo-Saxons—found most notably in the Old English epic, Beowulf. He referred to it as “sprung” rhythm and favored it because he felt it allowed for more variety in his writing1 You don’t really need to know anything about rhythm to know that Hopkins is doing something totally satisfying (here in “Pied Beauty” as in may of his other poems). You just need to read out loud and feel it.

The poem opens with a proclamation—“Glory be to God for dappled things” tagging it as a poem of praise, but the object of that praise is somewhat unexpected. Hopkins seeks to honor dappled things, which feels contrary in a subtle way. To be dappled is perhaps to be imperfect. Freckled instead of ivory pristine. In the lines that follow, Hopkins cites the “skies of couple-colour,” the “brinded cow,” the “finches’ wings.” The third line is my favorite, with “rose-moles” calling to mind the image of a speckled rose (another wonderful dappled thing) before he surprises you by placing the rose-mole on the sides of “the trout that swim.” His use of the word stipple, “all in stipple,” is soo delicious. The alliteration of “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” similarly displays Hopkins’s focus on the sound of things.

In the last two lines of the first stanza, he broadens his lens, expands to whole landscapes, that are “plotted and pieced,” plowed, dotted, furrowed. We’ve zoomed out to a bird's eye—God’s-eye—view, all the better for the one we are praising to view his creation, here the sheep, here the fields ready for planting. It calls man to mind, and Hopkins says yes, all trades too (accents included for metrical reasons) are from God and honor Him in their variety.

In the second stanza, the humble nature of this praise—hinted at in line one—is made explicit. They are not just dappled, but “counter, original, spare, strange…fickle, freckled,” and still worthy of praise! Beyond our understanding, part of some larger map or constellation, and therefore worthy of our praise. Even, or perhaps especially to those things that appear to be in contradiction (swift and slow, sweet and sour, adazzle and dim), we must pour forth our praise. God “whose beauty is past change,” who is perpetually perfect, “fathers-forth” these mysterious pleasures and gifts. And in the end, it is not an exclamation or entreaty, but a command: “Praise him.”

This poem came into my mind because it was referenced by Linda Gregg in an essay I was assigned in my poetry workshop last month. She says that Hopkins, and poems like “Pied Beauty” in particular, “gave [her] a special way of knowing the earth and experiencing God,” and I couldn’t put it better myself. Xx

At the end of May I finished up Outline and was lost. These days, I stare at my bookshelf, and the same books that I haven’t reallllly felt like reading for the past ~3 years stare back. Of course at some point (when I bought them), I wanted to read these books. But now…well. And I know it’s largely a trick of the mind—just knowing they’ve been sitting on the shelf forever makes them less appealing to me. But still, it produces a certain sense of dread. This is heightened at the beginning of the month, when I feel like my choice risks setting the wrong tone for an entire month. (This is obviously not a Thing, but still).

So, feeling kind of non-committal and like I wanted something that would feel more…male after Cusk, I started reading Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins. I picked this one up at the Strand with the vague sense that I wanted to read more Robbins. I read Only Cowgirls Get the Blues a few years ago, and found it highly compelling. For a window into the full extend of my book buying PROBLEM I will share that when I bought Wild Ducks with the vague sense that I wanted to read more Robbins, I was already the proud owner of another novel by the man himself! But more on that momentarily.

Wild Ducks Flying Backward is a collection of Robbins’s shorter writings. In his characteristically tongue in cheek introduction, he imagines the reader settling down on an evening when it may rain or may snow, with a little dram of something strong to get the mental juices flowing. The reader has procured a copy of Tom Robbins’s latest, but finds herself “somewhat disgruntled” to discover that it’s not a novel at all. By the end of the introduction I didn’t care what it was. I was totally delighted with myself for my offhand choice. I had forgotten how amusing and engaging Robbins’s writing is. There’s just no one else like him. I rolled my eyes a couple times—like I might at a mildly inappropriate uncle—but I laughed out loud far more often (coincidentally, also like I would at a mildly inappropriate uncle).

This collection includes travel writings, in which we get to accompany our fearless leader through the African bush, into the Canyon of Vaginas, and to dinner with a tribe of rumored (former?) cannibals. From there, he moves on to tributes—quick hits in which he pays homage to some of his favorite things. There’s The Doors and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Redheads and Miniskirt Feminism, and my personal favorite Slipper Sipping (whereby a man sips champagne (it must be champagne) from a woman’s shoe—“no gesture in the annals of romantic behavior is quite as auspicious”).

Next, we get stories (one enticingly titled “Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata”), poems and lyrics, as well as the absolutely bonkers “The Towers of St. Ignatz,” a script treatment for a feature film. If anything in this collection will give you a sense of what some of Robbins’s longer form fiction feels like, it will be this. Hopefully you won’t be chased off before you get to the Musings & Critiques—which include an A+ paean to the tomato and mayonnaise sandwich—and finally his responses to an assortment of questions like, “Tell Us About Your Favorite Car,” and “What is the Meaning of Life?” If you haven’t read anything by Robbins yet, this wouldn’t be a bad place to dip your toe in.

So delighted was I by Wild Ducks that there was only one thing for it. Not done with Robbins and not able to go to the store for more when we have plenty of food at home, It was time to read Jitterbug Perfume. This is one of Robbins’s most well known novels and was lovingly gifted to me by my stepmother four and a half years ago when I requested that all my family members give me a book they loved for my birthday. I read a bunch of those books and then, naturally, burned out on reading what other people wanted me to read instead of what I wanted to read. Well, dear family and loved ones (if you’re reading this), if I haven’t read your book yet, have faith, take heart. Let this be your proof that I may still get around to it.

The novel opens with a tribute to/warning about the beet, “the most intense of vegetables,” before launching us into present day. We meet Priscilla in Seattle. She is a genius waitress (a type that Robbins defines in Wild Ducks!). Next, we meet Madame Devalier and her assistant V’lu processing Jamaican jasmine in New Orleans. Finally, the LeFever cousins come into view in Paris—Claude in his suit and Marcel in his…whale mask. What do these characters all have in common? They are perfumieres.

From there we head back to Eurasia in the 8th century where King Alobar has discovered a grey hair on his head. This spells disaster as in his kingdom, kings are executed and replaced at the first sign of aging (whether it be a grey hair or a wrinkle). He’s quite intent on staying alive, which kicks off a journey for the ages, ha ha. After running into the god, Pan, he heads east in search of the Bandaloop—a mysterious tribe that has discovered the secrets of immortality. Along the way, he picks up Kudra, a young Indian woman who is escaping suttee, the practice in which a widow is burned with the body of her deceased husband. Alobar and Kudra fall in love and spend the rest of their very long lives together.

The novel repeats this pattern, with shorter sections for Priscilla, Madame Devalier and the LeFevers followed by a longer chunk on Alobar and Kudra’s adventures, until everyone catches up with each other. If it all sounds insane, it really, really is. It’s a miracle that Robbins is able to land the plane in the end, tying together these disparate strands into something coherent and satisfying, but he is.

With immortality as a central concern, I found that the novel had much to contribute to our present cultural discourse re: reversing aging and extending life. It was less than a year ago that here, on this very page, in response to some chilling New Yorker long read on the crazy tech bros trying to live forever, I proclaimed, and I quote, “get old and DIE. It’s the whole point.” And I pretty much still feel that way, but I’ll tell you what, Robbins gave me A LOT to think about. For him life is abundance, joy, passion, fun, and why should that end?

About halfway through the novel, Alobar and Kudra encounter Lalo, a nymph and follower of Pan who commends their quest for immortality but warns them that:

Someday, however a thousand years from today, there wilt be men who seek to defeat death by intelligence alone. They wilt combat age and death with potions and the like, medical weapons that their minds have invented, and age and death will shrink back from them and their medicines. Alas, because they fight with reason only, making no advance in the area of soul and heart, true immortality wilst be denied them. However, they must not be allowed to attain even the false immortality that their mental facility doth gain for them, for huge evil will be conducted if they shouldst.

So then I knew Tom and I were on the same page.

His style and his voice are perfectly suited to his message—that one must be unapologetically oneself, convention be damned. His commitment to not taking himself too seriously is deadly serious. His style and his voice HAVE style and voice. His humor is irresistible, his puns mostly tolerable, his flaws forgivable. Most of all, he is having fun, which means you will have fun too. I can understand how his use of metaphor (LIBERAL) may not be for everyone, but what can’t be denied is that he loves language. Loves to play with it, and has gotten quite adept at doing so. 10/10 I loved it and am now devastatingly out of Robbins for the time being.

Luckily at the beginning of the month in an act of charity, my sweet sister bought me a copy of On The Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle. Technically this is in violation of the spirit of my project to read the books I already own, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc. I never said I was perfect (though I can see how you may have gotten that impression; my lover says I’m close to it!). I was deep in Robbins land when she gave it to me, but it was a comfort to know that it would be waiting for me when I was ready.

It’s hard to really say too much about this one, since it’s the fourth in a series. To even allude to the plot would be to spoil the progression of the first three books, which I’m not willing to do. For any who aren’t familiar, Balle’s series (which will ultimately consist of 7 books) focuses on Tara Selter, a woman who wakes up on 18th of November to a day she has already lived before. Then she keeps waking up to that day for another 3637 days (and counting!). I implore everyone to read these books. What Balle achieves is nothing short of a miracle. She makes the mundane inconceivably interesting; her pacing is second to none. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, every time I think I’m about to be over it (the premise, the repetition, the lack of action), she pulls me right back in. Book V is out in English in November (on November 17th, which is intriguing!).

Next up was Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, which longtime readers may recall from my original month of short books. kindly asked me to contribute to a newsletter on books that can be read in a single afternoon and Bonsai popped into my mind. I remembered loving it the first time I read it, and so, to write a fresh review for Regan, I sat down one afternoon and read it again.

My review is linked below, along with nine other fantastic recommendations, which I will be procuring and devouring post haste, just as soon as I’m legally allowed to buy books again.

Regan’s newsletter

Ten books short enough for summer afternoons

Regan’s newsletter publishes book recommendations on a theme and the occasional essay. Past newsletters have covered author completionism, reading routine, women in translation, and more…

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a month ago · 85 likes · 33 comments · Regan

As you may have deduced by now, I tend to swing when it comes to my reading choices. Something old calls for something new next. Something feminine begs to be followed by something more masculine. Something short by something long. My friend Francis was over for dinner the other night and in admiring my bookshelf, pointed out The Lincoln Highway by Amour Towles. I own it in hardcover and it came out in 2021 so you can do the math on that. I thought now would be as good a time as any.

The novel is a very zoomed in coming of age story, set over the course of ten days in June of 1954. Emmett Watson arrives home after a stint serving time at juvenile detention camp, Salina, for a fight gone wrong. His father passed away while he was away, and he’s been let out of his sentence early so that he can care for his eight year old brother. Due to a long list of outstanding loans, the Nebraska farm where the boys grew up is in foreclosure. At just eighteen, Emmett has a plan. With nothing tying the boys down, they’ll travel to Texas where Emmett can use his experience in carpentry to buy up old houses, fix them up, then rent or sell them to turn a profit.

Billy—that’s the eight year old brother—has other ideas. When Emmett was away, Billy found a stash of postcards from their mother describing the journey she embarked on, west to San Francisco (yes, along the Lincoln Highway), after she unceremoniously abandoned her family ~8 years prior. He thinks they should go to California to find her, and believes that since she always loved the 4th of July, they’ll be able to find her at the fireworks show in Lincoln Park. Emmett decides that he can flip houses just as well in California.

Best laid plans, as they say! When the warden from Salina drove Emmett home, neither of them realized that Duchess and Wooly—two well-meaning but troubled agents of chaos—had hitched a ride in the trunk. When the warden leaves and Duchess and Wooly reveal themselves, things begin to veer off track. They want to go to Wooly’s family home in the Adirondack’s, where $150,000, is sitting in his grandfather’s safe, and they’d be more than happy to offer a three way split for Emmett’s trouble in getting them there. He’s resistant, but when they effectively steal his car, it’s off to New York for the whole crew.

The story was fun, and I appreciated some of what Towles was doing with his literary references. Much like in Homer’s Odyssey, he spins a tale of similarly constant setbacks and frustrations. To make sure you get it, he introduces a character named Ulysses. His invocation of Shakespeare’s tragedies is a bit more subtle, and ties in with the ending quite skillfully. However, for the first 532 pages (of 576), I felt like I was reading a young adult novel. Sorry!! I think part of that effect came from the alternating points of view (not a favorite device of mine), and think Towles would have benefited a lot from using a 3rd person omniscient narrator—like maybe Billy reminiscing as an old man?? This option is basically written into the book already, but Towles decides not to lean in.

Aside from that, the characters are constantly wiping tears from their cheeks, which started to drive me crazy. I cry legitimately all the time, and even I felt it was a bit overdone. It was folksy, saccharine, cliched, and more than anything, it felt like Towles was trying to write like Steinbeck and failing. Not to be that person, but the solitary female character was also so underdeveloped and confusing. Everyone and their mother seems to have given it a rave review, so I might be the crazy one. I just remember Rules of Civility being more grown up and feeling less like it was trying to hit me over the head with its own wisdom. Phew! Francis, if you’re reading this, let’s talk.

I was traveling when I was nearing the end of The Lincoln Highway, so I naturally had a backup book on hand. I picked it because it wasn’t too thick (with Towles hogging most of the space in my carryon) and because I knew it would be good (Woolf). I didn’t end up needing it on my trip, but decided to read it anyway when I got back. That book was Flush, by Virginia Woolf, a playful, quasi-fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel by the same name.

It was written after Woolf completed The Waves, which exhausted her (UNDERSTANDABLY if you’ve read it). She wanted to do something a bit lighter, and decided that EBB’s loyal companion, oft mentioned in her letters and writings, deserved a biography of his own. While she makes good use of Barrett Browning’s references, there was much that had to be invented. As such, Woolf chooses to put herself inside Flush’s mind, allowing greater artistic liberty while still building upon a frame of true events.

Woolf also uses Flush as a vehicle through which to examine the confining and repressive quality of life in Victorian England, particularly for women. On Wimpole Street, both Flush and EBB spend all their time in her darkened room. Barrett Browning’s poor health kept her indoors, but even when she was feeling well, the force of her father’s presence oppressed her. Even when she was able to go out, she was confined to her bath chair or carriage and Flush to his chain—all nice dogs in London must be led on chains.

When Elizabeth and Robert run off to Italy, everything changes. Their romance is surely one of the greatest.1 It allowed Barrett Browning to come into her own, and their removal to Italy completed her transformation. She became a much freer woman (and Flush a much freer dog). To witness it all through the eyes of her little Flush was delightful. Woolf displays her characteristic skill when playing with Flush’s interiority—his intuitive understanding of certain things and his inability to penetrate others.

In shorter things, I unearthed a printed copy of Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting,” in which she describes inventing an excuse—the purchase of a pencil—to go out walking in the evening: “As the fox hunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of horses, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say, ‘Really I must buy a pencil,’ as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.

This essay was a deeply pleasurable gust of chill air at the start of summer. As always I love the way that Woolf plays with the interiority / exteriority paradox of life. She describes perfectly the sudden suffocation that sometimes descends when one has spent too much time in their regular environs, as well as the joy of street rambling anonymity, as well as the comfort of returning home.

This essay reminded me of that famous Vonnegut quote about going out to buy an envelope. Earlier this week I read a random personal essay here on Substack titled “What I Think About New York” or something like that. In it, our author who recently moved from Paris shares that back in the city of lights she would find herself going to an unnecessarily distant grocery store just for the opportunity to walk through the city, but that in New York “if you’re doing that there’s something deeply wrong with you.” This is such an illegally garbage take that I almost got in an internet fight with this sanctimonious idiot! My grandmother travels ~80 blocks to buy Amish eggs on the Upper West Side. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

Anyway it made me realize how much I love walking around in New York—arguably the greatest city on earth for walking around (Paris included). The other day I saw a couple on a dirt bike—he was revving the engine and her bottle blonde hair was wavy in the humidity. It was on 14th and 6th, and they looked so damn cool it made me laugh out loud.

I also read this piece by Ben Lerner about his experience with open-heart surgery, which greatly moved me. I don’t know much about Ben Lerner and feel like he has a loyal gaggle of followers and an equally loyal cabal of haters, but I will be thinking about this essay for a long time to come. It never occurred to me how heart breaking it must be to have this type of surgery, to have your heart stopped and restarted. Something that would have been unimaginable say 200 years ago, but that now happens to 2 million people a year.

And last but not least, I read two craft-y essays. One was by Linda Gregg on “The Art of Finding,” which was assigned to me in the poetry workshop I’m taking, but that is worth reading for anyone who creates art or who wants to live an artful life. The other, called “My Truck Desk” by Bud Smith expounds on the joys of working on the job. Well, stealing in between moments on the job to not do the job and to write instead. Very much looking forward to his next novel (next year).

That’s all, love you, bye!

To touch on form first, “Putting in the Seed” is a sonnet—close to a Petrarchan sonnet, though with a modified rhyme, and the Volta, or the turn, happens in the ninth line instead of the eighth. It’s written in iambic pentameter, which gives it such a pleasing sound. Of course—like all poetry, it must be read OUT LOUD.

Before I start sounding like your high school English teacher, though, let the form and meter fade into the background (important and impressive though they are). Frost begins by setting a simple scene. The speaker is out in the garden, and someone a “you,” most likely a wife, comes to call him to supper. He’s so engrossed in his work that he’s not sure he’ll be able to “leave off.” He’s burying “soft petals fallen” along with beans and peas. This is a late spring, maybe even early summer scene, and though the first signs of life, the early apple blossoms, are fallen to decay, the beans and peas are being planted for summer growth.

This dichotomy, death and the act of burying, along with birth and the formation of life, is central to the poem, and highlighted most starkly in his parenthetical interjection—“not so barren quite!!” Quickly, his dedication to the planting task turns into something compulsive and possibly contagious. If he lingers and his wife stays outside waiting for him for too long, she might forget herself and like him, become a “slave to springtime passion for the earth.” It’s here that the poem first takes a sensual turn, but the true turn is accomplished in the next line: “How Love burns through Putting in the Seed,” the productive, reproductive act.

Importantly, however, this burning love carries through to the “watching for that early birth,“ that hoping and that waiting for the arrival of new life. And just when it seems that the weeds are coming up to strangle the young seedling, even when conditions aren’t ideal, the “arched body” of young life comes “shouldering it’s way and shedding the earth crumbs.” I love how much life and vitality is coiled up in that arched body—how much effort in the shouldering. Life is determined to live.

It’s just a delicious poem, and I hope it inspires at least one of you to plant a garden or otherwise to reproduce with haste. LOVE BURNS THROUGH PUTTING IN THE SEED. Xx

As I trudged through the final pages of Lies & Sorcery at the end of April, I knew I would have to pick my next read carefully, or else face the consequences (despair, reading slump, existential crisis, etc.). I laid on the couch with that tome weighing on me (literally) and stared up at my bookshelf with weary eyes. I needed something that would grab me, enchant me, ideally make me forget that I was reading at all. Something with a Plot. Why do I own so many apparently Plotless novels? I scanned my shelves in mounting terror until, like a prayed for sietch on the sand planet itself, DUNE emerged from the haze to save me.

That’s right, dear reader, last month, in what can only be described as total desperation, I finally got around to reading Dune by Frank Herbert. Now I know what you’re thinking, because apparently this is what popped into everyone’s mind minute he or she heard (or saw) that I was reading Dune: it’s some variation of I didn’t know you liked sci-fi, or I don’t really read sci-fi, or do you read a lot of sci-fi. My response(s)? I don’t particularly, me neither, and no, obviously not you imbecile; if I read a lot of sci-fi, surely I would have already read DUNE, which, according to many, is the greatest sci-fi novel ever written.

I don’t feel qualified to pass a judgment of that nature (given my still limited exposure to the genre), but I can say that Dune was exactly what I needed. For those unfamiliar, this is the story of Paul Atreides. When his father, Duke Leto, is ordered to abandon their home planet (earth-like vibes) to rule over Arrakis (inhospitable desert vibes, no water, literally enormous sand worms, hostile population, but also this addictive and highly valuable drug called Melange and/or ‘spice’ that increases cognition and lifespan) the family packs up and ships out.

Intrigue abounds. There’s the Padishah Emperor, the Landsraad (which includes House Atreides and BAD House Harkonnen), and the Spacing Guild all vying for power in a precariously balanced triumvirate. The Bene Gesserit (the quasi-religious, very powerful, witch-vibe order of women to which Paul’s mom Lady Jessica belongs) are also doing stuff as are the FREMEN out in the desert. It’s really way to much to get into. The long and short of it is that everyone is lowkey evil except for the Fremen and Paul. Paul might be the Fremen’s messiah (the Lisan al-Gaib), which is kind of the same thing but not necessarily as the Bene Gesserit’s Kwisatz Haderach. TBQH it’s all pretty confusing, but Paul has to save the world (Arrakis) and maybe the whole universe.

As is common in sci-fi (I think, LOL), Herbert uses his imaginary world to explore ~themes.~ Unlike literary fiction, you don’t have to read between the lines to figure out that blue curtains mean sad or whatever. Herbert is pretty clear about what he wants you to be thinking about—and much of it is eerily relevant sixty years later. Before page 20, he hits us with this banger: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” In addition to the dangers of technology, he’ll have you thinking about well…the dangers of everything else too (complacency, comfort, blind faith, ecological destruction, etc.).

If that sounds good to you, you’ll love Dune. If that sounds boring (or stressful?) to you, I totally get that, and the good news is that you can still enjoy Dune without reading it as an allegory—the story is that good! I was totally swept up, as my lover can attest—he was subjected to nightly recaps on what had happened “today in DUNE.” Jury is still out on whether I will read Dune Messiah. I don’t own it, but since the Timothée movie version comes out in December, I feel like maybe I should break my rules to get a copy? Robert Pattinson will be in the movie <3 Any Dune Messiah fans out there, weigh in, thank you.

Coming off that high, I thought something a little mellower, a little less all-consuming might do the trick. Back in April, I picked up two books off the street that I never told you about. This is technically a violation of my policies, but we aren’t going to dwell on it since no money changed hands. Anyway, one of the books I scurried home with that day was Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence, and now it called to me from my shelf like all new books do: read me! read me! The little Penguin edition I found contains just 6 tales, which frankly is a good number for someone like me who doesn’t always get the appeal of short story collections.

The titular story, “Love Among the Haystacks,” is the tenderly told tale of two brothers’ first encounters with love set against the hay harvest in rural England. Maurice has fallen in love with Paula, the German governess from a neighboring farm, and he arranges for her to come to him in the night—volunteering to be the one among the crew who stays overnight to guard the hay. Geoffrey, the shyer more introspective of the two feels left behind and lonely in light of his brother’s budding romance. In payment for his private resentments, he offers to stay with Maurice overnight as well, and ends up getting a taste of romance as well when the neglected wife of a gypsy tramp wonders into his camp.

“Love Among the Haystacks” seemed most similar to Lawrence’s usual style and subject matter (judging from my limited experience with Lady Chatterley’s Lover). He finds the encroachment of modernity alarming, and he’s interested in the romantic and sexual impulse—the way that it manifests differently, but ideally symbiotically, in men and women.

My favorite story in the collection was “The Rocking-Horse Winner” which is about Paul, a young boy growing up in a middle-class family plagued by financial anxiety. Appearances must be kept up, and the walls seem to whisper “there must be more money!” Paul learns about horse racing from the gardener Basset, and develops a strange knack for knowing which horse will win (without ever visiting the track mind you). When he knows, he asks Basset to place a bet for him, and in this way builds up a nice little fund. The ending totally shocked me in that way that only successful short stories can.

I can’t seem to find the specific collection that I have anywhere online, but if you read one or two stories, I’d seek out the aforementioned two. The others were good too if you stumble upon them—one called “The Lovely Lady,” about a poisonously possessive mother, “Rawdon’s Roof” about a selfish and foolish philanderer, “The Man Who Loved Islands,” which reads like a parable, and “The Man Who Died,” which is a kooky retelling of Jesus’s resurrection (namely what happens after the resurrection) that didn’t really hit with me.

The month burned on. I had recovered from my desert fever with Lawrence, but decided I wanted to go backwards from him for my next read instead of forwards into something more contemporary. It was time for The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard, brought out by none other than the ladies. It’s starting to feel like I talk about Mandylion nonstop, but what can I say, I love their work!

To begin, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like The Morgesons. The premise sounds somewhat simple: it’s a coming of age story set in small town New England in the nineteenth century. We are introduced to the Morgesons—with deep family roots in New England, Locke Morgeson runs a successful whaling business, and his wife Mary runs runs a house. The novel focuses on their daughters, Cassandra and Veronica, as they traverse their adolescence and become women. Cassandra is our narrator, so we are most with her, but Veronica serves as her double and her opposite.

Where Cassandra says whatever comes to her mind, Veronica speaks very little, and when she does, it always seems to be in riddles. Where Cassandra is hearty and solid, Veronica is plagued by mysterious bouts of illness that keep her laid up in bed for months at a time. Where Cassandra is sent out into the world—first to school and then on extended family visits—Veronica wouldn’t dream of leaving home. It is out in the world the Cassy gets her first (and second and third) taste of love. She even brings some love home for Verry.

What makes The Morgesons so unique is that Stoddard leaves so much unsaid and unexplained. I’m used to this to some degree when it comes to nineteenth century novels—I know that no one is ever pregnant, the babies just appear—but The Morgesons takes this decorum to the next level, or at the very least, its abstentions are more noticeable because it’s narrated by Cassy herself in the first person. I LOVED IT. More intrigue in novels, more inference and conjecture. More using your brain to follow the narrative thread, more saying “OH okay, they’ve clearly been going on carriage rides without my knowledge and now he loves her,” you know what I mean??

I don’t want to give anything else away, but this book was so good. It’s all about a woman’s place in the world—how to resist when someone tries to put you in it, AND how to find it for yourself. It’s also soooo romantic. 10/10, I loved The Morgesons, my favorite book of the month and I can’t wait to reread it.

I wrapped that right before a Memorial Day trip to New Orleans (where I knew I would get zero reading done), and wasn’t expecting to fit in another book before the end of the month. I was kind of directionless in terms of what to read next, and picked up Outline by Rachel Cusk on whim. It’s not very long, but I ended up finishing it much more quickly than I expected (it’s essentially plotless, which can make for slower reading).

The novel follows an unnamed writer in sweltering Athens for the summer to teach a creative writing course. It begins on the airplane to Greece, when the man in a neighboring seat strikes up a conversation. As he speaks, he reveals much about himself—as much in what he does say as in what he doesn’t—and our writer listens. We will learn that she has a knack for listening over the course of the novel, which is made up of ten chapters, each one grounded by its own central conversation. Colleagues, old friends and students talk and talk, and we as the reader (inside the mind of our great listener) have a front row seat to the ways in which people construct and project their identities.

The writer—we eventually learn that her name is Faye—on the other hand seems to operate outside these normal patterns. Like many great listeners, she reveals very little about herself, and it’s only seemingly against her will that the outline (ha ha) of her life (two children, recent divorce, deep sense of loss) does take shape. Of course, the notion that she’s somehow immune from the impulse for self-articulation and projection that the other people she encounters cant seem to escape is an illusion. The whole novel is a manifestation of her inner life.

Cusk’s use of free indirect speech—in which the majority of the dialogue (a fair amount considering how heavily the novel relies on conversation) is reported in Faye’s own words, rather than as transcribed quotations—gives Faye away. Even though we know very little about her, we somehow feel that we do. In the stories she tells about those around her, she, perhaps inadvertently (subconsciously?) reveals her own fixations: difficult family dynamics, difficult marriages, difficult childhoods, to name a few.

To be honest, I thought I was kind of neither here nor there on the whole thing while I was reading it—though I did read the back 2/3 in basically one sitting laying out by the Hudson on Sunday, so obviously I liked it well enough. The writing is strong, the voice curiously compelling, but on the whole, the book didn’t provoke strong feelings while I was in the midst of it. However, since I finished reading it and the more I think about it, I like it more and more, and I consider it to be a more and more impressive feat of writing.

Has anyone read Transit or Kudos? Should I?

That’s all for now—ta ta!

Not a bad showing considering what a busy woman I’ve been. I jetted off to Boston (I trained, but let’s go with jetted) one weekend and to New Orleans another. I tried to run and cook every week and mostly succeeded. I’ve taken up ballet again, and I’m also in a Tuesday evening poetry class. This has all been very nice, and I’m grateful.

I’ve still not bought a book (even Faulkner House Books couldn’t break me!!!); however, I have doubled down on the purchase of literary magazines in a way that I’ve deemed legal but can acknowledge is questionable. This month I enjoyed:

Midnight Mind Magazine was a Casa Magazines treat, and I got the last copy they had. This edition was themed “On the Road in America Again” and featured primarily road trip related musings and poetry. My favorites were “Going to California: A Journal Excerpt from 1981” by Hugh Findlay and “The Gospel According to Alfred,” an epic poem by Paul Doty. None of it is available online, and it’s sold out, but you can buy next the edition here!

One day, I ran out of my spicy chili crisp, and instead of going to the normal grocery story to replace it, I went to Big Night on 10th Street. Big mistake, because chili crisp there costs $15 instead off $7 at the grocery store, but also because they had copies of Steak Zine (so cute! So red!) stacked up on the counter. I ended up spending $50 that day on chili crisp and Steak Zine, so you do the math on that.

Despite the exorbitant cost it was fun to tote around and read over the course of the month. I won’t say they were all winners—sorry but every essayist seemed to think her little “I know it’s not really okay to eat steak given the political, socioeconomic and literal climate” caveat was really providing a unique perspective, and it became BORING after essay #3. That being said, my favorites were “Six Orders of Foie Gras, for Research” by Anonymous, “Omaha After the Stock Yards” by Jamal Dauda, and “Good Food, Full Nude” by Sophia June. Buy here.

My copy of the Sewanee Review arrived in the mail just in time for me to dip my toes in. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but “Dairy” by Kelan Nee (winner of the Review’s annual non-fiction contest) and “Accurate Witness” by Nell Freudenberger were both excellent. You can get an annual subscription here for the cost of one Steak Zine.

And lastly, I must admit that I additionally bought the “Dead Friends” and “Generations” editions of Granta at Trident Booksellers in Back Bay, though I haven’t gotten into either yet.

In other one off things, I read Joyce Johnson’s essay on Jack Kerouac and an old profile on Gerald and Sara Murphy (friends and muses to F. Scott Fitzgerald), both in The New Yorker. Came away wanting to read more Kerouac and Fitzgerald (although that’s really not the point), so I feel I can recommend. Some interesting parallel to be drawn there re: voice(s) of generation(s).

I also pretty reliably love ’s writing, and her contract violating Hinge x Esther Perel expose is no exception. I’m looking forward to part 2.

Finally, as it’s really almost summer, I can point you in the direction of a few worthy reading lists:

• Translated literature from

• Not technically a reading list but a review of all the books read for grad school

• ’s basics v. classics list (sorry paywalled, but honestly subscribe)

also just read Lonesome Dove, which I’m dying to read but do not own. Alas, I will try to scratch the itch for something epic via the other big books on my shelf. I famously believe that the best time to read an 700 page book is in the heat of the summer, and nothing is more glam than pulling out a clunker at the beach and going home with sand stuck between the pages. After recovering from Lies and Sorcery, I’m ready to get hurt again. Some contenders for this summer:

A bridge to cross. In the meantime, I figured some of the books that have piqued my interest might pique yours too. If you end up reading one of these in the next 7.25 months, let me know how it goes so that I can move it up my list or remove it entirely. Kisses!

Child of Light by Jessi Bender

Discovered at Afterword Bookstore on East 6th, obsessed with how amateurish the cover design is, set in 1896, main character named Ambrétte who’s interested in spiritualism and electricity? Done. this feels like it could be right up your alley (even though it was published in 2025, which does count against it).

Riders by Jilly Cooper

I’ve never read anything by Jilly Cooper. My cousin Elias texted me back in January “Read Riders by Jilly Cooper,” and then a follow up: “It’s very bawdy.” Points for cover design, would love to be reading this on the subway.

Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke

I guess this came onto my radar because of the relatively recent McNally Editions reissue, described as “searing tale of a young woman's unravelling beneath the unforgiving Tuscan sun.” Sounds like a young couple travels to Italy, the husband is unexpectedly called away, and a young Italian man shows up and sets the wife aquiver.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe

This book is the archetypal gothic novel. It’s also the go to novel to reference when you want to telegraph to your reader that your 19th century heroine reads too many silly novels and might have an overactive imagination. Jane Austen lovingly pokes fun at the Udolpho’s melodrama in her funniest novel, Northanger Abbey. It’s time for me to read it.

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

I’ve had my eye on Persephone Books for a while now, but have yet to purchase anything of theirs. Streatfeild of Ballet Shoes fame also wrote novels for adults. This one follows a middle-class English family in the years before WWI, and proceeds to track “in miserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of such families.” Probably not an uplifting read, but I’m intrigued nonetheless.

Tollbooth by Bud Smith

I love ’s writing and am eager to read more. If you haven’t read anything by him, read Teenager!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi

I cannot for the life of me remember where I read about this book. Originally published in 1948 it’s a classic Japanese locked-room murder mystery. If reading Dune (more on this in a couple weeks) reminded me of anything, it’s that I need to be reading more GOOD genre fiction (see Jilly Cooper above, same same but different).

The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje

The Remembered Soldier was one of the best books I read last year (Huffines family recommendation). It was definitely the best book I’ve read in a while that was written in this century. Don’t even know what this other one is about, saw it would be published in English in August, will read anything Anjet Daanje puts out.

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

From NYRB (love), a “shrewd commentary on how history bends to the quirks of certain individuals,” centered on Mosfell Church in Mosfellsdalur Valley, Iceland. I trust.

House of Fury by Evelio Rosero

Read predictably enticing review here, and join me in wanting to read this one (and maybe some others too).

Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death by Kathleen Stock

A lowkey fixation of mine ever since I found out that everyone in Canada is trying to kill themselves. Comes out in July.

Constable’s Year by Susan Owens

Love Constable because I love clouds and I love how many poems there are about him. Saw a copy of this one at Three Lives and added it to my list

Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown by Alan Watts

I want to read it because of the Van Morrison song. Kathryn is also really into Buddhism at the moment, and I think she’s great.

This morning I ran into my sister Kathryn on my way to work, and I asked her what I should write about. She said I should write about Isabelle’s wedding. Isabelle is my other sister. Isabelle and her husband Grayson went to Italy on their honeymoon—spent a lovely couple of days in Sienna, arrived in Florence, came down with a case of traveler’s bacteria (whatever the hell that is), and in her own words “didn’t get to see or eat anything.” Their wedding was beautiful.

When, after work and still directionless, I stopped by Maddie’s, she said I should write about her, and then more specifically about watching her fall in love. I asked her if she really wanted me to write about that for my thousand odd subscribers and she said maybe not, but here we are (or rather here I am, writing)—I guess you can’t really put the toothpaste back in the tube. Maddie is off to Paris tonight with the man she’s recently fallen in love with (a process that has been dizzyingly joyful to watch). That’s two votes for love.

I decided to go on a run and maybe think about love and see if I could come up with something coherent. I’ve fallen into the habit of running without music, which makes it easy to think—so easy, in fact that I don’t even have to be an active participant in the thinking. I ran three miles and don’t remember a single thought except for when I saw a single tree blooming with pink flowers and considered stopping to tear off and carry home one of its branches.

I called my cousin Grace and asked her what I should write about. She said I could write about my breakfast dilemma or about David.

My breakfast dilemma is this: at my old job, I used to eat two eggs for breakfast everyday which (and I know this is insane) I would cook in the office kitchen. Yes—I, Eve, was the girl who cooked eggs at work. What can I say? Though I never saw anyone else do this, there was an induction stovetop, frying pans in the cabinet, and anywhere from 1-3 dozen eggs in the fridge at all times, so someone else must have done it sometime. At my new job, they don’t have any of that stuff. They have a catered breakfast, which includes fruit (usually an assortment of melon, which doesn’t interest me), fixings for avocado toast (the mashed avocado always looks so oily, I just can’t bear it), a platter of bagels, and a pyramid of hard boiled eggs in little plastic cups. I don’t want to eat a peeled hard boiled egg out of a cup, so I end up eating anywhere from 1/4 to 3/4 of a bagel with cream cheese, and that’s just not a breakfast that’s going to serve me well. In fact, I find that I’m starving by 11am, and then even after I’ve eaten lunch, I’m hungry again 2 hours later, probably because I’m bored, but also definitely because I didn’t get enough protein for breakfast. David is Grace’s perfect baby.

Grace also said, and I quote: “You can write about anything I guess. I love all your posts. I always enjoy them. The only time I’m sad is when you just do a poem, and I’m sad that there’s not more; I want more. But I really liked the poem you posted about last week. I love your posts, all of them, and I agree, I wouldn’t want to eat a hard boiled egg—I don’t want to eat a hard boiled egg anyway, but if I did eat eggs—from someone else. I want to boil my own eggs, thanks.”

I got home from my run then and got in the shower. The stupid LED boob light in my bathroom is burnt out for the second time in the 2.5 years I’ve lived in this apartment even though they’re supposed to last for 5-20 years. Because it was dark-ish in the bathroom, I didn’t miss the change in the light outside that occurred at 7:46pm. I could see it happen through the fogged glass window in my shower.

My windows face east, so there shouldn’t really be a change in the light at 7:46pm; however, the large windows on several buildings on 7th Avenue catch the sunset and reflect it back at me. I saw the light change and flung open the window, set my elbows on the sill and leaned down and out in such a way so as not to flash any neighbors. All the tall buildings were glowing practically red, and a cool wind was blowing each leaf on the big backyard tree—also bathed in warm light—in tempting undulations. The steam from my shower drifted out into the evening, and I could almost imagine that the sound of falling water (unremarkable water pressure) was that of a babbling brook. The sunset in the east only ever lasts for six or seven minutes, and tonight I didn’t miss it.

William Wordsworth wrote “She Was a Phantom of Delight” about his wife, Mary Hutchinson. Of the poem he said, “ It was written from my heart, as is sufficiently obvious.”

Sufficiently obvious indeed. Read OUT LOUD!

xx

Lies and Sorcery was published in 1948 to much praise. Natalia Ginzburg later recalled reading an early manuscript and being “filled with vitality and joy.” This, reader, can be described as nothing but a totally insane reaction to the text. Morante’s husband, Alberto Moravia, called the novel genius. Slightly less insane. Italo Calvino called it a “serious novel” that “successfully penetrates to the bone,” which I would say is more in line with my experience of it.

The novel is set around the turn of the 20th century in southern Italy, and tells the story of one family over three generations, as narrated by Elisa, the youngest member of the clan and sole survivor. We learn in the introduction that Elisa’s parents—Anna and Francesco—have been dead for several years. Upon their death, she was adopted by a fallen woman, Rosaria, who she has lived with in relative isolation for the past several years. At the opening of the book, Rosaria has died, leaving Elisa completely alone in the world.

Alone, that is, save for the ghosts of her ancestors. During the years she lived with Rosaria, Elisa often shut herself up in her room fantasizing about her ancestors and their grand romantic lives. In her mind they were princes, saints, dukes and queens. She spun stories to entertain herself in her solitude—spurning Rosaria’s unsavory lifestyle—and she began to believe her own stories. When she finds herself truly alone, these fantastical ghosts abandon her too and are replaced with memory.

Elisa finds that she can suddenly remember, with great precision, her entire past, and not just that—she can remember the pasts of her dead ancestors as well, the true version of events. She says, “Things I never knew about I now understood and I could retrace their lives from the beginning, as if their experiences were mine.” These memories come to her in light early morning dreams, whispered in the voices of her ancestors. She rises and each morning “like a faithful secretary” writes it all down. And this is how the story begins.

We meet Cesira, Elisa’s maternal grandmother, who grew up in a middle class family but had too high a sense of herself and too great of ambitions to continue in that station. She catches herself a nobleman, Teodoro, though much to her chagrin his family disowns and disinherits him in response to their marriage. Teodoro, Cesira and soon enough their daughter, Anna, are plunged into debt. In Anna’s early life, Cesira’s overwhelming disappointment and resultant hardness contrast with Teodoro’s good nature and charm. Though the family lives in near poverty, Teodoro regales Anna with embellished stories of his noble upbringing (not unlike the stories Elisa spins for herself two generations later) and instills in her that unwarranted and poisonous sense of her own superiority. Like her mother and father, Anna will contend with the feeling that she deserves better—that she is better—than what she has for the rest of her life.

This is in some ways the center of the novel: the terrible restriction of the traditional (archaic?) social and class structures that were still so prominent in Italy during this time. Morante puts the effects of such repression on full display in her characters, each one more miserable and unlikeable than the last. The poor are bitter, the rich careless. No one wins, but no alternative is presented. Even poor little Elisa, who comes into the world when Anna, after a life altering brush with her noble cousin Edoardo, is driven to marry Francesco by bitter necessity, is hardly a compelling character. I pitied her, but that was about the extent of it.

As I soldiered through, I found myself wondering what the point was. There were moments where I expected Morante to stake a claim or take a perspective. For a section of the novel, young Francesco is captivated by Marx and dreams of creating a more equal world, but his drive doubles back on itself and goes nowhere. Beyond painting a striking portrait of one troubled family against very particular social and economic backdrop, Morante doesn’t offer a path out of the trouble, until you realize that she actually already did, on page 24 at that. At the end of Elisa’s introduction she confides in her reader: “Perhaps by reconstructing my family’s story, I will finally be able to solve the mystery of my childhood as well as discover the truth behind all the other family myths…This is why I obey their voices and write. Who knows, perhaps with their help I may at last be able to leave this room.”

It’s worth noting that Elena Ferrante (whoever she is) cites Morante as one of her major influences. For Ferrante lovers, Lies and Sorcery may be a compelling text if only to place Ferrante’s work within the larger context of the Italian novel. It’s been a while, but I remember loving the Neapolitan Quartet. Ferrante is certainly unflinching when it comes to the flaws of her characters, but I remember rooting for them nonetheless, liking them flaws and all. Consider this your warning: not so with Lies and Sorcery.

Hi! This month I have been reading Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante. As predicted, it has taken me just about the entire month, and I am by this point quite eager to finish it. Maybe I will fit something else in before May comes. You’ll find out next week.

Additionally I read two short stories out of my copy of the 1997 O. Henry Prize Stories—“City Life” by Mary Gordon (the winner), and then also, because I was intrigued by a collection of hers at the Strand the other day, “Comfort” by Mary Gaitskill. The first was about woman, who having broken away from her poverty-stricken family finds herself greatly disturbed when a slovenly downstairs neighbor interrupts her carefully constructed life. The second focuses on the subject’s respective relationships with his father and girlfriend in the aftermath of a horrible car accident that disables his mother. I’ve already kind of forgotten it—“City Life” was more memorable, which I think is as good a barometer for short stories as any.

Fittingly though unintentionally (April being National Poetry Month), I read a lot about poetry and poets, including Poetry Magazine, which I mentioned last week, and two interesting profiles—one on Michael Ondaatje and one on V.R. Lang. It inspired me to finally start a list of the poets I want to read more of which is something I have thought about doing many times. The internet is a wonderful place (LOL) to discover poetry, but it is often the case that whatever you discover is totally out of context. I want more context & a deeper understanding. So far, on my list:

Jane Kenyon
Jane Hirshfield 
Linda Greg
Michael Ondaatje
Gregory Orr
V.R. Lang  

Who should I add?

I love love love this poem and was delighted to find it featured in the April edition of Poetry Magazine along with several other poems by Gregg. She is a poet I am always meaning to read more of, and in “Praising Spring,” it seems she is at her very best.

As suggested by the title it is a celebration of the beauty of spring. It arrives every year a miracle. But there is also a more sinister undertone that balances the poem and makes it true. The best poems are true. Even in the opening line, Gregg introduces the idea of this double feeling: “The day is taken by each thing.” Is the day delighted by the blooming world around it, or does each thing (those later described: the spider, the flower, the doe, the running brook) claim the day for itself?

She expands on both possible meanings simultaneously. She is certainly taken by each thing, kicked into a frenzied and compulsive movement, out, in, out again, finding herself out even in the dark of night to witness what she describes as “a beauty that knows nothing of delay.” In this world defined by incredible speed, each of us is forced out of our heads into the moment, as Gregg says, the mind “leans back and smiles, having nothing to say.”

In our best moments, our minds have nothing to say, and the coming of spring in all its glory can catch even the most active mind off guard. However, there is a piece of this poem, a piece of Gregg’s quiet mind, that remains keenly aware of the passage of time. Small performances of life and death take place all around us and very quickly during spring. The flowers bloom only so an hour, the doe becomes a deer. Gregg is awestruck (both amazed and terrified) by a growth and “wildness / that does not heed the hour.” It will stop for no one, no thing, not even the coming of night—and all that night’s darkness may represent.

Faced with such beauty and such power, Gregg acknowledges herself as a servant and sings her praises. It’s a song of wonder and a song of humble tribute to something uncontrollable. In the closing line, it begins to rain in her spring—rain, being a quintessential springtime image, representing both birth and destruction, has not been mentioned until now. We see it nourishing the flowers and filling the brook to near overflowing. There is an old farmer sleeping while his flowers open into life, there are stars to remind us of our smallness, there is mint, fresh, bright, and liable to take over your herb patch if its not contained. In spring there is room for all of it, the rain continues to fall, but the sun shines through.

I too grew up eating soft boiled eggs, and have an enduring, and shall we say recurring passion for them. When I was little—very little, my grandparents would take my sister and I to breakfast at Balthazar on Sunday mornings. This was back when they still opened at 7am for breakfast service. We were often the only people in the restaurant, and I remember the table we always sat at, to the left on the first banquet. My sister and I were charming and well-behaved little girls, much cooed at by the waitstaff.

Baba would order the eggs and soldiers, which I believe was an on-menu item at the time, but may not have been. She would request that our waiter bring out a bowl so that she could scoop my boiled eggs out of the shells, making it easier for me—probably about four years old at this time—to eat them. When we ate breakfast at home, she would do the same after boiling the eggs herself. She would tell me when the eggs went in, so I knew it would only be a few minutes, and then I would become impatient while waiting for the eggs to be cool enough for her to handle so that they could be scooped.

A warm soft boiled egg is a humble food, but the flavor—which is distinct from what you get with any other egg preparation—is rich. There are many ways to skin a cat, I mean boil an egg, but my current method is: eggs & one inch of water go into a small pot, bring the water up to a boil, turn down the heat and cover for three and a half minutes, remove eggs from pot and run briefly under cold water (just long enough to be able to touch them).

I’m an adult now, so I eat my eggs out of their shells, and own delightful egg cups (two pink ones, and two that look like camels) and two different tiny spoons for this express purpose. Toast soldiers (well-buttered) are an excellent but unnecessary accoutrement. This is the most chic breakfast imaginable. If you aren’t squeamish about eggs, which is obviously important when it comes to eating them soft boiled, I encourage you to to join me:

March was a slow-ish and random month for reading as you will soon see. I didn’t get through much, and what I did get through was thematically…disparate. I mean to continue my downward trajectory (from eight books in January) as I started Lies and Sorcery (long) and will likely be reading it through the end of the month. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First, three little March reviews.

I don’t remember why I decided on Painting Time at the beginning of the month. I finished Parma, so something shorter and something modern seemed like the ticket. I am learning through my little no new books exercise that my reading is often reactive—I rarely read two similar books in a row, even if I loved the first. Good things must be spread out. And Maylis de Kerangal is a good thing. I read The Cook by her a couple years ago and loved her depiction of total devotion. I picked up Painting Time second hand shortly after, knowing that I would eventually get around to it, then never did until now.

Where The Cook portrayed a young man’s almost compulsive commitment to the craft of cooking, Painting Time takes as it’s subject, yes you guessed correctly, painting, and takes as it’s protagonist a young woman named Paula. Paula is 20 and directionless (an “impetuous dabbler) when she decides to enroll herself at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels. This is not your typical art course, something she has already dabbled in. Instead, it is the Mecca of decorative painting, or trompe-l’œil—painting to deceive the eye. Paula is told in her interview that the course is six months of “intensive practical training” during which she will “delve into the very matter of nature, starting with wood, moving to marble, into semi-precious stones, then finally drawing in perspective, gilding, silver plating and commercial lettering.

The novel follows her through her training, which turns out to be grueling, and into her early career, which at first is non-existent. The course at the Institut gave Paula direction—something to dedicate herself to if only because she was so busy she didn’t have time to think about whether she should dedicate herself to it—but after she receives her diploma and returns home to her parents’s apartment in Paris, “her rhythm is broken.” Luckily a pregnant downstairs neighbor, possibly at the prompting of Paula’s solicitous parents, wants the ceiling of her soon-to-be nursery painted like the sky.

As soon as Paula begins, she is cured of her listlessness, wherein lies the central theme of the novel: art should be made for the sake of making it, without grand artistic intentions, or grand artistic pretensions. Doing it is enough (doing it well, of course), and is largely the whole point. By choosing painting as her artform, de Kerangal is able to put the beaux arts and it’s abstracted museum-housed descendants on one side of the coin, and what Paula chooses to do, paint for work, on the other. She argues in the end that the work is the purer form, if not of art, then at least of love.

I love the way de Kerangal writes. She has this third person narration style that is simultaneously aerial and internal. She writes in the present tense, which makes it feel like you’re watching a movie, and her oscillation between laser focused action reportage and dreamy fragmented memory turns the movie into a documentary. This was my favorite book of the month!

After I finished it, I started reading Two Dozen Eggs before bed. It’s a charming collection of stories, each of which has a corresponding recipe, but before I tell you about it, I’m going to tell you about Less Than Zero, which I started in the middle of Two Dozen Eggs because I wanted a longer story with my short stories. Back in January, I read ’s primer on Bret Easton Ellis and thought to myself, you know, I really don’t know if this is for me, but I do own Less than Zero, so I could find out. Since January, it’s been on my shelf, but in a special position that indicates “maybe read me sooner than all these other books you also haven’t read,” so I did that. Reader, it’s not for me.

Clay is an eighteen year old college student back from school in New Hampshire to spend the holidays at home in 1980s Los Angeles. His parents are divorced, which means his dad lives in an apartment in Studio Ciry and his mom lives in a pharmaceutical haze. Neither one pays much attention to him, and so he galavants around the city doing drugs with his friends, none of whom really seem Like real friends. Galavant isn’t the right word though, because that makes it sound fun. No one is having much fun.

The style is very diaristic, told in short matter-of-fact fragments. For example: “I wake up sometime before dawn. My mouth is really dry and it hurts to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth,” of “Trent calls me the next night and tells me that he’s feeling depressed and doesn’t have any more coke, can’t find Julian; having problems with some girl.” Clay is detached, only occasionally revealing his thoughts or feelings, but mostly just reporting the facts.

It’s not hard to imagine that the novel started as a handful of journal entries that Ellis submitted as part of his college admission application, which it did. His freshman year creative writing professor passed them along to a Simon & Schuster Editor, who was interested. Over the next three years, Ellis continued fleshing out the novel using scenes and stories from his own experience partying in L.A. Less Than Zero was published before Ellis graduated college.1

I can understand why people like Ellis’s style, and even more how this particular first novel took the literary world by storm. I think there’s always something compelling about unsupervised and misbehaving teenagers, and underneath the hopelessness and depravity, Ellis weaves in a palpable tenderness for Clay, or at least invokes it in his reader. It wasn’t as gratuitously violent or as pointlessly shocking as I expected it to be, but when Ellis wants to horrify, he horrifies, and ~3 truly stomach turning scenes is 2.5 too many for me.

Once I was about halfway through Less Than Zero, Two Dozen Eggs got put on pause. Well, I can’t tell you how glad I was to be able to recenter Hugh Corcoran’s world after escaping Ellis’s. Of course both of their worlds are really just our world, but Corcoran has a knack for balancing misfortune and mundanity, which are both ever-present in his stories, with a gentle and curing gratitude. I found Two Dozen Eggs at Three Lives at Christmastime and immediately bought all three copies they had in stock; one for my mom, one for Kathryn, and one for me.

I say it’s a collection of short stories, which it is, but the stories are really very short, more like character sketches than anything else. Corcoran was inspired by real people he’d encountered across his travels through Ireland (his home country), France and the Basque Country. The people he portrays are simple folk, mostly middle-aged or older, often a bit lonely, but when they cook, or even just prepare to eat, they are uplifted, transformed. Each little story is followed by a no recipe recipe, so that you too can make stuffed snails or chicken in aspic and be transformed.

Sally Finnegan is turning 87, and doesn’t have a large appetite anymore. When asked by her daughter what she’d like to eat on her birthday, she thinks a boiled egg sounds nice. Her daughter ignores her, but she’s made herself hungry for a boiled egg, which she prepares while reminiscing on her childhood in the French countryside—running out to the chicken coop in the morning to fetch warm eggs in for breakfast.

Monsieur Fourcade is poor and alone. He buys bulk rice and beans from the local Indian and North African grocers and farms a small plot of land for his vegetables. He befriends Claire, a young woman who runs a wine store (one of the few extravagances Monsieur Fourcade allows himself). When she invites herself over for lunch unexpectedly, he doesn’t have much on hand, but whips together a riz pilaf and runner beans in garlic and chili.

I am a firm believer in the power of a good meal, and Corcoran captures the magic over and over again. A chef himself, he writes well about food—convincing you that it’s not so complicated to prepare, in fact it’s all very intuitive. Impressively, he writes just as well about people, and in his sympathetic hands, the most ordinary people become the most interesting. He sums it up nicely in the acknowledgments: “This book is a memory of all the characters that I have met in my life, and in this age of homogenization being a character is more important than ever.”

The best non-book thing from this month was Granta’s Winter 2026 issue, which I read cover to cover. Its theme is therapy, more specifically, Freudian psychoanalysis, and it includes interviews with three prominent analysts, short stories and essays that tackle analysis as a concept—either head on or at a slant—and poems that aim to excavate. Favorites included “Good Medicine” by Sheila Heti (though I’m not sure I’m pro-psychedelics as therapy, and definitely ANTI-psychedelics as a way to see God), “Transference in the Afternoon” by Jesse Barron (analyst and patient are obviously both totally bonkers), “My Grandfather is the Future” by Victor Heringer (lovely tribute), and “Secondhand Smoke” by Dushko Petrovich Córdova (on the world of online perfume reviewers).

I additionally read this essay by David Sedaris in The New Yorker after my mom sent it to me to PDF so that she could read behind the paywall. This is a service I’m willing to offer. Sedaris is a little bit of a cheese ball but also a pleasure. In the SoHo McNally Jackson, I stealthily read “Curtis” by Patrick Cottrell out of the Paris Review. It’s a dryly funny little short story that packs a punch. And for my obligatory piece on something that’s going seriously wrong in the world, this article on online sports betting (and gambling more generally) from The Atlantic confirmed what I already know (online sports betting (and gambling more generally)) is a scourge on society). The obligatory piece on something going terribly wrong in the world is an area where The Atlantic seems to thrive. I meant to cancel my subscription, but I forgot, so we’ve just re-upped for another year.

In other news, daffodils, and the light is back on my walls in the morning. A pigeon is brooding over her nest right outside my lover’s front door, and neither of us has been pooped on yet. Have you ever actually seen a pigeon’s nest? I had my friends over this week to celebrate the equinox. I made chicken cutlets (by request) and a farro salad and garlic bread because I’m starting to feel like why wouldn’t you make garlic bread when you could just also make garlic bread. I did cut my finger trying to slice the baguette but it’s closed up and healing now. The baguette was so crusty and my knife was dull and slipped. There used to be a bakery on the Upper East Side called Hot & Crusty. I would pass it on my way to ballet and even as a child, I knew that Hot & Crusty was a disgusting name for anyplace that you were supposed to get food. Anyway, we had cupcakes for dessert. Xx

“A Primer” by Bob Hicok

I never formally decided that my year long ban on book buying would extend to cookbooks, but in my heart I knew that it should. The unread novel languishes on the shelf, and the uncooked (?) cookbook also! In each cookbook, a hundred (or more!) odd recipes—languishing! Well, my past self, as excited about the whole thing as my current self, had preordered the book when she (me?) first heard about it LAST YEAR. I am so wonderful. Thusly saved from having to on the one side make an exception to my rules (laws) and on the other side deny myself the pleasure of this book and the recipes therein, all that was left was to decide what to cook first.

It’s spring technically (officially as of today!!!!), but it’s still…hmmm, cold. Something light but comforting was what I craved and, was I immediately drawn to the lovely looking Poached Halibut with Fresh Chiles, Tomatoes, and Mint. I almost talked myself out of it in favor of the Lamb Meatballs with Mint and Feta in Saucy Couscous (also delicious looking for what it’s worth). It’s not tomato season and the fish counter at Citarella is good, but doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as the fish market at the summertime beach. I’m glad I went with my gut (ha ha). SOMETIMES I EAT OUT OF SEASON PRODUCE, okay! SOMETIMES I am a modern girl.

This was literally so easy to make. I always roll my eyes when I see “TIME: 20 minutes” at the top of a recipe and plan for double that, but this one genuinely took 20 minutes. I halved all measurements since it was just me and my lover, used halibut as called for, and subbed dry vermouth for white wine (as suggested) because I had an open bottle of white wine and did not have vermouth. I served the fish and broth over a little rice because I will take any opportunity to incorporate rice into a meal, but honestly it wasn't needed. A hunk of fresh bread is the optimal carb accompaniment for this dish. No notes, enjoy enjoy enjoy!!!

Must be read OUT LOUD. Read it out loud NOW, and then read it out loud again. Xx