What I'm Reading Lately Or Really What The Novel Lets Me Read.

I'll try to explain.

Last night I stopped by one of my local bookstores after class to grab a few books on my way home. The new CAConrad and the new Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. The booksellers were engaged in doing some returns and so I also plucked a friend’s novel I’d been meaning to buy from that pile. “I’m so behind. But when you’re writing a novel there comes a point where you have to read whatever the novel wants,” I said, and the young man at the cashier register just smiled at me as if this was a completely normal thing to say.

And by this I mean, this way a novel controls your reading is something I think we don’t talk about that much as writers.

“How many books do you read a week,” the bookseller asked me as he bagged up my little pile.

I shrugged. “2 or 3?”

“I’m so slow,” he said.

“I was trained as a speed-reader as a child,” I said, and then wished him a good evening and left before I could start boring him with the details. I am wary of chatting up baristas and booksellers too much because they more or less have to listen to you for the duration of the transaction.

I am writing a novel and am trying to do everything in my life from within the novel’s centrifugal force, a period during which you are made to read whatever it wants to read to build itself. It lasts as long as it lasts. It’s a little like having a bully in your head, a possessive imaginary lover that demands to be fed books but sort of the way you’d drop grapes into that lover’s mouth, if you were in a Warner Bros. cartoon from the 60s. And it’s fine, I don’t mind. I forget that it happens each time. I mentioned at least one of these—Iris Murdoch’s Under The Net, to which I’d add Difficult Women by David Plante, People Who Report More Stress by my friend Alejandro Varela, The Revolution of Little Girls by Blanche Boyd, Park Sang Young’s Love In The Big City, Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt, Memories of My Ghost Brother, by Heinz Insu Fenkl, Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson. And Dancer From The Dance, by Andrew Holleran. For the most part these are books that I will reread throughout the year. They sit in a stack near the desk or one is in a tote bag with my laptop, or it is on the back seat of the car, wherever I find it handy to have in case I need it.

The Honest Library Dream Book, courtesy of The Open Access Metropolitan Museum of Art

I’ve described this speed reading machine I was trained on before, in my first novel. This was from about 1979, in Southern Maine, and my 5th Grade Gifted and Talented class in Cape Elizabeth met to read selections that projected the words onto a screen at high speeds. It was like reading on your phone but huge, decades before cell phones existed or the idea of books in your phone. We would read the selections and then take reading comprehension tests, and it was alternately fun, bizarre, and boring. One day a classmate turned the knob up higher when the teacher was out of the room and we all did the same on our tests. I think of it sometimes when listening to an audiobook and I sometimes try to turn the speed up, and the result is alienating and even dizzying. It isn’t like that when I read fast. Instead it feels like a beam entering my mind, energy coming in through my eyes.

As I thought about my answer to the question of how many books I read a week, I understood I have become a highly compartmentalized reader. I might forget to include the books I’m teaching, which I reread—this week it was Ling Ma’s Severance—as well as audiobooks I listen to while commuting back and forth to campus. Most recently this month it has been Where Angels Fear To Tread, by E. M. Forster, Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, and St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, by Karen Russell.

On my phone I am reading Wrong Norma, by Anne Carson.

When reading for pleasure while teaching as I am this term, I’ve tended to favor graphic novels for the visual stimulation. And I’ve been lucky of late. I read the new Anders Nilsen in advance, and loved it dearly, giving it a blurb. More recently the new Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Dog Days, was truly a balm. It’s a more autobiographical work from her, about her adoption of several dogs, and her confrontation with the legacy of dog eating in the Korean countryside, where she lives now. The book is for her a form of activism on behalf of the humane treatment of dogs and dog ownership, locally and internationally. And I absolutely devoured Luke Healy’s Self Esteem And The End Of The World, a sort of queer bear dystopian cartoonist autofiction escapade, funny, bittersweet, and with a penchant for absolutely taking the wind out of what you thought was happening in the story.

There’s also comic books, which I also don’t count if someone asks this question. The Hunger and the Dusk, Saga, Zatanna, Plastic Man No More!, X-Men, The Black Cloak, The Scarlet Witch, Local Man, NYX, The Sacrificers,

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A friend texted yesterday to ask me what my favorite book length essays are. I thought of three right away. The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin; Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through by T Fleischman. And Isabella Hammad’s On Recognizing The Stranger, one of my favorite book-length essays of the year and of all time, which I read last spring in an advance copy and was happy to blurb. Published originally at the Paris Review, the essay is her talk given in late September of 2023, at Columbia University—the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture—and an afterword. There’s a great podcast episode with her interviewed by David Naimon, if you’d like to check it out.

As Harvard suspends 25 faculty from the library for reading Palestinian literature there in a silent protest, I am reminded again of how radical it apparently is to read Palestinian literature. On my TBR currently is Behind You Is The Sea, by Susan Nuaddi Daraj and Her First Palestinian, by Saeed Teebvi.

I’ve also just started The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which so far isn’t at all how it’s been characterized by so many. As a good friend said, when he called me up recently, “It’s a craft book.” A craft book if you understand your craft is bound up in your life and the lives of others. Addressed to his students at Howard University, he offers readers a lesson in what it means to understand your mission is to write to free yourself and others. “This meant we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.”

Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory” reflects on her sense of this mandate memorably also. I keep thinking of it as I read the Coates.

Anyway. As I finish this, news comes that Israel is bombing targets in Iran, Iraq and Syria, in addition to Lebanon and Gaza. It is a terrible, terrible night, and the wider war steps closer.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee