The book I am currently reading
Last month, I was a writer in residence at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox, Massachusetts, and I’m on week six of an Edith Wharton kick. I’m rereading The House of Mirth now, for the third time, but it’s so different each time – I almost expect it to end differently. (It could happen, right?)
The book that changed my life
Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word “life-changing” in the title: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. I have read it three times – much like The House of Mirth. (Would the house have been more mirthful if the socks had been folded and stored upright?) I found it totally gripping – like an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
The book that influenced my writing
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, especially Time Regained, made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again. As I get older, I realise, repeatedly, that it isn’t always easy to draw a clear line between “realising” and “remembering”.
The book that changed my mind
While working on an article about “rental relatives” – you can hire out a mother, or a son – in Japan, I was trying to track down a claim about capitalism and unconditional love, and found myself trying to speed-read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in one afternoon. Although I thought I knew what the book was about, I realised that I hadn’t read it, and didn’t know what it was about, and that my ideas about the relationship between capitalism and unconditional love are in more flux than I was aware. Now I have to read The Second Sex.
The book I wish I’d written
I actually really wish I had written The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
The last book that made me cry
I started to cry the other day when I read a quote from Don Quixote that I found in a file on my computer. It’s Sancho Panza speaking at Quixote’s deathbed: “Look, don’t be lazy, but get up out of bed, and let’s go out into the fields dressed as shepherds, the way we agreed to: maybe we’ll find my lady Doña Dulcinea behind some bush, disenchanted, and what could be better than that?”
The last book that made me laugh
I was recently reminded that there is a character in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl named Fanny Assingham, and I momentarily lost it.
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
I don’t believe in being ashamed about not having read things. I do wish I had read The Second Sex by now.
My earliest reading memory
My father taught me how to read, using Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books, when I was three. Then he proudly told everyone that I’d taught myself how to read.
My comfort read
How about my stress read? That definitely has to be Epictetus’s Discourses and Selected Writings – I have it on my phone and once started reading it during a dental procedure.
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