why i read
and other post-election recommendations
I’m not going to explain why I read. I don’t think I’ll know for another couple decades — if I live that long — and if or when I do know, it will be either too personal or too fragile to be worth speaking aloud. All you can do is give or recommend books. The only answer to why you read: is to read.
Just as the only response to politics, to threat, to the question of attack or genocide is to be, to do. And to be fully in all that being and doing — in both the political and spiritual sense, in the sense of resistance.
The only real answer to any question is how you live.
books
Contemporary literature has been a great balm to me this year.
Taking a different approach to this newsletter, to this post-election week, I’m recommending some of the wonderful living and doing authors I’ve read this year: the novelists Paul Lynch, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Selva Amada, Karl Ove Knausgård, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Elmer Mendoza; the non-fiction writers Rachel Nolan, David S. Reynolds, Carlo Rovelli, Jon Blitzer, Megan Kate Nelson; the poets Ben Lerner, Paisley Rekdal, and Brandon Som. Read some of them.
other books, other things
More recommendations…
Read James Baldwin and Greg Grandin and John Vaillant. Read Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill. Read ProPublica. Buy a book written by a living poet. Subscribe to a newspaper (NYT and WaPo are flawed, but still worth reading; other options are many) or a magazine, and become a member of a media non profit. You can also support or recommend my work (hit or share the button below). You can also leave your phone at home, and you sometimes should. And we should all attend a dance performance, which I just did, and was transfixed. Do that, with an emphasis on the do.
recent writing
I wrote about the state of asylum for New York Review.
I responded to Trump’s victory for New York Review.
Some readings that have charged me lately:
Audre Lorde’s very short but epic essay “Poetry is not a luxury”
Alexis Pauline Gumb’s essay “The Sweetness of Salt” in Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism” (which led me to the novel Salt Eaters” and a new way to see relationships and the work of living tribute) and her new Audre Lorde bio “Survival is a promise”
Claire Pollard on children’s books in “Fierce Bad Rabbits” and her meta fairy tale novel “Modern Fairies”
Prentis Hemphill “What it takes to heal”
Olivia Laing “the garden against time”
Robin Shiff, Information Desk: An epic”
Robert Macfarlarne, “Underland: a deep time journey”
Diane DiPrima “Revolutionary Letters”
Vincent Bevins “If we burn: the mass protest decade and the missing revolution”
All the Jane MacAlevy books
Feel the same John. Have been reading non-stop and planning to do more singing 🎶 a dimension of myself I have not done enough of these past few years. Appreciate all you do.