Books to Read
This is for Alan S and all the other students who wrote me asking what to read over winter break! I have a great list for you. Sorry it took me so long to post this.
First, you have to read WHEN WANDERER’S CEASE TO ROAM by Vivian Swift. I can’t even leave the house without this book. I love it so much. I read it every day. I have read it so many times. I love this book. It’s like having a new dog in the house. I just love to be with it, curled up with it. It’s showing me the world and my self…. I love this book!
I love it so much, I’m going to propose I teach a class where we make books just like this. I would love to hear what you think of that idea.
Wolf Hall. When I go to writer’s houses, I try to sneak a look at the books on their bedside tables. It was very appropriate for me to do this at Peter and Janet’s new condo in Chicago (so beautiful!). I pretend they are my parents and you can be nosy, a little, when it’s your kind-of-parents. Plus, I was being given a tour. On Peter’s side of the bed, Wolf Hall. He usually likes hard German books and German hard books so I didn’t know…..but I wrote the title down. Oh, it’s so so so good. I’m savoring every step. Read this book. It’s the perfect winter break book for you!
Sisters Antipodes. I like to write fan letters to my favorite authors and I just wrote Jane Alison. This is my favorite memoir from my voracious fall memoir reading. I think you will love this book. It’s about a two families linked in such a complicated and troubling way. But Alison’s writing is so urgently beautiful. She wrings wisdom out of the most simple and hard moments. This book will be with me for a long, long time.
What else I am reading:
Love Poems from God.
Emily Dickinson.
Tolstoy’s commonplace book.
Lots of cookbooks.
John Updike’s essays, Self Consciousness and on art. I find my margin notes in these books, from when I read them long ago and I have no IDEA what I am talking about. “This is the key!” I wrote next to a perfectly ordinary sentence. What on earth? My old notes, my old self. Hello, I say, as she passes by, in her hurry, incomprehensibly young.
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