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.