currently reading: Normal People by Sally Rooney
books bought:
McSweeney's 53 (which is a lit mag but counts here as a book because a) it was expensive and b) it was long)
books received:
Normal People by Sally Rooney
books finished:
Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scanlon
McSweeney's 53
Hey you,
When I first started this newsletter I thought, among other things, it would be a cool way to track the patterns of what I read, to see how a book about A leads me to a book about B which mentions book C and so on and so forth. It has become evident that there is no pattern, really – I seem to just read what's been given to me, or what's around, so long as it can hold my attention. Except it's not very easy to hold my attention, so I bail on a ton of books. (You could get an idea of the huge number of books I start and then abandon by going back through the archives of this very newsletter, which you should not do!) This is actually one of my very few Literary Principles: you don't have to finish every book you start, or, phrased another way: you should put down a book that's really fckn boring you.
Most of the people I know have decided that they have to finish every book they start and that seems.......misguided. I think that reading something that you are bored by will only make you resent books and literature. I will let Nick Hornby take it from here because if I don't I will be at serious risk of plagiarizing him:
I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a television program...
All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll learn nothing from it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a chance.
(That's originally from his column in The Believer; I came across it in his book Ten Years in the Tub, which was the, um, inspiration for this newsletter.)
More to the point – and this is the part I really can't get over – there are literally millions of books you could be reading instead of the one that is boring you! Why spend another second on it?
There are exceptions to this, and you do you, obviously, and read what you want, I respect your journey, etc.
But since we're talking about my Literary Principles, here is another one: I try not to read books by men that are about men who hate women. This narrows down my reading options a lot (like...............a lot), but that is OK, because as I mentioned before, there are literally millions of books in the world.
I don't think such books are necessarily irredeemable, but I'm confident I don't personally want to read one for a very long time, maybe ever.
I decided I could no longer read these books, or realized I could no longer read these books, last summer after I finished reading Junot Diaz's Drown and Gabriel Tallent's My Absolute Darling.(I don't have anything to say about My Absolute Darling that Roxane Gay didn't already say better in herGoodreads review, by the way.) My feeling was that there was something larger I was supposed to take away from these books, something besides their obvious misogyny – the message that "misogyny is bad" or "misogynists will end up miserable and alone or shot dead," I guess.
And to a certain extent I'm being myopic, but the point is I know that men are writing these books without intending to spread misogyny, and still, after a certain point that started to seem irrelevant. In an essay in Tin House called "Experts in the Field," Bonnie Nadzam quotes a friend of hers: "What am I, what is my very life, if not a projection of and product of the desires of such sick men?" It boils down to this: why would I spend my money or my time reading about the desires of such sick men when I live those desires? When real women are really being affected by those desires, and I could read their books instead?
Another week in which I didn't talk at all about what I was reading this week, but that's only because Sally Rooney is really going to break my heart. I'm not sure yet what it is about Normal People (out in the US on 4/16), but it's making me feel feverish, in a very good way, in a lovesick way. The last time I felt like this about a book was when I finished White Fur by Jardine Libaire, after which I took my temperature just to make sure I didn't actually have a fever. (I didn't!) I will do my best to explain my attraction to Normal People next week, after I've finished it.
Your friend,
Smalls