You could say I’ve built my life around reading. I work in book publishing as an international literary scout; my boyfriend is an editor, we both also write and translate (me, Arabic & French, him, Italian). Books are the world I built for myself out of a lonely pandemic New York, after heart-wrenching college years which almost broke me. They are my job, my passion, much of my social life. I send emails to my friends, texting is the way I prefer to stay in touch. Words make me exist.
Where did it begin?
My older brother was a big reader; Jared was a year and a half older than me, and I used to steal books out of his bookshelves in the room across the hall from mine. Sometime before he started reading Chekhov and Bukowski, but after he’d finished Dan Brown and Walt Whitman, he got sick. I’m not sure he noticed me stealing his books, in the way big brothers wouldn’t. But I remember us, on Saturday mornings, sitting in the living room with coffee steaming on the table, TV on, playing cartoons or The Wire or whatever, and us on the green couch with thick books nestled in our laps. He died when he turned twenty, I was nineteen. I wish I could remember all he read.
The point is that we read, the two of us, everything. My parents are big readers; my twin brother reads non-fiction but not literary stuff. Books, stories occupied my mind, my imagination from a young age. I didn’t start reading the real literature until later, in high school when I began to study the classics and in college when some writing teachers made me booklists. I read avidly but it didn’t seem like a personality trait to advertise — it wasn’t cool, and I worried it made me antisocial. The thing is, I still loved books. I struggled to understand how they were written, what modern writers were worth paying attention to.
When my brother died, I wanted to read but I couldn’t. It makes me sleepy (seriously, like my brain is shutting off, protecting me) to think about, so I won’t. Instead I’ll just say I couldn’t focus on books. Their boundaries and logic made me angry. They were no longer an escape but a trap, a trap that didn’t reflect how easily the world could shatter, the way death penetrated life. I got angry at reading. I began to write something that I never thought I would have to write, namely, the story of how my older brother died. It hurt to write this, but I’d always wanted to be a writer, and I felt my grief poisoned everything I put down. I couldn’t write without writing about grief. I had something to say about it. So I let myself give in.
This isn’t the essay I set out to write — I didn’t set out to explain what exactly happened to my grief writing, which I finished at the age of 22, and agents found me at the age of 23. I set out to explain that the youths are still reading, that reading is indeed still hot.
These things have always come together for me when I try to talk about my history of reading: grief and sex. Fundamentals. Not in a manic-pixie-dream-girl way, but in a, oh, this is the opening to a revelation, something base about who I am. Maybe also into what I want this essay-space to become? What I’m willing to give to this weird internet space? I know that I want to talk more publicly about reading itself, at a time when TV, TikTok, and social media drain hours from our lives. I want to reach people who don’t read books much, but might want to, just as much as I want to talk to people who enjoy books as I do. I hope I can introduce reading as a worthwhile way to spend time for anyone, and maybe by starting that way, from a place that doesn’t assume an interest in books, I can understand why I have built my life around it.
So, do the youths still read in that same way me and my brother did, without deadline or demand, on a Saturday morning while the TV plays? I’m Gen-Z, technically. An elder, at that weird cusp age between Gen-Z and Millenial, where most of my friends’ are millenials but I’m on TikTok and was born in ‘97. Do my generation still read?
Yeah. Yeah, we do. And we aren’t all looking for romantasy or fantasy (no shade to those communities - I’m just not its best reader. I kill for “lyrical, sharp, vivid” prose about mundane, boring, daily life and the existential, romantic, platonic, and political shit we get ourselves into). It’s more that publishers would have you believe it’s the only stuff that sells, the only stuff we want. But I think instead what I’m looking for — and what I think others look for — are the kind of books that can (in Michael Cunninham’s words) “parent you through your life”. In The Hours, he writes of these kinds of books, that can provide company, advice, support in moments of nameless fear or tender pain. Laura Brown sits in bed reading, avoiding her husband and three-year old downstairs — “One more page, to calm and locate herself, then she’ll get out of bed.” That’s the kind of reading I do. Not self-help or practical advice — I’m talking the kind of thing that speaks in vivid images to your soul, that soothes and entertains at once with the sharpness of prose, the quick turns, the logical arguments made when the chords of a story begin to sound together, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. These kinds of books I think are always and forever worth publishing, these kinds of reads the book publishing industry sometimes disowns.
It’s common in book publishing to lose faith in readers or reading: every six months or so, another book publisher falls on hard times, everyone begins to question whether reading is over. I was just today talking to a rights agent who has been around for decades. She was saying, “The literary readers, those are the ones who are going to keep reading print. Their curiosity, their need for real books, real literature describing the world, it doesn’t go away. We complain - we complain all the time, have for years. There are booms and down times, and the truth is they are mostly indistinguishable. It’s hard to know what will happen next, but don’t fall for trite explanations about what’s happening right now.”
Fair, I thought. Seems right. Literary readers - myself included - are not going to stop caring about authors who might explain the apocalypse, the end of the American empire, the results of postcolonial struggle, the rise of China, the killing of Alexei Navalny, the human rights atrocities happening in Palestine … these events that permeate our atmosphere and leave chilling dread or detached dullness, loneliness in our bodies. Authors are not just entertainment — we need them to give form to our lives. Writers are faceless, numerous, giving voice to the invisible currents constantly pulsing through us.
Perhaps that’s grandiose. I remember once going on a date with a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist (from That Magazine, you know the one). I was maybe twenty, he was thirty. We met on Hinge. I asked him if he felt the impact of his pieces on politics of the world? “Well, that’s a little grandiose,” he said in a self-important tone. Maybe he was trying for humble, but it came off fake. He made me feel ashamed for asking. Ever since then, when I’ve said something about my deep belief in literature, I’ve followed up with, “maybe that’s a bit grandiose.” Just in case a Pulitzer-prize winner is around and wants to shame me for my reliance and belief.
Fuck him, it should be easier to say. But he had won a Pulitzer, and I admired him for that. Some part of me, somewhere, still thinks he’s more accomplished than I’ll ever be, so perhaps I should let his words keep echoing around my head. My intellect knows to dismiss those thoughts as intrusive. My little soft psyche, on the other hand … she is shaped by intrusions.
I suppose let’s lay it to rest here for the moment, and see how it looks again in the morning. On reading: It’s important because my older brother did it, and I’m still in some silent competition with him, trying to prove my intellect, to gain his attention, though he’s been gone seven years; it’s important because the youths still need guidance, shape, form to our lives, our selves, our loves, and reading can give it in a way no other medium can; it’s important because fuck that Pulitzer-prize-winning asshole, we slept together and he ghosted and I don’t read his stuff anymore, anyway.