I went back to ceramics today after a month away. Our studio was closed for August so that our teacher could put in new shelves — long stretches of raw wood twice as tall as I am — and plan our curriculum for this upcoming year and go on vacation in Italy, where each day her family ate lunch with one...
I spent the last minute of 28 and the first minute of 29 wet and naked and surprisingly not cold. “This is 20 percent for the checkmark of it all,” I’d told Cam as we walked towards the cab, my arm hooked around her shoulders like a parenthesis, hers tucked around my waist. (I’d promised myself I would swim in...
You know that feeling when you realize you’re close to the end of a book and you’re not ready to finish it? When you’ve sat yourself in the sun porch and made yourself close the book on your finger and wait a few minutes to prolong the inevitable? Or metered out chapters like doses, one every few hours? Or savored...
In a situation where you and I were trapped on a desert island together, I would be good for two things: distraction, via high-energy complaining, and food, via my body, which would have succumbed to something or other several days in, and which you’d begrudgingly bring yourself to eat in order to survive. I don’t know how to make a...
I often remember the place I was when I read a given book more than the characters within it or the exact machinations of its plot. I can recall with near-perfect clarity re[ading Naomi Alderman’s The Power laying on a cold stone bench in a quiet park behind an art museum in Concepción, Chile. Turning the pages of A Little...
Books have had to do some heavy lifting this year. Personally, they continued to be a major source of comfort and companionship as I traveled to all the places year 26 took me, from Mexico to Cuba to Belize to Guatemala to several places in the States. They were a distraction and a salve post-breakup, at least when I wasn’t...
It’s time for my favorite annual post: my birthday-eve reflections on what I’ve read and learned this year, highlighting the best books I read during the 12 months from one birthday to the next. It’s year three of doing this, and as I do every year, I lament not having started earlier. And not just so that I’d have the...
I used to write fanfiction. Lots of it. Harry Potter, mostly, which was kind of strange because I wasn’t even that obsessed with the books themselves. I’d skimmed through the first couple, gotten pretty into The Goblet of Fire, and started writing my own storyline and posting it online. Later, I read The Half-Blood Prince […]
I have well-worn grooves in my reading history. Just like I have meals or clothes or television series I enjoy going back to over and over again, there are types of stories that I gravitate towards. My literary comfort zone is some amalgamation of sprawling epics detailing the web of connections between a group of people and/or places (The Interestings...