What I'm Reading

Tessa Hadley and Angie Cruz

Today I’m launching What I’m Reading on Letter from Berlin: Every other week I’ll be sharing thoughts on books that I’ve read and loved recently, along with other things I’m reading. I’ve long hoped to find a more satisfying place to talk about books than on Instagram and I think this might be just the spot! These issues will be free for all readers. I am grateful, as ever, if you choose to subscribe, whether paid or not. Your support is essential to this venture.

This winter I had a bit of a hard time with reading. I was more distracted than usual and I found it hard to be swallowed up by a book. Several of the books I read felt tedious and bad and one that shall go unnamed I refused to finish reading shortly before the end because it was causing me nearly physical pain. Some of this malaise was clearly bad luck in my book choices. But some of it was revenge bedtime procrastination and being on my phone too much. Some of it was probably just winter. Still, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat unmoored. I mean, if there’s one thing I can do well it is read. It’s kind of my thing? (Haha, but also, uh, for real. Not as in therefore it can’t be your thing! Rather as in I don’t think I really have any other thing besides reading no really I mean it should I take up tennis.)

Then I took a long walk around my neighborhood on my lunch break two weeks ago and stopped into a bookstore, which is always where I go when things are looking bleak. With zero expectations, because you never really know what the “Books in English” section is going to offer. But the book gods had clearly been tracking my listlessness for a while and those shelves were stocked with delights.

I came home with four new books and then at the bus stop my neighbor loaned me a book she couldn’t stop raving about and then my book club’s next pick turned out to be a banger and suddenly my reading mojo was back, baby! Ohh, the joy and the relief. What even am I without that feeling of impatience that I need to get back to reading my book?

Free Love by Tessa Hadley (affiliate link)

I try my best to remain immune to blurbs, but sort of feel like you’d have to be a robot not to be swayed even the tiniest bit by the ones on Tessa Hadley’s new book? They’re not the reason I bought it, ultimately, but they definitely helped me pick it up. Free Love is about a middle-aged English woman in 1967 who embarks upon an affair with the son of family friends and leaves her stable home to live with her lover in London, upending the lives of everyone around her. Tessa Hadley’s writing is so masterful. It’s a pleasure just witnessing someone who is very, very good at their job go about their tasks right in front of your eyes and making it look effortless. I sometimes feel that there is a chilliness to Hadley’s writing that can come across as remote or clinical, but in this book, that quality works so well with a story that in other, less accomplished, hands could veer into melodrama.

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz (affiliate link)

My friend Helga picked this slim book (191 pages, chef’s kiss) for our next book club and ooh ooh ooh, it is so good. How Not to Drown in A Glass of Water is about Cara Romero, an older Dominican woman in New York City during the Great Recession who has been laid off from her job at a factory and must meet regularly with a job counselor to fulfill the requirements of the Senior Workforce Program. The book consists entirely of Cara’s narrative during the twelve sessions and the accompanying paperwork that the counselor completes, along with some other correspondence. I won’t say more than that, but I inhaled it in a day or so and loved it. It is clever and funny and devastating and perfect.

Also, short! Can we talk more about short novels and how wonderful they are? It’s not that I dislike long novels per se, but I often find myself thinking they’re under-edited and overwrought. The skill required to pull off a big novel that sustains your attention effortlessly is rare. The zing and economy of a short good book is so delightful! And you’re far more likely to finish the book wishing that it would go on, rather than feeling relieved that it’s over. A feeling I’d like to feel more of in life, frankly.

Another short novel I read recently and enjoyed was Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. What are your favorite short novels? (Anything under, say, 200 pages.)

Also: How do you get out of reading ruts? Do you re-read old favorites? Ask friends for recommendations? Step out of your comfort zone by picking up a genre you don’t usually touch?

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Three other things I read this month that stayed with me:

• This article on The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing from Wired. Fascinating and thought-provoking. I’ve long been a member of a private flea market on Facebook with lots of the same complicated dynamics that were brought up in this piece. Basically: people are nuts, but also creative and generous.

• But How Do You Read So Much? Pandora Sykes answers a question that many book worms get and I end up rethinking several life choices I’ve made. So much to unpack and be inspired by here.

• This eye-opening New Yorker interview, Brooke Shields Never Knew Normal, is a must-read. It draws back the curtain on the way Shields perceived her very public childhood and life and the way she navigated all of the garbage she has encountered over the years. She has my respect.