When I visited Istanbul for work in 2023, I thought it was a once in a lifetime trip. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get back. I remember thinking how we just don’t do craftsmanship and everyday artistry like people used to. Everywhere in Istanbul are designs, patterns, and decorative details: tiles, rugs, mosques, minarets; tulip-shaped teacups, Turkish delight like mounds of gems, glittering gold mosaics.
Last week, I got a chance to go to Istanbul again on another work trip. This time, we visited the Hagia Sophia, which I did get to visit last time, and the Blue Mosque, which I didn’t. In Hagia Sophia, we saw mosaics made with gold, which made me think of some of my favorite fiction of all time, The Sarantine Mosaic historic fantasy duology by Guy Gavrial Kay, about a Byzantine mosaicist who decorates the dome of a giant church. The novels include hippodrome chariot racing (we visited the hippodrome in Istanbul), and a riot of colors and perfumes and decoration, just like what we saw all over the city. Now I want to read them again.
Arch, Hagia SophiaGreen marble column, Hagia SophiaGlittering arch mosaic, Hagia SophiaGolden mosaic, Hagia SophiaHagia Sophia golden mosaic and other patterns
The Blue Mosque is only steps away from Hagia Sophia, is about 1100 years newer (1615 compared with 537 A.D.). It’s still decorative, but the decoration is Ottoman instead of Byzantine. It is awe inspiring, both inside and out.
Blue MosqueMain dome inside the Blue Mosque. The wires hold massive circular light fixtures.So decorative!Ostrich egg to repel spidersTiles of the Blue Mosque
After the Blue Mosque, we visited a studio that makes tiles and ceramics in the same way (from white quartz) as the tiles in the Blue Mosque. We watched a short demonstration while they served us pomegranate tea. I wanted to buy everything, but I did not.
The first time I read Donna Tartt’s novel, The Goldfinch, I fell in love with Boris. I was sucked in by the philosophical questions it raised about good and bad, about whether people can change, about whether people should change. At the time, I don’t think I was thinking a lot about art.
I’ve since read the book a couple more times. I’ve also since realized that art fills me with as much awe as the night sky does. I want more of it it in my life. Art fills my cup. So after the second or third read, I became more interested in the painting that’s central to the novel: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius. I didn’t think I’d ever actually get to see it, but I added “see the original Goldfinch” to my bucket list.
Miraculously, beautifully, unexpectedly, and with my deepest gratitude, I have now seen this little bird, in real life, at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, where I travelled last week for a meetup for work. The experience was even better than I could have hoped for.
Close-up of the goldfinch’s perch and chain
I began reading The Goldfinch again on the flight to Amsterdam, only to realize a detail I’d passed over with every other reading, which is that at the beginning of the novel, Theo and his mother are visiting a special, temporary exhibit at the Met in New York called “Portraiture and Nature Morte: Northern Masterworks of the Golden Age.” In the first chapters, Tartt describes not just Fabritius’s Goldfinch, but the overall mood and feel of Dutch masterpieces from the Golden Age. Dutch masterpieces that I was going to get a chance to see while in Amsterdam and The Hague: works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Frans Hals; deep darks and beautiful light; voluptuous satiny flowers with insects and reptiles, skulls, and other still life compositions that take my breath away in their richness and their juxtaposition of the exhuberance of life with the certainty of death.
The walls glowed with a warm, dull haze of opulence, a generic mellowness of antiquity; but then it all broke apart into clarity and color and pure Northern light, portraits, interiors, still lifes, some tiny, others majestic: ladies with husbands, ladies with lapdogs, lonely beauties in embroidered gowns and splendid, solitary merchants in jewels and furs. Ruined banquet tables littered with peeled apples and walnut shells; draped tapestries and silver; trompe l’oeils with crawling insects and striped flowers.
Still Life with Nautilus Cup, Willem Claesz HedaStill Life with a Vase of Flowers and a Dead Frog, Jacob Marrel
With this reading of The Goldfinch, I realized in a way I never had before how much it is about art. This is what makes a masterpiece a masterpiece, whether visual or with language: it is deeply layered. With every visit, you get something new in addition to the pleasure of its familiarity. With this reading, I got to go deeper with the Dutch art I never knew I loved until my husband and I encountered it in an exhibit in Montreal when we went there for my 50th birthday: “The Golden Age in Holland and Flanders: Cabinet of Curiosities.” I remember gasping anew with each painting we saw, and I fell in love with the Dutch masters that day.
Reading The Goldfinch while visiting the paintings in real life was a decadent treat that will fill my soul for a long, long time.
The Goldfinch, Carel FabritiusStill Life with Tazza, Pieter ClaeszVanitas Still Life, Pieter ClaeszStill Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, Clara Peeters
The evening light has changed. After work, it shines an amber glow across spindly seedheads. Shadows stretch. Coppery leaves fall slowly to the ground.
At the beginning of October, our son announced he planned to watch a horror movie every day of the month. I don’t think he’s accomplished that, but his idea inspired me to read spooky classics.
I started with Frankenstein, which I hadn’t read since high school. At a friend’s 50th birthday in September, I got to talking to her her sister, a former high school English teacher. I asked what book she most liked to teach, and she said Frankenstein. She said she thinks it should be required reading for everyone. It tells of what happens when we go too far, when we create beyond ourselves without thought of consequence, when we play god, when our creations become more powerful than we are. The next weekend, when we visited The Lynx bookstore in Gainesville, I saw this shelf-talker from the same staff member whose writeup inspired my husband to read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse:
The two convinced me. I read it. It broke my heart.
Next I read The Shining. Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece came to our local movie theater early in the month. We went to see it on the big screen with our son, and I wasn’t sure if I’d still want to read it after seeing it, but seeing it only made me want to read it more. Stephen King is such a delight! Like Frankenstein, I hadn’t read this in probably 35 years. It took me back to all the Stephen King I read as a teenager: Carrie, Pet Semetary, Misery. Cujo, Christine, Firestarter. The Tommyknockers. It. Salem’s Lot. It! Salem’s Lot! My favorite thing about Stephen King is that it’s so clear, so obvious, that this is a man who loves his job. He’s having a whale of a time writing these books. They’re imaginative and free and fun, and I can just see him laughing to himself as he rolls along with the stories that come out of him.
And also disturbing himself. The Shining goes deep inside the psyche, to those dark places that are part of us even as we try to be good. The main character, Jack, is a recovering alcoholic, 18 months sober when he and his family arrive at the Overlook hotel as caretakers for the winter. Anyone who’s interacted with a mean drunk, whether in real life or in fiction, has probably wondered, “Is that meanness who they really are, and the alcohol just lowers the barrier to let it out? Or is it the alcohol that makes them mean. Would they be kind if they never drank again?” I found myself asking similar questions with The Shining. What comes out when we’re under the influence, whether of drugs or alcohol or the Overlook hotel? Is that who we really are, or is it the substance we’re on?
Now I’m on Dracula. My husband and I are going to see an adaptation of it this weekend in a nearby theater, and I wanted to read it again before we go. I’d forgotten what a page-turner it is. And I do need to keep turning the pages — I only have three more days to finish it, and I’m about halfway through. But also, I came across a passage this morning that surprised me. When I think about faith, I typically think about faith in a higher power, in God, in a benevolent force outside ourselves. Bram Stoker flips that on its head in Dracula. In a clever argument for faith, instead of asking a man of reason to believe in God, he asks a man of reason to believe in the monster of Count Dracula:
I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’
This reminded me of Life of Pi, which was a transformative book for me when it comes to faith. It freed me to believe what I want to believe, even things which I suspect to be untrue.
I didn’t expect to take anything profound from reading horror novels, but here we are! What a pleasant surprise.
We had firewood delivered last week. “Firewood John,” as my phone identifies him, backed his battered farm truck onto the grass next to the house. He tipped the bed until a pile of split logs lay next to our homemade stand. I stacked the yellow wood Tuesday after work under a crisp blue sky in air cool enough to burn my nose. I wore long sleeves and long pants. My cheeks were pink when I was done. By the end of this week, it might be cold enough to burn some of it.
Yesterday was gray and drizzly. Wind whipped the trees in neighbor’s yards and in the woods across the street. The dogwoods have turned scarlet with bright red berries. The tops of maples have begun to pink. I wore sweatpants and slippers at home; jeans and long sleeves, socks and a light fall jacket when we went out in the drizzle for bitters, to return a library book, and to sip coffee and read at the café where I buy our coffee beans.
After dark, rain lashed the windows. I burned pumpkin spice candles. My husband fried garlic and onions for a white bean soup. He served it with balsamic dressed greens and baked sweet potatoes with feta and pepitas. A warming meal for a chilly, raw night.
Today we’ll get more rain. The streets will be wet, the sky heavy and gray. I love it. I’ll finish the book I’m reading for book club, I See You’ve Called in Dead. It’s about a depressed obituary writer who jokingly writes his obituary one night when he’s drunk. He publishes it. He shows up to work the next day not dead, and he’s put on leave for his recklessness. He starts going to funerals, where the dead no longer have the choice to live.
The book is a little on the nose at times, but it’s asking questions about what it means to be alive. I’m not sure of the answer. It’s not just about being content and reading books and looking at art and admiring fall leaves. Of all of those things, probably the only one I’d regret not doing more of is appreciating the beauty of the world and the physical gift of being able to enjoy it with my senses.
What I would regret even more is not spending enough time actively loving the important people in my life. I would regret not spending more quality time with them, not loving them the way they want to be loved.
Rain drums the roof and tings the chimney. A kitty lays on my arm and purrs. I put together a small care package for our daughter that I’ll send in the mail tomorrow. This morning, when my husband wakes up, I’ll see if he wants to go to breakfast together.
When I travel to cities, my favorite things to do are to walk, explore art museums, and visit independent book stores. My souvenirs are often books that have nothing to do with the place I’m in, except maybe a John Cheever novel from a shop in Greenwich Village with my mom, but that bring back fond memories of the place I bought them: Mary Oliver’s poems from Shakespeare & Company in Paris with my son, Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive from Books Upstairs in Dublin, Little Women from E. Shaver in Savannah, Georgia with all my family. Holding the books, thinking of the books, smelling the books: these all conjure the light in the shop, the coziness of it, the sidewalk and scene outside its doors.
Earlier this year, my husband and I visited our daughter in Gainesville, Florida. We stayed in a downtown hotel so that we could walk to restaurants, coffee shops, Bo Diddley plaza, and past street murals and whatever else might be interesting. We found a cool art store and an even cooler book store, The Lynx.
The book store was off the beaten path on a quiet street, was wooden-floored and tall-shelved, and had a compelling staff picks section that convinced my husband to buy Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Every time I see it on the shelf I think of the pleasure of buying it. The staff member who recommended it happened to check us out, and he told us how much of an impact the book had had on him. It was a human and personal experience.
A few weeks later, I read Florida, a book of short stories by Lauren Groff, one of my favorite authors. She wrote Fates and Furies which knocked my socks off the first time I read it. The Vaster Wilds is stunning. In one of the Florida short stories, the character walks through Bo Diddley plaza, and I thought, hang on. Is Lauren Groff in Gainesville?
Yes. She is.
My son loves to visit book stores when he travels, too. This past weekend, when my husband, son, and I traveled to Gainesville to see our daughter, we told him about The Lynx. I remembered that Groff lived in Gainesville and thought, wouldn’t that be funny if we saw her at the book store? I wonder what she looks like. In my googling for photos, I saw this sentence: She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.
!
When we visited, I was delighted to see a display of the books featured on A Great Book with Barack Obama. In the final episode, Groff talks with him about Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which I read specifically to hear them dig into. It’s gorgeous and a little bit devastating.
We didn’t see Lauren Groff when we visited The Lynx, but we walked off with a memorable haul. Our son bought 2666 from her staff picks, my husband bought a signed copy of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, and I bought myself a signed copy of Groff’s newest book of short stories, Brawler. It’s a rainy day today and I’m going to disappear into them.
I can’t believe I live in a time that I have to say this, but I don’t want to read blog posts or work memos or marketing materials that are clearly written by AI. That the human behind the AI did not go in and add their own personality and remove the generic mediocrity. I cringe now at certain words and patterns because it’s obvious they come from Claude (“lands”, “matters”, “honest”). I look at LinkedIn and see posts that are so repetitive in their structure that the pattern can only be explained by AI (an intro of multiple one-sentence paragraphs in a row, followed by a couple of multi-sentence paragraphs).
I want to read words written by my fellow humans, from their hearts and minds, through the effort of trying to clearly express what it is they’re trying to communicate, because in that effort, they figure out what it is that they actually think and want to say.
It’s hard work to do this! It’s also rewarding. This year I’ve built a habit of journaling my thoughts after I read. I finished a story the other day, “New Shoes” by Hisham Matar, and was like, ugh, I don’t get it, I don’t have any thoughts about this, I’d rather go rummage around in the fridge than journal about it. But I made myself do it anyway, and as I journaled and puzzled my way through what I thought, I realized oh, actually this is really a kind of heartrending story about what it means to leave, and what it means to be left behind.
But how do you write what people actually want to read? It’s tempting in this AI age to say, “just write it yourself.” It’s obviously not that easy. It’s one thing to know what seems to resonate with readers, but it’s another thing entirely to know how to execute the writing of those things. When I think of what resonates for me, especially in my pleasure reading, I like interiority, vulnerability, thoughtfulness about our place in the world and the universe and in relation to each other. I like crisp sentences, precise vocabulary. I like humor and emotion, I like unsaid things. In my work reading, I want clarity: I want to know, “What should I take away from this? How does this move us forward? Who’s doing what as a result of this, and by when?” I don’t want to spend 15 minutes reading it and another 15 minutes trying to comprehend.
If I knew a secret formula for how to do any of those things, maybe I’d be a best selling novelist instead of a sometimes blogger, and maybe I wouldn’t still be saying at work, “I’m sorry this is so long.” I do know that for myself, the posts that seem to resonate most with readers are ones that are vulnerable, that grapple with mortality, or the struggles of creativity, or a small domestic thing that is an entry point into something larger. That are human.
Daily prompt: How do you write what people actually want to read?
