I promise I’ll stop writing about Zadie Smith soon. It’s just that I’m making my way through her book of essays right now, Dead and Alive, and with nearly every one I read, I fall more in love with her. Whenever I see prompts or ice-breakers like, “If you could hang out with any one famous person, dead or alive, who would it be?”, every person I think of I’m like, but do I really feel connected to that person? What would spending time with them actually be like? Would we have anything to say to each other?
After reading this book, I think it’d be Zadie Smith, even though I’d be super intimidated and fangirly and wouldn’t know what to talk about, and I’d make it all weird and awkward because I’m not her equal. But if I could manage to be cool — maybe we could listen to hip-hop or go dancing to break the ice and then talk — I think she would be super fun to hang out with.
She adores fiction. She adores reading it. She adores writing it. She adores “the way it lies to tell the truth.” And she believes in its ability to truly immerse us in different points of view in a way that social media and the absolute glut of online news sources do not:
[The internet] seems to be a place of diverse views but the deeper truth is it’s all taking place on the identical platforms with identical aesthetics and in the end an identical motive: profit. It’s such a narrow version of ’the real’. I just have to open Mieko Kawakami or Thackeray or Dostoevsky or Bambara and I’m in a completely alternative perspective, unsponsored, uncontrolled, unmediated by anything apart from language. It’s not an important vision of reality because two million people upvoted it. It’s important because I am communing with it and being transformed by it.
I want to read all of these people! Previous to this paragraph, she had referenced several other writers and philosophers I’ve never read in response to a question about her sharp, fresh, and natural style. All I could think was, “Where does she find the time?!”
When I got older and read philosphers like Wittgenstein and Russell and Fanon — or the essays of Virginia Woolf — it occurred to me that there are few thoughts so complex that they can’t be expressed in clear, accessible prose. It’s a discipline.
She makes me want to quit my job and spend all my time reading. I know this is not possible. So the alternative is to keep myself healthy and live a very long life, if for no other reason than to be able to read as much as possible before I die.
It’s only the sixth day of the year, so I am certain I am being premature in sharing this, but this week I’ve started a new practice. Each time I read something — an essay, a short story, a book — I put it down at the end and write about it.
This takes effort, and I don’t always want to do it. I’d much rather just pick up the next thing and start reading again. But I wanted to try it to see what happens. I’ll often read something, and I’ll have lots of thoughts and feelings, but the most I can articulate when I talk about it is, “I loved that book!” I feel frustrated when that’s all I can seem to say, especially when the work deserves better.
What’s happened so far is that my reading life has become richer. I spend more time with moments that matter. I reflect on titles and what the author is trying to do. I buy physical books I can underline and make notes in. I go back and look at my favorite passages when I’m done. The things I read are getting deeper into me, and I into them.
I think it helped to begin the practice with Zadie Smith essays. I bought her latest collection on a work trip to Ireland, and God she’s good. My first three entries are obituaries she wrote for Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. Because they were the same type of essays (remembrances), I found myself comparing them against one another in my reflection.
One thing that stood out in my very first reflection, on “The Opposite of Magical Thinking: on Didion” was the types of words Smith used throughout the essay: astringency, bracing, skewer, hardened, acid, hardpan, authority, shards, sharp, fierce, radically liberating. I had underlined all of these in the essay because they’re so evocative, and they paint a picture of an author.
Similarly, when I read “A Writer All the Way Down: On Philip Roth,” I underlined words, but they were much different from Didion’s and give a completely different author portrait: irresponsibility, comedy, vulgarity, independence, embarrassing, admirable, perverse, ideal, absurd. Sheer energy. Laugher, history, sex, fury. Conscious.
I adore Zadie Smith’s mind and words. She’s so good.
To make my reflection practice as low-friction for me as possible, because I know if there is even the slightest barrier, I will not follow through, I wrote a list of prompts for after I read something. I created a template in my Day One app so that when I finish reading, I can start a journal entry that’s prefilled with these questions, then just answer two or three (or more) that I feel drawn to:
Book/essay/story title
What’s it about?
What’s the author trying to do?
Does it ask or answer questions?
What stands out to me?
Do I relate to any of the characters?
Does it feel true?
What was going on in the world when it was written?
What’s the significance off the title?
This gives me a good jumping off point. If there’s something I want to write about that’s not on this list, I add a new section. I usually spend 5-10 minutes reflecting, which gives me a stimulating writing practice that’s not just me brain dumping boring stuff into my journal.
I almost didn’t reflect this morning after I read a couple more essays. I had a cat on my lap and I didn’t want to disturb her to write. But one of the essays left me with some niggling thoughts, and when that happens, I want to write to clarify my thinking. So off the cat went.
I’m curious how others process what they read. If you’ve got any practices or habits, I’d love to hear them.
At the very end of my sabbatical, I listened to a short story on the New Yorker‘s Writer’s Voice podcast. “The Silence” by Zadie Smith. I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open while I listened. I loved it so much. The next day, I drove to Barnes & Noble and bought the July 7 & 14 issue, paid the full $9.99 cover price, because I wanted a hard copy of this story in my possession. The story is itself wonderful, but what I wanted to be able to access was a specific passage that stopped me in my tracks:
Beautiful girls were passing by her right now, as she sat on this bench, and she thought that she’d been totally right all those years ago: she had been precious, and so were these girls. Everyone talks about the beauty of nature, but people are far more beautiful. So Sharon felt, even if she no longer had the words to express it. Nature is only a backdrop, like scenery at the theatre, and all the man-made objects only props. People are the beauty and the light and the point and the purpose.
People are the beauty and the light and the point and the purpose. Even if you had the glory of unspoiled nature, even if you had all the art and stories and music of all the humans who came before you, being alone at the end of the world would be devastatingly, crushingly lonely. None of it means anything without other souls to share it with. Even if you don’t know them. Even if they’re different from you.
Last year I made an effort to get out in the world more. I am a creature of habit and I work from home, so it’s easy for me to go days without interacting in physical space with other people. But last year I extended my lap time at the pool and have struck up small friendships with other regulars there. I shop at our local book store and try to have coffee at a local coffee shop once a week. With my family and alone, we quietly built habits of going book stores, art museums, and jazz shows where we were surrounded by people appreciating the marvelous architecture, literature, paintings, sculptures, and music that fellow humans had created.
This year I want to keep those habits going, the habits of engaging with others in shared physical space. That feels like a weird thing to say. I guess it’s not that weird after COVID, but I’ve been working remotely for 10 years, and all my closest friends live far away. I have deep connections with people who don’t live near me thanks to modern technology, but I want to also share space — the sounds of splashing or of crockery clinking, temperatures that require bundling up or shedding sweaters, scents in the air, three dimensions of sitting beside each other or seeing an animal race across the street, food and drink, all five senses.
I’m joining a book club this year, which is a step in the right direction of building community in my community. Maybe I’ll see if anyone at the pool wants to go out for coffee some time. It might be fun to find a trivia night, too. Whatever I do, I want to connect more with people outside of my computer in 2026.
What an incredible year for books. Time is my biggest challenge to getting to everything I want to read. A three month sabbatical in 2025 made this glaringly obvious. Not only did I read more books in 2025 than I’ve ever read in a year (73), but I also read great books. And I mean great in multiple senses: with a capital G as in Greats of literature, great in that I loved them, and great in that my reading life was much richer for reading them.
I read a lot of beautiful writing in 2025, along with classics that are referenced so much they are part of our cultural DNA. I got hooked on the Zero to Well Read podcast, which has also enriched my reading life, and I revisited some old favorites, like A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Shipping News, which I wonder if I will ever tire of.
Our son is an English major, and I love to see his excitement when he gets deep into a work and really thinks about it. I often speed through a book and then move onto the next one without any reflection. In 2026, I’m interested in thinking more about what I read. I’m not sure what that looks like yet. Maybe writing notes after I finish. Maybe getting physical copies to mark up. I’m excited to join a local book club starting in January, so that’ll be a great way to engage more with what I read.
Some of the greatest influences in my life come from the pages of books. Settings send me on real life travels. Characters inspire or give me permission or make me laugh. Writers motivate me and send me back to my notebook.
I finished Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News again this week. I don’t know how many times I’ve read this. I’ve blogged about it multiple times. This time was just as good as all the others. Like any good book, I got something different out of it than in other readings. My first read, I was probably struck by the setting. I’d never read anything set in Newfoundland. I loved how immersive it was, both the landscape and the descriptions of the characters.
On the horizon icebergs like white prisons. The immense blue fabric of the sea, rumpled and creased.
Weather coming on. I see the spiders is lively all day and my knees is full of crackles.
Other readings, I’m sure the sense of place brought me back to the book — it’s a great winter read — but once I was in it, I appreciated the evocative language in one read.
Jack had things on his mind and talked like a rivet gun.
The humor in another.
“You’re a rotten, bitey shit!” bawled Sunshine.
The wisdom in another.
Of course you can do the job. We face up to awful things because we can’t go around them, or forget them.
In this read, what struck me was the main character, Quoyle’s, transformation. His whole life, he was unloved and outcast, a hulking freak. But didn’t want to be.
For Quoyle was a failure at loneliness, yearned to be gregarious, to know his company was a pleasure to others.
When he went north after his demon lover’s death, north to Newfoundland where his terrible ancestors were from, he found his talents. He found community who did not judge him. He found felt a sense of rightness. He found his place in the world.
Thirty-six years old and this was the first time anybody had ever said he’d done it right.
My husband and I are entering a new stage of our lives as both kids move through college. They will start their own adult lives soon, and Brian and I are thinking where we might want to end up one day. Blacksburg was an amazing place to raise our family, but neither of us feel that sense of rightness here.
On a team call once, the icebreaker was “If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?” One person looked confused and said, “Uh, where I live now. I can live anywhere in the world, so I moved to where I want to live.”
This was revelatory to me. Lately I’ve hung out with several people who feel this way about their home region. They’re proud of where they live. They have roots and community and that sense of rightness. And for the first time in however many readings of The Shipping News, I see this for Quoyle, too, and I love it for him.
Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain…
I’m thinking differently now about where I might want to go next. I want it to feel like home.
The first time I went to Spain was 22 years ago. It was July and sweltering, and I was pregnant with our son. We went to Barcelona with a friend who grew up there. We stayed with his Dad. We ate late-night gazpacho and fresh sardines from La Rambla on his terrace. Visiting a friend who was from Barcelona, who shared with us his favorite childhood pastries and his everyday meals and who welcomed us into his home, was one of the most magical travel experiences we’ve had.
Last week, I got to experience something similar, this time in cities I never knew I wanted to visit. My team at work traveled to Spain to meet up with a colleague who lives north of Madrid, and who couldn’t get away to travel. We had originally planned to meet up in Madrid, and he said, You should go to Segovia instead. It’s smaller and cheaper but has everything you want. Plus there’s an aqueduct! I can take you to good restaurants there. And you can come visit my city on your activity day and I’ll show you around!
So we went to Segovia. And his home town of Aranda de Duero. This time we were bundled up, and there were Christmas lights, and I drank all the Spanish wine my heart desired.
Segovia Aqueduct
From the airbnb where we worked, we walked a block to get to the aqueduct, then we followed the aqueduct for 5 minutes or so to the heart of the city. On our first day, after working for a few hours, we took a stroll around Segovia under a crisp November sky. The ochre colors and earthy textures of the buildings and the landscape soothed my soul. I really loved it there.
Architectural textures in SegoviaI can’t get enough of the patterns and the earthy colorsLook at that light!Patterned exteriors of buildings. So many cool patterns.
As promised, Raúl took us to his home city of Aranda de Duero, the capital of the Ribera del Duero wine region, on our activity day. Raúl drove us from Segovia in his minivan, and as we approached the city, we saw miles and miles of browned grape vines propped in neat rows above the rocky soil.
Beneath the city of Aranda de Duero is a vast network of wine cellars, or bodegas, 10-13 meters under the ground. They are everywhere. Associations called peñas, which seemed similar to Elks lodges in the US, have their own bodegas where they meet, hang out, celebrate. We visited three. The first was an underground escape room, Ribiértete, which we managed to escape after copious wine. I won’t tell you any more in case you ever decide to go.
Our escape room host, Sonia, and a porron, which folks drink from in bodegas.
The second belonged to a friend of Raúl’s who was kind enough to show us around his bodega. He swiped a key card across the panel of a large wooden door, and it opened into a stone staircase underground.
Raúl had stuffed our pockets with bottles of wine from his own house, and I carried his porron in my backpack. Once we were underground and his friend had shown us around his bodega, Raúl pulled out a bottle, filled a porron, and he and his friend demonstrated how to drink out of it. You pour the wine in an arc into your mouth without touching the spout. It is not as easy as it would seem to do this without pouring wine in your nose or dribbling it all over your clothes. Luckily I wore black. I asked why this way? As soon as I said it, I realized, ahh! When done correctly, nobody’s mouth touches the porron. This makes for easy cleanup: no wine glasses to wash.
It took a lot of practice to get the technique right, but after 3 or 4 bottles throughout the day, we all mostly got there in the end.
After the escape room and the Bodega la Navarra, we went in search of tapas. Raúl’s favorite place was packed, so we walked around the block to another, where we got tortilla de patatas, the Spanish omelette with potatoes that I can’t get enough of, and some sort of small salty fish. I don’t know what it was but it was delicious. Probably anchovies. We were six people, and there was enough for each of us to have one or two bites of each, and then we headed back to the first tapas place to see if any people had cleared out.
We managed to find a standing table and ordered a larger assortment of tapas. The one I still dream about was a toast with warm goat cheese and caramelized onions. Oh my god. It was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. There was something else with small pickles sandwiching anchovies and an olive on a toothpick. Google tells me that tapas that are skewered like this are called pintxos, and this particular one was possibly a Gilda. They are described online as “piquant”. I agree. It was briny and vinegary and crunchy and delicious. And everywhere had olives de anchoa (anchovies). I couldn’t get enough of these either. Raúl took us to his favorite olive shop at the end of our day and I bought a giant can to bring home.
After tapas, as we walked along the streets of the town’s center, Raúl pointed out doors everywhere — “That goes to a bodega. And that one. That one, too, and that one.” As he neared his peña’s bodega, he pointed across the square, “That’s my wife’s association.” He waved his card over the door, and we descended another set of stone stairs.
Raúl’s porron
We filled the porron and carried it with us as Raúl took us on a tour of his association’s bodega. One room was full of pictures of the members of the peña, lined up like in class photos at school, different events they’d hosted, and big life events, like new babies. I kept saying, “I can’t believe this is your life Raúl.” It was one of the neatest things I’ve ever experienced.
1503 map of Aranda de Duero, which is Spain’s oldest city plan and map in perspective. It is everywhere around the city, including on the label of the first bottle of wine we drank while there, the Tierra Aranda Tempranillo
I never knew I wanted to go to Segovia or Aranda de Duero, and now that I’ve been, I’m so grateful I got the chance. It would not have been the same without our friend and coworker as a guide. It was magical. Thank you, Raúl!
Butterfly Mind 