Butterfly Mind

Tag: Books

First book memories

May 31st, 2026

Memory is a funny, fuzzy thing. Most of us can relate to not knowing if our first memories are our own or if they’re based on photographs we’ve seen or stories we’ve heard. Many untold, unphotographed memories are gauzy: I don’t recall specifics, like what year it was, or a teacher’s name, but I do recall a sense of the setting and what I felt: unease, comfort, safety, pleasure.

I don’t know the first book I ever finished and still remember to this day. I have distinct memories of reading Salem’s Lot in high school. It scared the crap out of me. My bed was pushed up against the window, where palm fronds screeched against the glass right next to me, like vampires clawing to be let in. It was scary, too, but we didn’t have sewers in our neighborhood, so I didn’t have to worry about clowns on my walk to the bus stop. I read a lot of Stephen King in those days — Carrie is still a favorite, and of course The Shining. Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, Pet Semetary, Misery. “The Body” that Stand by Me was based on, and “Children of the Corn,” which may be the only adaptation ever that’s better than the original story.

Those are not the first books I finished and remember, though. Before those was a book called The Girl With the Silver Eyes, which was probably my gateway to Stephen King. The main character has telekinetic powers. It may have been my first interaction with the supernatural, and it blew open my mind. I kind of want to find it and read it again. My memory is that it went deep for me. It totally sucked me in. I couldn’t wait to get back to it when I was away from it.

Before The Girl With the Silver Eyes were probably my Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High years. Those books were like potato chips. I churned through them. Not much lingers except Nancy Drew’s convertible and that the mysteries were fun.

Before those, I think the earliest books I read by myself and that I remember were probably the Little House on the Prairie books. I loved them so much. I had the whole set in paperbacks. We didn’t have snow where I grew up, and I remember being captivated by the snow candy they made: they packed snow into a pan and poured molasses or maple syrup into it, I can’t remember which. I remember the blizzard that was so bad, Pa had to run a line from the house to the barn so he wouldn’t get lost in the storm going between them. I remember the grasshoppers. I read those books over and over again. When we moved to Minnesota, it was a highlight of my life to be among real prairies and to experience those winters that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about. My love for Lonesome Dove may be the grown-up version of what I felt for the Little House books.

I don’t know all the books I read in my young life or what order I read them in, but I do remember my room being a sanctuary for reading. I remember how it felt to lay on my bed, my feet up on the wall, not a care in the world except whatever was going on in the pages of my novel. Reading time was the best part of my day. I felt ease, content, safety, pleasure. There was nothing better than the release I felt when all my chores and homework were done and I could escape into my my books. I still feel the same way today.
Swimming back up

April 19th, 2026

I have a book hangover. This past week, I reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt again. Even though it’s over, I don’t want it to end. The characters are insufferable intellectual snobs. They are not likeable. They drink themselves blind. They murder their friend (and an unsuspecting farmer during their successful Bacchanal).

And yet. I root for them every time I read it. They entertain me. I want to be with them on the page. I — and I’m sure many, or it wouldn’t be such a beloved book — can relate to these seeking college students, though it makes me squirm to say that (I am not murdery!). They’re fascinated by language and books and philosophy, ancient rituals, gods, the mind, belief. They speak Ancient Greek and Latin with each other. They cloister themselves in a world of beauty: the narrator’s fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque.” Henry never took the SATs because he had “some kind of aesthetic objection to them.” They’re funny. They understand each other. They are outsiders, and they find belonging together.

In their seeking to go beyond themselves, I recognize the need to release:

“We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people — the ancients no less than us — have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.”

I can relate to being locked in loops inside my own head:

“And how did [the Furies] drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

Like Richard, the narrator, I am vulnerable to the picturesque, and Tartt’s writing is cinematic, as beautiful an experience as watching Stanley Kubrik’s Barry Lyndon.

It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside — airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills.

Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.

I could go on and on. I don’t want my time in this book to end. I considered going straight into The Goldfinch, chain-smoking Tartt, lighting one novel off another. I should probably take a break in between though, and come up for air.

Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
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Vacation of books

March 27th, 2026

You know what nobody understands? Kafka.

Okay, maybe some people understand him, but I’m not one of them. Shockingly, I have maintained the habit I began in January where I stop at the end of everything I read to write about it. I am delighted by how enriching and rewarding this practice is! It has been an especially funny experience as I made my way through Franz Kafka’s Complete Stories. Our son took a Kafka class last semester and these stories were frequently what his mind was on, so when we visited, he and I went to the book store and I bought a copy so I could see what so captivated him. I stopped and wrote after each story. These are some of my notes from my journal:

“Before the Law” by Franz Kafka
What’s it about?
Fuck if I know.

“Description of a Struggle” by Franz Kafka
What’s it about?
I’ll share what happens because I don’t know what it’s about.

“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka
What’s the author trying to do?
Goodness knows!

“The Village Schoolmaster” [The Giant Mole] by Franz Kafka
What’s the author trying to do?
As usual, I do not know.

And so on. I struggled with every one of the stories except “The Metamorphosis” which is just spectacular. Really an amazing piece of fiction. Funny and sweet, grotesque and repulsive, heartbreakingly sad.

Other than “The Metamorphosis” I can’t say I liked many of the stories while I was reading them. Liking isn’t everything, though. I still think about some of the stories, weeks and months after reading them, and I appreciate them, deeply. Their chewiness and ambiguity and “what the hell is going on here?” nature leave them wide open for interpretation. You can make anything of them you want! Did Kafka intend what I took away from these stories? Probably not. But there are two players in the game of fiction — the writer and the reader. As with any interesting game, the outcome is completely unknown when the players engage, and both writer and reader are necessary for anything to happen.

All of this is to say: my gardening vacation turned into a reading vacation. This is the best type of vacation! I cannot wait to retire so my whole life can be like this. I read at the coffee shop, at the kitchen table, on the love seat, on the couch, in the chair by the window. I finished Kafka’s stories early in the week, and also Lauren Groff’s Florida, along with “My Balenciaga” by Han Ong and New Yorker articles about the war in Iran and Zac Posen, and I began Amor Towle’s The Lincoln Highway in breaks between mulching.

Once the mulch was done, I was going to go to the nursery to look for plants, but I confess, I did not do that. The pages of The Lincoln Highway, they turned themselves. Next thing I knew, instead of planting plants, I was on the couch reading, then napping, then picking my book right back up again when I woke. It’s okay, there wasn’t much inspiring at the first nursery I went to, and it’s really too early to plant anyway. Now, I have the latest issue of The New Yorker, which means a buffet of excellent writing, and I had a hankering for some good southern gothic fiction, so I’m going to reread Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I should be able to understand a little better than Kafka.

Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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Books for days

January 25th, 2026

So far, so good. The snow we thought would dump to our knees is only finger-deep. Sleet ticks against the window as I write. Nobody in the neighborhood has left their houses this morning, and the white outside is pristine. It stretches as far as I can see without tire tracks or footprints. Puffs of steam drift from rooftop ventpipes. Tiny homemade clouds.

The tree limbs are bare: no sodden snow sticks to them. No ice makes them sparkle. Sleet drops at a shallow angle: the wind is barely a breeze, nothing heavy whips in it. All of this is auspicious for us keeping power.

Even if we lose it later today, when the freezing rain sets in, I can sit by the window for light to read physical books. I’m currently making my way through Kafka’s complete stories. I have it in paperback so I can underline, and it’s going much better now that I’ve committed to pause and reflect after everything I read. I’d started these stories last year and other than The Metamorphosis, which really is a spectacular story, everything I read just left me like, huh? I had to text my son after each one: what the heck is going on here? Now that I stop and write, I’m getting a lot more out of the stories. They’re satisfying in that they make me think and question; nothing is tied up in a neat bow. Not a single thing.

In our storm prep, after charging our power banks, I charged my e-reader and my portable book light. So once the sun drops, I can still read a novel even if the power goes out. I downloaded two from the library. We’ve also started building up our bookshelves again, and I’ve got three on the shelf I’m eager to read.

The New Yorker did not arrive yesterday, alas. I had hoped to read it next to the window with my coffee on a snowy Sunday morning. It’s okay. I finished 33 Place Brugmann instead. At first I wasn’t sure about the book. I almost abandoned it, despite it seeming like something I’d really like: a WWII novel told by the residents of an apartment building in occupied Brussels. I had trouble keeping track of the characters at first. But given the leisure of the weekend, I stuck it out, and it paid off. It turned out to be a book about, among other things, the role of art and ideas in civilizations that last. Which I am into.

Now, I’ll read another Kafka story. Yesterday’s was “In the Penal Colony,” which is brutal, and eerily prescient. I would have thought it was written about Hitler and his regime, but it was not. The story predates WWII by 15 years. Today’s story is “The Village Schoolmaster.” There is no telling where this is going to go.

Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
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Live long and read

January 8th, 2026

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.
Stop, drop, write

January 6th, 2026
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.