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.
Sometimes, when I don’t allow myself to think about what it would really mean in terms of time and cost and effort, I dream about going back to school to study literature. Of all the interests I’ve ever had, reading books is the one that has never flagged. I cannot remember any time in my life that I have not read books, nor any time where I wasn’t excited about reading books, where at some point in the day, when I looked toward evening, I didn’t get a little sparkly feeling when I thought about picking up my novel. The joy has not faded. It has only deepened.
The problem is that I want to read everything. Moreso, the problem is that I want to understand everything. As I age and have read more books, which means things become repetitive, I particularly want to read classics and literary fiction — stuff that goes deep, is different, that makes me think and feel and that might blow my mind.
When I read those books on my own, though, I know I miss a ton. I loved my literature classes in college because we had an instructor who knew the work. They knew its significance in its time and place, and to all the authors who followed. When the text was difficult, they helped untangle it. They highlighted key moments or beautiful passages. They pointed to the questions the work posed and then left to us to contemplate. And of course, when we talked about the books in class, everyone brought different perspectives, none of which were wrong, and all of which made me appreciate how amazing art is in what it evokes for us.
Our son is in his final year of college. He frequently texts us with book recommendations from his literature courses, his mind sparking with awe after reading and discussing in class. Beloved was one of those. As frequently, he talks about how much he loves reading these books under the tutelage of someone who knows them. The instructor helps the class see and appreciate what is happening beyond what they might have found on their own.
I don’t have literature courses to do this for me, but I have found something that is almost as good, and I am SO EXCITED about it. I’ve listened to the Book Riot podcast for years. I even applied for a job at Book Riot more than ten years ago, before I found the job I’m working at now. The hosts are fun and funny, and I love their sensibility about books. They’ve recently launched a new podcast called Zero to Well-Read that does everything I want except put me in a room with other people to talk about books. LAAAAA!
They started with The Great Gatsby, where they shared ideas I’d never thought of before, and which inspired me to read it again, then Their Eyes Were Watching God which taught me a lot about Zora Neale Hurston and which reminded me of how much I love that book. They talked about Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the inspiration for One Battle After Another that we’ll likely go see with our son this weekend. After listening to the episode I’m still not sure if I want to tackle the book, and this is one of the things I love about the show: they do the heavy lifting of reading the book to help you figure out if you want to read it yourself. They talked about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which I’ve read at least twice and didn’t really get, but when they talked about it, it all clicked and I got it. In the most recent episode, they talked about Twilight, which I’ve never read and still don’t care to, and which they include because it is undoubtedly one of the biggest book events of our time. Its impact on the book industry, and particularly YA, cannot be overstated, and this piece is as fascinating to me as the episodes about the books I do want to read.
I cannot express how excited I get each time they release an episode. I listen to it the instant it hits my feed. I suffer through the ads to hear it as soon as it comes out even though if I waited a couple of days, I’d be able to listen ad-free when they release it to Patreon members. I’m a little bit giddy because a couple of weeks ago, after I finished my Mary Oliver book of poems, which I read a little in each morning, I decided I want to try some Shakespeare. I went out and bought Hamlet, and I read a couple of pages in the mornings or evenings. And what do you know, they’re going to be doing Hamlet soon on Zero to Well-Read. I can’t wait.
More time means more books. Over the past three months, I’ve maintained my early to bed, early to rise schedule even though I didn’t need to get up for work. The cats wake me at 5am, and most days, I just stay up after I feed them.
When I’m working, I eat breakfast, exercise, shower, and write before logging on at 8am. I work all day, relax with my husband, eat dinner, and then crawl in bed around 9pm and indulge in a few pages of a novel before my eyes close. Sometimes I might read a little on my lunch break.
On sabbatical, I read in the morning. I read during the day. Fiction! During the day! I read at night. I spent the entire afternoon yesterday on the couch devouring Loving Frank, a novel about the love affair between feminist Mamah Borthwick and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I read for a couple of hours, cat-napped for an hour, then reached over to the table from the couch and picked it right back up without getting up. It was an intense and brutal novel, and I feel melancholy after reading it (and after lying on the couch all day). But now it’s done, and I can move on to the next on my long list of other books I want to read.
I know I won’t be able to read this much when I go back to work, and that’s okay. I need to create and not just consume. But I will certainly miss taking in all the stories, the beautiful writing, the characters, the settings. I’ll keep my wake-up and go-to-bed hours when I go back to work next week, but I might shift my working hours. Maybe I’ll start and end later to accommodate a slightly longer swim workout, and to give myself time to read while I’m awake rather than as my eyes are closing for the day.
Books I read (so far) on sabbatical:
Paris Letters: A Travel Memoir about Art, Writing, and Finding Love in Paris, Janice McLeod ♥️
The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles ♥️
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
The Paris Wife, Paula McLain ♥️
James, Percival Everett ♥️
Beloved, Toni Morrison ♥️
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Paris Novel, Ruth Reichl ♥️
1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round, Jami Attenberg
Less, Andrew Sean Greer
The Road, Cormac McCarthy ♥️
Night Watch, Jayne Anne Phillips
Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson ♥️
In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
The Lost Queen, Signe Pike ♥️
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien ♥️
The Godmother, Hannelore Cayre
Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life, Bill Perkins
I’m upstairs in the reading room at Shakespeare and Company while Owen shops downstairs. It’s quiet up here. The walls are lined with wooden bookshelves filled with English language hardbound books that aren’t for sale. Next to me is a reading nook, like a window seat in the corner, with a red velour cushion on it. I could sit there with my back against the honey wood wall and read if I were reading instead of writing. At the end of the hall in the room across from me, facing the window that looks out over the Seine and Notre Dame Cathedral, is a wooden table with an ancient typewriter with circle keys.
The floor is old cracked hexagonal tiles, brick red and faded terra cotta, wonderfully worn.The ceiling is wood beams, old old with gaps in the grain from swelling and shrinking. The ceiling is low. On the wall in the stairwell are black and white photos of authors: Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Sylvia Plath. Maurice Sendak. James Baldwin. Other authors, like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, are painted in line illustrations in the stairwell beneath the photos. A piano sits in the corner. Photos of more authors adorn the walls around it. Walt Whitman. Toni Morrison.
Painted over the door is “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.”
Painted on the stairs, “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
–May 31, 2025, 3:20pm
On our first full day in the city, I got to spend time alone with each person in my family doing something cool in Paris.
My husband and I were up before the kids, as we always are. We walked the Montmartre neighborhood again, this time in the cool of morning before the streets were clogged with tourists. We climbed the more than 200 steps to Basilique du Sacré-Cœur while runners with hydration vests ran down the steep cobbles beside the stone stairs. From the basilica, which sits at the top of Montmartre hill, you can see the whole of Paris.
After our walk, he and I had pastries and coffee at a little boulangerie around the corner, Chez Carla, where as I stood in line, I watched as they slid batches of fresh croissants off a pan into the display case. The croissants made a sound like stuffed dry leaves as they tumbled, flaky light and substantial at the same time.
Once the kids were awake, the four of us tried to figure out how to manage all of our desires. We each had a different One Thing we wanted to do in Paris. My husband wanted to head towards the river, maybe see Notre Dame. Our son’s one thing was the Shakespeare and Company book store. Our daughter wanted to shop, but her real one thing was to see the Eiffel Tower at night. I wanted to do it all. Plus Luxembourg Gardens.
We committed to shopping since our daughter’s time with us was limited.
We ventured out of our neighborhood, down Rue Marguerite de Rochechouart towards the Seine. We weren’t 5 minutes from our apartment when I grabbed a photo of what delighted me as a quintessential Parisian scene: flower boxes and window shutters above a fromagerie (cheese shop), with a chic woman walking through the frame just as I snapped the shot.
On our meanderings, our daughter and I stopped into a multi-level Zara next door to the Palais Garnier Opera House. The time we spent waiting in a sweltering line for sweltering fitting rooms ultimately paid off — she found a dress she loved. While we were in Zara, my husband and son sat on the palace stairs and listened to a street musician. Our son said later that that was one of his favorite moments from the trip, just sitting there taking in the guitar player, the busy streets, the palaces.
We walked by ritzy shops and through Jardin des Tuileries before standing on one of the more than a dozen bridges that crosses the Seine. At this point, the Left Bank, where Shakespeare and Company is, was right there, just a few steps further. I knew our son really wanted to go to the book store. I asked, do you want to go now? I do. We can split up.
So we split up. He and I walked the mile or more along the Seine, past the book vendors that I’ve read about so many times in so many books, including Hemingway’s A Movable Feast from his time in Paris more than100 years ago.
When we arrived, there was a line to get into the shop. There were lines for everything that day. The sidewalks were packed. The restaurants and cafés and museums and shops were packed.
Once inside, Shakespeare and Company was not packed; the purpose of the line was to control how many people are in the store at any given time. Once you’re in, you can breathe and feel the coziness of being in a really special book store, where beloved English language authors have found kindred spirits in their time in Paris, borrowed literature when they couldn’t afford to buy it, leaned on the shop owner to find rare books; they’ve read, written, thought, and found shelter.
I loved being with our son there. I loved that I got to go with him and experience it together. He picked up several books, put some back, picked up more, put more back. He’d brought his backpack so he could carry any books he bought. Ultimately, he took home The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. I bought Devotionals by Mary Oliver. We said yes when asked if we wanted our books stamped with the Shakespeare and Company stamp.
After the book store, we waited in the leafy cover of the Marché aux Fleurs (flower market) for my husband and daughter. Our son wanted to go back to the apartment. Our daughter wanted to shop more.
I went with our daughter, even though I was hot and hungry.
As soon as we started walking in the sun, she wilted, too. I saw a brasserie with tables in the shade, Le Sarah Bernhardt, and when I asked about a seat, the waiter took us around to a much better set of tables — we’d gone to the quiet side, and he took us around front where the people-watching was spectacular. We got seats at a little round table outside, facing the bustling Place du Châtelet, and sighed with pleasure to get off our feet.
I convinced our daughter that what she wanted was an Aperol Spritz. “They’re so refreshing on a hot day.” I got one, too. Our waiter was fun and friendly, full of smiles in in his tanned and wrinkled face. He brought us olives, and ice for our water (we were hot and I misunderstood him when he asked “still?” for our water, and I said, “Yes, chilled please.”)
Annabelle and I refreshed ourselves in the shade. We sipped our Aperol Spritzes and iced water, shared a caprese salad, and watched the fantastic style on display on the cobbled sidewalks in front of us. We commented on all the fashion we saw, what we liked, “Ooh, I love those pants,” “Look at those shoes!” , “That bag is spectacular,” “I like whatever this trouser thing is some of the guys are doing,” “I love how everyone uses color,” “Look how she pulls that off.” She talked about how refreshing it is that all the college girls where she’s studying abroad don’t wear the same things as each other like they do at home — women have their own style and wear what they wear because they like it, because they put it together, because it’s them. They don’t just wear whatever they’re supposed to wear so that they fit in. She admires the confidence and is inspired by it. And she loves that people actually care about style.
My edges were relaxed and fuzzy after the Aperol Spritz, and I felt wonderfully happy. We were fortified for another round of shopping after our rest and refreshment, and so we were off to Bershka, a store we don’t have at home, and where she found success and bought dresses and tops.
I was so happy to have that time alone with our daughter, and before that, with our son, and before that, with my husband, in this beautiful city. Our first morning at a café with coffee and croissants with my husband, appreciating Shakespeare and Company with our son, and Aperol Spritzes and people watching with our daughter were three of my favorite moments in our time in Paris.
Life of Pi is always the book that jumps to the front of the line when I think about books that had an impact on me or changed my life. My experience with it was deeply personal and I don’t expect that others will undergo something similar, but Life of Pi gave me permission to believe in whatever brings the most joy, meaning, and sense to my life. For this I will always be grateful. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the unknown and unknowable, to the transcendent, to the depths inside of us, to universal connection, to the divine force. To all of the things that would be encapsulated by the word “God” except that the first association of that word conjures an image of the Judeo-Christian god, which does not match at all what I want to think about when I think about the divine. Until Life of Pi, I felt torn about this mismatch, and about what I can or can’t believe about God. Now I believe exactly what I want to believe, and I have fun with it, and it feels real and right to me.
Roots
Though it’s been many years, Roots by Alex Haley also had a deep impact on me. I was maybe in my twenties when I read it, and it was the first piece of art I’d experienced that showed slavery in an unabstracted, un-whitewashed way. It was the most brutal book I’d ever read at that point in my life. It humbled me.
Roots opened my eyes in a way that no public or private schooling in Georgia did. Last year I read How to Say Babylon by a Jamaican author who escaped her patriarchal Rasta home and landed at UVA in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was shocked there to be confronted constantly on campus by statues and monuments to Confederate “heroes.” In Jamaica, the statues and monuments were to those who overthrew slavery, not to the ones who perpetuated it. In the South when I grew up, we didn’t go deep on the realities of slavery for the enslaved nor how it continues to reverberate in the Black American experience now. My guess is that Southern schools don’t go there now either.
I remember I kept thinking, in and around the heartbreak and shock of reading Roots, This wasn’t that long ago. I know now that Roots is problematic for plagiarism and because Haley didn’t outright represent it as fiction, but I read it as a novel, and I stand by its impact. Literary fiction helps us understand one another. Understanding helps us love one another. We could use a lot more love among one another right now. Roots showed the realities and ramifications of slavery in a way I never had been exposed to before. It made me want to understand deeper, to bear witness, and to not forget. In doing so, it paved the way for some of the richest reading of my life, like The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Trees, James, and most recently, Beloved.
Ducks, Newburyport
Other than the two people I know who already read this — both of whom recommended it to me — Ducks, Newburyport is not a book I expect anyone in my life to read or ever have any desire to read. It is a single sentence that goes on for 1000 pages, which I know sounds awful and terrible and the worst thing ever, who would want to read that? Where do you stop when you need a break? I totally get that, which is why I don’t expect anyone to read it, and is also why I love it so much and why it goes on a list of three books that had an impact on me. The audacity! Who would do this? What writer would have the guts to say, you know what, I’m going to write an entire novel in one sentence, and not only that, but it’s going to be a good novel, with characters and plot and a phenomenal central conflict that is going to come out of nowhere at the end (or maybe the reader got a tiny hint, because I did throw in some foreshadowing) and it is going to BLOW the reader away?
A true artist, that’s what writer would do it.
I wrote about this book right after I read it (see Gobsmacked), so I won’t repeat all that again. If you do think you might want to read the book, maybe don’t read the blog post, it might have spoilers.
Daily writing prompt
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
I, of course, immediately took a field trip to Blacksburg Books and ordered Attenberg’s book. And subscribed to her Craft Talk newsletter.
After hearing the episode last month, I toyed with the idea of joining the community to write 1000 words a day for two weeks on something besides my rambly what’s-in-my-head journaling. In morning writes, I’ve listed topics to explore. While I wondered when this year’s #1000wordsofsummer event might start, I considered what project I might work on for a two week, 14,000 word commitment.
I learned a lot about my writing self in the process, namely that I recoil from planned writing work. That’s what it feels like when it’s planned: work. Right now, what attracts me to writing is spontaneity, and being in the moment. As soon as a topic becomes planned, I lose interest. Right now, I want to play. I don’t want to work.
One of my favorite writing prompts is the Here and Now* exercise. I frequently do this exercise when I want to write but don’t have anything in mind to write about. I love it because it makes me pay attention, right here, right now. It engages my senses and makes me realize how much I don’t know, like what kind of trees those are across the street, the ones I see every dang day of my life, or the name of the little hat a pendulum (pendant) light wears (it’s a shade, just like a lamp), or whether those metal ceilings with stamped patterns in them have a name (pressed tin ceiling).
I’d considered focusing on a particular topic for 1000wordsofsummer — I found one I thought I was excited about — but as it became more clear that it would feel like work instead of fun, Jami announced the dates of this year’s event: May 31 – June 13. The entire time I’ll be on vacation in Europe.
There’s no way I’m doing a project that feels like work while I’m there. But can I sit in a café, on a train, in a garden, on a museum bench, and write 1000 words on the here and now? Hell yeah I can. And I can’t wait to do it.
*There are many variations on this prompt. Here and Now is what Priscilla Long calls it in The Writer’s Portable Mentor. In Old Friend from Far Away, Natalie Goldberg uses “I’m looking at,” which can be expanded to “I’m listening to, I feel, I smell…”
Butterfly Mind 