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& Which Are More Important
the closest I'll get to lending out my books
For a while, I’ve been finding it hard to carry notebooks. I generally read while I’m on the subway, and it’s usually too cumbersome to pull out a notebook to take notes on whatever I’m reading. I’ve found, however, that every published book has its own empty spaces. Blank pages at the front and back, or title pages which are otherwise empty. When I read a physical book, I devour it. But despite my incessant underlining, bracketing, starring, and a system of dog-earing to indicate which passages I like (upper corner), and which are more important (lower corner), I rarely, if ever, write notes in the margins of the pages. I’m honest with myself enough to know that I would likely never see those notes again. Often, the thoughts that come to mind aren’t even directly related to the text. They’re usually a jogged memory, or personal artifact I hope that I’ll return to, once I find the words to write about it, the reasons for its sudden pull to the front of my brain. My notes on the end pages, then, become a record of all the ways that a particular book touched me, a brainstorming web like the mind maps we used to stretch across the chalkboard in English class. The book itself being the single oval in the middle, all of my bullet-pointed memories sprawled out, connected across space like electrons circling an atom.
Eleven years ago I took a class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called The History of Artist Books. The course was centered around one ongoing project: to look through the library, our personal reading and watching history, and the school’s artist book collection, and to begin compiling a bibliography and commonplace book for our artistic practice, annotated to explain the influence of each book or film or piece of ephemera on our own work. All these years later, I’m still influenced by this assignment. When I finish reading something, I transcribe all of the notes that I’ve accumulated, but they also continue living where they first originated, within the covers of each book. This is the reason I will never lend my favorite books, and why I can’t imagine ever letting them go from my collection. Sometimes I look back and can recall the passage, or the chapter, or the line that sparked a particular memory, but most of the time I can’t.
I finished reading 42 books this year. That could be a lot or very little depending on who’s reading this. That number includes audiobooks and a couple of re-reads, but doesn’t include novels I didn’t finish, or collections of short stories or poetry or essays which I read pieces from, but didn’t read in their entirety (a fair bit of my reading fell into that latter category this year). I wanted to write one more substack post before the year is out, but rather than rush the essay I’ve been working on, I figured I would instead close the year with a quick recap of sorts. The notes that I myself wrote in the end pages of these books are, for now, still mine alone to revisit. But as an end-of-year gift for you all, here’s an extremely incomplete list: a handful of the books I read this year, each with a passage or two that I had flagged with lower-corner dog ears:
“And then I realize she is thinking about the future, she is waiting for the future, she is waiting for the small unmistakable sound of the shutter. The click of the camera signifying that something is over, and I do not think we can be any more specific than that, so I blink and let that be the sign between us.”
(From “A Free Woman”) :
“I watched him relax his shoulders and straighten his posture from a small jolt of confidence, which I decided meant that I was beautiful. I have always known that I am not instantly beautiful, but I am beautiful after prolonged exposure. Like the way your eyes adjust in the dark, and what you thought was a person is, in fact, a floor lamp and that is a relief. A floor lamp! Aha! Against the backdrop of copper pipes, bags of soil, and ant traps, I had become the most beautiful thing he’d seen, if not that day, than certainly in that moment. Sometimes people just need context.”
(From “Watch Me”):
“I hate small talk with people I already love.”
“It’s alright if love feels like a rhythm of reaching and falling short, a reaching out and falling short. Then an unexpected receiving — a sometimes wholly unsought interaction, having nothing whatsoever to do with ambition. A dispossession. Not an achieved steadiness.”
“For, unlike ‘a simple story,’ a novel does both: it is interested in how one thing follows another; it is equally (arguably more) interested in what it feels like to live in time; in life lived by intensity. As a treatment of time, a novel activates not only curiosity in the reader (And then?) but memory: a form of attention that is both accumulative as well as anticipatory, backward-reaching as well as forward-facing and itself capable of acting on time.”
Life is Everywhere, by Lucy Ives
“The elevator smelled of synthetic pine and various canine emanations. The mirror in it was bad, and Erin knew not to seek confirmation of her humanity in it.”
“And I remember, after things got bad, how hard it was to comprehend the decay of intelligibility, the way in which it no longer mattered that we could perceive each other’s thoughts in all their dappled, pebbled, mixed familiarity, that they were always close enough to bite and touch. It wasn’t that we stopped understanding each other. It was that we stopped caring about what we understood.”
Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti
“I see men with qualities I admire and wish to possess, and I make them my lovers, rather than trying to develop those qualities in myself. I sent Pavel to the door, then at the last minute pulled him back. I should go to bed soon. I should go to sleep. I should live according to my feelings and see what comes—that is, my independent feelings, not feelings that are attempts to mirror other people’s feelings.”
The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, by Sarah Manguso
“I’m aware of accuracy as an abstract goal, but I don’t know what it looks like or how to find it or how I would know it if I found it or what I would do if I did.”
The Book of All Loves, by Agustín Fernández Mallo
“Couples build real cities — out of physical matter, out of their affection, out of singular, unrepeatable customs and rituals: a language of their own. The peculiarity of this universe they create is that it isn’t destroyed if they split up, but simply enters the condition of abandoned city, of a ruin consigned to run its course in some unspecified place. We do not know the exact mutations this city-space undergoes, nor what form it ultimately takes, but what is certain is that, disconnected forever from all that is known, it is an emotional destination that nobody can ever go back to. Not even the people who built it — the former lovers — will get to walk its streets again.”
Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, by Emmeline Clein
“I wanted to touch their necks, tenderly, and clasp their necklaces for them, when they asked, but I also wanted to curl my fingers around those chains and yank them off, touch someone’s skin and leave a mark. I still feel this when I meet a certain type of girl on a certain type of night, and this could be because I want to be them, or because I want to breathe their air, or because I want them to bite me, or because I want to ask: What’s it like?”
The Observable Universe: An Investigation, by Heather McCalden
“Minutes later, when I shut the front door to my flat to head to the airport, I understood that on my return, there would be a different person unlocking it. I understood it in some remote way, like how you know things from watching too many movies. The accumulation of artificial experience can, after a certain point, feel like the shell of something real. Over time, the shell grows into a reference point that can be used to navigate the future despite the fact that it is fictional.”
“You can’t ask someone for help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised, that you’ve been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you’re uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else. Once you expose yourself as insecure, it’s easy to feel resentment if you’re not immediately put back at ease. If there’s even a flicker, a tiny recognition of your bad qualities, the resentment kicks in, the deal is broken, and suddenly you’re both angry strangers, spending hours alone in a room together and completely unsure of why.”
“She was detached from Wes, inside her own thoughts. She was the moon on the water. Wes could drown and she wouldn’t notice. It was a relief to be ignored. When Mona was writing, she was apart from him. He needed her apartness because it gave him his own. It was like a pact between them, as it they’d halved a drug. Wes watched Mona’s rib cage moving in and out.”
“Then Eva said, The second you’re born your parents start describing you back to yourself and you become that person. They keep telling me that you and I are exact opposites and I don’t believe it. I hate seeing myself from the outside. It has this hall-of-mirrors effect. I can never get to my real self because of these endless reflections.”
Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
“That’s all writing really is. Obsession punctuated by long periods of forgetting. An attempt to capture the attention of someone you love. But what do I know.”
Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux
“I stopped writing in my journal. As I do every time I cease to record the present, I feel I am withdrawing from the movement of the world, giving up not only narrating my days, but seeing them too. Because seeing in order to write is to see in a different way. It means to distinguish objects, individuals, and mechanisms, and to give their existence value.”
Her 37th Year: an Index, by Suzanne Scanlon
“I hate longing but I must not really because I am so good at it. You may feel connected to a former loneliness, an old friend.”
“Despite her suffering, she knew how to be in the world in a way that I do not. Where I am fragments, she was an entire composition.”
“Love is always misplaced. It’s always a misfire, or a misreading of the person we can’t live without. How can we know them, really? We only know what we know to know. We can only recognize what we’ve already seen.”
“I think about the opposite of the city, about small rooms, or maybe they’re the essence of it, I think about claustrophobia, about desire as a place we inhabit that is possibly not big enough for two people, much less three or four. The city as a place where we have to live together with our ghosts, that’s what we’re all trying to accept.”
The Use of Photography, by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie
“I don’t know how to use the language of feelings while “believing” it. When I try, it seems fake to me. I only know the language of things, of material traces, visible evidence. (Although I never stop trying to transmute it into words and ideas.)”
An Image of My Name Enters America, by Lucy Ives
“I could learn to make something out of words that wouldn’t smudge—and not only this: that there was a way to manipulate words such that they would have no drag, no physical resistance. That they might be all energy, all light, all vector. That their meaning might rush into a person’s head to create a crystalline image there, a hologram. A reader would see a picture. It would be as if it had not come from words at all, that picture. It would be clear, crisp, piercing, permanent, upright, still.”
The Hearing Test, by Eliza Barry Callahan
“I had begun to understand my own life by way of misinterpreting things I was reading and experiencing with only half of my attention. I found clarity in misinterpretation. And I thought that our misinterpretations are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have.”
What else? If you made it to the end, here’s a playlist I made for Phil a few weeks ago, but have also been listening to a lot myself since. It’s 1 hour long exactly, which was unintentional. And here’s a photo of my cat, Mendieta:
Happy new year, I promise to post more in 2025.
this is an incredibly generous offering!