“I will cut adrift—I will sit on pavements and drink coffee—I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim—this fine October.” — Virginia Woolf
One of my 2023 reading projects is to read at least two
@nyrbclassics
written by women per month. Here’s my stack & schedule. Anyone is welcome to join for whichever books are of interest. Let me know if you want me to add you to the list. First up is Olivia Manning.
#NYRBWomen23
@octopus_grigori
I just saw the retrospective of his work in Paris & was fascinated by the number of times he withdrew his work from specific commissions.
“I asked Leanora what surrealism meant to her. ‘It’s the belief,’ she told me, ‘that nothing is ordinary; that everything in life is extraordinary. And being old is no more, no less, extraordinary than being young.’”
@JoannaMoorhead
#LeonoraCarrington
"We should not have a society where the value of marginalized people is determined by how well they can scale impossible obstacles that others will never know." —
@IjeomaOluo
, SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE
Kafka: “we ought to read only the books that bite & sting us…A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Barthes: “Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts…unsettles…brings to a crisis [the reader’s] relation to language.”(p195)
I’d say my goal to not acquire any new books over the past 90 days has gone really well.🤷♀️ Several though are gifts from thoughtful friends, a number are used bookstore finds, a few from neighborhood free libraries, and 4 are new new. At least they’re on shelves.😉
Here are the books I finished in November. So many favorites! Mansfield & Lispector were first time reads for me & I will definitely be reading more. Continuing to LOVE Adnan. THE WAVES was even better than I remembered it. And we only one more to go in
#PilgrimageTogether
!
#RecommendedListening
Olga Tokarczuk discusses the souls of animals, discovering feminism, & her home in the village of Krajanów where she was once neighbors with “3 different translators of William Blake.”
These are the literary treasures I brought home from London & Paris. Some used, some new, some gifts, several purchases. I visited 12 bookstores, 12 museums, Charleston & walked about 240k steps! Such a great trip! Thank you
@JacquiWine
@MarinaSofia8
&
@aecnyc
for your company!💛
A new essay by Olga Tokarczuk (!!), translated by
@jenniferlcroft
. Coins a new word for us to take in our new world of multiplicities & “multiorganismicity.”
I’ve read 45 books in my
#NYRBWomen
collection so far, but still have many to go. Here’s my list for
#NYRBWomen24
. Do you see any you want to read? Should I add you to the group list?! (cc
#NYRBWomen23
)
I have a big stack of possibilities set aside for
#WITMonth
, but this is my
#WIT
bookshelf organized by original language. (Spanish is on a separate shelf though, I ran out of room.) Arabic, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic …
This is an excellent piece by Rachel Cusk on the brilliance of Annie Ernaux. “How, through the simple story of her origins, had she laid her hand so surely on the human tragedy of our ability to make ourselves unfree?”
“More than just a group biography…an engaging cultural history of the 1890s literary and artistic avant-garde and its fragmented afterlife in the post-Victorian era of imperial decline and war.” Out in December from
@reaktionbooks
.
One of the bookshops I loved in London was
@Dauntbooks
in Marylebone. It’s a beautiful space & their collection of books is organized by country. I wish all bookstores were organized this way!
Here are the books I finished in April.
#BlackLamb24
&
#KateBriggs24
both started in January and I’m excited & sad to have finished. I loved every book this month!
Books I read in October. Hardwick, Barnes, Adnan, Quin & NDiaye were all first time reads for me, all fabulous. Also loved AFTER SAPPHO (paired w/Carson) & A HORSE AT NIGHT, which both added many new titles to my tbr. And Woolf’s early journals were the perfect bedtime reading.
“…always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as painting or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.”
Here are the books I finished in June. Such a fabulous kick-off to summer reading, with much anticipated releases from Kate Briggs (out 10/3
@DorothyProject
) & Kate Zambreno (out 7/5
@riverheadbooks
), plus
#NYRBWomen23
!
What I read in October. I’m finishing
#Middlemarch21
today, which has been incredibly wonderful to reread. Also my first read of JACOB’S ROOM which I adored.
“Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year.
To have none. Not to be tied.
To be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio...” — Virginia Woolf, 2 Jan 1931 Diary Entry
I think I was born to be a flâneuse in Paris & London. I’ve walked just over 190k steps in the past 12 days & it’s been heavenly. Sadly, I only have a couple more days to go.
#NYRBWomen24
Time to cast another vote for Leonora!!! ✨ “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”
.
@Ofbooksandbikes
& I were messaging this morning about loose trilogies, i.e. Selva Almada, Eva Baltasar, Ariana Harwicz, Nathalie Léger, Deborah Levy. Can you all think of any others?
I got a month behind with traveling, but here are the books I finished in October & November. So much great reading & here’s your reminder to pre-order Danielle Dutton’s new book. Also, the Samatar/Zambreno collaboration is 🔥!! And I had no idea Shirley Jackson was so funny.
Here are the books I finished in July. What a perfect reading month! The Belben &
@PipAdam
are both coming out soon so don’t forget to pre-order your copies! :)
#NYRBWomen23
#DryHeartSummer
.
@FitzcarraldoEds
has snapped up four novels by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, including The Empusium- the author’s first novel since she won the prize.
Read more 👇
I’m excited to announce that
@Ofbooksandbikes
& I are collaborating on a special slow read project of Kate Briggs & Roland Barthes next year. All are welcome to join, the more the merrier. More details to come soon!
#KateBriggs24
April reading. On the left are the books I finished & on the right are books still in progress. It was an excellent reading month for translated literature & I finally finished the very impressive Plath bio. I recommend everything.😉
Kate Zambreno(!!): “I am working on a cycle of three books that are all thinking around precarity, housing, and problems with the first person. I'm in this very porous period of my life.”
Inspired by
@bibliopaul
&
@mookse
’s most recent podcast, I’ve been giving some thought to summer reads. This is one I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Does anyone want to join me?
#DeWitt2023
It’s 482pp. Maybe in August? 15-20pp a day.
Musée de Cluny is GORGEOUS & now one of my favorite museums in Paris! Set on the site of Gallo-Roman thermal baths & a place of residence for the Abbots of Cluny in the 15th century, the museum is dedicated to medieval art, including The Lady & the Unicorn tapestries.
“Slowly, little by little, almost imperceptibly, I let them drift until only our fingertips were touching, then reaching, then finding nothing. Our hands dropped & we turned away... They were my first enemies.”😢😢😢
#NYRBWomen24
This is already heartbreaking.💔
“We have a lot of head-sentences […] but we’re still missing a lot a sentence sets, we don’t have a single sentence about feelings, since Ivan never pronounces any & since I don’t dare create the first one, but I wonder about this far-off, absent set of sentences…”
#Malina
A group of us will be reading THE LAST SAMURAI in August. 15-20pp a day. Let me know if you’d like to be added to the list. I’ll publish a page guide next month.
#DeWitt2023
Inspired by
@bibliopaul
&
@mookse
’s most recent podcast, I’ve been giving some thought to summer reads. This is one I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Does anyone want to join me?
#DeWitt2023
It’s 482pp. Maybe in August? 15-20pp a day.
I’m a couple days late to the party but these are the books I read in December. A strong finish to the year. I loved every book & THE BOOKS OF JACOB is a masterpiece!
#Tokarczuk21
#LoversDiscourse21
Bilphena Yahwon's online library, The Womanist Reader, is dedicated to archiving free texts from Black women across the diaspora in the hope of politicizing readers to a world without prisons, capitalism, anti-Blackness, & transphobia.
“‘Vessels of memory’…This eternal, fertile & dread-laden stream inside us. This fundamental question: do you want to remember or forget? Either way, something will grow. A path, a scar in the mind, a sorrow that you cannot grasp…” — Dorthe Nors
“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper & deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”
The. End. 🎉 !!!!!!!!!!
1050 pages. 4 months. The best co-readers possible. And my copy is in remarkably good shape for all the miles it’s put on.
#BlackLamb24
(Now, thanks to said co-readers, I have a list of rabbit holes I want to go down.)
I’m home from spending 4 days in the fresh mountain air with my beloved book club. We ate delicious food, drank wine, puzzled, read a play together, relaxed on the deck, went for walks & enjoyed each others’ company. I’m so grateful for these women.💛
Here are the books I finished in December. It was such a perfect mix to wrap-up the year, including a couple favorites of my year (which I will post soon). Here’s to another year of fabulous reading in 2023. It’s already off to a great start with
#NYRBWomen23
!
Books read in February. On the left are the books I finished. I’m still working my way thru the Plath bio, poems & journals & we’ll be finishing the first volume of
#PilgrimageTogether
this month. I recommend it all! Have you read any of these? Thoughts? Please share any reviews.