Reading and Rereading
Some posts I recently read and recommend
Hello! I traveled for Spring Break and now I have a mountain of grading to do. The emails I haven’t yet responded to are enough to haunt my dreams. Thank you for reading and subscribing. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, now is the time:
As part of a reading challenge that I participate in every year with coworkers and friends, my next category is to reread a favorite book. I couldn’t choose at first, so I ended up stacking four favorite books that immediately came to mind and ended up with Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.
I’ve consistently recommended these books over the years or talked about them with friends. They probably also indicate my reading tastes pretty well (a little bit haunted, a little bit inspirational). To help decide which to choose, I thought I would read a few pages of each, but when I started rereading Station Eleven, I couldn’t stop. Decision made.
Honestly, though I know I read Station Eleven years ago and I watched the series recently on HBO, there is so much I didn’t remember about the book. This happens when I read books too fast sometimes; I forget the best parts. Or, in my case, I read Station Eleven during a period of considerable grief while living in Morgantown, West Virginia (the second time). Rereading the book now feels like a gentle recovery, noticing details I was too foggy to notice the first time.
The prose alone is so beautiful that I find myself rereading passages to understand what Emily St. John Mandel was doing to my brain and how she got there. So, yes, I’m enjoying the process of rereading very much.
I hope you’ll chime in, in the Comments, with your favorite book to reread, or what you would choose if given this particular reading challenge.
Here are also some of the other things I’ve been reading lately online (all via Substack):
Reading is such a large part of my everyday life that I often forget how my mood can impact the experience. The same goes for writing, of course, but it’s hard not to notice when the writing falters.
I’m still writing every day and hope that you are also able to carve out time for whatever you’re working on now, whatever creative outlets are at the center of your life.
Writing prompt
Here’s a quick writing prompt that I tried with my students and saw fascinating results.
From Creative Writing Now, choose three elements and “imagine a story that includes all three of them.”
For example:
a pilot, a panic attack, and a late delivery.
a circus, a broken ankle, and a case of mistaken identity.
I didn’t create this prompt, but I did add another layer when I tried it on my own. You better believe I substituted one item in each list for an element of morbid grief or mourning: a dead pet, a grieving spouse, a headless doll. Roadside crash sites are also a good one to add in.
Cheers to Wednesday Addams for the headless doll inspiration.
Let me know how it goes!
Is it weird that I don’t reread books? I sometimes reread passages or scenes to remember how an author accomplished a particular thing, but I don’t reread the whole book unless I forgot I’d read it already—which has happened 😆
My favorite book is Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson and I tend to reread it once every year or two. It's on the shorter side, the process is gorgeous and poetic, and it's a really beautiful exploration of loneliness and how you find your place in the world. In fact, it's getting to be time for another reread, I think.