Whatcha reading lately?

There’s a passage at the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird when 6-year old Scout is starting school and is admonished by her teacher for the terrible crime of already knowing how to read. In the novel, the confused and devastated young protagonist tries to remember when and how she first learned to read and considers if she actually loves to read: “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

I definitely feel this. Reading does feel essential and like Scout, I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t love to read. And not only that, I really love sharing books and ideas about books, which I guess is why I chose the profession I did. Happily, many of my close friends feel the same way and one of the things I really love is when I’m on the phone and a friend says, hey, wait, before we hang up, whatcha reading lately?

I love this question for a million reasons—reasons that have as much to do with friendship and connection as they have to do with my passion for literature. Sharing the experience of a good book can feel like taking a little trip together and when we talk about that book, even briefly, that shared experience becomes a kind of common memory about a thing we did together, a place we traveled—a conversation we loved.

For me, it definitely started with my Mother, who shared books with me from the time I was in in my early teens and our conversations about those books were really my first lessons in literature—and in the joy of a good book. Later, my sister and Mother and I passed around books and recommendations, laughing at how similarly distracted we became when we were lost in a book we loved. Then in my early thirties, I was a youngish mother living in New Jersey when my close group of fabulous girlfriends started what we consider to be the mother of all book clubs. Keep in mind that book clubs were not as popular or well-publicized as they seem to be today, so we thought our little monthly literary fete was incredibly special and perhaps even a bit of a revelation.

We met regularly on a weekday evening in someone’s living room or at a local Italian bakery, with a back room, where they let us buy pastries and bring our own wine. Our conversations were usually spirited, sometimes controversial and almost always hilarious. The novels we read became catalysts for conversations about our own stories and our own histories. We delved into topics that transcended our experiences at the time and our discussions were often so resonant that even decades later, I can remember some as if they happened yesterday. Although our book club probably lasted only a couple of years, I think it left an indelible impression on all of us and the books we read became much more memorable and important to us, for having been shared with each other.

That’s the thing about books; they are often powerful and life-changing and when we read a great one and say to a friend, I just read the most amazing book and I think you’d really love it, what we’re really saying is, I want to share something incredible with you because we are deeply connected and I know when a book lands in my heart like this one did, it will probably land in yours too.

Now the truth is, despite my job as an English teacher and my deep love of literature, I have spent the last decade or so, not reading a lot for pleasure. Of course, I’m always reading the books that I’m teaching my students and a million articles about pedagogy and wellness and the world, but really, in recent years, other than a novel or two in the summer, I have not been reading the way I used to.

Until now. Sometime in late 2023, I started thinking about how much I used to love losing myself in a great novel and how little of that I had done in recent years. Armed with a couple of great recommendations from friends, I decided that 2024 was going to be the year I reclaimed one of my great passions: reading for pleasure. To me, this means not reading for work, not previewing a book to add to the curriculum or reading for information about the world or something I want to learn more about. No, my new reading quest is really an anti-quest. Simply put, I want to always be lost in a good book, chosen for no other reason that it was recommended by a friend, or because it sounded interesting or because I happened upon it, in the myriad of ways I happen upon books.

So far, my anti-quest is going pretty well. On New Year’s Day, I opened my first book of the year, Go as a River, a debut novel by Shelly Read, that I had seen reviewed and immediately ordered online. From the first line of the book, I quite literally could not put it down. Seriously. I think I did other things on that day (it was New Years Day, after all) but what I remember most is being perfectly transported to another world and actually losing track of time. I suddenly remembered that odd and compelling tension between wanting to see what happens next and slowing down to savor the story. At the end of the day, my desire to see how it ended won over my desire to extend my pleasure. I finished the book around 9 pm and immediately wrote a gushing note to the author, in which I pontificated about the gorgeous writing and the original and compelling story. A few days later I loaned the book to a friend at work, who finished it a week later and have since recommended it to literally everyone I know who loves to read.

Awww, the power and delight of a really good book. Since January, I have read five more novels and I am grateful that as I regain my reading muscles and stamina, this act of reading for pleasure has once again become natural and effortless; the hardest part, really, is putting a book down and attending to my actual life. Although I thought I happened upon these books randomly, I can definitely see patterns in what I am drawn to read lately. The one thing I know for sure is that the minute I’m done with one book, I can’t wait to pick up another.

Which leads me to my next question: Whatcha reading lately?

My reading lately list:

Go As A River by Shelly Read
There, There by Tommy Orange
The Round House by Louise Erdich
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
None of this is True by Lisa Jewel
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid