Currently Reading

Reading lots, reading some, reading none. Each day brings with it what it will.

That being said, I’m not too prone—I don’t think—to determinism. I’m making an effort to return to my books and that waft of old paper and ink you get when your nose gets a bit too close to the page, hopefully not from falling asleep into it. We went through a renovation and my books were packed up in bins and now they are mostly up on the shelves, but even without those, I have stacks of books on my desk from the shop, from the library, from friends, from bookstores, books I have been meaning to read for ages, books I’ve just discovered. Junia was born last spring, and here we are, encroaching on spring again, and I hate to imagine a year of reading lost in a poof and haze and fog and fug—even if she is worth it. All those would-be stories I could’ve disappeared into! Perhaps it’s the existentialism getting the best of me: one lives only so many years, and one can only read so many books in the years one has left. These babies are everything to me, but why can’t we have a little of both.

I’m often listening to audiobooks—very occasionally a podcast, but I can’t seem to make time for podcasts when I’ve got an audiobook from the library going on—when I’m doing chores, when I’m walking the baby around or to sleep. I sometimes try to do a tidy up, 10 or 20 minutes, before bed, picking up dirty laundry or recycling all the scraps of paper the kids have left strewn about, and this is the perfect time for listening to an audiobook, with the house dark and quiet.

But! There is nothing like the feel of a book in the hand. It’s the difference between dictating your notes into an app and writing things down with a pen, flipping the pages, holding the notebook in your hands.

Here are a few things I’ve been reading these days, or at least the ones I’ve grabbed pictures of.