The reading life
I’ve been reading seriously for most of my life, and the question I come back to isn’t what to read next. It’s what reading actually does to attention, to memory, and to the way I move through a difficult year.
Why do some books follow me out of the room, and others don’t? What happens when I return to a book I annotated ten years ago and find a stranger’s notes in my own handwriting? How does the pressure to read the right things, in the right order, for the right reasons narrow what reading can be?
The Reading Life is where I think about reading as a practice rather than a performance: rereading, marginalia, attention, memory, and the books that stay with us after the page is closed.
Marginalia in practice
Anyone who annotates books or returns to favorites can begin here. These essays look at marginalia not as decoration, but as evidence of attention: the marks a reader leaves while thinking.
Marginalia in practice: how to annotate
On tools, systems, and the difference between marking a book and actually reading it.
Marginalia in practice: notes that last
Why marginal notes outlast notebook entries, and what to do when an annotation outgrows its margin.
Marginalia in practice: rereading as discovery
What a second reading reveals when the first-reading notes are already on the page.
On reading without performing
Reading can become another form of display if it’s allowed to. These essays are about stepping away from that pressure and returning to the private, unruly work of being changed by books.
In defense of reading everything
A reading life that crosses genres, disciplines, and hierarchies is accurate, not scattered.
What it means to read without rules
On the pressure to read the right books, and what becomes possible once the performance for others stops.
How to read without rating: on quiet literary criticism
On reading as interpretation rather than judgment, and why stars may be the wrong instrument entirely.
On rereading and what stays
Some books change on a return visit. Sometimes I do too. These essays are about the strange intimacy of rereading and the books that keep working on us long after we expected them to be finished.
On rereading, marginalia, and a lifelong reading practice
Why returning to a book isn’t repetition.
Books that linger: why some reads stay with us
Some books end the moment the cover closes. Others follow into the next week or the next year.
What reading does to attention
The books we read under pressure leave different marks. These essays ask what reading does when life is noisy, fractured, or difficult, and why attention may be one of the deepest forms of response.
What reading does to attention
Why hard seasons change what we hear in a sentence, and why the books we read under pressure leave marks that others don’t.
On reading through hard seasons
Reading isn’t always an escape. Sometimes it’s presence. Sometimes it’s the one quiet practice that helps me remain in my own life when everything else feels loud.
Why I keep reading, even when life is loud
On reading as presence rather than escape, for anyone in grief, transition, or fatigue.
Franz Kafka wrote that a book should be “an axe for the frozen sea within us.” The books that matter rearrange something in me, sometimes permanently.
That’s what these essays are about.