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held my door wide open and told my students how proud I was as they walked out of class this morning on their way to a student protest. teaching is hard as hell sometimes, but oh my god it’s the best job ever. (also, authors they are bringing into class right now – sally rooney, haruki murakami, zadie smith, virginia woolf, arundhati roy, donna tartt, kazuo ishiguro, patricia highsmith)
I’m a hoe for fitzcarraldo
I found myself reading debut authors backwards – the likes of sally rooney, sophie mackintosh, and eley williams – who would explode (in my world of print and pixels). I would devour the book in a sitting, maybe twice, and then trawl in the blue light of the late-night internet search for everything they’d ever written. and it always led back to @thewhitereview so now, now I read with fervour and follow these authors and artists from page to page as they make their way. julia armfield is one such writer, whose short story ‘the great awake’ I read twice in a row, only to stop to talk about it to all those around me. and now LOOK! it’s in a collection of her own, bound and beautiful and brimming with all kinds of magic. thank you @kishani for sending this proof my way!
hazy winter light
there was a time when I would reach for these books – stretching to pick them off the shelves. late nights in the library, rushing to finish for a lecture at first light. I read almost all of them. I know their weight, and can map the thread they weave through the literature of today. we can’t read the literature of the present without seeing words of the past pushing in. what do I miss on a fresh page if I haven’t read dickens or hardy or all the white men the past privileged? but of course, what do I miss if the past is my sole reading material? the reading self is not one but two – past and present together. and, it’s these selves (and all of the reading they do) that create the words of the future.
a day of iced rivers and winter walks. bright shining light with blue shadows, and reading the ends of all the books I’ve accidentally abandoned
books I keep returning to again and again: madness, rack, and honey (have you ever had a perfect reading experience?) my year of rest and relaxation (cannot stop thinking about it) three poems (I feel like I should read these three with a decade between each one) black leopard, red wolf (high fantasy rooted in african mythology. it’s nothing like I’ve read before) the letters of vita and virginia (oof) nocilla dream (experimental af and perfect for it) there but for the (the fact is) freshwater (found a form I’d thought impossible)
‘whether we want to or not, in the end we all go back to the hidden threads of a literature that is outside our control’ the nocilla novels – dream, experience, and lab. I’m two thirds through the translated trilogy and quite obsessed.
each one is a reminder of time — to see time like this time spent writing time spent reading — time stacked upon itself

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andre aciman

Books to read after watching Call Me By Your Name

I saw Call Me By Your Name twice. Once, after work in a near empty cinema with a bag of caramel popcorn and no knowledge of what I was about to see. I cycled home in the rain, buoyed by the heady images of an Italian summer: arts and classics and introspection and lust and swimming and […]

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