One of the many things I love about my girlfriends is that most of them are avid readers and often our conversations, whether on the phone or in person, land on one of my favorite questions: Whatcha reading? 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. 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. And then, in my early thirties, when I was a youngish mother living in New Jersey, a close group of girlfriends and I—long-since dispersed, but still close in spirit—started what we consider to be the mother of all book clubs. To be clear, book clubs were not as popular or well-publicized as they seem to be today, probably because there was no social media, so we thought our little monthly literary fete was incredibly special and perhaps even a bit of a revelation.
Our book club 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, 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 education 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 just stumbled upon the title. And, 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 that had me racing to finish to see what happened, while at the same time, wanting to slow down and savor the ending and kind of dreading it at the same time, because I hated to leave the story. At the end of the day, my desire to see how it ended won over my desire to savor each word. I finished the book around 9 pm and immediately wrote a note to the author, in which I gushed about the gorgeous writing and the 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 honestly, as I regain my reading muscles and stamina, this act of reading for pleasure has become easy and effortless again, and the hardest part of any book I happen to be in, is to stop reading and do the busy things that fill my day. I can honestly say that each of the six novels I’ve read in the past few months I have enjoyed deeply and the minute I’m finished, I am looking for a new book to read. Which leads me to my question: Whatcha reading?
My 2024 reading list (so far)
Go As A River by Shelly ReadThere, There by Tommy Orange The Round House by Louise ErdichThe Berry Pickers by Amanda PetersNone of this is True by Lisa JewelThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
