I Read All of My Books
And now you can't tell me jack sh*t
Mini-announcement: The paperback of Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones (6.17.25) is available for pre-order, and it’s honestly so beautiful I want to eat it. I’ll share a handful of summer dates here soon, and here’s the form for Book Club Requests.
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I don’t like myself when I’m working too much, but doing it is as easy as falling down. I can glue myself to the computer screen for every second of the school day, write thousands of coherent words, startle at the alarm I’ve set for school pickup time, feed the kids, see them through bedtime, pass out myself, rinse, repeat.
But after a few days of this my mood sours. My friend and accountability buddy
asked if it's because my brain gets tired. I said—and I have never said it aloud before—that I never EVER remember to work in breaks and rewards. Maybe it’s something about arriving at writing later in my life than most. The idea that I get to write all day is its own treat. But there’s something about the words piling up too fast that irritates and repulses me, and when I start avoiding my computer, I know it’s time to step away.Whenever the most pleasurable of activities starts to feel like a chore, my puzzle-brain starts to work on a Big Change, and that’s how I started to feel about my reading sometime last summer. I had traditionally gobbled up an indiscriminate number of books of a week, like I was scarfing down potato chips, and I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I used to. I stared at my teetering TBR pile - galleys, purchases, and library books, most of which I had collected on unchecked impulse, and felt ill. I was never going to get through them all, which felt like an obligation I had to meet. I couldn’t possibly. And even if I did, I would have rushed the process, churning through them with very little retention. Why did I read, if not to be moved? Did I read simply to have said I read? That didn’t feel right. It felt acquisitive, and strangely empty. It felt disrespectful to the author, and definitely not enjoyable.
I’ve learned enough about myself that when I feel overwhelmed I know it’s time to slow down. I may or may not tell myself to be a snail. And what would a reading snail do? A reading snail would slowly make her way through one book at a time, on paper, and not procure another one until she had finished the first. A reading snail would figure out how to drag a pen across a notebook to log, in her terrible handwriting (now officially diagnosed as “disorder of written expression”), what she was reading. A reading snail would never order from That Website. She would call in orders to her local indie bookseller, and go pick up books as they came in. She would sit and think about what she had read, and reach out to the writer after, to tell them how she had been moved, or tickled. She’s a gregarious snail, there are many types.
So I made my way through my books, all of them. I forced myself to read one at a time. Even when I got bored, or distracted, I didn’t pick up a book halfway through another one. I treated each one like a treasured guest in my home. I enjoyed most, and—let’s say—appreciated the others. I donated the ones I didn’t want to keep, I carefully shelved the keepers in our library (see photo above). I did not actually succeed in waiting until now to acquire more books. But I did make myself finish three or four before I bought a new one, and I got intimately familar with the Los Angeles Public Library’s inter-library hold system, whereby I can ask for any book I had my eye on, and it shows up down the street—not tomorrow (who needs a book tomorrow! NOT A SNAIL)—but generally in a week or two, right when I am ready for it.
Last week, I reached the end of the pile. It took about nine months, or the time it took me to gestate each baby, which feels right. But my relationship to reading is much closer to what it was when I first fell in love with it. One immersive, meditative, enjoyable experience after the next.
I am still singlehandedly keeping publishing afloat, if you look at my credit card receipts. But it feels less like a series of impulse purchases piling up in my house (stressful!), and more a series of a deliberate, well-paced choices. I’ve shared them all here. xo
Just Read: All The Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman (Chris Storer of The Bear is producing the adaptation), Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel (pre-order this one, just trust me!), Heavy by Kiese Laymon, and Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD, by Dr Eli Lebowitz (a total gamechanger I will address in a parenting post-the headline is that it’s like sleep training, but for fear).
Currently Reading: An e-galley of
’s Mobius Book. I wish I had this on paper, because look at this jacket. But—humblebrag—I am pre-approved to read most publishers on Netgalley, IYKYK. Like everything else she does, it is brilliant so far.And below is everything else I’ve read since last July, if you can make out my chicken scratch. My thumb is covering up
’s exciting next title for her exciting next book, because that’s her news to share.
Thanks for reading, Priyanka!
Hooray for Village Well! And for the amazing LA library loan system.