Reading

I have zero interest in football, which can make it challenging to move through American life.

Hill House, famously not sane, bothers the soul because Jackson describes the perception of horror, not the horror itself.

Maybe I was primed for horror because I woke before dawn on a Sunday morning.

Tornado sirens rang the other day while I played mahjong with the in-laws. The sun went down at 9:02pm, the humidity is building, and there’s a supermoon tonight. You can never see further than your headlights: this old slice of trucker philosophy makes more sense to me with

My map is upside down, inscrutable, and probably for a different planet.

One of those fine afternoons when you wander into a dusty bookstore in an unfamiliar city and come across a book by a writer you don’t know, but it harmonizes with the noises in your head and leaves you wondering about the lines between randomness, serendipity, and synchronicity.

London. Another day of clouds and drizzle punctuated by a few moments of sunshine—an event so rare that it feels like a cosmic event when the light shifts and the world briefly brightens as if the gods are smiling down upon us. A high of 53 degrees and the

While explaining myself to the grumpy clerk behind the glass, I realized I had no idea where I legally lived.

In Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, the residents of an unnamed island suffer the ritual disappearance of objects big and small. Flowers. Lemons. Perfume. Calendars. These erasures are enforced by a surveillance state that deforms the lives of its citizens a little more each day. First published twenty-five years

Sunset: 5:19pm. A cloudy day with highs in the low 40s and a few beautiful minutes of blustery snow. I’m reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of Hilary Mantel’s dense portrait of Thomas Cromwell. It’s slow-going for me, but worthwhile for images like this:

Four days left in New York City. Sunset: 4:28pm with highs around 50, and the weather has been distressingly warm while we put our things into boxes.  Last night I finished Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, and even as I turned the final page, I was amazed I was reading

Sunset: 4:35pm. A bright springlike day with a high of 70 degrees and lows in the fifties. Tonight the moon is full. This morning I flipped open my beaten copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind because I needed what it advertised. Some zen. Some peace

Last week I reread Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and it harmonized with our latest heatwave to an unsettling degree. Snowman is the last person on the planet after a virus intersects with technological hubris. Sunburnt and crazed, he wanders the ruins, seeking refuge from the unbearable heat. But

In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers reappear in South Dakota, wholly intact and without explanation.

I’m attempting to read Gustav Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, his 1874 depiction of the saint’s struggle with vice and distraction while searching for salvation in the Egyptian desert two thousand years ago. Flaubert’s account inspired one of my favorite artists, Odilon Redon, whose eerie

Finished Stephen King’s The Stand today and, even at 1152 pages, I was sad when I read the last sentence, as if a friend had left town for good.

I’m slowly forging through High Weirdness, Erik Davis’s inventory of 1970s mysticism. He writes wonderfully about the feedback loops between our image world and the sense of spiritual possibility: “The object of weird fascination is folded back into the subject, constructing a strange loop of cultural play, recursive

The stock market spiked in response to encouraging test trials for a vaccine. Some say it might be ready for the public early next year. I feel compelled to write this down because I want to remember this moment of optimism; time will tell if this announcement was made in

They’re taking down the makeshift hospital in Central Park. Someone put masks on the status of Romeo and Juliet. Masked icons have become a new genre, an emblem appearing on statuary all over the world. The mood is shifting in New York City. The Chinese takeout spots have pulled

A rainy Sunday that underscores these days of suspension. New York is reporting fewer dead each day, and there’s a sense of exhalation at last, although nobody knows what the future holds. Will there be a second wave? Will there be a depression? My projects and plans for the

Today the price of oil went negative for the first time since we’ve started keeping track of these things. There’s too much oil now. So much that we have no place to put it. I’m not bright enough to understand the implications beyond the fact that we’

One of those days when the moon is perfectly visible in an empty blue sky. It’s unseasonably warm for February in New York. Riding the train along the Harlem River, I finished the last pages of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a stunning book

Here is another book that describes the end of our world. I did not want to spend 228 pages thinking about climate change, so it sat untouched on my desk for several weeks until I realized this was like plugging my ears while a doctor delivered the diagnosis. And David

What is the role of fiction in an age of perpetual outrage, engineered distraction, and vicious governance? After returning to the monochrome worlds of Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 in the wake of Trump’s installation, I began re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which might

This story has seeped into my dreams, grinding at my thoughts like sand in the teeth.

Finally tracked down a clean hardcover copy of Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, which might be the book I return to the most. Something about it feels like home. Aside from elegantly navigating the depths of Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer et al, Durant might be the most kind-hearted and