At this time of the year, I try to resist the pressure to be productive.
When the end of the year comes around, I know that I can count on taking multiple long, cross-country plane rides broken up by days’ worth of loafing on my parents’ or my in-laws’ couches. “Dead week,” as Helena Fitzgerald memorably calls the time from Christmas to New Year’s Day, is the perfect moment for aimless reading. “It is a time against ambition and against striving,” Fitzgerald writes. Lounge about, flip through a book, and let a story wrap itself around your shoulders.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s book section:
Unfortunately, there’s still a part of my brain that wants me to be using my time productively. Right now I’m staring at my bookshelf as I prepare to pack for the holidays, and titles I purchased or borrowed but never opened are looking back reproachfully. I just picked up Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire, recommended by Alex Shephard last year, and it’s so short—but do I want to waste suitcase space on a book I’ll get through in one sitting and have to carry for two weeks? My copy of Michael Schmidt’s 1200-page The Novel: A Biography is collecting dust, but will a brick like that cost me an overweight fee at the airport? How have I owned Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing this long without finishing it?
At this time of the year, I try to resist the pressure. Some of the most generative moments in my reading life happen when I allow myself to be guided by natural curiosity. Last Christmas, on little more than a whim, I tore through Susanna Clarke’s weird and wonderful Piranesi, which my colleague Jane Kim calls a “jewel of a novel” and highlighted as a book that will help you love reading again. Earlier this year, based on a half-remembered recommendation from a friend, I picked up—and loved—Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. Sometimes, books I’ve already finished beckon to me. After putting down Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, I’ve been considering revisiting its spiritual little sister, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which Bethanne Patrick called a book you won’t regret rereading. And I know that I’ll have plenty of chance encounters with my past self this month: My parents are moving, and I’ve been assigned to clear out my whole teenage bookshelf.
If you’re feeling similar stress about reading this month, I encourage you to allow yourself to be drawn to something that just feels right. Try a book you can finish in a weekend (I probably will take Aliss along with me). Read aloud verse by one of these 10 poets whom my colleagues Faith Hill and Walt Hunter recommend. If you bought Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me as a gift for someone, you may enjoy another great celebrity memoir. If you’re traveling far or have plenty of empty time to fill, maybe you do want a long book to accompany you the whole way. And don’t discount the power of a book that can actually make you laugh. See if anything fits comfortably—don’t force it—and you may find yourself utterly transported.
Possession, by A. S. Byatt
It may feel counterintuitive, but when nothing else can keep my attention, I know it’s time to go long. As opposed to the articles, tweets, and TikToks I see all day, I find that a long novel with a drawn-out structure and pacing—especially a deep dive into several psyches, over some period of time—will always keep me engaged. Plenty of classic novels offer this, but my favorite is Byatt’s Possession, a 1990 novel that adopts a Victorian structure and gives it a postmodern bent. There are two timelines—a contemporary narrative, in which the scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey discover letters between two Victorian poets and reconstruct a missing piece of literary history, and a Victorian narrative, in which we see the relationship between those same poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Woven into these two plots are poems, letters, and excerpts from scholarly books—all masterfully written by Byatt. The two worlds create intense dramatic irony: The reader gets to see both what Michell and Bailey get right and what their archives can never capture, reminding us how unknown the territory of the past truly is. The slow pacing means we get to delve into each perspective, but the book remains thrilling throughout, as a picture of history comes slowly into view. By the end, I find I’m always itching to start reading it again. — Bekah Waalkes
From our list: Seven books that will make you put down your phone
📚 How to Draw a Novel, by Martin Solares
📚 Following Caesar: From Rome to Constantinople, the Pathways that Planted the Seeds of Empire, by John Keahey
📚 Churn, by Chloe Chun Seim
Norman Lear’s Many American Families
If anyone knew how to watch, it was Lear. His great appreciation for the work of making television reflected his commitment to the less glamorous task of observing and attempting to understand other people. When developing series and talent alike, Lear prioritized the challenge of depicting experiences and viewpoints different from his own—and in doing so, he changed the trajectory of American television.
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The Best Strategy for Late-December Reading
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08.12.2023
At this time of the year, I try to resist the pressure to be productive.
When the end of the year comes around, I know that I can count on taking multiple long, cross-country plane rides broken up by days’ worth of loafing on my parents’ or my in-laws’ couches. “Dead week,” as Helena Fitzgerald memorably calls the time from Christmas to New Year’s Day, is the perfect moment for aimless reading. “It is a time against ambition and against striving,” Fitzgerald writes. Lounge about, flip through a book, and let a story wrap itself around your shoulders.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s book section:
Unfortunately, there’s still a part of my brain that wants me to be using my time productively. Right now I’m staring at my bookshelf as I prepare to pack for the holidays, and titles I purchased or borrowed but never opened are looking back reproachfully. I just picked up Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire, recommended by Alex Shephard last year, and it’s so short—but do I want to waste suitcase space on a book I’ll get through in one sitting and have to carry for two weeks? My copy of Michael Schmidt’s 1200-page The Novel: A Biography is collecting dust, but will a brick like that cost me an overweight fee at the airport? How have I owned Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing this long without finishing........
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