Reading Notes, 5/23/2020

My school year has ended, leaving me with a little more time and the feeling that I’d like to write about my reading more, so I’m back to this blog. I’ve found reading to be a welcome escape from pandemic worries. I do feel at times like I can’t focus on a book, but often when I give it a try anyway, focusing on something besides the news clears my head and makes me feel better. So I’ve been reading a lot, even more than usual. I already teach a lot online, so switching all my classes to that format was relatively easy (and I didn’t bother myself to try new things) and left me with no commute and more reading time. My son is home, of course, and needs/wants attention, but he’s also good at getting lost in imaginary worlds and playing by himself. He’s also getting to the point where he reads on his own, so we read quietly together sometimes. At the moment, he’s taking a piano lesson — virtually, of course.

Right now I’m reading Drifts by Kate Zambreno, my second Zambreno book this year after finishing Screen Tests. I think I may try to read them all. I love how her books are about consciousness, about writing and reading, about art and time. I’ve read enough Zambreno to know that although Drifts is a novel, it’s heavily based on her life, and I like recognizing details from her writing I’ve seen elsewhere in nonfiction. I just read a passage that mentions “autofiction” somewhat skeptically, but surely this novel fits into that category. I’ve described this book as autofiction where nothing happens — precisely the kind of book I like — but I don’t want to forget the “fiction” part of that term. The main character isn’t Zambreno. But probably it kind of is. I like writing where it doesn’t matter whether it’s fictional or not.

The main character lives in New York City and is trying to write a novel. She wanders, thinks, reads, observes, obsesses, works, and writes. She tries to capture days as they pass, tries to describe living in time. She writes a lot about her neighbors, people she sees on the streets, her dog and stray animals she encounters. It’s meandering and absorbing and a book to sink into.

Screen Tests was a mix of fiction and non — another book where the distinction doesn’t matter a whole lot. The first part is a series of short stories, although they draw heavily on Zambreno’s life as Drifts does, and the second part is essays. I loved many of these pieces (especially the essays). Others seemed slight or on topics I don’t know much about — she writes a lot about films and actresses, hence the book’s title — but I still found the book as a whole meditative and calming in its exploration of thinking and consciousness. Perhaps books about consciousness and interiority are what I need because they are the opposite of my news feed on twitter and don’t make me panic.

On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera (translated by Christina Macsweeney) is a book in a similar vein as the Zambreno books, not in terms of content, but in the way it’s meditative and about ideas and I found it soothing. It’s about … well, lighthouses, real and literary ones. It’s part travelogue as Barrera visits lighthouses around the world, part memoir, part literary history, part a contemplation on time, isolation, and collecting. It makes good company, as Barrera’s voice is calm and thoughtful, wandering into some difficult subjects (lighthouse keepers have difficult lives) and then wandering off somewhere else. Lighthouses have not been a particular interest of mine, exactly, but I still loved reading about them and even more about the emotions, ideas, and human history they evoke.