what we are reading

So we commit to reading at least two books every week, in addition to any manuscripts we are reviewing or reading for other reasons. Recent books of the week have included Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (of course), Tony Hoagland’s Sweet Ruin, Bill McKibben’s Age of Missing Information, Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (yes why not), Corbusier’s Le Modulor, Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be, and and and.

But we also always have an extra book that lingers between the weeks, maybe because it’s really long or complex, or maybe because we love it and cannot let it go.

And we have to confess (is this a confession? just became a confession) that we’ve been lingering over Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Sigh. We are just obsessed. And Book 2 is even better than Book 1, and so we are just dying to begin Book 3. And what is the attraction? the narration becomes embedded in our way of thinking. So much of it echoes the quotidian realities of our daily lives, and the insights, when they arrive, are the ones we’ve somehow failed to articulate. Some of them we have been ashamed to admit. But we find ourselves attracted to, identifying with, the solitariness, the brittleness, the domesticated swagger.

So. Do you have a reading list? Do you pop through some books and linger over others? What are you reading now?