🧵 Thursday Thread: The Best Books Thread Ever, Please!

What are you all reading right now? And why is it holding your attention? And most importantly, why should the rest of us be reading it too?!

Hi, friends,

I often find it difficult to read when under duress. Lots of people do. And that’s on top of the already fragmented and fractured attention and constant distraction we all live with even in relatively “normal” circumstances. In fact, I remember back in grad school for my MFA—this was 2015—one of the faculty lectures was on how to re-learn how to read in an age of distraction. All of the faculty admitted that their reading practices were strained compared to how they had once read (more deeply, more attentively, less distractedly).

As writers, reading is our oxygen. And at least we are, to the best of our ability, close reading here in WITD and in WITD: THE SCHOOL.

But there’s another thing I do at times like these, which is to look for reading material that I cannot put down. That definition varies for all of us, I know. For me, right now, it’s the novel Midwives by Chris Bohjalian. I was absolutely riveted by this novel when I was a young mother (it came out in 1997), but I have not read it since. So, now, I am reading it both for pleasure and as a study of the novel. It’s a wonderful immersion and, yes, needed distraction. That, for me, is a beautiful combination!

What about you? What do you look for in your reading material at times like now, and why? And, most importantly, what are you reading that we should all be reading with you?!

Love,

Jeannine

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