Journal Club

This year I‘ve read more than I ever have in my life (which is still largely unreflected on my sad Goodreads log). Two reasons for this: first, more time and space – to digest books and truly understand them. Second, I wanted to write better, and the calibre of what you read enhances the calibre of what you write. This is undoubtedly true. 

2020 was the year I started to write prose (I had previously only written poetry). Yanagihara writes this about math but it rings true for writing as well: 

We talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the 

loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. 

Finding this balance between logic and expression is pretty unintuitive. The only way to improve is to read the works of those who have largely figured it out :) 

 and some accompanying quotes (the books are not listed in order of enjoyment). What did you read this year? 

I discovered Hesse through another book of his that I enjoyed immensely called Siddartha. This book was very different – much darker, but still very enjoyable. 

The thing he most compulsively desired, most stubbornly searched and strove for, was granted to him, but more abundantly than is good for a human being. 

Initially all he dreamed of and wished for, it later became his bitter lot.

 Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker.

We live to fear death, then to love it again, and it’s precisely because of death that the 

brief candle of our lives burns so beautifully for a while.

2. The Little Virtues + A Place to Live by Natalia Ginzburg

Gorgeous essay collections. Her prose is beautiful and sharp with a signature detached/aloof voice.

We think we’ll be spending our whole life 

, learning to move under the gaze of others with the same confidence and nonchalance as when we’re alone.

composite of ruthlessness, arrogance, irony, carnal love, imagination and memory, of light and dark,

 and if we cannot achieve all of these together, our result will be impoverished, precarious, and scarcely alive.

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is 

. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be 

, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. 


4. Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison 

She had a deep desire to understand her life as something structured by patterns, woven through with signs and signals and voices. She was hungry for a logic that might arrange 

all the isolated points of her experience into a legible constellation.

Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been 

 and besides the world is a lousy lover.

One’s body is intimately related to one’s writing, although the precise nature of the connection is subtle and may take years to understand. Some tall thin poets write short fat poems. But it’s not a simple matter of the law of inversion. In a sense, every poem is an attempt to 

6. American Originality: Essays on Poetry by Louise Glück

Every period has its manners, its signatures, and, by extension, its

. And it is particularly difficult, from the inside, to recognize such characteristics: omnipresence makes them invisible. If they are noticed at all, they are taken as marks of progress; the limitations we have been trained to see as limitations are no longer evident.

Part of his (Rilke's) genius was his perception of the way we transform what is at hand into something sufficiently remote, immaterial, to be 

This book is about a life that doesn't live up to potential. Love that was lost and prevented, a man disconnected from his family and friends, and not reaching the academic prowess he wants to achieve due to rivalry. It doesn't try to paint a rosy picture of life, it presents all of life in sorrow and in beauty. The writing is clean, impactful, and despite the 'lack of plot' I found myself empathizing with Stoner deeply, and couldn't put the book down.


If the novel can be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, 

it was a force that comprehended them both

, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance."

He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a 

; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?

This book was hauntingly beautiful and sad. Absolutely recommend it, but it is definitely emotionally turbulent.

Beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without 

We talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is 

the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression.

9. Madness, Rack and Honey by Mary Ruefle

 is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels 

 which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. 


In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a 

, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great 

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers 

11. What Light Can Do + The Apple Trees at Olema + Form and Meaning (poems) by Robert Hass (one of my absolute favorite poets)

Language was a kind of moral cloud chamber/through which the world passed and from which/it emerged charged with desire.

Awareness is not the same as perspective; sometimes the former is an 

13. Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Wang 

Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them, boxes and labels, but I've always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I'm not 

Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing; both flare up and die down. 

I understood then, as any human being would, the 

difference between love and a love which is visionary. 

The first may well be guaranteed by security and attachment; only the second has the power to transform.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the 

 line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

16. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 

Days I feel like a human being, while other days 

. I touch the world not as myself but as an 

17. On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the 

pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible.

 No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.


Scarry reminds me heavily of Milan Kundera, this is his line below:

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the 

18. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek + The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

: it makes the beds, puts a vase of flowers on the dresser, opens the curtains to let in the sun.

19. Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself

You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire - not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you 

. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most 

20. Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence 

When Rilke asks for help on writer's block, Salomé writes: 

While you are perpetually feeling sick and miserable you are also perpetually

, and those expressions, in the distinctive form you give them, would be quite impossible unless somewhere inside you there is a flowing together, an experiencing in unison.

21. Essays on Elsewhere by André Aciman 

We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in 

, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that 

 into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is 

, not the things themselves – the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.

22. How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Quotes here wouldn't really make sense – but I'd like to implement this notetaking system in my life 