Hi guys! Happy Monday!
It seems like the whole world is off work today - I took advantage of the ghost town that is my office to swing to Facebook for breakfast with Laura, and am working on a few miscellaneous life lists this morning.
This weekend, I had brunch with Charlie, one of my first and oldest college friends. Together we survived budget air travel and spring break mishaps in London, navigated life fresh out of college living right across the street from each other in Minneapolis, and now he's also in the Bay Area for a post-MBA career! So excited to have him close(ish). While we dined, we ended up talking about the most disparate topics - the future of Notre Dame football, the necessity and politics of graduate education, and the idiosyncrasies of Californians. He recommended a few books to me, and I took note of them in my phone to add to my list later.
That afternoon, Dave and I grabbed beers at a local brewery, and he similarly had a new book recommendation for me. This is a thing in my life, guys...a friend of mine once told me, "You'll read anything that's printed. It's kind of like being a slut, but you read books instead of going down on guys wantonly." Knowing this, people share book recommendations with me like others share shows to binge on Netflix, or hot new music.
It makes me deeply happy...the act of reading can be so solitary that I particularly value when people's recommendations make it feel more social. Plus, I think sharing a book recommendation is such a personal thing. Telling someone that you enjoyed/loved/got something meaningful out of a book shares a specific little slice of who you are as a person in a way that I find insightful.
All this to say...when I opened up my Life Lists Excel workbook (because, duh, I have a Life Lists Excel workbook) and flipped to the Books to Read tab (because, duh, it has a Books to Read tab, HI, IT'S ME), I realized the list has grown to 93 books. NINETY THREE.
Given I average 8-13 books a month, I won't finish my current list for 7-12 months as is, but all these good recommendations I've gotten from friends have me wondering...
What are you reading?
I don't care about genre, or newness, or how "cool" or "trendy" your current book choice is. My list ranges from Hemingway and Nabokov to endless Roxane Gay and Meg Wolitzer. There is fiction. There is non-fiction. There is technical reading, and there are fairy tales. Love stories and murder mysteries (sometimes both in the same book, let's be real). Send recs my way - I am always looking for something new and previously unexpected to add to the list.
(As for me: currently working my way through a collection of Lucia Berlin's short stories, above, as well as "Modern Lovers" by Emma Straub at night and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer on my iPhone!)