A shelf of well-worn short stories
The first twelve weeks were largely about unlearning. None of this is new, and that is partly why it works.
Notes along the way
Every reading list says as much about the reader as the books. If something here is unclear, that is on me, not you. It is not glamorous, but it holds up. I abandoned it halfway and came back a year later, glad I did.
A note on tools
Half of the work is deciding what to leave out. For a long time I treated margins as an afterthought. Margins are where reading turns into thinking. I wrote most of this on a calm Sunday morning. Most of what I know about novels came from getting it wrong first.
Here is what shifted, and what stayed exactly the same. There is a version of this that is much more complicated. This is not that version. The best passages are the ones I copied out by hand. I am still not sure I have it right, but it is closer.
essays