A January Reading "Recap," Reimagined
A whole-body reading of one single paragraph.
I have a complicated relationship with the monthly reading “recaps” that are so common on social media. On the one hand, I love the voyeurism of knowing what stories other people have been spending their days with. On the other, I can’t help but compare myself to these other (better) readers. They’ve ingested five or eight or ten titles in the time it’s taken me to wade through two or three. I envy them.
And yet, I’m proud of the way I read. I get hung up on adjectives and paragraphs and tenses. I scribble words I like in a notebook. I have to stop mid-sentence because I’m crying too hard to keep going. I get chills when the author has phrased something just right. To me, becoming a better reader means learning to read more deeply. Not more, period. Some people can do both, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m not one of those magicians; I owe it to myself to read like me.
Sorry to be the asshole who says things like “Nabokov says,” but Nabokov says, “A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”
To that end, I want to do my reading “recaps” on Life Lives a little differently. Each month, I will pick the book, a paragraph, or maybe even just a sentence that impacted me the most. Something I highlighted or, in the case of this month’s favorite, underlined and wrote “wowza” in the margins. (I need you to know that I never say “wowza” in real life.)
I will deep-read this passage. I will “recap” my love for it. I will share what it brings up for me. And that’s all. No numbers here.
A Paragraph From Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot
“I decided then to tell Artichoke to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what anyone thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick with rain, of valleys dry in drought. I'd tell her 'no fear' and she'd know it was the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn't worry because I knew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin, her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.”
There’s so much to love about this paragraph. It has rhythm and heart. It comes at a turning point for the character and feels cathartic and deserved when it arrives. Here’s what my mind did while I was reading this passage:
• Unpainted: What a great adjective, the perfect adjective, really, to describe a woman who doesn’t measure her worth by her physical beauty.
• Anaphora: There are three sentences in a row that start with “to.” This gives the paragraph a really nice cadence and tells us that Bieker is building up to something.
• Nature imagery: Our main character, Lacey May, spends most of this novel in drought-stricken Central California. And thus, seeing these images of her daughter, “Artichoke,” enjoying the many different faces of nature is particularly moving.
• And, and, and: I love that “and” is used so many times to make this paragraph seem breathless, almost as though Lacey May is running out of time to say what she wants to say.
• Ugly and beautiful: At the beginning of this ‘graph, Bieker sets the words ugly and beautiful up as opposites. By the end, she brings us to the realization that living a free life is beautiful. Not aesthetically beautiful, but that to-the-core kind of beautiful. This idea of beauty being on the “inside” is one that I’ve heard many times before (notably, in the 2001 movie Shrek). But, in this paragraph, I experience this realization in a more profound, moving way.
Sometimes, it’s not about what’s said but how it’s said. That’s why I love great writing: The right words permeate deeper and deeper still.
What one paragraph, sentence, or idea has stuck with you from your reading life this month?
Reading: Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Mouth to Mouth, Antoine Wilson, Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino
Writing: Something new
Watching: Mean Girls (the remake)
Eating: It’s summer here in LA LA Land, so I’ve been sipping mango smoothies! I’m obsessed with this recipe.
This newsletter is written and edited by me, so please excuse the occasional grammatical error or spelling gaffe. My Very Talented Mother, Caitilin McPhillips, designed my logo for me. Thanks, Mom.
Kells, you have given me a gift beyond what you could possibly know with this post, looking so deeply at these lines, talking about rhythm and heart. I am so grateful to be read this way. Thank you, thank you.