On her Substack, Cecily Carver writes about her reading habits. While posts like this don’t always interest me to the point of sharing, this one does. Her writing is direct, self-deprecating and resonant. Here are a couple of standout bits with my inferior commentary:

2. Being well-read is accumulative. Even if you forget most of what’s in a book, you still get credit for having read it.

I find books come back to me when they matter. I’ll often remember a book that’s relevant to something in the moment, without having thought about it for years, but it’s also embarrassing when someone asks me ‘have you read anything good lately?’ and I completely blank on every book I’ve ever read. It’s to the point where I keep a little list of answers to that question, or else I just start talking about Scarborough again. (You should read Scarborough though.)

5. My favorite bookstore in the world is City Lights in San Francisco. I find something exciting and previously unknown to me every single time.

Ben McNally, Toronto. I can spend $100 in less than a minute there, blindfolded.

9. I feel some disdain when I meet someone (almost always male) who claims to read only business, leadership, and personal development books… Whenever I open books like this, the supporting anecdotes are always about pro athletes and business leaders, i.e. the dullest people alive.

While I’m a sucker for biographies of famous people, anecdotes about how they achieved success is never useful to anyone. The people who read only these books also often think that books are too long and they should be blog posts. That’s absolutely true of most books in this category, and absolutely untrue of most books outside of it.

13. One thing that repels me in contemporary pop culture is fandom and fannishness in all its forms. I find it very sinister, and I cringe when people online try to construct fan-like ways of interacting with books: building little clubs around them and swearing allegiance, making memes, cultivating in-jokes and talking about the characters as though they are cartoon characters living out their lives in a literary theme park somewhere.

Perfect. No notes.

16. A book that came out this year that I liked: Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar. An older classic that I hated: Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Döblin. Currently struggling with Dr. Zhivago (Boris Pasternak) and loving London Fields (Martin Amis).

Mine:

1. New and loved: James, by Percival Everett.
2. Older and hated: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
3. Currently: Struggling to stay engaged with The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and loving Don’t Look Now, short stories by Daphne Du Maurier

Her Substack is great — I only found it yesterday but you can expect to see more links to it here soon. The post above is great and you should read it in full.

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