I don’t see my website as a separate entity or any sort of media outlet - it is the record and reflection of my inner life, my discourse with ideas and questions through literature, my extended marginalia. A book that gives the English language back to itself and your conscience back to itself.ĭo your blog posts grow out of whatever you happen to be reading at the time? Or do you pick books specifically with Brain Pickings in mind? Toni Morrison’s “ Beloved.” I am filled with disbelief bordering on shame that I went this long without it. Decades after her death, her work - much of it by then out of print - was rediscovered and championed by Robert Macfarlane, a splendid nature writer himself.Īre there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time? Shepherd composed it sometime around World War II, but kept it in a drawer for nearly four decades, until the final years of her life.
I only recently discovered, and absolutely loved, “The Living Mountain,” by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd - part memoir, part field notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature and our relationship with it, evocative of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston and John Muir. At this particular moment, I am completely smitten with Jill Lepore’s history of America - what a rare masterwork of rigorous scholarship with a poetic sensibility - but I am barely a quarter through, so I’d be cheating if I counted it as read. I read multiple books each week and have no qualms about abandoning what fails to captivate me, so I tend to love just about everything I finish. Currently among my anti-tsundoku: “Time Travel,” by James Gleick, “Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,” by Alan Lightman, “ Little Panic,” by Amanda Stern, “ Inheritance,” by Dani Shapiro, and an exhibition catalog - which, in her case, is part poetry and part philosophy - by Ann Hamilton. Of the piles that inevitably accumulate in every room of my house, friends’ books I have recently read and loved tower nearest the bed - part synonym and part antonym to the lovely Japanese concept of tsundoku, the guilt-pile of books acquired with the intention of reading but left unread. I do tend to keep a rotating selection of longtime favorites near or in it, to dip into before sleep - “The Little Prince” (which I reread at least once a year every year, and somehow find new wisdom and pertinence to whatever I am going through at the moment), “The Lives of the Heart,” by Jane Hirshfield, “Hope in the Dark,” by Rebecca Solnit, Thoreau’s diaries, “How the Universe Got Its Spots,” by Janna Levin.
I don’t have a nightstand per se - my bedroom is rather ascetic, with only a bed nestled between the constellation-painted walls. The author of “Figuring” (and the brain behind the Brain Pickings website) likes how children’s books speak “a language of absolute sincerity, so deliciously countercultural in our age of cynicism.”
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