I asked and I really received

Thank you for breaking my malcontent reading streak

You are probably here because you read my cry for help a couple weeks ago. I was headed to somewhere beautiful (Bangkok) for work (a quick reporting thing), and since I was already going to be on the other side of the world and I’d never been to Thailand before, I was taking two extra days to go to somewhere else beautiful (Phuket) and be alone for what would likely be the longest stretch I’d get to be alone in 2023 (upsetting), and as such I needed to read the best book I had ever read in my life, or at least one that would provide me with a transcendent and specific reading experience and thus immediately join the small canon of books I urge upon friends who are going on trips and seeking similar things.

I was a little worried that I was pinning too much, in terms of my general existential fortitude, on these forty-eight hours of solo beach reading time. I try to have low expectations for everything in my life in order to ensure that most things feel like pleasant surprises, but the exception is solo reading time on the beach. It’s been a precious annual treat/seasonal-depression-intervention for me for the last eight years or so to get a midweek flight to Miami in February and stay in a specific crappy Airbnb in North Beach, away from tourists like myself, and do nothing for a few days but move from the burning sand to the cool ocean to the little bakery, tote bag full of weed gummies and ice water and books. I have such luscious, exhilarating sense-memories from these trips, many of which involve specific books; I can still feel exactly what it was like, opening Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves, the sun blazing into my skin, soaked in cold saltwater, while I took the first bite of a rectangular slice of melty Cuban pizza and drank a lemonade and read this first paragraph:

Wow. I was stoned, obviously, but wow. Anyway, as a person who loves to be alone but is too social to obtain much alone time, I really relied on these brief annual escapes for a psychological reset even before I had a kid and completely obliterated (temporarily, I hope and assume) the concept of “downtime,” and for a variety of snowballing reasons I couldn’t find a window to go anywhere non-required this winter until this Bangkok trip landed last-minute, and suddenly what amounted to basically six months of physically longing for a day of simply not working at all, not answering to the name of Mommy, not having violent thoughts related to what I would do for sunshine, was all pinned on my two days in Phuket.

I am happy to report that somehow I was granted everything I needed. I emptied my credit-card points and booked a treehouse beachfront villa at a wildly fancy resort and when I got to this uncanny White Lotus-y place at nine in the morning after an early flight from Bangkok someone handed me a jasmine bracelet and a cold mango smoothie and I’m not ashamed to say my eyes smarted with tears. That first day I finished The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki, which I had started in Bangkok, and which two of my most trusted reading friends, Ari and Gideon, had separately texted me about before I left. (“Japanese Buddenbrooks but better,” I think Gideon said, so I picked it up at McNally Jackson the next day.) That night I started I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, which I knew was one of those books that bookworm women are crazy about and had had kicking around my shelves for awhile but had avoided out of some suspicion that it might be too cute for me (I was wrong). I finished it the next day and started Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, which my darling friend Will had texted me about, saying that he got the same feeling from it that he did from the Neapolitan quartet and would not explain further. I finished that one on the long, three-stop plane ride back, and I cried and cried and cried, and then later when I posted this top picture to my Instagram I found out how many of you have nursed years of intense fondness for Lonesome Dove and I’m just saying you have got to tell me these things so we can all be transported as much as possible and really minimize how many times we open some tepid new fiction that a bunch of people like me have blurbed out of friendly obligation (haha, just kidding) and get fifty pages in and then give up. This update comes in that spirit, anyway, because I’ve been off Twitter for years and barely post on Instagram but apparently can return quite easily for one-off occasions to my home base, the blog.

Anyway. One reason I put so much near-superstitious effort into picking books correctly for travel is that I kind of rely on these solo trips to tell me where my head’s at in a deep way: I’ll realize after the fact that all the books I brought were somehow about scale or emergency or whatever it might be. I had watched Lena Dunham’s adaptation of Catherine Called Birdy, beloved from childhood, on the plane over, and with that in my head I felt like the accidental theme was coming-of-age: not a subject I typically gravitate toward but one that fit the moment in which I find myself and was wonderful when defamiliarized in these very specific ways.

Some of the books people recommended to me that I cosign: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a Middlemarch reread (have honestly been wanting to), Trust by Hernan Diaz, Family Happiness and Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin (became a Colwin completist belatedly last year and loved the very smooth ride), Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, various Natalia Ginzburg, Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, obviously the Wolf Hall trilogy as well as the Southern Reach trilogy (though I mostly like Annihilation, I’m too dumb for spy stuff), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Mieko Kawakami’s novels, Interior Chinatown, The Great Believers…

And the ones that are now at the top of my list: Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, Embers by Sandor Murai, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, Eline Vere by Louis Comperus, and there’s a treasure trove in the previous post’s comments of other ideas, many of which are decidedly not for me but the wonderful thing is that they are for someone and may really be for you.

Thank you for your help!