Do you even read, bro?
Tip #25 - Read something enriching
This post is part of a series I’m writing from mid-June to mid-November 2024, on things that helped me rebuild my confidence, sense of self, and increased my delight in my life after massive difficulty in multiple areas. For full details and post links to all 110 things, go to this post here.
**This post is too long to be read via the email so pop over to the app for the full experience**
Tip #25 - Read something enriching
It might seem a little expected for me, a librarian, reader, book dork, to suggest reading as a Thing That Helped, but it does, and it has. Reading all kinds of things has helped me with all kinds of things. A lot of the reading I have done was for fun, to get better at it, because someone else said I had to (hi all the book club’s I’ve flunked myself out of sorry), because I want to be able to participate in the conversations (so I read twilight in a weekend to hate talk it from an informed pov - true story), because I was trying to figure something out, wanted to be shocked, soothed, taught etc. Often I didn’t go into a book knowing what I wanted to learn from it or anything besides “yes that looks cool lets see what happens” which is also a valid form of book consumption.
All the ways of consuming books are fine. I’m not going to moralize your reading I think that’s something people do who don’t know how to have any fun and probably need to eat more vegetables and fiber and find a hobby but ANYWAY. My point is, reading is a thing I do regularly to various degrees of emphasis. Being a reader doesn’t make me a smarter or better or more informed or more interesting person than someone who’s curious and pursues other hobbies. I’m not here to turn you into a reader either - it’s not everyone’s thing and that’s fine.
Ok I’ve digressed enough. If you wanna read in your free time, cool. If you wanna not read in your free time, also cool. You do you, baby bean.
This tip and suggestion is entirely about intention - paying attention to what you’re reading, choosing something with consideration and active intention whether you’re a book dork like me or not - we’re not just diving into a book pile and coming up with something interesting to say afterwards.
What I mean with this is the following - If you feel like you have issues with familial traumas and perhaps dealt with difficult parents, pick up a book that addresses that topic. I’d give you Radical Acceptance : Embracing Your Life With the Heart of A Buddha, by Tara Brach, or Healing the Adult Children of Narcissists : Essays on the Invisible War Zone and Exercises for Recovery, by Shahida Arabi.
If you’re looking to get ahold of your money issues, mental blocks about them, and reframe your financial life, I’d give you The Wealth Money Can’t Buy : the 8 Hidden Habits to Live Your Richest Life, by Robin Sharma, You Are A Badass at Making Money : Master the Mindset of Wealth, by Jen Sincero, and ask you to come back in a month for more recs because that’s an area of self growth reading materials I’m learning from right now.
If you want some general self help and feelings of self worth and a reminder that you’re actually ok and pretty cool, I’d direct you towards Radically Content : Being Satisfied in an Endlessly Dissatisfied World, by Jamie Varon (her IG is rad too), 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, by Brianna Wiest, and Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies : and Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, From Someone Who’s Been There, by Tara Schuster.
If you want creative help and an increase in your abilities for find joy I’d give you The Creative Act : A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin, and The Books of Delights : Essays, by Ross Gay.
If you’re feeling the struggles of the fact that healing in not a linear thing, I’d give you The Myth of Normal : Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Dr. Gabriel Mate, and The Body Keeps the Score : Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk.
You’ll note that all the above are non-fiction.
It can be a source of discussion, to say the least, the chat surrounding readers of particular genres within each larger category, but I’m not deciding on that and not getting deep in that murky spot today either.
What I WILL say is that in my opinion is that if you decide to learn something you can learn something. If YOU bring a curious mind to the material you’re picking up, you can have an experience that will inform you of something.
Even if that something is that you learn what books, what authors, what methods or things are not for you. There’s value there too.
I’d highly recommend picking up fiction as well, and not just because I read it most, but because there’s science that says it’s helpful in developing emotional intelligence. “…reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations.” Still, I feel my point remains, that whatever you choose to read with active intention, you can learn from. Sam with the things you do, eat, think about, activities etc. Active participation yields information you can do something with.
Another thing to consider here - to read something enriching - is to figure out the delivery method that best works for you when you’re reading.
Are you an audiobooks type of a person? I am.
Might I suggest and encourage you to take a look at your library’s digital offerings of ebooks and audiobooks, and that if you can swing for it, that you check out Libro.fm which donates a percentage of their profits from your subscription and purchases to the independent bookshop of your choice and has all the things you want anyway and is the same price as Audible? I get most of my audiobooks from the library and from Libro.fm.
I don’t read much digitally via e-books but I have the kindle app and something do go that way. I know folks with kindles that fly through their books and love Being able to carry that little thing around. It’s rad for them and that’s so cool.
Are you a paperback or hardback person?
All of it counts, all of it works. You get to figure that part out.
BUT WHAT WILL I READ?! *grinch intonation thank you*
I got you there baby bean. Here’s some suggestions for how to find something of interest -
Try a book podcast – I listen to All The Books weekly when they drop an episode that covers the weeks new releases (every Tuesday). I also hang with Reading Glasses, From the Front Porch, Books Unbound, Turek Books, and Glamorous Trash (celebrity memoir focused) to name a few.
Who do you know that is super successful in life, home, family, work, etc - check out what they’re reading, what they’ve read. You can know them the way we know people via social media and see what they’re recommending, what’s on their shelves etc and give that a try.
Ask your favorite people what books have held meaning for them and try those. That’s a cool one because reading things that are important to the people who are important to you is a great way to get to know them better.
AND OF COURSE ASK YOUR LOCAL LIBRARIAN - I qualify for that and recommending reading materials is like my favorite thing to do. PUH-LEASE hit me up if you’re looking for something to get into and I’ll do my best to find you a book.
Another thing to consider when going for this one is that not every book is going to be for you. Some books you’re going to read that you’ve heard people RAVE about and you’ll feel angry that it was such trash. That’s fine. That’s normal.
Two of the five laws of library science are about this exact thing - “every person his or her book” and “every book its person” - meaning if this book isn’t for you that just means it’s for someone else.
Another couple things to keep in mind that follow from that, especially when you’re reading with intention, maybe outside your typical genre or area of comfort.
Things that work for some people might not work for you. For example, some folks love alien romances, and for a while I did too - still do but haven’t gone that way in a while, I’ll write about it because it was incredibly helpful (yes actually) when I was trying to figure out how to heal my issues about sexuality reading monster smut really helped, historical regency romance did nothing for me. The rule there is - DON’T YUCK SOMEONE ELSE’S YUM - and while it’s an idea of courtesy that’s often said when referring to particular preferences of romance reading materials, it is also just a good lesson for everything else too.
Don’t be a dick. Easy. If someone thinks something is rad that you think is lame, you don’t need to blast about how lame you think that thing is that they love.
The other one is that now sounds like what all those hot tarot bitches say on tiktok these days - TAKE WHAT RESONATES AND LEAVE THE REST. You don’t have to agree with or find value or alignment in 100% of every chapter of every book from every author you read. You might agree with the concepts in one part of the book and take issue or disagree with a method in another part. That’s okay. The one does not invalidate the other. If you can find value, take that value. Leave what isn’t for you.
Dig in babes and as always come get me if you need another book. You’re doing great.
Alright - you ready for a book list?? (not even close to comprehensive)
Non-fiction not mentioned in the earlier parts of this post -
Grief is for People, by Sloane Crosley - she loses her best friend from suicide and is robbed within a month. Short and compelling and gorgeous exploration of loss, friendship, finding and keeping meaning in really tough parts of life.
There’s Always This Year : On Basketball and Ascension, by Hanif Abduraqib - y’all if I could I would mail Hanif’s work to each one of you. His books make me feel blessed to be alive at the same time as he is, and to be made of incredible things. My soul buzzes when I listen to him explain community, glory, the flight of Michael Jordan’s eternal dunk, and I always feel noticeably improved in my being after I read Hanif.
Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti - I’m going to write an entire thing about this book. It is fascinating to me from a literature point of view, from a journaling point of view, from a self development point of view, and more. Heti kept diaries for 10 years, put the sentences into an excel and then alphabetized the sentences. Each letter gets a chapter. The sentences within each chapter are alphabetized. They cover the span of 10 years. Repetition of phrases, people, words, ideas is so interesting in this book and made me contemplate the repeating themes that might exist in my life. When the sentences start out I am for 10 sentences it makes you as reader wonder what you are. And with all the 10 years being organized with no relation to the next sentence to sentence - kindof the opposite of how we derive meaning from a story - it does fascinating things.
Splinters : Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison - Incredible telling of the dissolving of a relationship. Reading this helped me understand and have compassion for myself (past and present), as well as for Jamison’s experience. In observing the telling of a relationship’s end I have found a lot of help and understanding that is useful when I then consider what happened to mine. Jamison is also brilliant and honest and it’s an excellent work.
The Ends of the World : Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and the Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen - BUT MARIAN WHY WOULD YOU RECOMMEND A BOOK ABOUT APOCALYPSES IN THIS ECONOMY?! and to that I say I hear you, my friend, and still - this book is a monumental one for me. It gives a hopeful consideration of our brief brief brief existence in relation to the entire world and the universe around us, and looks right into the heart of the fact of our temporary existence but enduring cells of energy and I find that incredibly inspiring. You don’t have to be a science person to read this. It flows. The end of it devastated me in the best ways. I exist, you exist, we exist, but not forever. Go do the thing now, and look at the world while you do it. Wrote about it here.
I’ll Show Myself Out : Essays on Midlife and Motherhood, by Jessi Klein - I don’t like books about being a mom. I am one, but I don’t need to read blog after blog and think piece after think piece about the hellscape of the parking lot or the ins and outs of the pta or whatever the hell. HOWEVER. This book is the type of conversation I want to have and listen to about motherhood. It is tricky and messy and hard and the best thing I’ve ever done. I love how Jessi writes about it and felt held and seen by her reflections here. Highly recommend if you have children. I wrote about it here.
The Diaries of David Sedaris - Say what you will about him but what I appreciate is his absolute honesty about his actions, his feelings, his thoughts, his decisions, and his life. He says the thing directly and concisely. Sometimes maybe he shouldn’t say it all, but he has an honesty and self-acceptance that I have learned from and found valuable.
This one chapter (you can read it there on instagram) in this Jomny Sun book where he writes a ranking of the last 15 minutes of the world. In a couple of pages this manages to solidify everything important. I think of it often. It’s singular, heartbreaking, and so clever.
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and From Here to Eternity, all by Caitlin Doughty - death is the one thing every single person does. The only thing we all have no choice about. I think it’s fascinating. The way death is discussed, dealt with, not talked about or dealt with, the actual process of what happens, what could happen, and what someone like Doughty thinks about having been around death and its treatments for so long. Often, at least to me, a lot of the things I learn about myself and what I want from life are considering what I want from death and the spaces that are in the in between of it.
Endurance : Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing - One thing about me is I love (respectfully, this was a terrible incident but I still enjoy as in to find edifying and of great interest, learning about this particular type of thing) dudes getting lost in boats in cold places and overcoming great disasters full of heart and intense elemental odds. This is an incredibly well written and fascinating account, with journal entries and things from the crew as well, of Shackleton, who in 1914 decided he wanted to go to Antarctica and walk across it. So off he went to do that. They got stuck in ice just a day from their destination and then had to cross something like 850 miles of insane intense seas. AND IT WAS SO COLD. I think about this whenever I’m cold. Incredible truly. Might reread this one.
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth : What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything, by Colonel Chris Hadfield - Another thing about me is I love a book about space and people who have been to space and who want to be in space, I think it is the coolest thing I will never do. To be out among the everything else. There’s a few parts of this book that I appreciated a lot, aside from the space is cool and interesting. In their training they practice for every scenatio so much that when an emergency happens, it’s just going through the steps of whatever scenario is happening in order to solve it. Steps. Repetition that builds competence and skill and calm surety. Love that. Another part is when he talks about being a zero. In that when you enter a new situation you’re not going to be a negative and detract anything from the situation. And on the opposite side of things you don’t want to lead with ego. Being a zero, as he puts it, is coming in neutral in order to do your own observing, to contribute where you can, to learn where you can, and be of value where you can. I like that.
Furiously Happy : A Funny Book About Horrible Things, by Jenny Lawson - I read this one several years ago but it was a helpful one to me at the time. Lawson has had some challenges to her mental health that she reflects on with transparency and an openness that I appreciated. I loved a line from this book that she had decided to be furiously happy out of spite, if nothing else. Something like that. I liked that focus on the self cultivation of happiness. When I read this one I was having a lot of difficulties engaging with the outside world, much more than I do now. It was much stickier in my brain, I was still married I think when I read this, and it helped to see that Lawson had a relationship that was supportive of her and that none of her areas of difficulty were too much for her relationship. I needed to see that. To see what it looked like for someone to have their inside self held and cared about by another. Anyway, if you’re starting out in the journey of feeling like there’s differences and things you struggle with socially, with having enough mental energy, I really like this one for a perspective, another story about things like that, and I find it to be an engaging entry point to discussions of mental health improvement and self growth journeys.
Some of the fiction that I have found helpful -
Liars, by Sarah Manguso - This is about a woman chronicling the entirety of her relationship. How it started, solidified, how they moved and grew together and apart, how it grew toxic, unbearable, how they split, how they managed as coparents and how she works it out with herself. I found it helpful because it mimics a lot of the patterns I found myself in over the course of my relationship. Especially the parts where she reintroduces herself and how long she’s been married and every time she does it during the narrative it feels like she is trying to get a handle on her situation, lay it out fresh, and try her best to figure it out before it changes again. It isn’t a quick read or super thrilling but it had me riveted because it was so similar to what I went through, how I felt, even in the timeline, it was helpful, even from a fictional character to see something so similar to what I felt and lived laid out in well written full sentences..
Acts of Service, by Lillian Fishman - This book is about sex. Straight up. It’s about a woman navigating a sexual relationship and the emotions, feelings, and all the rest, that goes into that. The hook with this one, the boy she’s seeing also has a girlfriend. It’s not necessarily a book about a throuple or threesomes, more like it’s about how the complex melty feelings of desire and fondness don’t stay tidy, don’t stay strictly where you’d like them, don’t listen to reason, and I found it to be really well done. It’s not smut. It’s not heavily plotted. It felt, when I read it, like an intellectual-ish exploration of the degrees and consequences of our desires. How to we love, how to we feel loved, how does that kaleidoscope around with wanting someone physically and how do both those things melt with and infect or enhance our states of arousal. Why is it here in this list of fictional books I’ve found helpful? Good question. Simply put it was helpful to have a skilled author say, lets look at this sexual possibility and the feelings that go with it, what might that be like? and I, a former mormon good girl without much of an understanding of healthy relationships at all, could watch this woman make choices, explore and try things, think critically about her selfish needs, how she impacted people with her decisions, how her physical wants impacted her feelings, it was really interesting.
The Agatha Raisin series, by M.C. Beaton - I binge listened to this series and did puzzles when things were really tough at home. For months I listened to this bossy woman solve neighborhood murders in the Cotswolds. There’s nothing really remarkable about it, it’s a cozy mystery series, but at the time it was what I needed - an easy plot of someone dealing with ridiculous circumstances far from my own, that would entertain me while I decompressed from making it through the day. It was a tough time. I think there’s like 35 of these books and M.C. Beaton has died in recent years, but someone else is writing in her place, so Agatha continues. After about 25 of them I could feel that I didn’t need Agatha as much anymore. I was happier to stay in my own life and my own reality, and I haven’t done a puzzle in a long time either. I don’t really use books as a way to escape my real life anymore. I don’t need to disappear someplace else to recharge anymore. It’s nice to know that. I appreciate that books have helped me to get through the times when I needed safe places. Even if those safe places were ones filled with murdered villagers of an English country town I’ve never been to.
The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind - These books are so important to me. At the recommendation of one of my closest friends I picked them up and binge read them, as much you can binge read a massive series thats like 700 - 1,000 pages each book. By the time I was at the end of the first range of the series, and then read the 3 or 4 that followed these characters were real to me, the world they live in was real to me. In each of these books the main character learns a massive lesson really intensely, but for me it was never heavy handed or didactic or preachy, it’s just this character on his hero’s journey to save the world, learn his skills, and be able to have a life with the woman he loves. By the way, I buried the lead here, he’s a wizard and she’s an incredibly powerful lady and reading about them restructured my entire theories of love. It’s not for everyone, but it was incredible to me. It was both an escape and a learning experience.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher - My dog, Harry, is named after this fictional wizard named Harry, not the other one. I love Harry Dresden. The audiobooks of this series specifically, are incredible. I was able to binge them, then the most recent two came out at just the right time, I reread the whole thing, and then the last two twice over. Butcher is such a fun writer. This book is on this list because it helped me have fun again, to lean into something nerdy as hell - Harry is a wizard detective in Chicago that helps solve paranormal crime and is damn good at it and so so competent and hot about it imo - and I love them. Harry Dresden is a comfort read to me. It’s nerdy and fun and dark almost urban noir dramatic and he always tries to do the right thing it’s so noble and endearing. It’s weird to say a Chicago based wizard helped me start having fun again but this one really did.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I remember reading this while I was in high school, at a church Christmas choir practice I didn’t want to sing for, and being floored by the sentences Tolstoy was writing. I don’t barely even remember the specifics of it all and want to reread it to see what I feel about it at this time in my life, but it leveled me up to read this when I did. One of the most impactful things, to feel the words someone else writes hit so tough. One of those first moments where I felt that soul glow type of connection to a thing that resonated with what I wanted most in my life. Good words, good sentences that prompt feeling, that’s important to me.
Muriel Barberry has two books I think about a lot. The first I read is a little cliche to some folks but I found it to be utterly wonderful. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about some folks in an apartment building and the lives they’re living inside of the lives people see. We read the perspective of the landlady who puts on an expected facade of incompetence, invisibility, and generic flatness so people won’t bother her and she won’t be disappointed again when they judge her appearance before getting to know her. In reality she’s actually competent, intelligence, and quick. One day someone moves in who can tell she is more than she seems. Their relationship blooms and I found that aspect charming. The other perspective is that of a teen who’s family is rather lame, and she really doesn’t want to be alive anymore. She has a plan, and an intention, but wants to give the universe another chance so she starts to keep track of moments of beauty, deciding that if she can find enough reasons and figure out what beauty actually is, then she’ll stay. Eventually she comes up with this, while watching a rose petal fall off a rose and onto the tabletop, that beauty is an always within a never. I love that. It makes total sense to me. A moment is beautiful because it is a moment, and it’s like an infinite temporary thing. Permanent in memory, temporary in reality. It was significant to me to read that. The other book of hers is about a chef who is dying, craving a flavor he cannot identify. It takes place before the hedgehog, but I read it second and that really doesn’t matter. What I liked so much about it is the memories this dying man goes over as he’s searching for the flacor he wants to experience again before death. There’s a few things I miss like that already. It’s an interesting way to identify what’s meaningful. To remember flavors and the people and memories attached to them. The cafe’s of decades ago that are closed or from a place you might not get back to, from other countries, it’s just another reminder that savoring what’s good when it happens is important.
There’s an infinite more but this is the handful for now that I felt like sharing.
Thanks for being here - I appreciate your eyes on this very much.
xx-Marian