One of my oldest, most abiding joys: the privacy of reading. Locking myself in a bathroom with a pilfered book, or staying up past my bedtime with a flashlight under the covers to finish whatever was better than sleep.
I love reading a good book and—not more than or as much so much as as a part of that—I love not telling anyone about it. Not at first anyway, not right away, not everybody. In the morning I’ll tell Elisa. If the book has been good in a way that upsets me, maybe I’ll text her (“omg”).
One challenge of my constraint—to document only moments of pleasure—is that so few moments are of pleasure only. I can’t tell you how much I savor the intimacy I find in books without mentioning that these days it can feel like a defect. Everyone’s an evangelist for what they like, book people especially, and so I experience my desire not to share as a kind of failure of duty. It isn’t a hoarding impulse, though. I’ll tell all my friends who read (most but not all of my friends), when I talk to them, you have to read this book.
I want to protect my love for the book from my declaration of love for the book, from the performance you cannot get outside of when you say something in public (online). It doesn’t matter how much I mean it there—or it does, still, but it also matters what it means to say it, and to whom it matters, and why I have been moved to say it to nobody and everyone. And that has nothing to do with why I have ever loved any of the books I love most.
I realize that I’ve been saying “books” when what I mean is “novels,” an inversion of my students’ tendency. I wonder what that means.
But I meant to tell you about something that felt good:
Finishing Tristan Garcia’s Hate: A Romance (in French, La meilleure part des hommes) in an almost-empty car of the L train, in December, when I am twenty and drunk and on my way home from some DIY venue in Bushwick, probably, as was my wont in that life, which feels former. I cried and cried so hard I convulsed and could not stop—like a crazy person, I thought the only other person in the car must have thought of me. Which I more or less was then.
It did feel good: to cry that way, to be witnessed. Involuntarily and, in that way, ingenuously.
What was I trying to tell people once, with my books and my love of them? What did books—not the category, but the best of it—make me think I no longer needed from the people outside of them?