I've been reading slower this year. Not by design — my reading was never fast — but with more care, finishing fewer books and staying with each longer. A friend asked me for recommendations recently and I realized my list didn't include anything new or buzzy. Which is probably the point of the list. Here it is.
1. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
Reread, for the third time. The first time I read this I was twenty-one and I loved it in the way you love books at twenty-one, which is to say I underlined too much and misread several important paragraphs. The third reading is the best. Dillard is walking around a creek in Virginia looking at small things, and the looking itself is what the book is about.
It's the kind of book you can open to any page and find something worth stopping for. I keep it near the bed. When I can't sleep I read two pages and usually either fall asleep or get up to write.
2. A Month in the Country — J. L. Carr
A novel so short you could read it in a long afternoon, and so quiet you'll be thinking about it for weeks. An ex-soldier spends a summer in a Yorkshire village restoring a medieval fresco in a small church. Very little happens. Everything happens.
This is one of the few books I've read that treats peace as a serious subject. Most novels need conflict to move — this one is interested in the opposite. The book is about what it is to be fully present in a place, briefly, knowing you'll have to leave.
If you've read A Month in the Country and wanted more of that register, try Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, which does something similar with a narrower subject. English, quiet, devastating when you're not looking.
3. The Four Seasons — Jane Hirshfield (ed.)
A slim collection of haiku and tanka by classical Japanese poets, arranged by season. I have been reading this in very small doses — two or three poems a morning — for about half a year, and I'm not done.
What these forms do, that almost nothing else does, is reward stillness. A haiku in a rush is just a fact. A haiku read carefully, at the right pace, is something else. I don't know how to describe it except to say that I've started looking at my own garden differently since I started reading these. The book is training me to see.
4. Essays in Love — Alain de Botton
I've put this one on every reading list I've ever made. It's a novel disguised as essays (or essays disguised as a novel, depending on your mood). De Botton takes apart the experience of falling in love, being in love, and falling out of love with the precision of someone who is genuinely astonished by how strange all of it is.
It is a funny book in ways that are hard to predict. It is also, in places, piercingly honest about the small embarrassments of loving another person and being loved by them. I reread parts of it every year. It keeps working.
What these books have in common
None of them are fast. None of them are about a lot. They ask for a different kind of attention than most contemporary books ask for — the kind that doesn't pay off in summary but accumulates in the reading.
That's mostly what I'm reading for these days. Not information. Not plot. Not to be impressed. Just a good writer paying careful attention to something, and letting me come along.
If you have one like this to recommend, I'm always looking. Write to me. Tell me about the quiet book on your nightstand.