Unreadable, Un-quit-able, and Everything In Between

What I Read This Week 9.26.25

I could tell you what I WORE this week (a friend told me recently that my clothes were the most unexpected thing about me which I think is … good?). But no! This is #AmReading, not #AmWearing, so here, below, is what I really read this week and when and how and what I thought of it, and I will save the stories of how deeply convinced I am that this last second hand leather jacket find will change my life and mean I never ever have to buy another for another time.

Settle in! I HAD THOUGHTS.

Friday 9.18 NYC

Bedtime: I’m about to open up my Kindle and start the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir, All the Way to the River. Some thoughts before I jump in.. I have some trepidation about this. I admire much about Liz Gilbert. I read Eat Pray Love more than once, for the sheer openness of the voice, the way it felt unedited. I read and listened to Big Magic, many more times… but also, I always pause at the line where she says “I am not a person who seeks drama” and think, oh, honey.

That line is one of the things that taught me that usually, when a person says “I am someone who…” or “I am not someone who”… they’re lying. To you but mostly, to themselves. I now see Liz Gilbert as a person who knows a lot about what she feels but not a lot about who she is, and remarkably little about anyone who might see the world differently… a little ironic, since what I seek from her writing is exactly that, a chance to see the world through different eyes. Maybe this book is her coming to understand herself better… that seems to be always the goal… I’m interested to see if she’s come closer. To me, at least.

Saturday 9.19 NYC

Bedtime: 4 chapters in, and Liz Gilbert is unreadable. For me. I’m not sure what more I want to say…it’s a full throated expression of her truth, the way she sees herself, her relationship, the people around her, her wife—now dead of cancer and addiction—in particular. I found myself questioning whether it was the truth. Maybe there isn’t one here. But mostly it all felt more than a little vampiric, and I feel that the time for me to learn from this author is over.

I should have known. Oh well.

Sunday 9.20 HOME

Evening: I finished The Correspondent! Good stuff, kids. More here:

Just One Book: The Correspondent

Monday 9.21

Bedtime: I am still reading Mariana.

Truly, I am so tired of Mary or Marie or Mariana or whatever her name is. For one exciting moment tonight, it appeared that she was going to pull her head out of her ass and actually do something. She went to Paris and enrolled in dressmaking school so she could work with her mother who runs a dress shop, but now she has met a man.

This is clearly not the man that she is married to in the beginning of this book because he is French, and that man was fighting in the British Navy, and also because you can just tell Pierre is not a navy kind of guy. We only have about another quarter of this book to go to go and she still has to extract herself from this mistaken engagement and meet whoever our hero is at the end. Granted, a quarter of this book, which is fat and old school, is about 100 pages. Plenty of time for another writer to make this happen, but I am losing faith in this one..

Why am I still reading? Y’all KNOW I am a ruthless DNF-er. I don’t know, because it definitely doesn’t keep me awake? Because I really don’t have to pay attention because everything takes so incredibly long to happen and because I have an abiding affection for this particular time? I’ve read everything Angela Thirkell ever wrote and loved all of it, and this is kind of like a pale shadow. I can see how someone who read this as a teenager might’ve been enchanted and I’m sure that’s why it ended up on the reprint list… but I’m just kind of in this because everything else on my bedtable feels hard.

Tuesday 9.22.25

Lunch reading so far this week has consisted entirely of texting and work emails and I regret it. Meanwhile, this should be my evening reading time but as you can see in the above photo I am stuck. I failed to get a book before I sat down and now I am trapped I guess I am meditating.

After he got up I managed to read the first 4 chapters of The Road to Tender Hearts. So far, so good. Although also what is it with the old curmudgeons turn soft books? I do love them, but also I’m starting to feel just the tiniest bit curmudgeonly myself. I bet this one is a little off the beaten path though. Or maybe a lot. (My latest curmudgeon read, below.)

If you're low and in need of fun...

Weds 9.23.25

Bedtime: I meant to read The Road to Tender Hearts. I sat here with The Road to Tender Hearts next to me, and I played a game of online Mahjongg, which took a while cause I am not very good, and then I considered the book again and, I don’t know, somehow as much as I was enjoying it, it just felt like a lot. Like really a lot, to go into that world. Where things were happening and people were intense. And so I picked up my phone, and sort of inevitably ended up acquiring one tote bag secondhand that encompasses my entire personality (you’ll have to wait for a picture when it arrives) and a pair of allegedly extremely packable comfortable sneakers that will definitely solve all of my packing problems for now and forever unto eternity. Now it’s bedtime and I am not nearly as relaxed as I was earlier. So I will read… something.

You knew it would be Mariana, didn’t you? There is something wrong with me.

Thursday 9.24.25

Bedtime: More Mariana and… we have met our hero! With about 60 pages to go. He is quite nice and I am hoping he doesn’t turn out to be dead at the end of the book (I’m betting on him.)

The whole thing made me remember all the books of this time period I devoured as a teenager and young adult. I mentioned Thirkell, but really you name it and I read it, including all the murder mysteries by all the Queens of Crime, and I remember at some point wondering if that was really how it went, in England, that you met someone and liked them and they seemed suitable and 3 pages later they were proposing (I think it took 10 in Mariana). And then of course that was the end of the book.

It made a certain amount of sense in Austen, but these were later books, around the wars and after and yet, still, this seemed to be how it went. I must say I’m pretty sure Mary/Maria/etc had sex with Pierre, they were engaged and I’d put a pretty solid bet that if I were a reader of the time, I would have understood what was implied (another thing I’ve often wondered about many of these books… what am I missing that a contemporaneous reader would have understood?). But Hero and Heroine have exchanged but a chaste kiss before he’s declared his love.

Kids, I just looked and Monica Dickens wrote at least 50 books total. I may be mocking this one (mostly the heroine, not the work) but Monica is kind of my hero.

That… was this week! I’m off to visit family for the weekend and I have left Mariana behind, you will have to wait to hear how it all turns out. All I brought was my Kindle and I’ve forgotten what’s in it so that will be a fun surprise for us all.

Notable additions to the bedtable: The Secret of Secrets (my first Dan Brown, can you believe it?) and The Academy (I have some mixed feelings about this—written by Elin Hilderbrand and her daughter, who literally graduated from boarding school last year and apparently was willing to light a match to any bridges—but Anne Bogel said she liked it, so I’m giving it a shot.)

I’d ask you what to read in the Kindle, but like I said, it’s a lucky grab in there! I have faith that past me served up something good.

If it’s all quite disappointing (as Mariana would no doubt say) what should I download?

Until next week,