What I Read This Week, 9.12.25

From Swan Song to Mahjong: the messy, real log of what I actually read

What I Read This Week

I love nothing more than a “what I wore this week” post, especially if it includes the otherwise clothing-besotted and stylish human also wearing a sweatshirt to do something for which there really is no other reasonable clothing (if you’re not too sweaty to put on a cashmere sweater or blazer after your workout without showering… you didn’t do Inferno Hot Pilates, anyway.)

And I get a lot of “you read so much, howwwww,” so I thought I would try adding What I Read This Week—and when and how—to the rotation. This will reveal that sometimes I tell you about books I read a while ago because I accidently read nothing but Substacks with titles like “What I Wore This Week,” but so be it.

This space will be for magazines and books. I read the (parts of) NYT, the WSJ, the Upper Valley News and Daybreak every day. I’m informed!

I know, this is a picture of the WSJ Style section. I read that too.

Friday, 9.12.25

3 pm: I’ve decided, no more browsing on my phone at lunch, because I don’t think I’m cut out to alternate between global horrors and ads for perfect travel pants with the flick of a finger while eating gazpacho.

Therefore, it’s me and this issue of The New Yorker at the counter with my lunch donut. (listen, you eat your lunch and I’ll eat mine) and when I’m done eating it’s not that hard to put it away. I like Patricia Marx a lot, but I think she intentionally chose silly B-list AIs to write about forming parasocial relationships with bots (What My A.I. Boyfriends Think of Me,) and I’m kind of disappointed. Ian Frazier is in fine form, though (A Round of Gulf?).

Bedtime: I read three chapters of Swan Song, Elin Hilderbrand, and… this is going back to the library. I bet if you’ve read all her books it’s FULL of Easter eggs, and maybe I would have loved it in June but oh well.

Saturday, 9.13.25

Noon: I’m back with my New Yorker. I already listen, sometimes, to Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast, so I gobble up: An Unrepressed Podcast Hosted by Freud’s Great-Granddaughter. I’ve heard the episodes they reference, which makes me feel cool. Also did not know she was the older sister in Hideous Kinky.

11 pm: I have a problem, which is that it is 11 pm, and I want to read before bed, and I am 2/3 into The Correspondent, and halfway through The Summer Guests, and either is impossible to pick up and not finish and also impossoible to finish unless I want to stay up well after midnight. I’m also partly into a re-read of Four Thousand Weeks, but I am book-clubbing that with my oldest son and I am not sure where he is. Plus, it really won’t help me go to sleep, because I’m annotating. So I need another book. Something engrossing but also, not. I decide to start Monica Dickens’ Mariana. Monica Dickens is Charles Dickens’ granddaughter, so it seems fitting to go along with the whole Freud thing.

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Sunday, 9.14

Lunch: The WSJ’s Style section.

Bedtime: I started The Carpool Detectives on my Kindle and promptly forgot I was reading it until right now looking at the picture and preparing this post. I don’t think that’s a judgment on the book—I’ll let you know. (It’s nonfiction!)

Monday, 9.15

Lunch: Truly I don’t want to read fiction in the middle of the day unless my day is over, so I open Best Laid Plans, which I blurbed and which I’ll tell you more about in December when it comes out but besides being about planning (a) I love planning and b) I really need to get better at doing it at the right times and also actually looking at the resulting plans, which is what this is about) it’s also a total GLIMPSE INTO SOMEONE ELSE’S MIND, which I also love. I learn things about hair straightening and discover that even super-organized people aren’t necessarily super financially conscious. (Unlike me, who spends a ridiculous amount of time thinking about how the characters in my books would get health insurance).

Bedtime: I wanted to get back to The Correspondent, but in my excited rush to do more things in person (see also: less scrolling), I signed up for Mahjong Monday at the library. Sarina and I showed up to find two tables of happy competent women who were kind but a little nonplussed by the appearance of two newbies who’s previous knowledge consisted entirely of “there are tiles? Also Crazy Rich Asians?” Anyway, turns out Mahjong Monday is an all afternoon (fun, more about that later) commitment. So I end up finishing my word count at about 9:30 pm, and my bedtime reading consisted of a few chapters of Mariana again.

Tuesday 9.16

Breakfast (As you’ve gathered breakfast doesn’t happen every day and also it could happen at any time but I wrote a note that called this breakfast so we are rolling with it.): Hello I am a serial obsessor and I really liked Mahjong Monday, so For breakfast, not strolling on my phone reading I chose a few pages of a beginners guide to American Mahjong by Elaine Sandberg .

Lunch, which I had about 7 minutes for, was more Mahjong. I am scintillating.

Bedtime: Back to Marianna. What can I say, it’s just sort of mildly interesting enough to keep me turning pages but make it easy to turn off the light.

Wednesday, 9.17

Breakfast: I start off texting with a friend, which makes just shifting over to Substack awfully tempting, but the The Atlantic is right there, mostly because I eat lunch where we dump our mail. I struggle with a piece about recent government firings—You Deserved Better—because didn’t I say this was reading time, not news time? But it felt like the kind of thing I want to read—thoughtful, reasoned, critical but not partisan (the writer had served over the past 6 administrations.

I finished it feeling like my mind had been both stretched, and also somewhat soothed, because it wasn’t shouting, but constructively critical. I wasn’t sorry to move on but then I hit Jill Lepore’s article on why the Constitution was made to be revised—How Originalism Killed the Constitution—and… I am going to need a less politically facing magazine.

Bedtime: I’ll say this about Mariana: you can tell it is an older book written in an age of better attention spans, because it has about 47 bajillion characters all with vaguely similar upper class Brit names and the protagonist—presumably Mariana—has been referred to as both Mary and Maria. It’s ok, I can figure it out, don’t panic—but I guarantee today’s editors would be all “no one will understand it’s the same person you cannot do that!”

Thursday 9.18

Lunch: I went back to the Atlantic, but skipped some uninteresting or overwhelming. bits in favor of the book section where I made it about 2/3 of the way through Is This the End of the Dictionary by Stefan Fais. Now I’m contemplating all the ways that our online lives including this thing I’m writing now are destroying/altering things I’ve loved and that have shaped me like dictionaries and encyclopedia and newspapers. Is it a little depressing? Yes. Is it topical and kind of newsy? Also, yes. Is it better than the latest hot takes on whatever thing people are hot taking on at the moment that you’re raising that reading this? I would argue yes.

Bedtime: Are you bored of Mariana yet? Because I am. I knew she wouldn’t marry the cousin she’s besotted with for the first half of the book (the book starts with her as a married adult with a husband away in WWII on a boat that’s been hit, waiting for news). Now she’s wandered off to drama school and… she’s such a wet noodle, this character, she doesn’t fully actually DO anything, she wastes every opportunity, she wanders around thinking what she really needs is a man to love (presumably she gets one soon)… maybe that’s the point. I’m in it now and it makes good bedtime reading, and this little bookstore/publisher I love (see below) thought it was worth reprinting and I liked Dickens’ other book (One Pair of Hands, she probably has others too)… so I will carry on. Slowly. Oh and also Mariana is the name of a poem she recited badly at the drama school, not her name. I guess I should go back and read it and figure out what the point is but WHAT IS THIS ENGLISH CLASS?

Oh man I’m clearly a much worse and less educated reader than the average Brit of the 1950s, because this was quite popular.

That was my week. Are you thinking HOW DOES SHE EVER FINISH ANYTHING I’ll tell you it was not a good week for reading, and now I’m going into a traveling weekend and I only brought the Kindle (and I might start To the River and Back instead of carrying on with The Carpool Detectives) but I will put a solid bet on my finishing The Correspondent Sunday night and then you will hear about it, because I adore it. And maybe next week will be better. Probably. (I spent a lot of evening time trying to figure out American Mahjong…)

What’s your current ‘Mariana’—the book you keep reading even though you’re not sure why?