A Year in Reading: Merve Emre
I have a hard time remembering the books I have read without also remembering who I have read them with or where. Increasingly, since so much of my reading is done out loud to my children, it seems natural to me that all reading should be shared reading of one sort or another. Sifting through text messages, chats, emails, and the letters and envelopes scattered around my office, I have pieced together a calendar of the books I have read and the people who made them matter.
January, February: , “stories that show how the momentary convergence of yearning and surrender can make time hang still,” I shout first at Stephanie, then at the bartender serving us, before putting the thought in ; ’s ,, and (“one of the best novels of the twentieth century,” Len writes to me after reading a draft of )—novels built out of beautifully Brechtian tableaux. My calendar reminds me that most of February was spent at festivals and talks, reading on freezing trains. On a train to Harrogate: ’s , which features an old lady giving an old man a hand job beat out to a Nazi alphabet primer. On a train to Cambridge: ’s , the best anatomization of how one person can, , and for . On a flight to Glasgow, ’s , about an inexperienced, neurotic, young man seduced by a wry, charismatic, older woman.
