—from Vulture
If I see a Rolls-Royce in the world, I’ll tailgate or I won’t let them in because it’s such an ostentatious display of wealth; I feel like talking publicly about your own reading habits is a slightly less gauche version but still in the category of the person having the Rolls-Royce. To have a life that allows me to read in this way is such a function of the fact that I’ve been lucky and have time and enough money that I’m not panicking constantly.
I try to wake up and walk to this coffee shop near my house and read before I look at my phone, which I leave at home. I do that because I have no self-discipline and it’s easier to have one moment of self-discipline than endless moments of self-discipline. I like being around strangers. It’s comforting and diverting in a way that doesn’t make it impossible to read, but when you want to break from the fictional characters or the world, it’s nice to be able to look up and see a separate circus going on around you.
Right now I’m obsessed with Yiyun Li. I’ve never read anyone like her. I get scared to summarize her books because I don’t want to blaspheme her precision. She’s been through such unbelievable agony and has communicated it with such clarity. I find the act of doing that to be so hopeful and affirmative, even though so much of what she talks about is grotesque in its pain. I looked up the other day to see if she teaches any adult-ed classes at Princeton because I was like, I wonder if I could go and take one. I have Beatlemania for Yiyun Li, which is insane.
At home, I read wherever the maximum number of people will see me so that I can have a smug sense of superiority. I read in my bed before falling asleep sometimes. I read when I feel frightened or disconnected from myself. The most consistent thing is a desire to feel like I exist in my own life, which is a little bit of a paradoxical way of going about it, to enter into a fictional world where you don’t exist at all.