It’s July! July is usually my favorite month. I swear, that’s not just because it’s my birthday month, though that helps. It’s also usually vacation month, and the days are long and warm and sunny. Summer is definitely my season, and this July I have three separate trips planned! Okay, one is for work, but I’m also going to a wedding and on a writing retreat. July rules.

Of course, July means pride month just ended… but if you want a little more Pride, I was back on Superhero Ethics to talk about the 2014 movie.

One more link before the meat of the newsletter: A GoFundMe for my friend Celeste. If, over the last ten years of political bullshit, you’ve run into graphics with call scripts for contacting your reps, there’s a very good chance they were from her. She’s given so much time and energy to helping people, but the last few years have put her through the wringer of domestic violence, laws that penalized her as a victim of DV (which she’s now working to reform), a reduction-in-force layoff, and now health challenges. If you can spare a few bucks, she could really use a hand.

Where I’m At

I feel like one of the internet’s favorite topics is: How Can I Read More??? (With subtext of: I used to read more, what happened? And also, Is reading the cure to brain rot?? Can reading more get me off my phone a little???) Here’s an article that’s been making the rounds; here’s another one riffing off it. This is a pretty typical booktube take on it. Here’s a non-book-centric youtuber’s thoughts, too. (I don’t do TikTok so can only assume that the BookTokers are all over this, too.) So while I’m sure I keep running into this conversation because I follow a lot of people who care about books and reading, I also think it’s something a lot of people wonder about.

I have many miscellaneous thoughts on all of this. Sadly, none of them are a how-to for reading more, because I don’t read more. I read about thirty books a year, usually, but also always feel like That’s Not Enough!! I Should Read More!! But honestly? I probably won’t, and that’s fine.

Anyway, here are my current Thoughts On Reading For People Who Think They Should Read More.

First off: even if you feel like you don’t read enough, you probably do. I mean, “enough” is not a particularly helpful, quantifiable thing, so unless you’ve got a job that requires a super high annual book count the whole concern is a little silly. But if you, like me, hang out with a highly literate crowd, who do all read more than you do so you feel like you’re way behind, it may help to remember that the median number of books read each year by adults in the US is… two. Forty percent of US adults read zero books. (Source.) So don’t let the booktubers with monthly reading wrap-ups of dozens of books fool you: If you read even a single book, you’re doing just fine.

Except, let’s dig into that, too, because if you don’t read? You’re probably also doing fine. Reading rules!! You’re currently reading an author newsletter; you don’t need me to convince you of that. Goodness knows, I would like for everyone to read more, specifically, read my books and my friends’ books.

But also, it might also help to remember that reading is a morally neutral act. It is one form of entertainment and one way of taking in information. That doesn’t make it inherently superior to other ways of doing those things. (Asterisk.) Reading is a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a good person, and not reading a ton of books every year does not make you a bad person. We’re not living in a perpetual English class where we’re going to be given a test. Reading more books is not actually a requirement, so it’s okay to cut yourself some slack.

That asterisk, though: in a world where advertisements and misinformation are everywhere, and AI slop is ruining everything, I do think books are a bulwark against all of that. They’re not full of ads, most authors are horrified at the idea of AI anywhere near their books, and misinformation… well, books have always had some of that, but at least books require someone to have sat down and thought about it, tried to make a coherent argument of it, even if they’re wrong.

So, with all of that said, if reading is basically a neutral act, why do so many of us feel like failures because we think we don’t read enough? Because if the plethora of “how to read more” articles means anything, it’s that I’m not alone in this nebulous feeling.

I think it comes down to a few things. Reading might be a neutral act, but Being A Reader is a cultural thing. We think of reading as a thing smart people do, and most of us would like to feel that we’re smart people! It’s also an identity thing. Many of us were big readers when we were kids, we have the feeling that’s part of who we are and how we’re supposed to be, so feeling like we don’t read enough — whatever the hell “enough” means — feels like a loss of who we are, or a betrayal. I won sooooo many personal pan pizzas for my summer reading in elementary school, why is picking up a book now such a struggle sometimes?

I have a theory on that. It is not that no one is bribing you with pizza, though if that sounds like it would work, go ahead and buy yourself some. You’re a grown up, you’re allowed. But that’s it, that’s the theory: you’re a grown up.

Supported by no scientific evidence whatsoever I’m going to say, being an adult is harder than being a kid. You have a job. You have bills and rent or a mortgage. You have social and familial obligations; perhaps you even have kids of your own. The world is kind of a shitshow. You’re probably at least a little burnt out, because who isn’t? Especially if you’re old enough to remember those personal pan pizza rewards.

Reading takes a certain amount of brain power. For some people, using that brain power remains pretty easy — picking up a book feels easier than picking out a show on Netflix — but for a lot of us, it’s not. You’re tired and if it’s a choice between a book, which requires concentration and thought, and a nine-hour youtube video about a TV show you never watched much of because you actively disliked it but that you can kinda-sorta listen to while you scroll on your phone or make dinner… Well, one of those things feels easier on your brain and you probably don’t pick up a book, even though you really really meant to.

(Yes, that was a real video. I did not watch nine hours in a row, but I did watch the whole thing. No, it wasn’t worth it.)

Not to mention the question of attention span. That’s another thing that a lot of the youtubers I follow obsess over — what happened to our attention spans?! (Phones.) How can we get them back?! (Less phone.) I don’t have much novel to say here, either, but if your attention span feels frayed, that likely also contributes to making reading more difficult, since it does require a bit of focus.

To sum up: you don’t read as much as you think you should, because reading feels hard, and your day was already hard, so you do something easier. Honestly? That’s okay. It is.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t read more. Like I said, I always want to — I feel like as an author, it’s my job to read a lot in my genre, and also read plenty outside of it. I do want to be smart and thoughtful, and I think reading helps with those things. I also admire and am a little jealous of people who read a hundred or more books per year. I wish that was me!

But it’s not, and feeling bad about that does not actually motivate me to read more, it just makes me feel bad. So I’m trying to be zen, and forget the idea of “should”. Instead of dwelling on reading more, I’m working on reading more consistently — and engaging more deeply with books when I do.

But given how long this ramble is, that will have to be another newsletter for another month…

A Thing I Made

I made a bowl. Well, I made a bunch of bowls over the first half of the year, practicing to make a yarn bowl. This was a practice piece that turned out mostly round and reasonably sized so I decided to finish it up, but since I wasn’t making it as a gift for anyone I decided to grab underglazes and play for a bit.

I’m not a painter. These flowers are barely flowers. But they do look a lot like what I used to doodle in my notebooks in high school, which was the goal. I also loved playing with different greens for the grass and how wild it turned out. And I continue to love the speckles in this brown clay!

Something I’m Enjoying

I’ve never read anything quite like The City in Glass, a novella by Nghi Vo.

I am on the record as someone who mostly reads for plot. I love a good, pace-y novel in almost any genre. It makes me feel like a philistine to say this, but: beautiful prose is usually lost on me, and books that are mostly vibes and less story tend to bore me.

And yet! The City in Glass is almost entirely beautiful prose and vibes and I could not put it down. It is the story of a demon who loves a city, and an angel who loves the demon. It is about building back up out of destruction. It plays with the immortality of characters in a way I’ve never seen done before.

More than anything, it is a love letter to cities. To how people make a city, how a city is unique, how cultures clash and develop into something new. The demon at the center for the book loves her city, and I love her fictional city, and also the book reminds me of just how much I love my real city,with all of its flaws and quirks and triumphs.

This is an absolute gem of a book packed into 200 pages. Please read it.