big winter book reveal

time moves in one direction and leaks and spills in many

In November 2020, a prison abolitionist I admire a lot tweeted something along the lines of “remember that the work that is most useful for you to do in your community is the same, no matter the result of the election.” This might sound like a balm, but I’m think she meant it as I took it: as a call to action to day-to-day keep doing the stuff you can do to make your community safer and more loving. The to-do, small and large, of how I can serve my community will be the same on November 6 as it was on November 4.

With that in mind, I spent part of my weekend volunteering with Books Through Bars, an organization that sends books to incarcerated people in the mid-Atlantic states. The times I have volunteered with this group have been some of my favorite weekends in the city and I value being able to use my librarian skillset to get books directly into the hands of people for whom a library is sometimes used as a means of surveillance and control.

Something you can do, today or tomorrow or whenever: purchase a book of Books Through Bars’ Bookshop.org Wishlist and email me the receipt and I will gift you a year’s paid subscription to Restorative Romance. Normally an annual subscription is $30 and many of the books on the list are below that cost. You’re getting a deal on my non-romance, romance series, supporting a local bookstore through Bookshop.org and putting the exact book that someone wants to read into their hands!

Something I’ve done for the past four reading years¹ of my life is read a big book in winter. This started when I read Middlemarch as a New Year’s resolution in 2017, primarily by listening to Juliet Nicholson read it on my three hour round trip driving commute from two different suburbs in Atlanta.² The next year I read Moby-Dick in the hospital in February, immediately after the Eagles won the Super Bowl. The hospitalization had more to do with the three-hour round trip commute than the Super Bowl.

Then I went to law school and lost the ability to finish a novel until I picked up my first romance novel in March 2021. After reading a couple hundred romance novels, I wanted to get back to what I consider my reading roots (Victorian novels), so in November 2022, I started Bleak House and stopped reading romance novels until I could finish it (January 2023). This past winter’s big book was War and Peace, which I started in November 2023 and finished in a pub in London in February 2024.

The pub where I finished War and Peace!

I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself this year to do this again. I’m 4/4 on life-changing bangers. One solution for this internal pressure could be releasing myself from the idea that I have to pick one big book to define my year. But that’s the whole thing I like about doing this. If I only spent time reading, I would be able to finish these books in a few days, maybe. But I have to do all the other stuff that makes up my life when I read a really long and tough book. This is a major appeal.

I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles dir. Chantal Ackermann at my parents’ house over Christmas the winter I was reading Bleak House. I meant to go see it in theaters in Nashville, but hurt my back³ and couldn’t make the two hour drive. So I put my cell phone on a different floor of the house and tried my best to lock in. As the #1 on the most recent BFI Top 100 movies list, Jeanne Dielman has lots written about it, so I’m not saying anything new. But the effect of watching the 201 minutes of a mother’s three days at home, with long, silent takes shifted something in my brain. Suddenly actions that in any other context would be read as quotidian were the most riveting thing I could imagine. The grammar and stakes of visual meaning shifted over the three hours plus that I watched the movie. It was a temporary effect, but when I gasped when something changed in Jeanne Dielman’s routine on the third day, I felt my head explode a bit.

The same thing happens when I go see symphonies. I’m not particularly musical (it is hard to emphasize how weak my aural memory is—I have almost no ability to recognize melodies), but I love going to the Philadelphia Orchestra. And I love symphonies the most because of how long they are. When they get programmed, there are usually two or three short pieces in the first act, we then get an intermission and then everyone settles for something is going to take sometimes over an hour to complete. For all my musical deficits, I can feel myself, devoid of other stimuli, follow the stakes of the exclusively auditory production, when I am given time to let everything else recede.

I majored in Art History at a college that had two Art History professors, meaning all my classes were taught by a medievalist or a modernist. So I’ve let Clement Greenberg have an outsized impact on my understanding of art. Writing about modern painting, Greenberg argued the essential quality of the form of painting is flatness and the frame that contains it. Once “treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly,” “flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment” became the subject themselves of Modernism.⁴ This distinguishes painting from three dimensional sculpture, or literature, which has linear narrative. Painting, when it is Just Painting and not attempting to unite with another form, neither recedes or extends into the third dimension, nor suggests the passage of the fourth dimension time. Modernism invests in these “pure” forms of a genre and Greenberg links the collapse of the “picture plane” in impressionism to the flatness of minimalism as the advent of modern painting.

Greenberg pointed to Manet’s paintings as Modern “by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.”

Of the slow experiences, of a long book, of a long movie, of a long symphony, only a book surrounds my life instead of the opposite. During Jeanne Dielman, I experienced the film and my own bodily sensations: my back hurt and I was hungry. At the end of a symphony, I clap and stand up and stretch. At the end of a very long book, I’m older, my place in the world has changed, I’ve spent money, I’ve moved locations. Any number of my own quotidian activities have happened.⁵ And for at least some of these books, Bleak House and War and Peace in particular, this was part of the form of their execution. Bleak House, like many of Dickens’ works, was published over the course of a year and half as a twenty part serial in 1852 and 1853. War and Peace was similarly serialized in 1865, but then majorly rewritten before being published as one volume in 1869. Meaning for both, I finished reading the books faster than the any of their first generation of readers.

This is all to say: I’m doing this again. Last year with War and Peace, I did TikTok updates at the end of each “book.” I’d like to move those thoughts over here, both to be more formal that chatting into a front-facing camera and to have something more casual than 8000 word monthly essays that require me to read a dozen romance novels, especially as I let genre fiction romance take a back burner to my singular goal for a few months.

After much fretting, the Big Winter Read of 2025 (I’m starting in November, but I imagine I’ll finish at the end of January) is going to be Ulysses by James Joyce.

I picked Bleak House because I knew I would like it. I love Dickens and I suspected this would be the one of Dickens’ novels that is the meanest about lawyers. I picked War and Peace because of its connection to Napoleon. For this year, I thought about The Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky as options for more of the “lawyers, what they are up to (nothing good)” angle. But I thought doing two Russians in a row seemed too narrow. And like Bleak House and War and Peace, Ulysses has a history of serial publication and promised infinite rereading potential.

I don’t know if I’m going to like Ulysses. I deftly avoided ever being assigned Joyce in my English degree by fulfilling my post-1900 credits with mostly poetry classes. I even resisted the seemingly obvious conclusion (to me) that Ulysses would be this winter’s Big Book. Still Dubliners charmed me when I read it (it is very charming). But the goal is more to spend a lot of time with something than to enjoy it! To change around and be changed by something! In the time I read this book, I will turn 33, I will sign a new lease for an apartment in Philadelphia, I will knit a baby blanket for my best friend. I’ll go to the orchestra a least a few times, I’ll get nervous about a new forehead wrinkle, I’ll fret about the grow-out period of the bangs I’m getting this afternoon.

me before reading War and Peace // me after reading War and Peace

1. Law school precluded reading years.

2. Peachtree City to Peachtree Corners, which if you have ever heard a joke about Atlanta, you should know these are not anywhere close to each other!

3. A chronic issue since the 3 hour commute.

4. “Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg

5. Network television shows once worked like this, which I’ve been thinking a lot about through my Alias rewatch. Though I’ll finish the rewatch over the course of about three months, during the original run, I went from being age 9 to age 14.