The latest participant in my series of typewriter interviews is writer Laura Lippman.
Your next best friend
Here is an old blackout poem I stuck in Tuesday’s letter, “Your next best friend,” which is about making good friends — with people and books.
We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But how many great books are already waiting for us on our shelves? How many favorite authors would we form deep relationships with if we simply read or re-read a few more of their books?
I really like the way this one turned out. You can read the whole thing here.
On reading novels
Tuesday’s newsletter was “on sitting around and reading a novel” for nothing but the pleasure of it:
[The feeling] that you’re getting away with something […] is really important to the reading experience. Reading should feel a little subversive… because it is! To sit around and read a novel in the year 2025 is an act of resistance — you’re swimming against the current of the entire contemporary shitstream.
Readers left hundreds of recommendations in the comments of that one.
For a list of some of my favorite novels, check out a previous letter, “Big books for summer.”
Waste books
Here is the reading shelf in our bathroom. For the past month or two, I’ve been reading a few pages of G.C. Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books in there every day.
Here’s how Lichtenberg himself described a “waste book”:
Merchants and traders have a waste book… in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell, messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, where everything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts with each man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everything as I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be entered in another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, and the ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connections and explanations of the material that flow from it.
Read more in today’s newsletter about always having a book with you.
Steven Soderbergh on reading
This map of notes map of notes became item #4 in today’s newsletter:
“I read in order to calm down.” Steven Soderbergh’s Year in Reading. So many things I care about get mentioned in this conversation: not being guilty about quitting books, Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, the diminishing returns of new technology, and keeping a commonplace book. (Found via Mark Larson’s rebooted weekly blog, which continues to whip ass.)
Read the rest of the newsletter here.
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