Hidden Gems

Free today: reading lists and not reading

Apologies for missing the reading at the n+1 offices on Tuesday, I’ve been in bed with a cold. I also missed a birthday dinner, an engagement party, a denim launch cocktail, an event planner’s anniversary party, an issue launch, a fashion collaboration launch afterparty, a gallery’s “culinary experience,” and seeing the sun while it was out, smelling the first snowfall, having dinner at restaurants.

I’ll tell you more about what I didn’t miss once I get my head above water, but wanted to mention: on January 12, I’ll be introducing one of Madeline Cash’s book events for her novel Lost Lambs—at McNally Jackson Seaport, 7pm. Tickets are available now.

This week, Grand Rapids was on the New York Times’ list of “Favorite Hidden Gem Books of 2025” with a touching writeup. Thank you, Dave Kim, preview editor. It’s nice to know where it stands, and that it’s in great company there.

Also this week, the Paris Review published its 2025 list of favorites, to which I added an entry. Glad to see that someone else mentioned Mike Powell’s debut. And Granta published its much longer list of “A Year in Reading,” in which authors (I among them) give a condensed take on what we got into and out of. Some entries are pretty revealing, which shouldn’t surprise me—extracurricular reading is, after all, extremely personal.

For example, Kate Riley, whose first (and, as she says, last) book was published this year to what I saw as much acclaim, says of a 10-year-old novel, “its relative obscurity is bittersweet consolation to anyone dismayed by Literary Fiction lists dominated by cowards like [redacted] and [redacted].”

Coincidentally (or not), Molly Young recommends the same 10-year-old novel (Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose) as well as Riley’s Ruth—which, now that I’m looking into it, was named a top book of the year by many a major paper.

Elsewhere, Geoff Dyer says Ulysses “seems pretty much to suck ass, if you ask me,” and multiple people say they avoided anything new, especially new fiction. Sophie Kemp’s entry is a relatable, tragicomic breakup narrative.

Yesterday, one of my group chat’s topics was a short Times piece on declining reading lists in high school classes, the scarier part being these excerpting tools that give kids a couple hundred words of a novel as an entire assignment. I guess they’re supposed to write an essay about that? I remember most of us being stumped finding an angle after a couple hundred pages.

I don’t read as much as I used to because of the phone, and kids today always had the phone, so it makes sense that many of them find no secret pleasure in curling up with a book—or anything that isn’t a literal portal to the world updating in real time. They will all hopefully be interested in looking at something more static, for the sake of absorbing the weight of that, one day.

This doesn’t mean schools should stop trying or even meet the brain rot halfway, but I’m not a teacher, and the teachers I know say it’s gotten chaotic in there, so I’ll reserve any judgment. I only mention because what I ended up reading yesterday was a spectrum that went from “no one reads an entire book” to “I reread a Henry James book for the eleventh time” with no real middle ground.

This is important, I think: Something that arrived with the phones is access to infinite intimidations, and if you’ll recall being a teenager, they’re all basically addicted to self-sabotage. Every time one picks up a book, he or she could also be searching its title on social media and seeing discourse that didn’t slow down us adults in our youth—because it wasn’t there.

And reading is always a slog if it’s required. Decades ago, my English classes watched the movie version, if there was one, of every novella and play in our syllabi, sometimes as a treat after turning in reports, but other times instead of the text. Sometimes we’d read abridged versions without knowing it. As a teen, I was annoyed, but likely galvanized by that feeling into reading more on my own.

Most of my friends will tell you (no, they won’t tell you, but have told me) that they’ll go a whole year without reading a book, sometimes several. Of course, they’re not in school, and if they were, I’d suggest they drop out. I’ve gone whole years without ice skating, eating meat, doing my own laundry, or using a power tool. To each his own, is all I can really say.