May 2025

"I'm a writer, babe. Expressing ideas is what I get paid chump change for and criticized mercilessly about." So opens the conversation. Purity as innocence, purity as transparency, purity as brutal honesty: where's the real deal when everyone's putting themselves on display?

Franzen's got a bone to pick with our digital age of performance. Here's a sprawling novel that interrogates what it means to be "pure" in a world obsessed with exposure. The narrative spins through generations, crosses continents, digs into dark family secrets. Big themes: identity, truth, the lies we tell ourselves.

"There are people who move us more than others, probably because, without us knowing it, they carry within them a part of what we're missing." That's Wajdi Mouawad in Anima, and it hit different this month.

April started with a cold bath on the 1st. Bracing. Then a fainting spell in an airport. My body staging protests. The month unfolded in fragments: books read, moments lived, thoughts captured. This is my reading life intersecting with actual life. The personal inventory.