Reading Routine
On 3 books that settle into satisfying everyday rhythm
Regan’s newsletter publishes book recommendations on a theme and the occasional essay. Past newsletters have covered the 5+ Club and author completionism, the cure for autofiction, women in translation, and more.
Let me know if you’ve ever felt similarly—but when I was little and picking out new books to read, I remember so often feeling frustrated that something big had to happen in each new book in a series: an evil, a quest, a riddle. My favorite authors built such elaborate worlds for their characters, so why couldn’t we enjoy just sitting in them and watching days and weeks unfold.1 In movies, too, good situations always had to fall apart; characters’ successes and circumstances were always set to implode (before the dependable final-act resolution, at least).2
I think this sentiment of mine has transformed into what’s now an appreciation for the everydayness of life and routine—how some of my favorite “content” to consume is very low stakes. I love interviews and essays where writers talk about their lifestyles and routines, love learning how readers read, academics research, artists make art, scientists conduct field work and test hypotheses.3 I love when people share images of their cluttered desks and views out apartment windows and scribbled-in, color-coded planners and diaries. How do people act in those long flow-periods of their lives, which fill the gaps between interstitial bursts of change or transformation or adventure?
The books I’m recommending in this newsletter aren’t necessarily anti-climax or anti-inciting incident, although they don’t feature traditional plots. No glittering a-ha moments. No real forward momentum beyond, perhaps, the changing of seasons. Consequential decisions and reflections are translated into minutiae, observations, mannerisms. Emotions don’t build or boil over or explode but rather simmer.
I haven’t been able to come up with an easy moniker to suit exactly the characteristic I’m trying to put my finger on, but I hope I’m able to convey the overall sentiment: These three authors build singular spaces and set their characters into them gently, so they can move through quotidian experience, and so readers can observe the contours of a life: novel as window > novel as conflict > novel as journey.
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury, 2024)
For fans of…
Ex-pat lifestyle vloggers ✤ Elaborate dinner parties ✤ Calia Booth’s Substack, Library Booth, which marries literary fiction with elaborate dinner parties ✤ Kayla Roolaart’s Substack, No Crumbs: “Design-driven, food-centric, culture adjacent.” ✤ Humans of New York™ ✤ Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, particularly Central Park (1990) ✤ Anthropology (the brand), definitely ✤ Anthropology (the field of study), to an extent ✤ Scrolling Zillow in your downtime ✤ Petya K. Grady and Laurel Clayton’s Savaş reviews here and here, respectively, and Courtney Minor’s The Anthropologists book notes
I read The Anthropologists over a weekend this winter and finished it on the flight to visit one of my dearest friends. When I offered to leave the book with her, I pitched it enthusiastically as one of the most boring things I’d read in a long time, kind of slow, and strangely vague. And when she really laughed, I said, no, no but in the loveliest way, I swear. Meditative! Which is to say that I read the novel in a trance-like state, floating along a mellow, amiable current. Narratively, I neither felt urged forward nor slowed into stillness. To quote my friend’s eventual Goodreads review, Savaş’s third novel is “nothing groundbreaking”4 and I agree; its allure is that familiar, gentle comfort, its sense of beauty and pleasure in slowness.
Asya and Manu are a couple living in an foreign and unnamed European city.5 In fact, after some years living there, they’re finally looking for an apartment to really move into and settle down in. The two host dinners, get drinks with friends, FaceTime their families, and, briefly, family members come visit. They stroll new neighborhoods. House-hunt. Make breakfast, cook lunch. Asya is a documentarian who interviews strangers in parks, and we get glimpses into more lives. This novel is as slice-of-life as they come. It’s breezy without being shallow. The characters are thinking about place, belonging, home-making. At what points in our lives do we really decide what our lives will look like?
The Anthropologists came out last summer, but its origin short story was published in The New Yorker in early 2021. Link here, if you’re interested in reading “Future Selves,” which opens:
Some years after we moved to the city, my husband and I started looking for an apartment to buy. We were renting a small place past the southern boulevard that marked the end of the historic neighborhoods. On weekends, we’d usually take walks, always in the direction of the finer quarters that had first lured us to the city with their Old World charm. We lived on an unremarkable street, without cafés or shops. At the corner was a large glass building, on whose steps teen-agers congregated at every hour, smoking, laughing, playing music. Those with skateboards rode up and down the boulevard, dodging out of the way of old women who frowned at them.
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Grove Atlantic, 2024)
For fans of…
Celine Song’s Oscar-winning Past Lives (2023) ✤ Pulling all-nighters for academic work ✤ The Idiot by Elif Batuman ✤ Campus novels generally (Paulina has a great campus novel round-up) ✤ Sending and receiving postcards ✤ Rosalind Brown’s novel Practice, which covers one day in which a student attempts to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets6 ✤ Waking up very early and walking outside in that soothing, chilly quiet ✤ The short story collection Moldy Strawberries by Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu, which was translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, and Dantas Lobato’s LitHub essay on the process (as well as her time as a college student in Vermont…) ✤ Talking to your mom on the phone :)
Our friend Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists, says of Dantas Lobato’s debut, in a back-cover blurb, “At times, reading this utterly beautiful book, I thought I could not bear the tenderness of it… The yearning in these pages will haunt me.” To which I say, yes, I too am haunted by the yearning here! The tenderness! If, reading The Anthropologists, I sometimes felt like I was watching its protagonists through a screen, in Blue Light Hours, I’m fully alongside the main character who herself is separated from her mother by a screen. She remains unnamed, is from Brazil, and has moved to the American northeast to go to a small liberal arts college. She settles in. She meets new friends, has breakfast with them in the dining hall. They stay up late in the libraries. She goes to a party, writes papers. She Skypes with her mother every day. She experiences snow, turns her laptop camera to the window so her mom can see it, too. She buys a bike, rides it, sells it when her mother says she worries. She walks through the woods, makes dinner in her dorm, works an on-campus job. She doesn’t have money for flights home and is one of the few students on campus over the holidays. She housesits for a professor in the summer.
Blue Light Hours is a very neat 178 pages, but I’d have continued reading with fervor if the novel were 3x as long. Jenny Offill calls it “tenderhearted.” Tess Gunty, “spellbinding” and “resplendent.” Lydia Kiesling says, “melancholy, strange, and love-suffused.” If I were forced to add a few more adjectives to the list, I might include wholesome, glowing, protective, compassionate. And also, very sad. Sensory, definitely. I’m writing this from a cafe (no AC) on one of the first very warm days of early summer, and still, I can see the snow blowing over the soccer field.
The Wall by Marlene Haushofer tr. Shaun Whiteside (New Directions, 2022)
For fans of…
Building forts in the woods as a kid ✤ Middle-grade staples like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series; the epistolary, feminist Dear America series; and Gary Paulson’s Hatchet ✤ Dreaming of a tech-free life as a shepherd or farmer ✤ 20th-century Austrian women writers! Ingeborg Bachmann, Friederike Mayröcker… ✤ Dogs, cats, cows; petting zoos; animals and wildlife, generally ✤ Watching episodes of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting to fall asleep ✤ In The European Review of Books, “The great schizophrenia” by Nikianna Dinenis and “What an animal isn’t” by Madeline Gessel ✤ Scripted survival shows (à la Lost, Gilligan’s Island) ✤ Reading other people’s journals, diaries, and logs ✤ Your elementary school field trip to a working 19th-century farm/homestead
This is the perfect example of a book I suspected for so long that I would love, so much so that I put off reading it (because I was nervous it might let me down (it didn’t)). After The Wall had been on my radar for a couple years, I finally bought a copy at Three Lives & Co last summer and was finally finally forced/invited to read it this spring when it came up on a 20th-century novels lecture syllabus. It was completely my thing; feminist Austrian writer Marlene Haushofer’s pastoral, post-apocalyptic, diaristic novel from the 60s was everything I wanted it to be.
Our unnamed narrator is visiting her cousin’s remote Alpine hunting lodge only to wake up the first morning and realize she is utterly alone. When she walks down the winding gravel road through the forest to investigate, she comes upon a clear, impenetrable wall, which has seemingly descended overnight. She attempts to follow the wall through the forest, ravine, and pasture to gauge its circumference but stops in her tracks when, from a clearing on the mountainside, she spots a farmer in the distance who is frozen in time outside his home. Church bells still ring from the neighboring town when the wind blows, but there are no signs of human life outside the wall. Was it a nuclear detonation? Another variation of extreme weapon? Her hope that a plane will appear overhead to save her dwindles as months and seasons pass.
The Wall’s only characters are its narrator, a hunting dog, an ornery cat, and a cow. The novel’s form is that of the narrator writing her account of her isolation, how she manages to garden potatoes, take care of the animals, overcome illness, build tools, keep a fire going. There’s something so peaceful, almost idyllic, about the intense, necessary, predictable cycle of chores the narrator rotates through in order to survive. Something really exciting occurs on the line and scene level with time and narrative, too. The narrator begins writing her account only after a significant but indeterminate amount of time alone behind the wall, and she stretches back in memory to tell her story from the beginning, using her daily logs as a reference. But she’s constantly jumping between recalling her story up until now and living it in the present, often alluding to things that will happen but haven’t yet for readers—introducing what I felt were just the right beats of mystery and suspense to the story, and introducing also a satisfying, puzzle-like structure of presence and hindsight.
I love what juliana, phd had to say about The Wall in her May read/don’t read newsletter: to read it if “you wonder who you would be if no one else were watching”; not to read it if “being stuck inside your own head sounds like your worst nightmare.”
And a few more voices, in case you still aren’t convinced: Claire-Louise Bennett has written this edition’s wonderful afterword. Annie Ernaux calls the novel the “anti-Robinson Crusoe” and Doris Lessing says, “It is as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe” (I’m assuming these are both complimentary). And Nicole Krauss’s blurb is particularly incredible:
“Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. I know of no closer study in claustrophobia and liberation, and of an independence whose severity is at once ecstatic and doomed. I’ve read The Wall three times already and am nowhere near finished.”
If you’re looking for more…
Daniela’s newsletter Journaling Dan has been a recent favorite of mine, covering all things stationery, travel, art :)
I recently reviewed four more novels in translation for the Asymptote Journal blog, this time in May’s “What’s New in Translation” round-up! You’ll find my thoughts on Mathias Énard’s formally brilliant newest novel, Hungarian writer Rita Halasz’s debut about the collapse of a marriage, a surreal novel about freedom and government in Egypt from Mohamed Kheir, and a short story collection by a renowned German filmmaker.
And for even more, like an index, here are all the Substacks & specific Substack newsletters I’ve mentioned throughout “Reading Routine”!
I’m thinking first and foremost of those classics of “chosen one” young adult fantasy: imagine a school year at Hogwarts uninterrupted, a summer of daily activities and routines at Camp Half-Blood…
Why did the night guards have to steal the tablet of Ahkmenrah when Ben Stiller had the museum so under control? Wouldn’t Hotel for Dogs have been just as good without the second-act descent into chaos that sends Emma Roberts’ dogs to the pound?
You know those “my 5-9 before/after my 9-5” or “hour-by-hour at my ~corporate office~” or “spend a day in [industry] with me” videos? yes, even those
Hi rach :))
It’s Paris, though, right??
Disclaimer that I haven’t read this one yet, but I think about its premise all the time
Thought you might enjoy — we recently spoke with Savaş for Women of Letters: https://womenofletters.substack.com/p/aysegul-savas
Thank you so much for the shout-out! <3
And I love what you wrote about Blue Light Hours, one of my favorites from last year!