If I had a book club, we’d all arrive with dog-eared paperbacks, eager to share our favorite passages and bursting with questions. What did this mean? Who was to blame? Why did it end this way? Sometimes, even, Have you ever heard a sentence more beautiful than this?

We’d come with our own fiery opinions about literary style, characters we adored or abhorred, and plot twists that worked or didn’t. We’d all be excited to hear each others’ perspectives, and we’d go deep on passages or themes or character choices that sparked an epiphany or broke our hearts. Everyone would be wicked smart and endlessly thoughtful and appropriately witty, and yet somehow I would not feel like an imposter. I would finish all of my remarks with eloquence, never trailing off because I’d lost hold of the point I so desperately wanted to make.

Yes! Exactly! Me too!, the most brilliant and enigmatic person at the table would say. I would smile but not blush, and I would help myself to another slice of cheese, thus ceding the floor.

Someday, friends, someday! For now, though, here’s what I’m doing: keeping a running list of everything I’m reading, for posterity I guess, with ratings & reviews of a sort, and sporadically speed typing in this online reading journal, sometimes really about the book I’m currently reading but more often about the nerves the book is hitting and the thoughts and dreams it seeds. I like the flow of connections from book to book, book to life, book to movies, book to recurring themes, like…

addiction Adolfo Bioy Casares awareness beauty devil/s dreams food friendship ghosts god/gods hiking identity James life loneliness loss love masks Mikhail Bulgakov moral dilemmas music non-fiction Ocean Vuong Percival Everett prophet song racism Robert McFarland salinger The Emperor of Gladness The Invention of Morel The Master and Margarita the resistance time Underland wilderness