People are often surprised when I say that I rarely read nonfiction. Some people don’t believe it. I just laugh and say, “I read four newspapers a day.” Interestingly, this is my answer. Articles are not books. That being said, it somehow explains my failure and the conversation moves on.
The thing is, I’m just as serious about reading journalism as I am about reading fiction. I don’t watch TV news or listen to podcasts (which is so abnormal in my world that it now embarrasses my friends more than I do that I don’t read nonfiction). I also no longer listen to it regularly. NPR (National Public Radio, for readers outside the US) So reading is how I understand the world and its history.
if you are cursed I’m happy to have you as my friend. Over the course of the week, you’ll see something I think we all should read, either on my FB page or sent to you personally. (I’m also very pro-poetry, but that’s for another post.) Today I’m going to share a sentence that rocked my world. * I want to know what rocked your world.
The article I sent the most people this year was written by Ann Patchett for Harper’s Magazine. precious days. It’s 2021 and it’s beyond sublime.
It is made up of paragraph after paragraph, each individually perfect, and together they make a fist. Here is one of his:
Walking backwards is a great way to remember how little you know. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in a West Village cafe with my friends Lucy and Adrian, when a woman ran in and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. plane? we asked. Like a Cessna? she didn’t know. She had never seen it happen. That bright morning we went out into the street and saw a fire high up in the distance. A waiter came out and told us to go back inside. We didn’t pay the check. I paid the check. Lucy doesn’t have time for that, she said. She teaches in Bennington, Vermont, and this was her first day of classes. She had to be trained. We said our goodbyes and Adrian and I walked downtown to see what happened.we both wrote for New York Times. I’m sure there’s a story there for one of us. We had just passed Stuyvesant Park when the first tower collapsed. You could say we were stupid, but that’s only true in retrospect. In fact, we were right in the middle of history and had no way of understanding what we were seeing.
In another article, This is about the lives of people with dementia, has given hope to everyone I know who is struggling with this silencer. As a caregiver for people with dementia, I believe that their lives are full of joy. Below is an excerpt.
Paul Brocks describes the living brain as “the progenitor of infinite space,” the universe itself, and the dead brain as “the point at which the universe collapsed.” But I sometimes think of dementia as a long journey home. Most of us die gradually, and everything lost to dementia will eventually be lost to all of us. What I sense most in the world of people with dementia is wholeness, the incomprehensible and almost overwhelming wholeness of one person. I occasionally touch on this when I’m running errands and rushing to work. Everyone who sees it is beyond measure. A tired woman riding a bus, an eager young man riding his bike the wrong way down the road, a neighbor smiling and nodding his head past a snorting boxer walking down the stairs. As I walk down the hallway, I observe the singularity of people gently circling each other. Patricia, her hair carefully tousled with bobby pins. Albert punches Walker. They are planetary and huge.
Ms. Jenisha Watt I never called her mama It will break your heart. It may be the most powerful work published this year.
I was a collector of words. I learned meaning in 6th grade. open mouth From a vocabulary test. I loved the richness of the words and the way they rolled off the tongue.
I felt the same way about those words. confused. Radio host Tom Joyner said “I’m confused” during an interview, and the moment those words reached my ears, I knew what he meant.I learned Typical From a TLC song, and regurgitate From a friend’s letter about her abortion.
Words were the only thing that seemed achievable to me. I was able to look them up in my grandmother’s dictionary and understand their meanings. Unlike math, if you got stuck, you had to ask someone to help you. I realized that the more I learned a language, the deeper my language became.
Written by Christine Emba About the crisis facing American men It touched my heart. If you can make me believe in the following, I will do it.
Despite their problems, the rigid gender roles of the past gave boys a script for how to be manly. But even if trying to break out of the patriarchy leaves a void in our ideals of masculinity, it also gives us a chance for a fresh start. It’s also an opportunity to take something useful from the models of the past and repurpose it for today’s boys and men.
We can find ways to leverage the unique traits and powerful stories that already exist, such as risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, and creating. We can realize how real and important they are. And we can try to socialize them, to help not only men, but also women, and support the common good.
I think the best person writing long-form journalism today might be Jennifer Sr.I have never read anything better than her award-winning work. Bobby McIlvaine’s legacyThis year, she wrote about the devastation that comes with losing a close friendship. It’s your friends who break your heart killed me she wrote:
I started here. I will end here (everyone will end here). It’s amazing how the death of a loved one exposes the lie we told ourselves that there was always time. You can go months or even years without talking to a dear old friend, and you can just go on with your life, unaware. However, when she learns that same friend has passed away, she is shocked, even though nothing in her daily life has changed. You’re saying, excuse me, that this is the fickle, chaotic universe we live in, one that suddenly has a hole the size of a friend, and the air where this person used to be is now wrinkled. reminds me of.
Writing allows you to appreciate the people you love and those who are in your life.
These are just a few of my favorites, so I’d love to hear yours.
* We understand that these may be behind a paywall. If you can’t read it but would like to read it, please email dabney grinnan on romance.com. I’ll give it to you as a test present.