“I Play the Field; I Read Around.”

Editor’s Note: Passages is a members-only monthly newsletter about life-changing encounters with stories. Each edition of Passages features a short essay in which one of our favorite writers explores their own life as a reader. Our first contributor, Maggie Shipstead, is an accomplished travel writer whose most recent novel, Great Circle, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Join Longreads today to receive Passages in your inbox, along with our weekly Top 5 story recommendations and other member perks.

When I was a kid, my mom called the stack of books on my nightstand a “smorgasbord.” People use a lot of food language when they talk about reading. We devour; we gulp. I like to “graze” as a reader, moving through multiple books simultaneously, dipping in and out according to my mood. Romantic metaphors, too, come in handy, alluding to the vagaries of appetite and compatibility and taste. I would say that I’m still not a monogamous reader. I play the field; I read around.

The current count of books I’m partway through is eighteen: eight print books, eight e-books, and two audiobooks. There’s some nonfiction in there: Into the Ice by Mark Synnott, Boom by Michael Shnayerson, and the audiobook of Entitled by Andrew Lownie, which, if you need to be convinced that Prince Andrew is one of the most odious people on the planet, boy do I have the book for you. The majority of my docket is taken up by novels, though. A galley of Emily St. John Mandel’s new book Exit Party is on my nightstand, as is Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know. (Bad title! I hate titles that are unmemorable strings of nonspecific words!) I’m in a race to finish Venetian Vespers by John Banville before Libby, the public library app, takes it back for maybe the fourth time. The Banville is short and enjoyable but has been a victim of the smorgasbord approach, never quite seizing priority. Also on my Libby shelf are, among others, Lovers XXX by Allie Rowbottom, The Original by Nell Stevens, and Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer. On my Bookshop.org app, I have The Remembered Soldier, a magnificent novel by the Dutch writer Anjet Daanje that is very long and that I ended up (happily) buying because I didn’t want to race Libby’s loan period.

I wasn’t an early adopter of e-books, partly because my first novel was published in 2012, at the height of e-book doomerism, when everyone was saying print books were soon to be a thing of the past and e-books were the enemy. (Interestingly—at least to me—the ratio of print copies to digital has gone up for each of my three successive books, with only that first one selling more e-books than physical.) The Kindle launched in 2007, but I didn’t have an e-reader until 2013, when I got a Kobo in a gift bag. I liked it, but the process of acquiring e-books and getting them on the device was cumbersome, and, anyway, within a year I left it on an airplane. 

During the pandemic, I found myself meandering back toward e-books. I’d had an iPad for a while but didn’t really know what to do with it until a friend told me about Libby. Somehow I’d forgotten libraries existed, and I didn’t have a card for the Los Angeles system, even though I’d lived in the city for six years by then. I signed up for one online, downloaded the app, and everything changed. I didn’t even have to leave my house, which I wasn’t supposed to do anyway.

I’d never lost the habit of reading in bed at night, but my intake of books had slowed dramatically over the years, probably starting in college. I was an English lit major, so reading was work. Then writing became my job in my mid-20s, and that professionalism wore away any playfulness that was left in reading. I’d gotten timid and precious in my choices, only buying books I felt confident I would enjoy but then often not enjoying them after all, at which point they would linger, stubbornly material, in my house until I rounded up a box or two to donate. With Libby, I could be capricious again. Every time I came across an intriguing mention of a book or someone recommended one, I placed a hold. I would then immediately and completely forget about the hold until, days, weeks, or months later, some vaguely recalled title appeared on my iPad, a gift from my past self. Something about the convenience and low stakes of Libby got me reading like I hadn’t in years. I became a filter-feeder, opening my maw to take in books indiscriminately, unbothered by the ones that must be spat out. In 2020 I read 60 books; last year I read 92. I started but didn’t finish dozens more.

The dream, though, even for a nonmonogamist like myself, is The One, the book that makes all others disappear, that enchants you completely and exclusively until the last page boots you back out into the world. That feeling of absorption is one I crave, and I’ve experienced it many, many times, courtesy of books of all different genres and the whole spectrum of high- to low-browness. Last week it was the audiobook of Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling. In January it was a re-read of Ariel Levy’s memoir The Rules Do Not Apply. Lately I’ve been immersed in Michelle Huneven’s back catalog. Possibly the most delicious experiences of The One emerge from a perfect alchemy of time, place, and book, like when I found an orange and white Penguin edition of The Secret History in a used bookshop in Bali in 2011 and, having somehow never heard of it, bought it on the basis of the title alone. Or when I read Persuasion on my phone in a tent in the Swedish Arctic. Or when, traveling alone in New Zealand, I read all the Twilight books in rapid succession, and upon finishing the last one, felt like I’d woken up in a bus stop, disheveled and hungover and utterly mystified as to how I’d gotten there. 

The One is not singular but takes infinite forms. There is no heartbreak when you move on. In fact, the pleasure is additive. A writer friend reminded me of this once when I was expressing disgruntled envy about the reception of someone else’s book. “No one ever finishes a good book and says, ‘Now I’ll never read another book again,’” she said. 

Free love prevails at the smorgasbord. And, I mean, there’s a title.

Three Reading Recommendations

• In 2017, before a total solar eclipse made a nice long arc over the continental US, I read “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard for the first time. I’d had no plans to bestir myself to go see the eclipse, but I pretty much finished the last paragraph, bought a tent and some welder’s glass to look through, got in the car and drove from LA to Oregon. The eclipse—and you have to be in the path of totality—remains the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen. Conveying the power of natural phenomena is extremely difficult, and Dillard’s writing elicits both the visceral shock of seeing a total eclipse and the necessity to witness one with your own eyes.
  
  
• Look, call me unexciting, but I would be pretending to be someone I’m not if I didn’t include a New Yorker piece. How to choose, though? I love an unsolved/unsolvable mystery, so should I pick Douglas Preston’s piece about the Dyatlov Pass incident? Or pretty much anything by Patrick Radden Keefe? Or perhaps the 2009 profile of Caster Semenya by Ariel Levy that changed my understanding of gender and biological sex? I think because I can only pick one, I’ll go with Levy’s “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which you’ve either already read and been undone by or everyone you know has already told you to read and for some reason you haven’t. Her alchemy of experience into writing is somehow both raw and polished and hits with the force of a train.
  
  
• Recently I was reminded of this piece by Alexandra Paul, “Stalked: A Baywatch star’s 13-Year Nightmare,” when I happened to interview her twin sister, Caroline. It’s a harrowing personal account of being stalked for many years, and also includes meaningful practical advice for how to protect ourselves in this age of frightening access. I’d always had deep ambivalence about not responding to a horrible poison pen DM I got on my wedding day, and Paul’s essay granted me total certainty that not engaging had been the right move all along.

Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels and a short story collection. Her novel Great Circle was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her travel writing and essays have appeared lots of places. She lives in Los Angeles.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald