Being a devoted reader

And a new name!

Hello friends! You may have noticed that this newsletter landed in your inbox with a new name. As much as I love SARDINES and the Frank O’Hara poem that inspired it, I was feeling a change. I still love the idea of layers of life going into the art we create, surfacing and re-submerging, often unseen in the final product. I love the image of all these things being packed tight together, but it just wasn’t feeling quite right anymore.

So I went back to the dog-eared poetry anthologies I have and found myself returning to Kapka Kassabova’s poem, The door: anticipation of wisdom. Particularly this stanza:

One day, you will doubt the exactness
of your movements,
the accuracy of your sudden age.
You will ache for slow beauty
to save you from your quick, quick life.

Slow Beauty was on my shortlist when I was initially deciding on a name and I still found myself drawn to it. Now that I have a better idea of what I’m interested in exploring, it feels like a better fit. Who knows, maybe I’ll give this thing a new name every year. That’s good for growth, right?

I’ll still be posting monthly rounds ups and some standard blog fare nonsense (like bad haircuts and smoking nostalgia), but I’m going to include more essays and reviews and research rabbit holes. I’d love to have some sort of ephemera, like zines or print-only content, burned cds.¹ I also have a few ideas for interview series — with writers, with artists, with sober people — but that’s in the distant future, fingers crossed.

Thank you for being here and I hope you’ll stick around as we explore the art that makes us ache. If you know anyone who does good logo work, lmk :)

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Ok, on to some standard blog fare nonsense.

Last month I whittled my GoodReads tbr down from almost 1,800 titles to 579, which is probably still too big to be helpful and which doesn’t even include all the things on the “Books” note on my phone or rattling around in my head, uncommitted to a list as of yet. It certainly doesn’t include all the random treasures I’ve picked up while browsing used bookshops. But it was a start.

This whole exercise took the better half of a day, plus another hour or two the next day when I did a quick second pass. It was the perfect activity for the first day of break, when my brain wasn’t good for much else. (More on this culling exercise below.)

This was in service of one of my 2025 goals: to be a better reader. I’ve always been more of a generalist but lately my approach has felt scattershot and superficial. I’ve been hankering for some deep dives. In a happy coincidence, I came across Haley Larsen’s series on becoming a close(r) reader shortly afterward and took a few hours to sit with the prompts. In the end, these are some of the goals I identified for myself:

• Reread 5 books. I have an aversion to rereads bc I fret about the new-to-me book I could be reading instead. But this is a form of scarcity mindset and I’m determined to overcome it. Rereading — like rewatching movies or relistening to albums — is rewarding! I know this but I don’t know it, you know?

• Become a completionist or add more authors to my 5+ club.

• Read at least 6 poetry collections (bonus challenge: memorize a poem from each).

• Read at least 6 criticism or essay collections.

• Read more challenging books, including classics and theory.

• Be a more engaged reader. Annotate, take notes, write essays.

• Take a more strategic and immersive approach. Trace the lineage. Broaden the scope to include art, music, film, politics, etc. that complement what I’m reading.

• Listen to fewer audiobooks, take a physical book with me wherever I go. Audiobooks are fantastic and some books are really well suited to audio format, but I want to be more selective with how and when I use them. I can feel my brain engage differently when the book is in my hand vs in my ear.

• Read something in French?? Ambitious bc my rudimentary French stalled out sometime in 2008, but we get a few French language radio stations up here so I’m hoping if I keep that on in the car I’ll dust it off enough to make this happen.

• I’ve felt a King Arthur deep dive coming on for awhile now and I think reading The Bright Sword by

  Lev Grossman
  this past year is what will finally push me over the edge, hand in hand with a Irish / Welsh / Celtic mythology dig.

• Other topics I’m circling: mystics and mysticism and occultism; nature and nature writing; Gothic literature; Irish literature.

And with that, it’s time for me to leave this coffee shop and go wander around the used book store down the block, see if I can’t add a few titles to my now-tiny little tbr.

Also, just quick shout out in case you don’t know about Library Extension. It’s super easy to install and then when you’re on sites like GoodReads, Amazon, Bookshop, etc. there’s a little panel where it will show if it’s available through your library’s physical or digital collection. It’s saved me a small fortune.

If you don’t have a library card, that’s an easy win for your own 2025 reading goals :)

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Ok, now for those of you interested in more about the Great GoodReads Purge, here are some trends I noticed in what got the axe and what I kept.

What I got rid of:

• Everything with fewer than 3 stars. I know I’m probably throwing a few babies out with the bath water, but it was a risk I was willing to take. This knocked off a few hundred titles from the list in one swoop.

• A ton of buzzy books that knew in my heart I’d find underwhelming. This included lots of things I added from booktok and “best of” lists over the years.

• Everything with a YA tag and most things with a Coming of Age tag. Listen…40 is coming for me. FAST.

• Lots of stuff with “The Girl” or “The Woman” or “The Wife” in the title, mostly from the crime, suspense, or mystery genres. I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed them well enough but I also felt like I already knew what they were all about, ya know?

• Lots of stuff that is probably very good and worth my time but, if I’m being honest, I know I’ll never reach for because its just not a genre I get excited about.

• A lot of — but not all! — short stories. I’m nervous to admit that but I just don’t reach for a short story all that often! I’m sorry!

• Everything after the 1st in a series if I hadn’t read the 1st book yet (but I kept the 1st if I was still interested).

• Lots of stuff with horrendous cover art and lots of stuff that looked self-pubbed. Both of which are unfair, I know. But again, I was willing to sacrifice a few babies.

• Anything by certain celebrated authors whose books I have absolutely loathed such as [redacted] and [redacted].

• Anything that only had movies for comps in the synopsis 🤨

What I kept

• A lot of essays and art / film / literary criticism. A smattering of philosophy.

• Older gothic literature and horror classics I’ve yet to read. Actually classics of every genre that I’ve yet to read but really should / want to.

• Stuff from all those “best of” lists that still sounds interesting to me and that have enough rave reviews from people I trust that they made the cut.

• Myth and lore.

• Some stuff I’m still skeptical about tbh but the rec came from a trusted source.

• Some pop sci. I have an inner gym bro that must be pacified.

• A decent amount of memoirs and a few biographies.

• Stuff about cults, can’t help it.

• Plenty of stuff people on Substack have convinced me is well worth the time.

Have you done something similar? What was your criteria? Did it change your reading habits moving forward? Sometimes I think of nuking my GoodReads entirely but it’s hard to lose 10+ years of a reading log. Maybe some day…

one of many random piles

1. I say this from the perspective of someone at the end of 2+ weeks off work, so we’ll see what happens when my creative time is a little more crunched.