Slow Notes 09

February 2026 in review—and a few recommendations and prompts for you.

Feb 27, 2026

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👋 Notes on February

In the spirit of slow storytelling, I’m taking a little break and resharing an excerpt (slightly edited) from my essay “Reading Room,” which I published last February. Enjoy!

February is the shortest month with the longest memory. It’s a time we love to hate. It’s also a time when we think about time because it’s too cold to do anything else.

Two Februarys ago, my husband John and I stood in the middle of Paula Cooper Gallery on the final day of the group exhibition, “Books.” I was drawn to the show’s premise, a “[demonstration of] the many ways in which contemporary artists have engaged with the book as surface, structure, found object, and philosophical guide.”

There is a difference between looking at books and reading them, but each act offers unique pleasures. From the gallery’s website:

“Reading, collecting, and fabricating books informs a particular way of creative thinking, in which a double-page spread, a fabric-bound volume, or an illustrious typeface become crucial components of works of art. … There will be books on shelves, indicating how intensely revelatory a library can be about its owner, and sculptures incorporating books as found objects will embrace the book as a talisman, gesturing to the acute historical specificity of a volume that originated in a particular place and time.”

I was struck by the phrasing—how intensely revelatory a library can be about its owner—as if the books are creating the person and not the other way around.

Books have always been a big part of my life, but I can identify the difference between who I was before I started reading (again, in adulthood) and who I was after.

My previous creative pursuits were story-centric and filled with beauty and opportunity. They helped me cultivate my taste and aesthetic interests. I was never more attuned to my body (for better and for worse) than mid-pirouette or trying on a well-tailored coat. But for a long time, I couldn’t go as deeply as I wanted. While those endeavors got me into the world and out of my head, I forgot how to come home to myself.

I’ve carried some qualities from these past chapters into my current reading/writing life—particularly when it comes to body language and the senses: sighing from the day’s disappointments—or delights—before pulling a book off the shelf, smiling at the first page as if it’s going to return the gesture.

There is a physicality to reading, a subtle exchange. In The Beauty of Light, Etel Adnan remarks to Laure Adler about talking to flowers (and giving them agency to speak back). In Shifting the Silence, she suggests that other humans aren’t the only beings that can be one’s friends.

For many, books are friends with distinct voices and demeanors. They slouch over—pages to the floor, spine to the sky. Other times, they stand tall, sandwiched between forests of potted plants and flickering candles. They aren’t sentient but can instill a level of consciousness. Pick up a book and pick up a life. As Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe and Black Light, shared: “Reading is a meditative, relaxing act that slows me down, but sometimes I find scanning [or] touching the spines of my books to be blissfully invigorating too, almost like I can hear little snippets of voice from each author as I touch them.”

In the presence of books, we aren’t as alone as we might think—a chorus of voices rushes to fill our hearts and homes. To that end, I like how Alina Grabowski, author of Women and Children First, described the singular joy of reading at home: “I love to lie, I love to flop, I love to lounge. If I’m reading in public, I still feel a need to be respectable. I can’t flick my shoes off, take up an entire couch, or just generally forget about the amount of space I’m occupying and how I’m occupying it. There’s this pleasurable lack of self-awareness that comes with reading at home. Plus, I can have one of our cats on my lap.”

Last February, a sleek black cat circled my feet as John and I perused the shelves inside High Valley Books, a parlor and basement-level bookstore run by Bill Hall out of his house in Greenpoint. Sounds of rustling papers and soft chatter drifted throughout the halls. It was clear that everyone here held storytelling in high regard.

Usually, I would have spent several hours surveying Hall’s incredible collection, but in the presence of someone else’s home—glimpsing mail in the vestibule, a stray coat draped on the banister—I suddenly wanted nothing more than to return to mine. I left empty-handed, burning with a desire for something I couldn’t quite name: Something between reading and living.

Lately, I’ve been stalled by other modes of being: Maybe wintering or languishing. For some reason, the word visiting comes to mind, too.