Photo of Admont Abbey Library by Nat S. Retsu
Welcome to Shelf Help, a Substack about consumption. The foundation of this newsletter is a monthly post about everything I’ve read, which is for me as much as it is for you because I often lose track of what I’ve read and when. Other topics include: more in-depth posts about my favorite books of the month, posts about movies/TikToks/I’m not sure yet, and a potential book club (maybe!! no promises). I’d also like to hear about/see your bookshelves and what you’re reading (shelfies, get it?).
This month I stopped writing and started thinking again (long overdue). I moved back to New York, and sat in several different cafes with my laptop and an oat milk chai and wore huge fleece sweatpants and did yoga every day and slept in the same bed as my dog. I read on the airplane and in the cafe attached in the yoga studio and in my new apartment while breathing in the fumes of a gardenia-and-rose-scented Diptyque candle. I read about love, as always. And about psychedelics. And parent-child relationships. I didn’t read that much fiction because right now reading fiction makes me want to cry. Maybe that will change next month.
Some things about me as a reader, as we’re getting started: I find books through Kindle/Amazon recommendations (mine are pretty good, I don’t know about yours), NYT/New Yorker/Paris Review/NYRB book reviews, and books mentioned in the book I’m reading (lol). I don’t know how good my retention is (probably bad?) but it’s not terrible. I reread fairly often. I really enjoy highlighting quotes and passages that particularly strike me (those are the passages you see in all of my Substack posts).
Books:
Completed
What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, a memoir about complex PTSD
In Love, a memoir by Amy Bloom, a memoir about helping her husband end his life after he receives an Alzheimer’s diagnosis
Aurelia, Aurelia by Kathryn Davis, also a memoir about the death of her husband.
The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabelle Burton, a novel about a religious boarding school, fittingly described as “The Girls meets Fight Club”
An Enlarged Heart by Cynthia Zarin, a beautiful memoir about places and feelings
Never Simple by Liz Scheier, a memoir about growing up with an unreliable mother
Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy, a book of poems about motherhood and art
The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, a book about childhood trauma (yes this is my first time reading it!)
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. Title is self-explanatory
(a reread) Conscious Loving by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks, a book about how to have healthier romantic relationships
Controlling People by Richard S. Marken and Timothy A. Carey, a nonfiction book about, well, controlling people
Breath by James Nestor, a nonfiction book about the dangers of mouth-breathing
The End of Your World by Adyashanti, about the gap between a glimpse of awakening and full awakening
Incomplete/on the deck for next month:
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
The Ada Poems by Cynthia Zarin
French Braid by Anne Tyler
In the Margins by Elena Ferrante
Some highlights: I really loved Aurelia, Aurelia, which contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years: paragraphs like
For a while, my immortal beloved had been Beethoven. That much I knew, and that even the Swedish boy who entered our class just after Thanksgiving and who claimed to be in love with me was nothing by comparison. The wish to attach oneself to greatness comes early; it’s corollary to the wish to be great, which is a wish better kept to oneself if one happens to be an American girl suffering to be a beautiful pianist on a suburban street in Philadelphia right after the end of the Second World War. He could be a lamb, Beethoven, but he could also be a monster.
In Love also made me cry. First of all, it’s unbearably sad (a happy second marriage ends when he receives an Alzheimer’s diagnosis). But also: they’re such a wonderful couple and it makes me happy to know that kind of love is possible. Probable? I don’t know. But possible. The scene where they first get together:
He said, I’m not stupid. I know how this will end. You’ll tell me we should not do this to the people we love, or I’ll tell you, and we will go back to our lives, where we should be. And I will never get over this. Or, we blow up our lives and be together.
I just want to say this, he said, before we walk back to our cars. I know who you could be with. Someone rich, someone fancy, some guy your sister finds for you. But I know who you should be with. You should be with a guy who doesn’t mind that you’re smarter than he is, who doesn’t mind that most of the time, you’ll be the main event. You need to be with a guy who supports how hard you work and who’ll bring you a cup of coffee late at night. I don’t know if I can be that guy, he said, tears in his eyes, but I’d like a shot.
We married.
I read Breath by James Nestor on my flight from Utah to New York and was horrified. I’ll sum up the book for you: mouth-breathing is bad, very bad, probably deforming you and causing health problems, stop mouth-breathing immediately. I am a chronic mouth-breather (or used to be, Flonase literally changed my life. I could not smell anything for 23 years of my life) and I was so spooked by this book I started taping my mouth at night. It was so scary I barely double-checked the science (did a 20-min Google search where experts did seem to agree nose breathing was better than mouth-breathing) and immediately bought tape at CVS so I could start taping my mouth shut. So far, so good? One interesting fact from the book is that the optimal breathing pace is apparently 5.5 seconds in and 5.5 seconds out, and that’s apparently also the most common pace used in religious practices like Buddhist chants and reciting the rosary.
Controlling People was also pretty interesting. I read it because I saw something on Twitter about PCT (perceptual control theory), which theorizes that all our behavior is motivated by the goal of controlling our perception. It was interesting to see the authors describe us all as “control systems”: just the act of waking up and getting coffee is an act of control, apparently (picture me beaming with relief). In other words, behaving is controlling:
The idea that behaving is controlling doesn’t apply just to ‘simple’ behaviors like ‘crossing the street’. Everything people do, everything we call behavior, can be seen to involve control, because all behavior is happening in a world filled with disturbances that vary constantly and unpredictably. We are controlling when we balance a checkbook, get a college education, write a computer application, run for office, or compose a symphony.
I recommend the book for funny lines like Just as all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, all controlling people control in their own way (with apologies to Tolstoy). So, it is quite likely that everyone has a somewhat different image of what a controlling person does that is controlling.
Our Andromeda is a gorgeous poetry collection, with lines like The books on the bookshelves are touching / themselves / like virgins. But I’ve had them. The book is centered around motherhood and is both joyous and celebratory as well as unbearably sad, FYI (sometimes I read happy books, I promise. Here’s a great conversation about it.
As I look at what I’ve been reading, I see that what I’m craving is beauty on the sentence level. When I’m disoriented, beauty is what I try to orient myself towards. When I read Cynthia Zarin and Kathryn Davis I kept stopping because I was like, oh, yeah, this is what a sentence can be. Sometimes I forget, and then reading helps me remember again.
Not books:
This article in The Cut by Elaine Hsieh Chou made me cry. Also all the fucking comments about how Asian women have nothing to complain about—LOL!
I've been reading Do Not Research and really enjoying it. I recommend:
This post about schizoposting
This one about Femtech.
Substack-wise, I continued to enjoy Between a Rock and a Card Place, Atoosa Unedited, and Ask Molly/Ask Polly always. This month I especially liked:
This post by Caroline about “rejection as protection.”
This post by Atoosa about the importance of new patterns.
I’m hosting some salons with Alex about psychedelics in April and have been doing a ton of psychedelics-related reading:
Here’s a paper about how psychedelics change metaphysical beliefs
Here’s a post about neural annealing
Here’s an interesting paper about how the HTR2A T102C polymorphism affects autistic traits and perspective taking. (I’m currently obsessed with the HTR2A serotonin receptor, if you can’t tell).
I think that psychedelics have made me noticeably more empathetic (not that impressive because I was really not very empathetic before lol) which is personally very interesting to me. So I want to understand more about the mechanics that make that possible. But maybe the psychedelic reading can be a separate post, lol.
That’s all for now—tell me about what you’ve been reading, please!
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