Deenie, Valencia, and Kitchen

Rereading old favorites + how a non-reader became a reader

Feb 11, 2026

I started taking a book with me on the subway last year. I haven’t had a regular commute since before Covid and I’ve been made painfully aware that the end to my hour and a half, round trip daily commute effectively ended my daily reading time. Even if it was only a magazine like The New Yorker, which is easier to maneuver than a book with one hand on a crowded rush-hour subway car while straining to hold onto a pole with the other, I was reading.

Carrying a book with me again also means I have something to do other than scroll on my phone when waiting. To be fair, I do an enormous amount of reading online in the form of articles and long-form essays—but I hate reading on my phone. Besides, something about the physical act of turning pages and a visual tally of what’s been read, makes time visible in a way a phone never does. It reveals how much of living is spent waiting. Waiting for a friend, waiting in lines, waiting to be seen at the doctor’s office. Why not spend that time reading?

Since carrying a book, I also started noticing other people reading books out in public: on the subway, alone in cafes, on park benches. There are well-cited polls on how people are reading less and less every year and I guess data doesn’t lie, but I see people reading all around me. Certainly here on Substack where book lists are abundant, there is no lack of well-read people.

A year ago, I confessed in a newsletter that I had only read 6 books in 2024. Such a painfully embarrassing number that I’m surprised I made this confession to you at all, but even that was an improvement to the fewer number of books I had read the year before. I didn’t want to be another sad data point in those polls about people who don’t read, so I vowed to read more in 2025. And I did. I read 20 books last year. A modest improvement.

But I’ll be honest with you. I still haven’t found my groove with reading. I love the idea of reading books. I used to be a voracious reader and I want to read more, but I often wonder to myself: am I being influenced by the internet to chase some kind of romanticized desire to be perceived as a reader? Or even worse—do I desire to be perceived as some sort of well-read intellectual?

Lol. I don’t even pretend to be literary-savvy. In fact, quite the opposite. I realized that my exposure to the classics is limited to high school English lit classes. Yes, the Emily Dickinsons, the Brontes, the Austens. Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Salinger. I read Moby Dick (wait, did I read Moby Dick?), Chaucer, and George Orwell, but high school was the end to my exposure to canonical literary works.

The reason why I’m a huge proponent of a liberal arts education is because without the humanities, AI will continue to go unchecked. This is what happens when we push STEM and preprofessional education onto entire generations of students. There’s nothing to anchor the finance and tech bros in ethics or the human consequences of technological change. But I also gently nudged my kids to study STEM within a liberal arts context because I didn’t have that sort of education myself. I went to a conservatory-style arts college and I’m pretty sure we read for our required humanities classes (though I don’t remember what!), but in all my years of under and post graduate education, I did not take a single literature class. It wasn’t offered even if I wanted to. Even in grad school, reading was centered around critical theory on media, culture, and technology.

Decades later, I am still not a person who reads literature. I wonder if I should. Can I handle War and Peace or Dostoevsky or Proust? My shortened attention span might revolt.

The biggest surprise in our household last year is that my spouse, who was never much of a reader in all of the 35 years that I’ve known him, has now become one. He reads more books in a month than I do.

I’ve handed him books that I’ve devoured in the past—Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Gabriel Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow—but it wasn’t until last Fall when we made regular trips to the Brooklyn central library that he began reading nearly every night before bed. After a job switch last year in which he joined those of us on the dark side who spend our days in front of a glowing screen, he needed something off-screen to do in the evenings. This is how he became a reader. A huge change that even has his mother, the biggest bookworm I know, exclaim in wide-eyed surprise.

Library book stack — Our current library haul

The library, as it turns out, is a great way to reinforce the habit of reading (I know, who knew?). You check out some books and are given three weeks to read them. A deadline gentle enough to form a habit. Rinse and repeat. A trip to the library is now in our regular rotation of things to do on the weekends.

What I love most about Mark’s new reading habit is that he’s reading without any expectations. No tracking titles on apps. No mentions, affiliate links, or snaps of book stacks on social media. Nothing performative, just reading because he wants to. So silly, but it feels refreshing.

As an exercise last year to help kick my reading lull, I reread three books that I remember being standouts in my life, going all the way back to my childhood. I was delightfully reminded how much books, like music, have the power to transport you back to a specific year, a place, a former version of yourself.

I reread Judy Blume’s 1978 Deenie, about a 13 year old girl with scoliosis. Like Deenie, I also have a crooked spine. And like Deenie, I also wore a brace. Twenty three hours a day for five long years in a brace molded from hard plastic pulled tight across my torso by three velcro straps. It was incredible to even find a book about a girl with scoliosis, let alone one from a writer who wrote some of the most beloved and influential young adult books in my time. I read the novel at age 12 and felt like I found a friend who was going through this experience with me. I had no one else to share the humiliation, the physical pain, and the awkwardness of having to wear such an ugly contraption during the most vulnerable adolescence years.

When I read Michelle Tea’s Valencia the year it was published in 2000, the book dropped me right back into early 90s East Village and Riot grrrl era Olympia, WA. At first glance, it wouldn’t seem that a semi-autobiographical, queer coming-of-age story in 1990s San Francisco subculture could resonate so much, but there was enough to that life that was a mirror to my own and there were characters who reminded me of friends, that I dove into it with an appetite to remember the feeling of being in my early 20s again. Sticky, sweaty bar floors, the restless need for rebellion, and putting yourself in hilariously reckless, but dangerous predicaments. Michelle Tea had a way of evoking that era with unflinching, razor-sharp prose.

The last book I reread was Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. Interestingly, I kept seeing this novella crop up in book lists last year. Kitchen was a stand out book not so much for the story—I wouldn’t fully understand the themes of death and loss until my recent reread decades later when grief has become so centered in my adult life. I remember the book vividly because it was only the second novel by an Asian author that I had ever read. There was a difference in its descriptive storytelling and writing style that was hard for me to articulate, but I found it so charming. After being fed so much of Western literature in my youth, I wanted to read more.

These books have been sitting on my shelves alongside dozens of other novels that I’ve kept for years, moving with me from apartment to apartment. They sit like time capsules waiting to be revisited, but oddly after my rereads, I placed them into a big giveaway pile in front of my building along with some coffee table design books and cookbooks we rarely open. My contributions to the robust circular book economy that is my neighborhood.

As it turns out, I was ready to part with them, even with all the past versions of myself pressed onto their pages.

A roundup of links & recs

To read:

Where and When Do You Read? We asked book critics, authors, Substackers, New York staffers, and other well-read people how they find the time. (The Cut)
I love a good compilation round up, and this one about reading rituals didn’t disappoint.
Inside Bad Bunny’s Historic Super Bowl Halftime Show (Wired)
So much to love and enjoy about the halftime show, but it was the sugarcane grass people that I’m still thinking about. Pure theater, and such an ingenious and creative approach to set design under a compressed timeframe.
Playground Girls (Granta)
An essay by writer, Sophie Kemp, on childhood desire for acceptance and friendship breakups.
Typing for Love or Money. The Hidden Women’s Labor behind Modern Literary Masterpieces (The Public Domain Review)
Not surprising that women played an essential role in the creation of major works of modern literature. Also not surprising that their role has been overlooked in history.
All eyes on uniform designs at milano cortina 2026 winter olympics, from Mongolia to Haiti (Designboom)
I actually do like Team USA’s uniform, but the Mongolia and Haitian uniforms are something else!
How should a book stack be? “The stack suggests a life still in progress.” (Dirt)
I still have the original, first-edition design of Design Within Reach’s Story Bookcase that’s referenced in this piece, and the last design studio I worked for designed the packaging for a later model. A bookshelf designed to disappear. The article also reflects on the aesthetics of book stacks and the personal style in how we arrange our books.

To make and eat:

Yotam Ottolenghi’s comté and polenta tart recipe (The Guardian)
We made a version of this last weekend. Added mushrooms to the swiss chard filling. Surprisingly rich with a satisfying texture to the polenta-added crust. So good.

To watch:

Winter always makes me think of Saul Leitner’s snowy NYC captures, particularly his impressionistic photos through fogged up and rain-slicked windows and his use of reflective layering. Known as an early pioneer in color photography, Leitner was also a painter. I love how his color sensibility and compositional framing carried over to his street photography.